Hi, readers. I’m glad the recent political messages seem to be garnering attention. This post is for the grieving, especially those teachers in classrooms that have spun off the rails and entered an outraged political limbo where pain trumps academics.

Every so often this blog addresses the much greater challenges that exist in certain zip codes, the lack of supplies and hope that pull down struggling students, students whose whole experience of education would be much more positive, illuminating and professionally advantageous if they merely lived twenty miles down the road.

Longtime readers will know that I favor eliminating the 180-day school year in favor of whatever school year works. If students in District X are beating the state tests consistently, and easily going on to college after high school, then 180 days may be all those students need. But when District Y keeps “failing” those tests and students from District Y mostly need remedial education to survive community college, I’d scrap that 180-day year in favor of 220 or 240 days, and I’d consider a longer school day. We keep trying to find magic educational bullets, but no substitute exists for learning time. Students who are behind need time to catch up. No secret educational “quality time” makes up for the vocabulary and learning deficits that dog children in our inner cities, for example. Those kids who have fallen behind should be given whatever extra days and hours are required to catch up.

Eduhonesty: Here’s my wincing observation. I have watched the kids marching with their “No Trump!” signs. For the most part, those kids came from larger districts that rank among the academically struggling or fallen. In the prosperous suburbs near me that always beat those state tests, no one left a classroom to my knowledge.

I understand grief and anger. I understand taking a day or two off to process what may seem like a huge betrayal by the system, especially when the school staff and parents have made their political views clear, and students saw an election result that reflected none of the adult views in their daily lives.

But we only have 180 days in many of our school districts. Two days grieving is 1/90th of a school year. Five days grieving is 1/36th of a school year. America’s academically less-fortunate students don’t have 1/36th of a school year to spare. When the political discussion preempts language arts or mathematics, the gap between our strongest and weakest districts only grows wider.

Best quote of the day: Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom.

All we have to do is look at the recent election results if we want proof of this statement. We were drowning in polls. Data was flashing across screens all across America, information being thrown at us nonstop. But we did not understand. When the pollsters said Hillary had to win because 44% was her “floor” but 40% appeared to be his “ceiling,” people nodded as if that made sense, as if they understood the likely implications of the floor/ceiling argument. Where did our wisdom fail us?

I’ll start with that 40%. When 4 out of 10 people admit to preferring a candidate whose very name can decimate some Facebook friend lists, that’s a fierce indicator that the polls cannot be trusted. Hillary’s “deplorables” comment hit many, many nerves but the response was mostly a flurry of funny memes, followed by quiet, too much quiet for a comment directed at such a large chunk of the electorate. I believe that quiet stemmed from a shut-down, from a sense on the part of Trump supporters that admitting their preference could result in insults at best, loss of friends at worst.

I believe the press betrayed America. Not by the truths they told, or by the pictures of the Donald making fun of the handicapped, calling opposing candidates names, or making boastful, sexist comments on the bus. Those were all news.

But the news also treated Trump supporters as buffoons and I’d say that, just as they selected the ugliest pictures of Trump they could find for most of their articles and TV reports, they also pulled out what they viewed as entertaining wackiness when showing Trump supporters. Not all that disaffection deserved to be treated with contempt, however, If I lived in Flint, I would feel utterly betrayed by my ruling government. All across the Midwest people feel that betrayal. Those 46% who did not vote? I’m sure many in south Chicago stayed home.

We had some real issues we might have discussed. I might have started with the fact that something like 90% of the people picking our melons are undocumented. If they are sent home, I predict that the melons rot for the first year or two. Then wages go up enough to draw local workers and we start buying our $10 watermelons. I’d have gone on to discuss the many kids who have been raised here, kids who sometimes speak little Spanish and write less.

And the whole idea of a registry… Our government can already track all of us by cell phones I imagine, but the concept of a Muslim registry remains scary and so wrong. I am reminded of the Ben Franklin quotation, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Where were those discussions? Where were the issues? Where are they? In my view, lack of courtesy shut down those conversations, buried them in attacks and ugly pictures and echo-chamber overconfidence.

Eduhonesty: Today’s wisdom for the day will be a return to an earlier post. Don’t panic. When the news has carried as much bias as we have seen recently, don’t assume that the Donald Trump presented on TV and in the news will be the Donald Trump who becomes President. We don’t know who is about to become President. I’m not sure the President-elect knows. The implications of his win may only now be settling in on him.

In January, we begin to ride the rapids of a new Presidency. Trump says he wants to bring American together again. Let’s give him his chance. (It’s not like we have much choice.) Let’s also keep in mind that all those Republicans want to be re-elected. I’d rather we kept the kids in school rather than on the streets, but if we protest let’s not scatter our efforts.

NO REGISTRY! That’s where we ought to begin. The American internment of the Japanese in World War II is not a precedent. That relocation was a travesty and life-altering injustice based mostly in racism and paranoia.

It’s too late for “No Trump!” and protesters might as well put those signs down. Instead, it’s time to tell our representatives, “If you want to be re-elected, you had better vote against X, Y and Z.” Democracy works, at least when people make their voices heard. Our leaders want to be re-elected and this last election proves that even front-runners can be toppled when too many people feel excluded and unheard.

I’d like to make one last plea for courtesy and kindness. Our students need us to channel Martin Luther King, Jr., right now. When the dialog drips contempt or erupts into irrational – or even rational — rage, the dialog dies. We can’t afford those glacial silences. We are overdue for a great many conversations between the Coasts and the Heartland.

“I am reading Killer by Jonathan Kellerman, a mystery novel that started well. I hope I’m wrong about having guessed the ending. On page 141, I hit a paragraph that resonated with me, one I decided to blog.

…

“In the old days, that resulted from being a gay detective when the department supposedly had none. It’s been years since his locker was stuffed with nasty porn and carved with swastikas. Nowadays the department has regulations that bar discrimination of anyone by anyone based on anything, anytime. What that does to internal attitude is anyone’s guess.”

…

Eduhonesty: I believe this paragraph captures one source of the fear that has been erupting since the election. What is hiding below the surface? Already a few ugly reminders of the tenacity of prejudice have popped up to create anxiety. I am not sure how many of these racial incidents have been kicked off by the election and how many might have occurred anyway. We are looking for incidents now. We will find them.

However, I’d like to make my observation from years of teaching. The kids of today are not the kids of yesterday or one-hundred-years ago. Most of them abhor prejudice. Most of them have been educated by teachers who worked diligently to make sure classes were safe and kids respected each other. All that anti-bullying, Character Counts and Positive Behavioral Incentive System work has been paying off.

I also believe that if we bring the dregs of old attitudes out of the woodwork with new election results, America may be better off. You can’t fight the attitude hiding in the closet. But you can raise hell once that attitude comes out of the closet. I exploded at a class exactly twice in my teaching career and I’m sure the kids remember those events well. One occurred when almost no one tried the homework. The other occurred in response to an overtly racially-prejudiced remark. America must have zero tolerance for racism and prejudice.

But prejudice peeking out now is prejudice that can be addressed, prejudice that can be tackled. We are not the worse off if our closet racists start talking. We need them to talk. If we can find our racists, we can talk with them. We can help them learn tolerance and respect for alternative lifestyles, choices, and characteristics, differences that might incite prejudice if left to fester unaddressed.

Again, let’s look on the positive side. Honest expressions of anger and even bias leading to honest dialog between people who disagree could be one of the best results from this election. We have to begin talking. Too many scary ideas have been stuffed into lockers, hidden from view, as adults and children avoided conflict.

That conflict has come out into the open now. Let’s use this time to find out what others are thinking. Let’s listen to each other. Let’s get out of our echo chambers, the echo chambers that led to all those faulty polls and stunned reactions. We may encounter many teachable moments along the way.

Rudy Giuliani has said that he will never be President because he favors gay marriage.

Check out http://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a8293084/who-is-rudy-giuliani-trump-cabinet/ for more information, but Rudy even moved in with a couple of gay friends after he left one of his wives. From the article:

4. He supports same-sex marriage and presided over the wedding of two men.

Giuliani’s view of same-sex marriage is similar to that of President Barack Obama’s: It has evolved over time. He supported civil unions for same-sex couples but opposed marriage until 2015, when he publicly expressed support for same-sex marriage by calling on the Supreme Court to make it legal, according to Time magazine. A year later, Giuliani officiated the wedding of two men, according to the Washington Post, which said one of the men was Giuliani’s close friend and adviser.

This man obviously has been part of Trump’s inner circle for awhile. For that matter, Trump has said on CBN’s “The Brody File” that gay people are “tremendous” — a word that sounds so like the Donald — and that “there can be no discrimination against gays.”

Eduhonesty: To LGBT readers, I completely understand the Supreme Court fears driving concerns. But please don’t decide the new administration is allied against LGBT citizens. So far, evidence of that anti-gay slant remains thin on the ground, despite a few scary characters in the current cast.

Yes, the kids need a great deal of reassurance, some more than others, depending on where you teach. You can be sure that some bilingual and immigrant kids are terrified, even those too young to understand the issues.Suddenly, we are living in uncertain times. Racism has crawled out of the woodwork in a few venues and that ugliness has to be shut down fast and hard. Trump himself said, “Stop!”

The agenda may be about to shift under us rapidly. But before my teacher-readers get too scared of this change, I’d like to continue a theme from a few posts back: Has education been going in a direction that you like? Meeting, meeting, meeting, data, data, data, teacher evaluation rubrics over 20 pages long? Have you been watching lesson plan preparation, grading and even tutoring-time yanked out from under you for yet another paperwork requirement?

During the last year before I retired, I tutored in McDonalds on Saturday mornings because all the other rational, in-school time kept getting sucked up by meetings. That worked — for the kids who were willing to get up on Saturday and come to McDonalds. If I’d held that tutoring in the library, I doubt I could have ever gotten more than three kids, but middle-schoolers will get up if breakfast tacos and frappes are thrown into the mix. A lot of kids never got up, though. They also got very little tutoring. We did have a couple of afterschool classes slated for this purpose but sometimes twenty-plus kids were seated with friends in a room with only one teacher. I could send them for tutoring, but in a setting like that tutoring only happens if you are an extrovert willing to force your way to the front of the line. I would walk in with classwork for my kids to do, look at groups of chatting girls, silently curse and run off to my meeting.

I know I worked in an NCLB-reformed, academic disaster of a school. I’m sure most scenarios out there would look better, often much better. But those kids needed my time, time stolen away by government intervention and oversight.

Eduhonesty: We are living in scary times, but I’d like to ask readers to give the Donald a chance. Honestly, if he starts returning schools to local control, will we be worse off? Centralized, government control of education has not helped the kids in Manley (See previous post.) to get on the college bus. Some kids in Detroit might get a better education if they lived in a rural area in a developing nation. And let me go out on the big limb: Maybe charter schools are not always bad. I am a union supporter — oh, do I think teachers need unions – and a public school fan. But if all the public schools where you live genuinely offer a substandard education — then you need a choice. I have had many parents tell me that local schools were not intellectually demanding enough or even physically safe. I believe those parents, and desperate times may make people believe they need to take desperate measures. I have not looked at the statistics, but I’d be stunned if Flint, Michigan, did not vote for Trump.

Please, please, readers. Let’s notch the fear back. Trust each other. Trust that the vast majority of people remain basically decent and kind. The election is over. We must come together for our kids. Rather than taking to the streets, let’s get started fighting for the amendment to make America a true democracy, a simple democracy where the one with the most votes wins. Let’s get started working on the social studies lessons that were preempted to make more room for math and English for No Child Left Behind.

http://iirc.niu.edu/

Here’s the scary part: Schools have been trying desperately to raise test-score bars for over ten years, facing substantial Federal and State penalties under No Child Left Behind for failing to raise the bars above. Yet many bars did not budge or climbed only in tiny spurts. In fact, despite threats as huge as the dissolution of a school district, some of bars have fallen. For the 2012 – 2013 school year, bars fell all across Illinois due to scoring changes, but random bars have been falling all over the state data at many schools on the website.

In a post last week, I asked: Where are the autopsies of our failed, mandated government-improvement programs? I’d like to emphasize again a few questions that demand answers:

The big question: Why did NCLB’s test-based reforms fail?

Why did all our efforts across the nation not produce the results desired and demanded?

What efforts, if any, succeeded?

Considering the formidable amounts of time and money many school districts have sunk into pulling up test scores, why do so many students remain unready for college or university classes?

Is current educational policy now causing or contributing to the lack of progress in America’s academically-challenged zip codes?

What if bars in some zip codes have risen because our students have learned what to expect on the test, while learning practically nothing else?

What if many bars are stagnant or falling because students were unready to learn the material on the test – but were offered nothing else?

 Eduhonesty: I keep hammering the test topic because children across America are being pounded down by tests. What are we receiving in return?

Are America’s  schools better now than when NCLB began? I don’t see evidence to support hoped-for improvements. Yes, our drop-out rate has fallen, but the number of college students requiring remedial education has risen steadily. Do students know more than they did a decade ago?

My major concern: I’m afraid they may know less — as a direct result of lost instructional opportunities resulting from over-testing.

Covering the walls for test #2,520?

(Readers, please pass this post on, an offering of hope to the stunned.)

I thought many people were underestimating Trump’s appeal, but I am surprised* that he won. Considering that he easily got the votes he needed, despite almost universally negative press coverage, I’d have to say that the electorate just screamed. My father regards Trump as our last, best hope, his version of an Earthly Jedi Knight who might start unravelling the mess around him, and now I guess we will see.

To my many teacher readers, I’d like to say, “Take a deep breath, go out with family or friends for a delicious dinner, and don’t let doomsayers pull you down.” I expect a lot of doomsayers to be wailing in the teacher’s lounges this week. I belong to a number of teacher’s groups and they have been — at least on the surface — strongly for Hillary and the democrats. In one group, I watch hostile teachers rudely and nastily push a woman out of the group for supporting Trump.

But before we decide some ax has fallen, let’s take a few moments to view the current situation.

Unions are being gutted across America. Job security for older teachers has become a thing of the past in many areas. I talked a few weeks ago with a woman in her sixties who had once been teacher of the year in her district, but who had been let go with everyone over fifty in a purge. She is in her third year in a new district that plans to close schools and she is scared. What if this job goes away?

Crime has gone up dramatically in some inner-city areas, with case closure rates falling. Unemployment for youth in some areas is running over 50%. While trying to nail down the exact numbers becomes another adventure in fuzzy, social science statistics, I can safely say that young black men suffer from lower graduation rates, higher unemployment, and higher incarceration rates than other racial, age or gender group in this country. They are angry. Unsurprisingly, they can be hell-on-wheels in the classroom.

In the meantime, teachers are losing countless hours to meetings and professional developments meant to instruct them in learning new standards, and government data demands. These teachers are trying to teach angry young African-American men and other students who somehow missed the bus to the well-supplied, wealthy zip code less than twenty miles away. No Child Left Behind data demands have done enormous damage to education across the nation, leaving glutted Departments of Education in all 50 states, departments that had to ramp up hiring to supervise NCLB, but never had to ramp down. Instead, we see the creation of new laws and standards that will ensure continuing employment in these Departments of Education.

Eduhonesty: Departments of Education are not teacher’s friends. Lately, they sometimes join in the witch hunts for those “underperforming” teachers who are virtually always found in poor, struggling districts. The best way to avoid being an underperforming teacher? Go to work in the zip code with money, support and, most importantly, college-bound kids from motivated families, families who started the college fund for little Anne-Marie before she was born.

So let me offer a possible olive-branch of hope: Those Departments of Education would never have gone away or possibly even seen lay-offs under Hillary. Those new laws and standards would have kept coming. More power would have been concentrated above, rather than in the hands of teachers. Hillary believed government should fix our problems. That view tends to translate into more and greater government intervention in the classroom.

But maybe government should get the hell out of the way instead and just let teachers teach.

We don’t know what’s coming but, to parrot what Trump said to African-Americans who cannot even safely let their children walk to school in many areas, what do we have to lose?

Will continuing the educational bureaucracy of 2016 be to teachers’ advantages? Ask yourself the next time you spend an afternoon learning how to do a new math that your children’s parents can’t do either, the next week you spend 10 hours in meetings that suck away all your planning time, the next Saturday when you can’t prepare lessons because you have to make data spreadsheets showing student benchmark test progress results for another meeting that will suck up half- or a full-day of professional development — a day which a decade ago might have been given to you as time to help get your report cards finished and room spruced up for the next season. Ask yourself, did we really need more of the same, a continuation of the big-government legacy and oversight that led us into this mess?

We don’t know where we are going right now. But suppose Trump starts peeling back the layers of bureaucracy that have been slowly strangling education. That’s possible. Try to hope.

*I am not shocked by the election results. I always thought the polls were wrong. They did not jive with my conversations and I was clear that many Trump supporters were avoiding expressing their support to duck fights.

Readers, thank you for joining me. Sometimes, I feel a bit mystified by you. For one thing, this blog lacks a central theme other than education, and education has become a sprawling beast, its tentacles wrapped around so many topics that my own blog can make me dizzy. I am not preparing a reliable series of delicious or not-so-delicious crock-pot meals here.

Today, I am straying into finances. I’ve been here before. Sometimes I think I ought to dedicate this blog to finances, but finances bore me. Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a corporate and municipal bonds analyst looking at a portfolio of municipal bonds that added up to about $500,000,000. I prefer writing. I prefer teaching. Heck, I’d prefer being a barista. Still, I have to stray into finances today.

The following chart offers a potent example of the problem. Admittedly, Chicago has become a financial black hole, but the same can be said of Detroit, with Los Angeles is not running far behind. Many school districts are digging holes by floating bonds and surviving with the aid of loans that will eventually have to be repaid. Parts of Michigan have become genuine financial wastelands. From the CPS article, “Chicago Public Schools Fiscal Year 2015 Budget” at http://cps.edu/FY15Budget/Pages/debtmanagement.aspx: ^\

(Click on graph for better view.)

The above graph shows debt service payments for outstanding CPS bonds, money owed to bondholders. The graph does not include any impact from future bonds issued to further support future capital budgets, such as the $800,000,000 bond that CPS wants to issue next year to cover the next year’s financial challenges. General State Aid and PPRT (Personal Property Replacement Taxes) are among the revenues used to pay bondholders. GSA and PPRT revenues needed to fund debt will increase significantly – from $247 million in FY15 to $434 million by FY17, staying at approximately the same level through 2030. Money used to pay off debt holders is directly taken away from possible instructional and other immediate uses.

For this year, Heather Gillers, Chicago Tribune, reported that on February 3, 2016,

“Chicago Public Schools managed to borrow $725 million Wednesday by promising investors extraordinarily high interest rates.

Moody’s Investors Service rated this bond issue four levels below junk bond status. That’s why the interest rate has to be so high. When risk is high, return has to be high or people do not invest. What is the risk? CPS may have to default on these bond payments to bondholders. The Chicago Public Schools are broke, broker, brokest — and have been for some time, which is what these bond issues are about. Another risk that Chicagoans are running — and many do not know about the landmine underneath their schools — is that law requires large tax increases if CPS cannot meet its obligations with funds available.

Using debt to fund schools will not solve CPS’ long-term financial crisis. The district is only digging itself into a deeper hole, spending money to borrow money. Millions of dollars are slated to pay for borrowed money — millions that cannot pay for teachers, schools and educational supplies.

Eduhonesty: As the election comes near its close, I thought I would take today to emphasize that politicians promising to provide all the services to all the people are simply lying. Bills come due, even for governments.

Or maybe we should stop trying to figure out who to blame. Pointing fingers helps no one. We are spending too much time on accountability and not enough on helping children. Our homes and families are changing. We need to figure out how to adapt to the families and children of 2016.

Eduhonesty: If our old models are not working, how can we intelligently improve those models? I’ll start with just one suggestion: Maybe 900 hours at school are no longer enough.

(Spoiler alert for The Walking Dead.)

The pot’s about to call the kettle black. I am hardly the person to protest zombie shows. I watched The Walking Dead until a few screaming nightmares made me decide to find viewing alternatives. I am watching Fear the Walking Dead because I got sucked in by the first few episodes. I am waiting for the return of Colony, too. Post-apocalyptic, end-of-the-world drama happens to be a favorite genre of mine.

So I’ll confess to feeling hypocritical as I write this post. But I am concerned at the number of students who seem to be watching with me. As I tried to explain a lesson while substituting for a drama teacher, I needed a common reference point. I tried a few current shows. Nope. Then I went straight to Fear the Walking Dead. I know from experience that if a teacher wants to share TV viewing moments with students, The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead are great launch points — or gangplanks if you choose. Connect! My student and I discussed character motivation. What did Victor see in Nick? Why? What was Victor’s motivation in saving the Clarks? Why as actors would we want to know these background details? How might the backstory affect our performance?

But I am talking with 7th graders here. I was talking with 8th graders about the same show last year, lamenting with a favorite student the probable death of a prescient bit character. Within the middle school demographic, these are popular shows.

Are parents watching these shows with their children? Are they aware that the romantic, heroic and popular Glenn was just graphically beaten to death with a barbed-wire-covered baseball bat, while his beloved Maggie watched in helpless horror? TV shows shape children’s worlds. What visions of the present and future are we sharing with our children? Or worse, not sharing with our children?

Eduhonesty: How many children in America watched Glenn die? I shudder to think. The Walking Dead is the No. 1 series on TV among 18-to-49-year-olds.  Over 12,400,000 people viewed the episode shown during the last week in October, many of them younger than 18. Among other sources, Walmart and Amazon sell “Lucille,” the barbed-wire covered bat pictured above.

What are our children and students watching? With all the electronics scattered throughout houses today, parents must remain especially alert. If fifteen-year-old Aidan is babysitting nine-year-old Trent, I would not want them both viewing Glenn’s horrific death. I loved Preacher last season but, readers, if your child or your students are watching the show, I suggest you take in a few episodes. Or go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preacher_(TV_series) and read the content of those episodes. “Gore, glee and guile,” as Rotten Tomatoes says, captures this clever, funny series in a few words.*

At a certain point, we all have to let go and let our children immerse themselves in Criminal Minds if they choose to do so, but I wrote this post because I think the sheer volume of content out there sometimes overwhelms efforts to select viewing choices for children. I also think teachers might sometimes want to step into the gap during conferences or phone calls to say, “Mike certainly does talk about The Walking Dead a lot.” Mike may be watching his favorite shows privately to avoid upsetting his parents, for one thing, streaming content onto his laptop in his room.

The “What are your favorite shows?” conversation should happen regularly today, at home and even in classrooms. At home, the “You have to make sure your little brother does not see that show. It’s too scary!” conversation may have to follow. I have had too many students ask me, “Do you think zombies are real, Ms. Q?”, followed by the question, “But what if the virus got loose. Then could there be zombies?”

Young kids don’t understand chemistry and medical limitations, but they are aware that zombies have been proliferating on large and small screens across the globe. Classrooms will erupt into disputes as students take sides on the possibility of zombies. In these times, brain-eating viruses that can leave animated corpses have become perfectly plausible to many students.

I remember spending elementary-school years terrified that I would be attacked by sudden lightening in my bedroom, lightening that would make me disappear forever. I kept looking toward — or trying not to look toward — the corners of my room. The source of my irrational fear was a mediocre, black and white Outer Limits episode starring Donald Pleasance. But small children believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. They cannot separate fictions from reality easily. They may not talk about their fears. I do not know if I ever asked my mom or dad about the lightening. I just kept peeking at corners of the ceiling, hoping not to see flashes of light.

Project Runway, anyone? I believe we need to rein in the apocalypse. The death and mayhem have gotten out of hand. If I were a small child today, I’d probably be stacking heavy items on a chair in front of my bedroom door to stop the dead from walking in while I slept, tearing out my throat, and then leaving me to reanimate as a shambling horror of blood and teeth.

Children’s imaginations should not be underestimated.

*I already said I had dubious taste in entertainment. But I also bought Disney movies for my kids when they were little. What’s good for the eccentric, retired teacher may not be good for elementary or middle school boys and girls.