“What is truth?” Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society.”
― Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

The week before school starts marks the beginning of silly season for school districts on social media.

Teachers are back in their buildings doing the hard, mostly invisible work required to prepare for a new school year—arranging rooms, studying rosters, sitting through required trainings, and rewriting lessons.

District leadership, meanwhile, feels compelled to prove that all of this is happening.

So we get pictures.

Pictures of teachers staring at screens. Pictures of grown adults playing icebreakers with the forced enthusiasm of hostages holding today’s newspaper. Everybody is smiling because apparently nobody is allowed to prepare for school while looking tired or mildly concerned about the year ahead.

What are these pictures supposed to do?

Assuage my nerves about the upcoming school year?

Paint school buildings as amusement parks—good for you and good tasting?

Offer proof that even when children are not in the building, teachers are earning their keep? Because, you know, teachers are a lazy bunch, and without photographic evidence, how are we supposed to know they aren’t eating donuts and hanging around the teachers’ lounge?

I suspect that last one is a driving factor, along with district administrators’ need to justify their own existence.

When my lawyer prepares for trial, he never sends me photographs of the legal team rigorously preparing with giant smiles. My mechanic never posts pictures of everybody in the garage playing an icebreaker in anticipation of my car’s arrival.

They just do the work.

That used to be enough.

Everybody on the Bus

This week, I was treated to the most galling set of graphics yet. A local high school loaded roughly 40 teachers onto a school bus and invaded nearby apartment complexes. Naturally, the entire exercise was digitally captured and shared.

At my house, I don’t need you knocking on my door unannounced. I’ve got shit to do.

I may be catching up on housework, getting ready for work, or trying to grab five minutes of peace. I work from home. The last thing I need is my train of thought interrupted so I can star in somebody else’s vanity project.

There is also the question of who these visits are intended to reach.

I have a household with two teenagers. They aren’t home much. If they are home, they are likely sleeping or eating. Between jobs, sports, and social activities with friends, they are not sitting around the house waiting for teachers to show up and joyously announce the coming school year.

Trust me, they have already been counting down the days—and it ain’t in anticipation.

This isn’t an argument against relationships or purposeful, invited home visits connected to a student’s actual needs.

If three or four teachers want to quietly go into the community and reach out to chronically absent students, I applaud them. It is certainly not their job, and it should not become another administration-organized expectation piled onto their plates, but I understand the instinct. Sometimes a personal connection makes a difference.

But for God’s sake, don’t turn it into content.

Just do it.

Relationships lose something when the camera arrives before trust does. Teachers lose something when their goodwill is drafted into a marketing campaign they did not design. Every hour spent touring apartment complexes is an hour not spent preparing classrooms or completing one of the thousand tasks already waiting.

School districts routinely tell us teachers do not have enough time. Then they fill the little time teachers have with staged activities designed to show the public how productively that time is being used.

That is not community engagement. That is theater with a diesel engine.

What Are Kids Giving Up?

As summer comes to a close, I’ve been thinking about the nature of schools and what children—especially older students—give up when they return.

Over the years, my son and I have had many conversations about school and the way it often rewards conformity more reliably than learning or achievement.

This will probably piss some of you off, but the students with the best grades are not necessarily the smartest or the hardest working. Often, they are the ones who have learned most effectively to follow the rules, satisfy the rubric, and accept the agenda.

That may be a useful skill, but it is not the same thing as curiosity, intelligence, creativity, persistence, or wisdom.

We do not always allow children to identify and develop their passions. We dictate what they should be passionate about, establish the approved way for them to demonstrate that passion, and then grade the result.

Schools say they want students to find their voices. Too often, what they really want is for students to find an approved voice, at the approved volume, using the approved vocabulary.

Marching in Greatness

Metro Nashville Public Schools has recently gotten into the music business. This week marked the release of its second album, Marching in Greatness: Voices of Tomorrow.

I wonder which student came up with that title.

The record was created through the MNPS Songwriting Summit. The seven-track album features original music written and recorded by MNPS students and educators alongside Grammy Award-winning artists and Nashville music-industry professionals.

That sounds impressive. It probably was unforgettable for the students involved. I do not begrudge them the opportunity.

I do wonder who decided what they were going to write about.

Per the MNPS press release, rather than being a collection of individual songs, the album tells a larger story about growth, perseverance, belonging, and purpose, with each track representing a different stage of the student journey.

Superintendent Dr. Adrienne Battle said:

“When I listen to these songs, I hear more than incredible music. I hear students who know their voices matter. This album reflects the creativity, resilience, and limitless potential of our young people. Programs like the Songwriting Summit demonstrate what is possible when students are empowered to tell their own stories through the arts.”

Her words were echoed by Dee Hammonds, director of the Songwriting Summit:

“As people listen to this entire project, I hope they hear what is possible when we believe in students and give them the space, support, and guidance to do high-level work.”

Those are lovely words. They also reveal the tension.

Several years ago, I had a conversation with a friend who is a Grammy Award-winning producer.

“You know what I miss?” he said. “Kids going into a garage and doing everything all wrong that somehow turns out all right. Kids doing it because they felt it, not to be stars. Nowadays, at the end of the first rehearsal, members are discussing who’s going to post to social media, who’s going to call a manager, and who’s going to reach out to a designer.”

Somebody needs to remind Dee Hammonds that some of our most timeless music was produced by young people nobody believed in, working in spaces they carved out without anybody’s permission, guidance, or belief.

They did not begin by outlining their journey through growth, perseverance, belonging, and purpose. They began because they had something inside them that needed to come out.

The Songwriting Summit project reaches around 50 students. Meanwhile, every middle school and high school across the district has at least twice that number playing in its school band.

Those bands may not win awards or attract stars. Nobody may issue a press release about the second-chair trombone player who mastered a difficult passage or the freshman who found a place in the percussion section.

But those programs are every bit as important in the lives of those students, and they need every ounce of support we can give them.

Here is what too many people fail to understand: Art does not have to be “great” to be impactful. Its power lies in its creation.

The garage band may never play beyond the garage. The student writing poems nobody else will read may never publish a book. That does not make the work less valuable.

Every Child Known—as Long as They Match the Vision

Schools have increasingly become places where greatness and conformity rule. We tout slogans such as “Every Child Known,” but too often that promise comes with a quiet qualification: every child known, as long as everybody looks roughly alike and moves in the same direction.

Fall outside the norm and you fall outside the vision.

Look at the political battles being fought over schools. The arguments are increasingly about what students cannot have—certain books, phones, charter schools, vouchers, opinions—and rarely about what they should have.

It is not just students who face the wave of conformity. Teachers are constantly under the thumb of pacing guides, scripted lesson plans, prescribed classroom-management programs, mandated assessments, and a growing collection of noninstructional duties.

Here is the irony: Most of us will reinvent ourselves several times over the course of our lives. We may start in one profession only to discover a need—or desire—to change. Divorce, illness, failure, disappointment, and reinvention are all parts of healthy, complicated lives.

How will our children respond? Will they have the tools they need when confronted with challenges no pacing guide anticipated?

I work weddings as a bartender, and I love watching people on that day because the bride and groom feel like they understand exactly what marriage means. Little do they realize the distance between their vision and the reality ahead.

Marriage shifts and changes. It survives through adjustments made by the participants. Suggest to newlyweds that there will be days when they do not even like each other, and they will look at you like a fool.

But it is true.

Life works the same way. Are we really doing this for children—and preparing them to adjust when life refuses to follow the script?

Power, Priorities, and a New Lawyer

Last week, I wrote about MNPS hiring a new director of legal services. Several things about that hire require deeper questions.

First and foremost: Why?

Metro Legal already supplies legal advice to the MNPS Board. What happens if Metro Legal and the new MNPS legal director offer conflicting opinions? Who overrules whom? Who is the client? Whose interests are being protected?

There are financial questions as well. Where did funding for this position come from? When board members approved the budget, were they clearly told that MNPS intended to hire a legal director?

Last month MNPS faced cutting roughly half a million dollars because Metro Council demanded the district pay half the cost of a required audit. After much hand-wringing and rending of garments, the board cut a planned pre-K program—a program with a direct benefit to students.

Yet the district proceeded with hiring a new legal director at a six-figure salary.

That is like a neighbor telling you they are too broke to eat and then watching a brand-new boat appear in their driveway. It does not quite add up.

True, one six-figure salary would not cover the entire audit expense. But I am betting I could find four more.

My friend Julian Vasquez Heilig wrote something on social media this week that, while not directly related, applies here:

“Every hiring decision is a decision about power. Yet most search committees never ask the question that may matter most: What does this person want the power to do?

A résumé reveals accomplishments. It does not reveal whom someone will protect, what they will fund, which criticism they will tolerate, or whether they will expand opportunity for others.

As a dean and provost, I learned that a leader’s real values become visible through budgets, appointments, priorities, and results.

Before we hire, promote, support, or elect someone, we should ask what they believe power is for.”

Hopefully, somebody will ask those questions.

Budgets are declarations of values. A district that cuts a student-facing pre-K program while adding a high-level administrative position has told us what it values, regardless of its next inspirational post.

The Corporate Off-Ramp

The Tennessean recently published an opinion piece touting a solution to the current teacher shortage: Recruit experienced workers who are being aged out of corporate America.

Turning corporate layoffs into a teacher-recruitment strategy sounds clever—right up until somebody checks the invoice.

Teaching is not a corporate consolation prize.

Knowing spreadsheets, marketing, logistics, finance, or project management does not automatically prepare someone to manage 30 children, design instruction, understand adolescent development, serve students with disabilities, differentiate lessons, communicate with families, and satisfy Tennessee’s mountain of accountability requirements.

Subject knowledge matters. So do pedagogy, preparation, temperament, and experience.

Some corporate employees undoubtedly can become excellent teachers, and career changers often bring valuable knowledge. But expecting schools to absorb workers discarded by corporations treats teaching as an employment program instead of a profession.

Then there is the money.

Many workers pushed out under the corporate “Rule of 70” are older, experienced employees. That does not make them unhealthy or unqualified. Nor does it tell us anything about the medical needs of an individual applicant.

But health insurance operates through pools, not flattering individual profiles. Moving a sizable group of older workers into district health-insurance pools could increase total claims and costs. If the state does not provide additional funding, districts could answer those costs with higher employee premiums, larger deductibles, reduced benefits, or fewer dollars available for raises.

Existing teachers—already paying more for less—could wind up subsidizing the state’s shiny new recruitment experiment.

And how many corporate professionals will stay once they encounter the salary, workload, disrespect, and political interference that drove trained educators away in the first place?

The teacher shortage did not fall from the sky. It is the predictable result of policy choices. Tennessee has spent years limiting teacher autonomy, weakening the profession, expanding workloads, politicizing classrooms, and asking educators to accept compensation that does not reflect the demands of the job.

If your bathtub is leaking, the answer is not to keep bringing in fresh buckets. Fix the damn leak.

Tennessee does not lack intelligent people who might teach. It lacks the willingness to compensate, support, trust, and respect the teachers it already has.

What Is the Work For?

A bus full of teachers makes a good photograph. A student album makes a good press release. A new legal director may make administrators feel protected. A pipeline of corporate career changers makes a good opinion column.

But whom do these things serve?

That is the thread running through all of it.

Are we building relationships, or documenting that we built them? Are we nurturing creativity, or curating a marketable version of it? Are we spending limited dollars on children, or protecting the institution? Are we addressing the reasons teachers leave, or searching for the next group of adults willing to replace them?

Public education does not need more performance about the work.

It needs the work.

Quiet, sustained, unphotographed work. Work that respects teachers’ time, gives students room to be imperfect, funds unglamorous programs, treats budgets as moral documents, and values teaching as a profession rather than a landing spot for people corporate America no longer wants.

Nobody needs another picture of smiling teachers gathered around chart paper.

Show me the choices.

Show me who gets funded and protected. Show me which criticism is tolerated. Show me whether students and teachers have room to develop voices that do not match the district’s preferred soundtrack.

That will tell us what the power is for.

And it will tell us whether any of this is truly being done for the kids.

If you value independent reporting and commentary about Nashville public education, consider subscribing and sharing Dad Gone Wild.

Tips and story ideas: Norinrad10@yahoo.com
Venmo: @Thomas-Weber-10
Cash App: $PeterAveryWeber

Nobody reads it, everybody quotes it.

Categories: Education