A Year of Education
This July newsletter is a jumble of anecdotes. It is an array of observations and thoughts I’ve had while working in the public school system over the last year.
My first substitute job was at a local elementary school. I was blown away by how unhealthy the government funded school lunches and snacks were. If taxpayer dollars are going to feed the next generation of Americans, isn’t it reasonable to ask that the money doesn’t add costs to the overall health care system? It isn’t just that poor nutrition can lead to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and other health problems. Diet also affects academic performance and cognitive development, as nutritious meals can improve concentration, memory, and overall learning outcomes.
Of course, the flip side is that we want children to actually eat their lunches. If nutrition requirements lead to children throwing away the food, the standards are pointless. It’s also the case that healthy foods can be more expensive. Some schools have transferred money out of their teaching budgets to cover the food costs. At least, that was the claim by the Trump administration’s Agriculture Secretary, Sonny Perdue, when he was chipping away at Obama-era rules regarding school lunches. While Perdue argued that healthier food offerings mean more food waste and lower participation in the programs, other data points to the fact that the Hunger-Free Kids Act in 2010 increased participation in school meal programs at schools and kept food waste unchanged.
My next assignment was at a local middle school. I learned that the school’s name had recently been changed. It’s an interesting and important topic. I get that we want to rename military bases that previously honored Confederate generals. I agree with the Virginia chapter of the NAACP, which claims in a recent lawsuit that schools named for Confederate leaders create discriminatory educational environments for Black students. In particular, it makes sense that high schoolers and college students are old enough to understand the names of their schools and be affected by them. But I question the wisdom behind spending public funds to change the names of obscure historical figures, especially when it’s for elementary and middle schools.
The middle school where I worked for my second assignment was named after Jack Jouett, a revolutionary-era Virginian who was known as the “Paul Revere of the South.” Yes, it’s problematic that Jouett owned slaves. But is a twelve-year-old’s educational experience impacted by the name of Jouett on the building? Given the local shortages of teachers and bus drivers, wouldn’t the money be better allocated to hiring more of those essential workers? While it’s only a guess that middle school students don’t care enough to do research on Jack Jouett, I’m 100% sure that elementary students at the newly named Mountain View Elementary School didn’t know about Paul H. Cale, a former teacher, coach, principal, and superintendent.
In the mid-20th century, Paul led the local segregated school system to full integration without a single school closure or major incident. Paul wasn’t opposed to integration, but he understood that to keep schools open, he had to build trust with both sides. This fact made him a recent target and explains why his name was taken off the elementary school.
I’m not against renaming buildings and roads, and I’m happy that Charlottesville took down the statue of Robert E. Lee. But when it comes to the local school system, we should first fund the things that actually make a difference in changing educational outcomes. For example, I think that money would have been better spent on purchasing Yondr pouches to get the phones out of middle schools and high schools.
In schools that use Yondr pouches, students place their phones in small bags that are controlled by a magnet. Once a student walks into a “phone-free” zone, the pouches are locked and can only be unlocked once the student leaves school. For the many schools that have tried these devices—from Connecticut to California—the results have been game-changing. Fights have decreased and kids report engaging with their friends more.
When I was growing up, there was talk of a digital divide. It was a problem that poorer students couldn’t access technology. But, as Jonathan Haidt writes in his new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, the “digital divide” is no longer that poor kids and racial minorities have less access to the internet; it is now that they have less protection from it. According to Haidt, “Studies show that lower-income, Black, and Latino children put in more screen time and have less supervision of their electronic lives, on average, than children from wealthy families and white families. Data also shows that children in single-parent households have more unsupervised screen time. This suggests that smartphones are exacerbating educational inequality by both social class and race.” (I’ve observed that even the poorest of high school students have access to the newest smartphones.)
I’ve spoken to a few teachers who tried to ban phones from their classes, but they had so much paperwork to complete to punish the students for having their phones out. “I just gave up,” one said to me. I also asked a number of high school students. Every one of them said they would be delighted if phones were taken away. A sophomore girl said, “If our school completely banned all phones, we would all be together.” One teenager who attends the very popular and expensive St. Anne’s Belfield told me that in previous years STAB had a “no phone” rule in the classrooms. This past year they created a “no phone” rule for all of school grounds. She and her classmates love it. “Can anyone doubt that a school full of students using or thinking about their phones almost all the time—texting each other, scrolling through social media, and playing mobile games during class and lunchtime—is going to be a school with less learning, more drama, and a weaker sense of community and belonging?” writes Haidt.
While there aren’t any iPhones in local public elementary schools, there are lots of screens. Here is another example of the modern digital divide. While kindergartners and first graders in the local public schools use Chromebooks, private schools don’t allow screens until the children are in second grade.
The final anecdote relates to the holiday we will celebrate in three days. As Peggy Noonan writes, “We live in an age in which children are instructed that America is and always was a dark and scheming place, that its history is the history of pushing people around, often in an amoral quest for wealth.”
It is true that our Founders didn’t live up to the ideals they pronounced. But ideals are ideals because they give us something for which to strive. It is civic malpractice to teach that 1776 isn’t special and that the Founder’s ideals were irrelevant because some were slaveholders. The decision to sign Declaration of Independence was an earth shattering event that we should be celebrating without apology.
Given the importance of July 4, 1776, I was curious to look at an AP History class textbook. While the high school students said they didn’t use the book much, I was curious to see how the Declaration of the Independence was discussed. I found four short paragraphs— a total of about 750 words. This was the same amount of space was devoted to the influence of Rock and Roll and Malcom X. There were more words devoted to the impact of the gay liberation movement and four times as much information on Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon.
Curious about other textbooks, I did a little research and found an analysis by Dan Currell and Elle Rogers. It turns out that America's History, a leading textbook for AP classes, discusses the Declaration of Independence in the span of 344 words. Another widely adopted textbook is The American Pageant. It treats the Declaration as nothing more than a story of identity groups and factions fighting for power and economic advantage.
Considering the long sweep of human history, it’s very weird that people who look different from one another and who practice different religions are able to live and work and pray side-by-side without the threat of physical violence. It takes hard work to keep such an experiment going among such a diverse people. The first thing we need to do is to idealize the ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence. America is a very special project. If we don’t teach about how special America is, our experiment in democracy will fail.
I’ll close with a controversial idea from Daniel Pink. Pink proposes that native-born Americans should have to take the same USCIS naturalization civics test as non-citizens. After all, citizenship brings both opportunities and obligations. It’s noteworthy that only one in three native born Americans could pass the naturalization test, while eighty-eight percent of aspiring citizens pass on the first try.
How to implement this new requirement? Americans graduating high school could be required to take a civics test for graduation. Or we could offer the civics test as part of the passport application process? After all, Americans traveling abroad act as citizen ambassadors. Pink points out that the real value is in the preparation. The exercise demands that test-takers carve out space to stop and think. How should our system of government work? What makes America unique? Which rights are inalienable and which duties are inviolable? Stuff to think about on July 4th.