Remarkable education: writing from the year 2023.

This year I also decided to share with you my discoveries and interesting reads for 2023. There were a lot of great articles about education issues and related topics, but I only chose five of them. Of course, that means a lot of good stuff didn't make the list. Such is life.

Well, here we go:

• The St. Louis Neighborhood School District is actively checking student residency, calling it "educational theft" (By Kawan Mansouri and Kate Grumke, St. Louis Public Radio)

When I think of the people school districts hire, I envision teachers, administrators, bus drivers and janitors. But I've never thought of 'residential investigators'. However''Thanks to this exceptional article, I now have a clear, albeit disturbing, picture of what measures have been taken by a suburban St. Louis school district to prevent students who are not allowed to attend its schools.

• Is Sadiq Khan trying to make London schools more dangerous? (Tom Bennett, The Spectator)

The issue of teaching discipline is under-discussed, and there is perhaps no more sensible voice than Tom Bennett's. If you follow teachers or their social media accounts and pay attention to what's bothering them, it's certainly common to hear complaints about salary or workload, but, predominantly, teachers are frustrated by their students' misbehavior and lack of''tools for effective interventions. Too much emphasis is placed on forms of restorative discipline that don't work and only frustrate teachers and students suffering from children's disruptive behavior. Tom Bennett puts it eloquently:

"Many students don't accept the idea of dialog as readily as we would like them to. That's why parking inspectors don't issue restorative conversation tickets or try to '\''understand why a driver felt the need to park there'\''\''. Boundaries require consequences or some people won't consider them boundaries. "

The American education system is at a crossroads. We need to stop focusing so much on the negative consequences'''punishing students and start talking about the negative effects of erratic and disruptive students on their classmates.

• The boy who shouted 'Marx' (Robert Pondicio, Commentary)

The underperformance of the American education system is usually for boring reasons, and that may not satisfy some people. There has always been a leftward current among such people who believe that big businesses or some dark forces want schools to remain of low quality so that consumers and voters remain ignorant and easy to manage.

"American education is not characterized by the fact that Marxists control it, but by the fact that no one controls it. "

The Pondicio article is useful for those who want to change the American education system for the better or fear that it has deteriorated.

• French panic over 'leftists' (Thomas Chatterton Williams, The Atlantic)

Although this article is not directly about elementary and middle school education, it is useful for those who work in the field and have been confronting the "woke consciousness" for several years. I don't know if we can say that we have reached 'peak enlightenment', but it seems that this particular kind of''succumb to dogmatic thinking as rigid as that which they oppose'.

His main point:

"The key to healthy and sustainable social progress lies in understanding the extent to which a potentially useful idea can be realized before it devolves into self-destructive extremism. "

This applies to both enlightenment and criticism of enlightenment. Both sides of the debate could benefit from it.

• Attacks and assaults on school buses in Southeast Michigan (Lily Altavena, Detroit Free Press)

When I think of journalism as the "fourth estate," an integral component of our democracy that informs citizens so they can demand our''elected representatives of the response, I think of articles like this one. It's a huge shock to read it, but it's the kind of impenetrably important work that only local journalists can do. It tells the real stories of real people and the institutions that failed them.

It's underappreciated how difficult it is to run complex routes and manage drivers, something many districts do to provide transportation for students to school. It is difficult to find drivers. It's hard to plan efficient routes. Students can misbehave. When you add to that students with special needs and accompanying behavior problems, you can see that school administrators have a tough job. People make mistakes, that's normal.

But,''what is forgivable, and what is revealed in this story, is the hiding of mistakes in front of parents.

This story provides a broader lesson with applicability to many other debates in American education this year. Parents don't expect perfection from educators, but they do expect honesty. There was a dearth of truth in this story, and it exacerbated already painful situations.

There you have it! I hope you read a lot of great stuff in 2023 and will read even more in 2024.