a version of this piece was published in Education Week

This fall, gun violence created waves of panic and helplessness in my school district, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, when a freshman at Butler High School shot and killed a classmate in the hallway over a personal conflict.  With more than 80 incidents of gunfire on American school grounds already this year, it had seemed like only a matter of time.  How did we get to the point where such tragic events are now accepted as inevitable? How can we shift the interpersonal dynamics in our schools and in our society to make incidents like this less common?  

Psychologists have been administering a test called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory for more than 30 years.  Over that period, they’ve seen a consistent rise in levels of narcissism and a corresponding drop in feelings of empathy.  Individuals with higher narcissism scores are more likely to lash out in anger, while those with lower empathy scores are less likely to help others in need.

Look what has happened to school shooting numbers during those decades:

I’d already been thinking a lot about the decline in positive interactions in our society and how we might more effectively teach character in our schools. But this local act of gun violence added a new sense of urgency to my goal of building community and cultivating kindness between students.  Twenty plus years of experience teaching prescribed character education lessons have shown me that an adult simply talking about character or modelling positive behavior does not often lead to the changes we want to see in our children. There had to be a more impactful approach.

A few years ago, researchers at the University of Wisconsin set out to answer the question ‘Can compassion be learned?’  They wanted to see whether practicing the mindset of caring would lead to more caring behavior, and the results of their study were very promising.  After practicing compassion towards friends, strangers, and even people they’d had conflict with, participants showed increased activity in the region of the brain associated with empathy and understanding.  Just like learning to write the letters of the alphabet or using the quadratic formula, it was regular opportunities to practice the skill that made it more likely they would successfully use the skill on their own.

With that in mind, I created an assignment to give my 7th grade Language Arts students the opportunity to practice compassion towards each other.  I called it Undercover Agents of Kindness.

To increase interaction between students who did not normally talk to each other, I had students draw a random classmate’s name from a bowl.  After they drew names, I was shocked to hear some of them had no idea who the other person was–even after being in class together for two months and in many cases attending the same school for years.  Students had two weeks to perform an unexpected act of kindness for the other person and complete a written ‘mission report’ detailing what they did and how it went.  

Soon I began to see encouraging sticky notes on lockers in the hallway.  Batches of homemade cupcakes and bags of leftover Halloween candy made their way onto desks in my classroom, as did origami, inspirational quotes, and hand-drawn portraits.  I heard compliments exchanged about all kinds of things. Students I’d never seen together started offering to carry each other’s books and musical instruments to the next class.  As the mission reports started trickling in, I read accounts of children studying together, inviting others to sit together at lunch, helping others put football equipment on at practice.

However, it was my students’ reflections on the kindness activity that revealed its impact most.  Again and again they acknowledged that it was difficult and felt awkward to approach someone they didn’t know well and do something for them.  But almost every time they added that they were proud of themselves for doing it anyway and felt the power in brightening someone else’s day.

As part of our reflection on the assignment, I solicited student advice on what I could do to improve ‘Agents of Kindness.’  My students offered many helpful suggestions, including drawing names from the whole grade level instead of just individual classes, offering example acts of kindness for those who get stuck, and allowing a little more time so they don’t feel rushed.  The majority of them said they’d like to repeat the activity, although some admitted that it shouldn’t require a school assignment for them to be kind to each other.

I plan to make Undercover Agents of Kindness a monthly occurrence, and I would love to see other teachers borrow the idea, improve it, and share their results with the educator community as well.  

Sometimes our world seems dark and scary and we feel powerless to change it.  Together my students and I are learning that there are steps we can take to make things better. We can find ways to break down barriers, build stronger communities, and normalize compassionate behavior.  We can be intentional about creating opportunities to practice kindness and make it more likely people will treat each other with compassion on their own.  We can be the change we want to see in the world.

Last night an email from the SAS corporation hit the inboxes of teachers all across North Carolina.  I found it suspicious and forwarded it to spam.

EVAAS is a tool that SAS claims shows how effective educators are by measuring precisely what value each teacher adds to their students’ learning.  Each year teachers board an emotional roller coaster as they prepare to find out whether they are great teachers, average teachers, or terrible teachers–provided they can figure out their logins.  

NC taxpayers spend millions of dollars for this tool, and SAS founder and CEO James Goodnight is the richest person in North Carolina, worth nearly $10 billion.  However, over the past few years, more and more research has shown that value added ratings like EVAAS are highly unstable and are unable to account for the many factors that influence our students and their progress. Lawsuits have sprung up from Texas to Tennessee, charging, among other things, that use of this data to evaluate teachers and make staffing decisions violates teachers’ due process rights, since SAS refuses to reveal the algorithms it uses to calculate scores.

By coincidence, the same day I got the email from SAS, I also got this email from the mother of one of my 7th grade students:

Photos attached provided evidence that the student was indeed reading at the dinner table.

The student in question had never thought of himself as a reader.  That has changed this year–not because of any masterful teaching on my part, but just because he had the right book in front of him at the right time.

Here’s my point:  We need to remember that EVAAS can’t measure the most important ways teachers are adding value to our students’ lives.  Every day we are turning students into lifelong independent readers. We are counseling them through everything from skinned knees to school shootings.  We are mediating their conflicts. We are coaching them in sports. We are finding creative ways to inspire and motivate them. We are teaching them kindness and empathy.  We are doing so much more than helping them pass a standardized test at the end of the year.

So if you figure out your EVAAS login today, NC teachers, take heart.  You are so much more than your EVAAS score!

The general election is tomorrow, and both voters and nonvoters will decide whether the Republican party’s supermajority in the North Carolina General Assembly continues for another two years.

Thanks to extreme gerrymandering in our traditionally purple state, North Carolina Republicans currently hold 74 seats to 46 Democrat seats in the House and 35 seats to 15 Democrat seats in the Senate.  As a result, they can pass any bill they want and override Governor Cooper’s veto. This lack of balance has led to a far-right agenda since 2010 which includes the de-prioritizing of public education, unprecedented and illegal racial gerrymandering, a consistent lack of transparency and healthy debate, and so many power grabs they barely constitute news any more.  It’s been ugly, but that could be about to change.

In order to break the supermajority, restore the Governor’s veto, and bring back some semblance of balance and normalcy to our democracy, Democrats need to add either four seats the House or six seats in the Senate.  That’s completely within their means, but it depends 100% on who votes.

Preliminary indications from early voting are largely positive for Democrats.  Ironically, that could be a problem.

Travel back in time two years to the run-up to the presidential election of 2016.  Prognosticators were declaring Hillary Clinton the first female president of the United States and chiding Donald Trump for the inflammatory campaign rhetoric that had supposedly cost him any real chance at winning the presidency.  

Now remember sitting in front of your television on election night, watching states turn red one by one on the map.  Ohio. Florida. Pennsylvania.  Wisconsin. Michigan. Recall the nauseating sense of horror you felt as the reality of a Trump presidency settled in.  Reflect on the last two years of that presidency and what it has meant for our country and the world. The horrible cabinet appointments.  The Muslim ban. Charlottesville. The transgender military ban. Constant demonization of the press and resulting violence by his supporters.  Migrant family separation. Weekly embarrassment on the international stage. The list goes on and on.

I have bad news for anyone who sat out the 2016 election:  You are just as responsible for the Donald Trump presidency as those who voted for him.

This summer, Pew Research released a very thorough survey of the 2016 electorate.   The survey looked closely at demographics of registered voters who did not participate in the presidential election.  Results show clearly that nonvoters were made up more heavily of folks who, had they voted, would have been likely to lean away from Donald Trump (young people and nonwhite voters, for example).

There may have been a lot of different reasons why people didn’t vote in 2016, but one of them was no doubt a sense of media-fueled overconfidence leading to the belief that Clinton already had the presidency in the bag and there was no need to get out and vote.

Fast forward to 2018 in North Carolina.  For months, Democrats and their supporters have been talking about an impending blue wave sweeping our state.  Turnout in early voting is up substantially over the 2014 midterm election, including among voters ages 18-29.  But at the same time, there’s still a danger that the overconfidence that kept voters away from the polls two years ago could strike again on election day and preserve the GOP supermajority that has turned North Carolina into a national caricature.

Please do not take the results of this year’s election for granted.  If you did not vote early, look up your polling place’s address by visiting this convenient link.  Make your plan for when you’re going to vote tomorrow between 6:30 AM and 7:30 PM.  Vote before work. Pack a sandwich and go on your lunch break. Stop by on your way home in the evening (anyone who is in line at 7:30 will be permitted to vote).  But, whatever you do, please, please, please, do not sit this one out.

Help us make the General Assembly great–or at least not a total disaster–again.

(Hat tip to my friend John deVille for the custom hat!)

note:  a shorter version of this post appeared in the Charlotte Observer

To be honest, it felt like just a matter of time until it happened.  Our nation’s school shooting epidemic finally reached Charlotte this week, as 16 year-old Butler High freshman Bobby McKeithen was shot and killed by a classmate after a fight in a school hallway spiraled out of control.

Families, friends and educators are left to grieve and wonder what they could have done differently.  That question is impossible to answer with any kind of certainty. But one thing is clear: our students need better conflict resolution skills and ways of coping with their emotions.  In public schools, our school counselors, psychologists, and social workers form the front lines for helping students develop those skills that will provide them with the foundation they need to be socially and emotionally healthy and allow us to maintain safe and productive environments for all.

This past February, the Parkland, Florida school massacre ended the lives of seventeen students and staff members.  In the wake of that horrific tragedy, North Carolina legislators created the House Select Committee on School Safety to explore what measures could be taken in our schools to keep our students safe.  Unsurprisingly, they found that current student support services staffing ratios are far below what the industry sets as standards.  For example, the nationally recommended ratio of students to school psychologists is 1:700, but our state average is 1:1857.  

To its credit, the House committee recommended that North Carolina public schools increase their number of support staff to meet national standards.  It’s a great but also expensive recommendation requiring legislators who deeply value public education and want to do right by all children.  Former North Carolina General Assembly Fiscal Analyst and current Justice Center Senior Policy Analyst Kristopher Nordstrom puts the price tag for increasing instructional support staff ratios to recommended levels at $640 million.  Unfortunately, this summer our General Assembly budgeted only $10 million for increasing mental health support personnel and made schools apply for grants in order to get those funds.  That’s not a typo, our state lawmakers gave us 1.6% of what they acknowledged we need.  The funds are non-recurring, meaning there is no guarantee those positions will be funded for more than one school year.

It’s not the first time our General Assembly has balked at paying for desperately-needed social-emotional student supports.  In 2017, my own state representative John Autry noted Republicans were adding another $20 million to the private school voucher program despite the fact that existing voucher funds hadn’t been fully spent.  Autry proposed an amendment which would have taken that $20 million and used it to hire additional public school personnel such as school counselors, nurses, and psychologists.  That amendment was tabled by House leadership so they wouldn’t have to go on the record as voting against it.

Here in Mecklenburg County we’ve been fortunate to have the support of our local government to help fill the gaps for what the state refuses to do, but it’s still not nearly enough.  Last school year our support services ratios in CMS schools were far worse than the state averages (our ratio of school psychologists was 1:2112, for example). Our school district asked for and received $4.4 million in additional funding from the county which will provide 10 psychologists, 33 school counselors, and 17 social workers.  Those additional staff members will make a difference, but it’s a drop in the bucket in a district that serves nearly 150,000 children.

We have no way of knowing if counseling or peer mediation could have prevented the devastating events that took place at Butler this week.  But as we struggle to turn this loss of life into meaningful action, let’s focus on what concrete steps we can take to help students develop the social and emotional well being we know they all need to be successful in school.  Let’s break with the mentality that has us perpetually accepting as fact that public education is all about making do with less than we need and take bold steps on behalf of kids who need us now more than ever.