How Was School?

Notes on teaching, parenting, and American public schools.

In 2008, I lived in New York City, working as an educational consultant. My job was to help schools use writing and social studies units that incorporated what were, at the time, relatively new technologies: LCD projectors, interactive chalkboards, student laptops.

On a typical day, I would start at Intermediate School A in the Bronx. The head of the English department, Ms. Carroll (not her real name), always had coffee brewing in the lounge, which she had decorated with picture books and a bulletin board of student writing. We would co-observe teachers using the program, and then I would lead a staff meeting. Contractually, the teachers didn’t have to meet with me, but they always came. We wrote memoirs together to use as examples in class. I encouraged them to treat the end of each unit as a celebration, like a gallery opening, and have students read aloud from their work. They invited me to each one. Sometimes I would bring pastries. It was a nice school. 

Then, I would walk Southwest, through Crotona Park, to Intermediate School B. This school was innovative; their principal had decided to go all-in on digital learning. Every student had a laptop. There were not many veteran teachers here; it was staffed primarily by young idealists. Teaching was a struggle. The 7th-grade social studies teacher I worked with kept getting into shouting matches with a 14-year-old who was repeating the grade. “Oh, should we air out the laundry?” she would say, and the lesson would be lost. A math teacher, one of the only veterans, said to me, “I ask them to take out a pencil, but nobody has one. They can’t show their work.” I often advised teachers to circulate the classroom because their students were not actually on the correct websites. The veterans didn’t know how to teach in this new way. The young idealists spent a lot of their time repairing the laptops. 

After these visits, I would eat lunch at a pizza shop or a small deli, any place that had the good benches, and I would write down my observations. Every day I saw something beautiful, something upsetting, something strange. I accumulated these anecdotes in journal after journal; I already had a stack of them from four years of teaching special education at a school near Yankee Stadium. Reams of anecdotal data. What did it add up to? 

***

Last summer, after 20 years in the field, I stepped back from my work in public schools to be a homemaker. Not long ago, I picked my daughter up from pre-school. We live in Los Angeles now, so even though it was February, it was warm enough to play in the park. While we walked, we had the usual conversation about her day. How was it? “Regular.” Did you play with Alec (not his real name)? “A little bit.” Parents know this conversation. We know the boulder will just roll back down, but we push it up anyway. Once we set foot in the park, the conversation was over. 

Later, we picked up her older brother, who is in first grade. They like each other. When she sees him, in lieu of a greeting she likes to impart one bit of news. If someone at school had a birthday, and handed out treats, she will say, “Hilton, I had a cookie.” If we saw a cool moth on the way to school, she will say, “Hilton, we saw a cool moth.” On this day, the moment he emerged into the hallway, his face still red from P.E., she said, “Hilton, my fingers got licked by a wolf!” 

We don’t know what’s going on in schools. I believe this is as true at the aggregate level–we don’t know what’s happening in America’s schools–as it is for an individual. Our children cannot tell us. Even those blessedly loquacious children, or children of those crafty parents who are good at eliciting more information, cannot tell you more than a fraction of what happened in a given day. There is simply too much, too many complex social interactions, too many feelings, too much subconscious shifting and merging. Typically, you will receive some salient facts, news of a conflict, a good grade, a gross lunch, and this meager nourishment will have to suffice. 

As a young teacher, I often felt I didn’t know what had happened that day even though I was there, conducting it. I felt like I was on a treadmill. The days sailed by with increasing speed, evaporating from my mind almost as soon as they were over. To regain a sense of control, I began journaling. I would take the subway hundreds of blocks down to a jazz club on the Lower East Side and write down whatever occurred to me while my body uncoiled. Each time, I would realize something about a student that I hadn’t noticed before. A mood that I didn’t understand at the time, a reaction to something I said. Sometimes I would write about specific interactions to try and understand them. Sometimes I was looking for a route to forgiveness. Later in my career, I would write to connect my daily experiences to the larger questions that still consume me about teaching and public schools. (More on those to come). When I became a parent, and found myself as exhausted and confused as when I was a rookie teacher, I was grateful for this habit. Writing gave me back the day. It let me see my children. 

***

As it happened, my daughter was telling the truth: a wolf really had licked her fingers. People in LA sometimes acquire wolf pups and attempt to raise them as dogs. When they become too large, their bite too powerful, they are abandoned. A non-profit company exists that will take the wolves from you–no questions asked, no smiles given either–and train those that can be trained for use in movies and TV shows. They also visited schools. I should have known about this event; I saw later that it was indeed noted in an email from the pre-school director. But somehow I had missed the memo. And if she hadn’t greeted her brother with that exciting news, I might never have known it happened. 

Intermediate School A is still there, though its enrollment, and its test scores, have dropped to historically low levels since the pandemic. Intermediate School B is also still open. Its principal at the time I was visiting told a journalist that he was trying to “build a new model for public schools.” It was strange to read stories about this school knowing, as I did, that it was not working well at all. I still find myself thinking about one of my last visits there. I was asked to help a long-term substitute teacher–another veteran–to use his LCD projector to teach. When I arrived in the classroom, he was standing there, a man in his 70s, trim, hair gray and unwashed, pants pulled up to where my father always wanted them, above the belly button. He greeted me warmly, chuckled at the LCD projector I had wheeled in, and then began writing on the interactive dry erase board. As students filed in, he kept writing. Clear, elegant letters, too small for me to read. Amid the din of student conversation I realized he was talking, but he still had not turned around. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Two students threw paper airplanes at his back, something I thought only happened in the movies. He turned briefly, a hurt look on his face, and then resumed writing. When he had filled the board, he began writing on the wall.

Schools aren’t worse now, in 2024, than they were in 2008. In many respects they are far better. But something feels different. For some time before I stepped back, I felt the same way I did as a rookie teacher, and then again as a new parent: tired, unsure of myself, moving forward without a plan. I don’t think it was just me. In any case, I have decided to do what worked in the past: write my way through it. 

This project is an attempt to bring some coherence to the past, present, and future of school reform. I thought for a while to just focus on that, on schooling in America. But being a parent makes me see the work with an entirely different lens. It is personal for me now, more urgent, and yet I have the privilege of having some distance, some time off the treadmill. I have the luxury now to question the assumptions that used to guide my decisions, revisit the yellowing research papers I kept from graduate school. I can reread the letters students have written me over the years, the many essays of theirs that I have kept. I can search through those old journals, looking for clues, forgotten names, moments of joy and inspiration. I have time to work through this crisis directly. 

At least while the kids are at school.