Trump Targets

Instead of using the term, “diversity program,” to describe who is and has been targeted in the federal work force, we should say everyone who is not a white male, loyal to Trump federal employee. DEI is too ubiquitous an acronym. Likely, it means you. 

The “enemies of the Trump administration” and everyone else who is not a white guy, represents those being removed to from federal jobs. The loyalty clause is stated in Project 2025 and make no mistake, it is being used. But wait, perhaps you are white, male, and loyal and you have been sent home, laid off, or fired. Well no one says these folks were smart or efficient. They are the slash and burn brigade. As Musk said there will be collateral damage. Unfortunately, that may well be you. It’s easy to talk glibly about loss of pay when you have made $135 billion dollars since November 5, 2024. Do not expect empathy. 

You must remember the bold face lies Trump and Vance proclaimed repeatedly as they disavowed any relationship with Project 2025 all last year. They never heard of it. And yet here it is in action. A reckless plan. Made by reckless people, who pontificate from their very lofty and protected perches.

Side note: White males, loyal to Trump are a population in decline. Curious how this country will run with so few of them left? Well let’s take a look at our current indicators: 

See planes dropping from the sky, burning on tarmacs, flipping upside down on landing, exploding in midair collisions and 35 other ways since January. Maybe firing all those FAA folks wasn’t too smart. This is the most recent news item alert in the FAA website: 

February 24, 2025

General Aviation / Azle, Texas

A Starduster II crashed in a field near Flying Oakes Airport in Azle, Texas, around 2:45 p.m. local time on Monday, Feb. 24. Two people were on board. The FAA will investigate.

Okay so flying is riskier since Trump became president. But let’s move on.  

Ask nuclear power regulators how it’s going now that they are unemployed. Who’s managing the nukes?

Ask the former CDC scientists and support teams about the Avian flu. 

Ask midwestern farmers whose crops used to feed the world but now are rotting on docks how it feels to know their land will fall fallow as Trump, Musk, and the GOP have decided to get rid of USAID, painting it as some Mafia-like enterprise. People right now as I type these letters are dying because of this rash and immoral decision by Musk and Trump to cancel humanitarian aid. 

Ask any breathing person about the recent performance by the defense secretary on the international stage and they will tell you that it was amateur hour. Were you not ashamed of our Pro-Russia defense? Or how did you feel to hear our addled president claim Ukraine started the war, not Putin? We have watched the incursion of Russian troops into a sovereign nation for the last three years. Or how about the recent UN resolution to continue support of Ukraine when every darn UN member voted in support of the resolution except North Korea, Belarus, Russia, and yes, the United States. Such company we now keep!

Are you feeling safe as reckless cabinet secretaries take control? (See Hegseth’s debacle and today’s reporting on Kennedy’s apparent lie to senators on vaccinations.) Few of this gang even have minimal credentials or credibility to do their jobs. None have the requisite character. They are the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Well okay if they’re aiming at puppies, Kristi Noem seems to be a killer.

Still undecided if this century’s Rome is burning?  

See your non-IRS return. Think Musk and his teen minions who are gutting our federal work force are up to the task of reviewing and processing tax returns? 

Think about the millions and millions of children who will no longer get breakfast or lunch at school because the department who manages that task is gone. 

Try not to breathe too deeply as those pesky environmental employees are sent home or think you’ll take refuge in one of our once protected and beautiful national parks. 

Don’t count on health care as those who support and process Medicaid and Medicare are no longer employed.

Unemployed? Well the reductions in the labor office will not be helping you get the fraction of money you use to make before Trump was returned to office. 

Counting on social security, the program you paid into since you were 16 to continue or newly support you? Well the Republicans you elected think you should do without it. So now we all will. 

Excited to hear about the new treatments for diseases that kill Americans, namely heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s? Sorry federal research has been slashed. Remember, intellectuals (that means researchers and other scientists and all who support those academics) are not seen as Trump loyalists. 

Are you unable to send your child to private school at an average cost of $13,000 per child, or $60,000 for boarding school? Well sorry, but all those federal funds are being diverted from supporting public schools to pay for for profit school vouchers. Some corporations will be raking in the bucks! But you? Well those vouchers won’t actually pay the full cost of the new school, that isn’t regulated (that office was closed). You need to have enough money (be wealthy) to pay the majority of the tuition for your K-12 children. So yes, vouchers will help the wealthy! Meanwhile, your public school will be closing due to insufficient funds (see voucher scam). Is your child in need of special services? Private schooling for all of those children begins at $60,000 and climbs. That’s per child. Better start saving your pennies (oops that’s been stopped too!)

How safe are you feeling about now? Our long term allies have been recast as enemies and see us for the danger we now are to world peace. In a month Trump and Vance have aligned with autocratic regimes. Why? You know this! So, tax cuts for the billionaire class can be maintained. So the transnational corporations can make greater profits and assume greater power. Their allegiance is to their stockholders, not this country. Oh, and yes so all those billionaires who placed Trump and Vance in office will continue to support them. Look they do not want to be unemployed, nor do their Republican colleagues sitting on their butts in Congress with tape over their mouths want to be sent home by their loyal voters who now find themselves with no jobs, no futures. This is why Trump promised you that you only needed to vote in 2024. They cannot take a chance on free voting again. 

All of this has an impact on our economic security at personal and societal levels. This is from today’s NYT: 

“Fresh off the worst inflation shock in decades, Americans are once again bracing for higher prices.

Expectations about future inflation have started to move up, according to metrics closely watched by officials at the Federal Reserve. So far, the data, including a consumer survey from the University of Michigan and market-based measures of investors’ expectations, does not suggest that price pressures are perceived to be on the verge of spiraling out of control.

But the recent jump has been significant enough to warrant attention, stoking yet more uncertainty about an economic outlook already clouded by President Trump’s ever-evolving approach to trade, immigration, taxation and other policy areas.”

Remember when eggs were 4.99 under Biden? 

Okay, so in all that ‘free’ time you now have as Nero begins fiddling and our earth continues to heat up, don’t turn to the arts for salvation. Our once beautiful Kennedy Arts Center has been run into the ground by Trump as he has done with every other business he ever ran, including the USA. 

A Great ELA Curriculum Does Not Equal Achievement: Designing for Excellence

Children at work

So, you have invested in the development of a new ELA curriculum. You have procured all the necessary materials, reviewed with teachers the written lessons or units of study, and the measurements and exemplars. You agree that the work done by teachers, administrators, and consultants is excellent. You can see how the documents achieve cohesion across the school year and that there are strong alignments between the documents and the standards. 

Now, you are field-testing the work. On a recent walk-through of the school, you spent time reading student work displayed in the hallways and noticed that there does not seem to be an improvement from the beginning of the year to now regarding the quality of student thinking or composition. What's happening?

Unfortunately, in the design of the curriculum, an administrator's guide to analyzing student work was undeveloped, incomplete, or simply not enacted. To better ensure student achievement, participation by school and district administrators, in addition to teachers, in the analysis of student work needs to occur regularly. Analyzing district assessments can offer broad and important insights but analyzing student performance of key tasks during a unit of study yields far more actionable data. By identifying key tasks within a unit to study, teaching and learning can be seen, analyzed, revised, and corrected. Just as curriculum development is a design challenge, so too are the guides for the analysis of student work. These documents are important to create alongside the curriculum. 

Cohesive Teaching and Learning

Grade 2 Student’s Written Response to a Daily Instructional Task

Teaching young children, in this case second graders, to define the key term they are writing about allows them to better select evidence to support an assertion. I have embedded this kind of structure into primary and intermediate grade curriculum. In the example below, I modeled composition instruction in response to a text from a Cinderella unit. Children, through the routine of text talk, learned the word, crafty the previous day with their teachers (this is an inclusion class). I followed by using the the Single Paragraph Outline (SPO) designed by the Writing Revolution, with one key change. After Topic Sentence, I added a space for the explanation of the key term. The remainder is as TWR designed with details and the closing sentence. 

In the student writing example below, it is clear that the evidence selected (details) clearly supports the writer’s assertion that Yeh-Shen’s stepmother is crafty. She tricks her step daughter. 

In contrast to writing process reminders like, RACE, this approach actually focuses and scaffolds children’s thinking, producing far better outcomes.  What’s equally critical is the lesson the previous day built vocabulary knowledge. The next day’s lesson develops essayist writing. This happens because the curriculum is coherent. 

In grade 2, children need to build stamina, reading and writing fluency, and learn how to write convincing compositions with accurate evidence and paragraph structure. This technique of defining the key term allows students to stay focused, recall the critical parts of the text rather than try to retell all of it, and conclude well. 

The classroom teacher, principal, and I will be presenting on the the impact of teaching robust vocabulary and composition structure in primary grades at the 31st Annual Conference on Literacy, “Exploring Literacy and the Arts in Pursuit of a Socially Just World,” on  April 5, 2025 at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh,NY. 

Hope you can join us.

Driving Without a Map: How Kendrick Lamar's 'This Is Bigger Than Music' is a Location

I. Exposition

In the late 1980s, I disconnected from television, turning it off. Literally. My husband still watched his beloved Giants, on Sundays, but beyond that, our lone TV stood quiet in the corner. Yes, we flirted with Twin Peaks sometime in the early 90s, but it wouldn’t be until 2015 when Rob so sick from stage 4 lung cancer ‘discovered’ The West Wing and we momentarily engaged with TV again. We binged as Rob grew sicker and Donald Trump, that brass New Yorker, entered what seemed then an improbable race. So seeing myself watch and rewatch Kendrick Lamar’s 13-minute halftime show stunner this past week was a bit of a surprise. 

I spent Sunday evening as I do most Sundays talking books, politics, and life with a group of dear friends in a book club. The Super Bowl and its halftime show were not on my radar.  But the next morning, I read a post by a former colleague. She wrote how her daughter (who I truly hope to vote for someday) had sent her a completed lesson plan for her to use with high school students based on Lamar's Super Bowl performance. "Mommy you have to." 

So after hearing a lot of buzz about Lamar's performance, an artist frankly I knew only by name, I figured 15 minutes on the treadmill watching the show would work well. An hour later I was still walking, and rewatching. 

II. Subject

Last week, I read a small snippet on Dr. Victoria Williamson's blog about the cognitive importance of listening to new music as we age. It fascinated me. She writes,

“Listening to new music as we age provides the brain with a cognitive challenge that activates multiple, simultaneous neural systems. The benefits of music listening will never compare to the enchantments we get from actively performing music, but, nevertheless, new music listening activates areas of the brain from root to tip, from early auditory processing centres through to the outer reaches of our context.”

Listening to new music is good for us—that is, anyone beyond their teenage years. We tend as we age to deeply appreciate (regardless of quality) the music of our adolescence and early 20s. Neural nostalgia. The music of our youth is tightly bound with experiences. We tend to favor the familiar, such as that beloved song played and replayed on the way to and from school. Or in my youth, that one song my girlfriends and I waited to hear on a cheap AM transistor on the beach. We screamed each time it came on as if we had wished it into existence. Or that evening in Central Park when the concert we waited so long for got rained out, and we made a mad dash to the subway singing too loudly the songs we came to hear. Or maybe for you, it's the prom song, or the songs that followed you to college, or like me, the music that played at the first funeral of a too-young friend who had died. All it takes are the first few notes and memories flood us. The familiar is a comfort. But sometimes the familiar is also too comfortable.

I was thinking about how listening to new music breaks patterns and increases perspective. But doing that requires a modicum of discomfort. After watching the halftime show several times, I wanted to know more as there were holes in my understanding. I wanted a map that could locate what I was hearing with what I knew. But to understand also required a bridge. Whereas I grasped bits and pieces of what Lamar was rapping, and appreciated the choreography, lighting, and symbolism of America built on and by Black bodies, I wanted the full gestalt. So I read a few reviews a details became clearer. No longer was this performance an outline, but rather a map of our history.  Lamar's pronouncement, "40 acres and a mule, this is bigger than the music" connects the performance with Black history which is US history--and perhaps it is there in that slim space that some discomfort arises for some of the 133+ million people who watched. Yes, this is bigger than music. This is our collective history. 

III. Countersubject

Online opinions of the performance seemed to fall into two distinct camps that we might label, Blue and Red. (We are nothing if we are not tragically consistent.) For many, myself included, this performance was thought-provoking, re-affirming art.  For others, it was culturally affirming. We are here. Our history will not be erased.  Some commented on how it was storytelling, protest, playful, and necessary.

In a NJ newspaper, the reviewer, Bobby Olivier, wrote this: 

“… While Lamar is certainly one of hip-hop’s great minds and typically a blistering performer, the 37-year-old emcee came up small here: serviceable at best, pedestrian at worst…What I would’ve given for some older jams like “m.A.A.d City,” “Swimming Pools,” or “Alright.”

Bobby wanted nostaligia. Like Bobby, many wanted the remembered experiences they had at other halftime shows. The familiar. An America that was less truthful. That was not entertaining, became an ironic refame from many. 

For others, the commentary was less dressed up and I directly quote from several posted reactions:  “It was boring and offensive, a waste of time, DEI halftime show, This makes no sense, Zero diversity.”

Dr. Williamson explains that 

"Listening to new music is a challenge. It is like driving in a new area without a map – our attention is all over the place, faced with unfamiliar input, and we struggle to appreciate our surroundings when faced with the challenge of constantly unfolding novelty. It can be overwhelming to our brain since it cannot rely on memory."

Are some of the more negative experiences with the halftime show about driving without a map? For those and all of us who acknowledge that we all have moments when it might feel easier to turn away than engage, how do we collectively move from the too-quick response and dismissal to dwelling?

IV. Answer

With what bridge do we build that might join land and landscape be?  All the vitriol and hate speech that floods our days have ramifications, as does the targeting by our President of vulnerable populations.  Such hate speech has already resulted in deaths. 

Martin Heidegger in a powerful essay, "Building Dwelling Thinking" writes, "But only something that is itself a location can make space for a site."  

Be a location. Not the location, but a location.

Our practice, like Lamar's art, cannot simply be about using our energy to return to a place we have been. The mythology of making America great again is predicated on that belief. Such desire amplifies the separation we feel and leaves too many of us hungry, frustrated, and unforgiving.

How brave Kendrick Lamar was last Sunday to trust us to look beyond the spectacle of entertainment and the chiding voice of Uncle Sam warning of failure, of "too much ghetto" so that we could feel, think, and witness. This was an aesthetic that required our response. 

Let us learn to hear beyond the nostalgia and familiar tune.

A Child is Dead

I.

Yesterday evening I read a post on Linked In by a woman I do not follow. I cannot recall how I found the post as it disturbed me so greatly.  This mom was writing to say her beloved trans-daughter was dead.  Her daughter no longer felt safe in the United States of America given the relentless attacks on trans-girls and women in particular, by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Trump's administration, and the Republican governors and state representatives in this country.  These attacks purposely and legally erase trans people. The legislation put targets on the backs of every trans child and adult, opening them to hate crimes condoned by the president. 

Imagine a President of the United States saying repeatedly that an entire group of people do not exist, and stripping from them every right they have for protection under existing laws.  Imagine the same man having splashy shows of anti-trans-girl hatred where he signs executive orders aimed at harming trans-girls with a group of mostly white women and girls crowded behind him.  All of them laugh and smile as if the deaths these actions have and will continue to cause do not matter.  

This is what erasure does. It lessens our capacity to see others as human. 

II.

In Nazi Germany suicides in Hamburg up until 1938 occurred infrequently. From 1938 onwards that changed. In Hamburg, suicides dramatically increased after Kristallnacht and continued to increase with the onset of deportations in 1941. The response to hopelessness, fear, erasure, and potential violence against you can cause some to take their own lives.  The parallels between the anti-Trans hate speech and legislative actions in the US under Trump and Vance and the erasure of Jewish people in the 1930s and 1940s by Hitler and the Reich are present.

What will you do?

III.

A child is dead who felt afraid to live in this damn country. Her family now is left to grieve. 

If you too feel frustrated, scared, and isolated and want to take action against the Trump-Musk coup (Yes, coup! See Timothy Snyder here), Robert Hubbel on Substack may offer comfort, direction, and sources of action. The current post proposes methods for resistance.