“Whenever purity is paramount, terror is close at hand.”
― Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

Twenty-five years ago, the world changed.

People older than me remember exactly where they were when JFK was shot. They remember where they were when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The assassination of John Lennon is one of those days I’ll never forget.

September 11, 2001, certainly qualifies as one of those moments.

A moment I still struggle with 25 years later.

I vividly remember standing in front of my television that morning, watching the incomprehensible unfold in real time. There was no frame of reference for what we were seeing. No way to immediately process it. You watched, listened, tried to understand, and then watched some more.

I remember later that morning, at work, circling up with co-workers for a prayer as we struggled to find some logic in the day’s events.

There wasn’t any.

The whole day felt surreal.

I remember that evening being at the Gold Rush and people clinging to each other for support. People were exchanging updates about family members and friends who lived in New York. The crowd was smaller than normal, partly out of fear of being in a large group, but I don’t know that I’ve ever felt so much love in a room populated by both friends and strangers.

For a brief period, we were all just Americans.

Not Mexican-American.

Not Black-American.

Not Christian-American.

Not Republican-American or Democrat-American.

The hyphens had been dropped, and we were Americans trying desperately to make sense of the insane.

That feeling remains one of my strongest memories of the days immediately following 9/11. It wasn’t that all of our differences magically disappeared. They didn’t. It wasn’t that every problem in America suddenly evaporated. They certainly didn’t.

But for a moment, those differences felt smaller than the thing we shared.

For the next several days, I watched footage emerge from New York depicting the devastation and destruction with a permanent lump in my throat. I listened to stories of ordinary people becoming heroes because circumstances demanded it. Firefighters running toward something everyone else was running away from. Police officers, paramedics, office workers, passengers, strangers helping strangers.

For some, answering that challenge came at the expense of their own lives.

It was gutting.

Unfortunately, the unity didn’t last.

The bickering eventually returned. The tragedy became the vehicle for sweeping security changes, and personal privacy increasingly became something we were willing to surrender in exchange for the promise of safety.

Twenty-five years later, 9/11 itself has increasingly become another political football, kicked around whenever convenient by people on both sides.

Are we safer today?

Arguably.

But at what expense?

And maybe the harder question is whether we learned the right lessons from that morning.

Steve Schonberg writes a moving piece in The Tennessean that I recommend everyone read. Schonberg describes something that I suspect a lot of us who lived through 9/11 understand, even if we’ve never articulated it quite this way:

“For years I couldn’t watch that footage without flinching. Even brief anniversary clips would catch me off guard. That reaction felt human. Somewhere along the way, without my noticing, it stopped. The footage now feels almost routine, something we mark rather than something we feel. That shift, from raw to routine, unsettles me more than anything on the screen.”

That hits home.

There was a time when seeing those images immediately transported me back to that morning. Now they increasingly feel like historical footage.

That’s unsettling.

Schonberg talks about the tragedy of the day, but he also recognizes something else that shouldn’t be forgotten:

“What I keep coming back to is this. For all the horror of that day, something else happened alongside it. We came together. Strangers helped strangers. A shaken country found, for a while, a shared sense of purpose that crossed the usual lines. It didn’t undo the tragedy or excuse what followed in its name. But real years of hope grew out of that unity, a sense that shared suffering could produce something like solidarity.”

There’s that word.

Solidarity.

Something that feels increasingly foreign in 2026.

We spend an awful lot of time today sorting ourselves into teams. Red and blue. Urban and rural. Left and right. Woke and MAGA. Public school and private school. Christian and non-Christian.

We’ve gotten really good at identifying what separates us.

Finding what connects us?

Not so much.

And then COVID arrived.

Schonberg makes a comparison I had never really considered:

“Watching ‘Top of the World,’ I thought about the employees who showed up for an ordinary shift on an extraordinary morning, and how their story became part of something much larger. For all its horror, 9/11 pulled a country together. COVID, for all its necessity, pulled us apart, in ways we’re still living with. Neither deserves to be minimized or ranked against the other.”

That comparison has stuck with me.

Two national traumas.

Two very different responses.

One pushed us physically and emotionally toward each other.

The other required us to separate.

And maybe we’re still trying to figure out how to come back together.

Schonberg closes with a challenge worth considering regardless of where you fall politically:

“But I keep wondering whether there’s a middle ground we haven’t found yet: some way to hold each other close without needing a tragedy on the scale of 9/11 to do it, and without the isolation COVID demanded of us.

Twenty-five years later, watching one small human story pulled back into a much bigger one, that’s the question I can’t shake.”

Me either.

However you mark today — and some of you will barely acknowledge it — remember that for one morning, the best and worst of humanity lived side by side.

And for a little while afterward, we remembered that we belonged to each other.

Raise your hand if you live in Tennessee and know there’s a governor’s race going on.

This crowd is more politically active than most, so I’m sure there are a few hands in the air.

But seriously.

This might be the quietest governor’s race I can remember.

Senator Marsha Blackburn is the Republican nominee in a deeply Republican state. Jerri Green, a Memphis council member, is the Democratic nominee and, despite running a solid campaign, faces the considerable structural advantage Republicans currently enjoy statewide in Tennessee.

Recent polling has Blackburn ahead. A Targoz Market Research poll put Blackburn at 46 percent and Green at 33 percent.

Green and her supporters have also been unable to entice Blackburn into a public debate.

Given the advantage, you can understand the political calculation behind avoiding one. There’s an old line often attributed to Mark Twain: “Better to have them think you a fool, than open your mouth and prove it.”

With less than two months remaining before Election Day, Green has her work cut out for her.

When it comes to education policy, Blackburn has emphasized school choice and parental control in education while criticizing diversity, equity and inclusion programs in higher education.

How those priorities would translate into policy as governor remains to be seen.

And that’s part of why debates matter.

Education remains one of the largest responsibilities of state government. Tennessee is in the middle of enormous debates over vouchers, accountability, testing, teacher recruitment, funding, literacy, school safety and what authority belongs to parents, local districts and the state.

Those aren’t small questions.

They deserve more than campaign mailers and thirty-second advertisements.

Hopefully, as Election Day approaches, Tennessee voters hear considerably more from both candidates about what governing would actually look like.

PISA results are out, and there are some interesting findings.

For those unfamiliar, the PISA exam assesses 15-year-old students around the world in areas including problem solving, critical thinking and communication. It also includes questionnaires designed to provide information about students’ learning environments.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development administers the assessment, which is generally given every three years and includes students from countries around the world.

Hypothetically, the results help policymakers determine how effectively education systems are working and how American students compare with students elsewhere.

This year, the United States averaged 490 in reading and 463 in mathematics.

The bigger story is the direction of travel.

U.S. reading performance has fallen sharply from previous results and is now at its lowest level in decades, although American students remain above the international average in reading. Math performance remains a significant concern, while science has been comparatively steadier.

Luckily for us, even while our reading scores decline, we can still climb in the rankings if everybody else declines faster.

Winning!

So what’s to blame?

You already know the suspects.

AI.

Phones.

COVID.

And just for good measure…

Social media.

Student use of AI chatbots has become widespread, including regular use for schoolwork. That raises legitimate questions about whether dependence on AI reduces opportunities for students to struggle through problems, develop ideas independently and build the skills the technology is increasingly capable of performing for them.

Those are fair concerns.

But I wonder whether there’s another question we should be asking.

The world is changing at a ridiculous pace.

The way adults find information has changed. The way we communicate has changed. The way we write has changed. The way we work has changed. The tools available to students have changed.

And I can’t help wondering whether we are measuring the things that reflect those changes — or whether we’re simply clinging to rules designed for a world that no longer exists.

That doesn’t mean reading and math no longer matter.

Of course they matter.

It means we should be asking whether the assessments we rely on are measuring everything we need young people to know.

Maybe falling scores are a warning.

Maybe they’re also telling us that the environment around learning has fundamentally changed.

Most likely, it’s some combination of both.

Either way, yelling “AI!” and taking everybody’s phone away probably isn’t going to constitute a comprehensive education strategy.

But I’m sure somebody is drafting that bill as we speak.

Channel 4 News reports on an incident at an MNPS school that resulted in a student suffering a serious injury.

According to the report, several students were engaged in horseplay when they fell. During the fall, a hair pick reportedly became lodged in a student’s side. The student’s father said it pierced his side and punctured a lung.

That’s terrifying.

The father says he initially learned about police activity at the school through a WSMV4 alert.

Think about that for a second.

A parent learns from a television news alert that police are responding to the school his child attends.

He subsequently received a call from the school saying his son had suffered what was described as a superficial injury and was being transported to the hospital.

“They did not state actually what was happening. And of course, as a parent I panicked,” the father said.

Of course he did.

Who wouldn’t?

The father said he rushed to the hospital, where he waited two hours before learning the extent of his son’s injuries.

If you’re the parent of an MNPS student, the frustration surrounding communication probably doesn’t come as a surprise. Communication with parents has been a recurring source of criticism in the district, especially when incidents unfold quickly and families are trying to determine what is actually happening.

MNPS responded to criticism over how the incident was handled:

“The information we provided yesterday reflected the initial assessment based on what was known shortly after the incident, while the investigation was still underway. Given the student-specific nature of the matter and our obligations regarding student privacy, we are not able to provide additional details about the circumstances or any actions involving individual students. We will continue to cooperate with MNPD and follow all applicable legal and disciplinary processes.”

Okay.

Help me understand something.

Nobody is asking the district to broadcast a student’s medical records or disciplinary history.

Nobody is asking officials to speculate about facts they don’t have.

But does it really require an extensive investigation to call a parent and say:

Your child has been injured.

The injury may be serious.

Emergency personnel are treating them.

They are being transported to the hospital.

We will provide additional information as soon as we can confirm it.

That seems considerably different from describing an injury as “superficial” when the parent says he later learned his son had suffered a punctured lung.

Privacy laws are important.

Accuracy is important.

So is communicating clearly with a parent whose child is on the way to a hospital.

Those things aren’t mutually exclusive.

What would be nice here is if the MNPS School Board used the board floor to ask questions about the district’s communication protocols.

What information is communicated to parents during an emergency?

Who makes that call?

How quickly?

How is uncertain information characterized?

What happens when the initial assessment turns out to be wrong?

Those seem like reasonable questions.

Board meetings shouldn’t exist solely for presentations, recognitions and items that have already been decided before anybody reaches the microphone. They should also be a place where public concerns are aired and policy is questioned.

Even if it’s just to demonstrate that somebody understands why a parent might be upset after learning more about an incident involving his child from a television station than from the school system responsible for that child during the day.

Hopefully, there will be some discussion.

More importantly, here’s hoping the injured student makes a speedy and complete recovery.

Because whatever disagreements we have over communication, policy, politics, testing or anything else, that part shouldn’t be difficult.

Take care of the kid.

Then figure out how to do better next time.

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Categories: Education