Nancy Flanagan is an education writer and consultant focusing on teacher leadership. She spent 30 years in a K-12 music classroom in Hartland, Mich, and was named Michigan Teacher of the Year in 1993. She is National Board-certified, and a member of the Teacher Leaders Network. She welcomes feedback on her sharp-eyed perspectives on the inconsistencies and inspirations, the incomprehensible, immoral and imaginative, in American education. She is a digital organizer for IDEA(Institute for Democratic Education in America).
How Can We Turn This Mess Around?
Follow me on Twitter: @nancyflanagan
Louisiana. Ground Zero for clearing the educational decks (by political steamroller or hurricane) and putting "reform" in place. Louisiana, where Bobby Jindal and the legislature he controls choose political victories and empty rhetoric over the needs of actual kids. Doesn't matter if people are demonstrating on the statehouse steps, calling out their pain and frustration. Doesn't matter if teachers and school leaders and families have been trying, against enormous odds, to make their neighborhood schools better.
The good work done, the hard-won, incremental inching forward? Sorry.
Ideology triumphs over human beings!
Unless it doesn't--in some little corner, where educators keep going, in spite of the fact that their elected officials are self-righteously voting against their daily efforts to do the right thing, right down the road.
Meet the teachers in one Louisiana school, who made the decision to play by the federal government's thorny
Louisiana. Ground Zero for clearing the educational decks (by political steamroller or hurricane) and putting "reform" in place. Louisiana, where Bobby Jindal and the legislature he controls choose political victories and empty rhetoric over the needs of actual kids. Doesn't matter if people are demonstrating on the statehouse steps, calling out their pain and frustration. Doesn't matter if teachers and school leaders and families have been trying, against enormous odds, to make their neighborhood schools better.
The good work done, the hard-won, incremental inching forward? Sorry.
Ideology triumphs over human beings!
Unless it doesn't--in some little corner, where educators keep going, in spite of the fact that their elected officials are self-righteously voting against their daily efforts to do the right thing, right down the road.
Meet the teachers in one Louisiana school, who made the decision to play by the federal government's thorny