The Hard Part

They never tell you in teacher school, and it's rarely discussed elsewhere. It is never, ever portrayed in movies and tv shows about teaching. Teachers rarely bring it up around non-teachers for fear it will make us look weak or inadequate.

Valerie Strauss in yesterday's Washington Post put together a series of quotes to answer the question "How hard is teaching?" and asked for more in the comments section. My rant didn't entirely fit there, so I'm putting it here, because it is on the list of Top Ten Things They Never Tell You in Teacher School.

The hard part of teaching is coming to grips with this:

There is never enough.

There is never enough time. There are never enough resources. There is never enough you.

As a teacher, you can see what a perfect job in your classroom would look like. You know all the assignments you should be giving. You know all the feedback you should be providing your students. You know all the individual crafting that should provide for each individual's instruction. You know all the material you should be covering. You know all the ways in which, when the teachable moment emerges (unannounced as always), you can greet it with a smile and drop everything to make it grow and blossom.

You know all this, but you can also do the math. 110 papers about the view of death in American Romantic writing times 15 minutes to respond with thoughtful written comments equals-- wait! what?! That CAN'T be right! Plus quizzes to assess where we are in the grammar unit in order to design a new remedial unit before we craft the final test on that unit (five minutes each to grade). And that was before Ethel made that comment about Poe that offered us a perfect chance to talk about the gothic influences. And I know that if my students are really going to get good at writing, they should be composing something at least once a week. And if I am going to prepare my students for life in the real world, I need to have one of my own to be credible.

If you are going to take any control of your professional life, you have to make some hard, conscious decisions. What is it that I know I should be doing that I am not going to do?

Every year you get better. You get faster, you learn tricks, you learn which corners can more safely be cut, you get better at predicting where the student-based bumps in the road will appear. A good administrative team can provide a great deal of help.

But every day is still educational triage. You will pick and choose your battles, and you will always be at best bothered, at worst haunted, by the things you know you should have done but didn't. Show me a teacher who thinks she's got everything all under control and doesn't need to fix a thing for next year, and I will show you a lousy teacher. The best teachers I've ever known can give you a list of exactly what they don't do well enough yet.

Not everybody can deal with this. I had a colleague (high school English) years ago who was a great classroom teacher. But she gave every assignment that she knew she should, and so once a grading period, she took a personal day to sit at home and grade papers for 18 hours straight. She was awesome, but she left teaching, because doing triage broke her heart.

So if you show up at my door saying, "Here's a box from Pearson. Open it up, hand out the materials, read the script, and stick to the daily schedule. Do that, and your classroom will work perfectly," I will look you in your beady eyes and ask, "Are you high? Are you stupid?" Because you have to be one of those. Maybe both.

Here's your simile for the day.

Teaching is like painting a huge Victorian mansion. And you don't actually have enough paint. And when you get to some section of the house it turns out the wood is a little rotten or not ready for the paint. And about every hour some supervisor comes around and asks you get down off the ladder and explain why you aren't making faster progress. And some days the weather is terrible. So it takes all your art and skill and experience to do a job where the house still ends up looking good.

Where are school reformy folks in this metaphor? They're the ones who show up and tell you that having a ladder is making you lazy, and you should work without. They're the ones who take a cup of your paint every day to paint test strips on scrap wood, just to make sure the paint is okay (but now you have less of it). They're the ones who show up after the work is done and tell passerbys, "See that one good-looking part? That turned out good because the painters followed my instructions." And they're most especially the ones who turn up after the job is complete to say, "Hey, you missed a spot right there on that one board under the eaves."

There isn't much discussion of the not-enough problem. Movie and tv teachers never have it (high school teachers on television only ever teach one class a day!). And teachers hate to bring it up because we know it just sounds like whiny complaining.

But all the other hard part of teaching-- the technical issues of instruction and planning and individualization and being our own "administrative assistants" and acquiring materials and designing unit plans and assessment-- all of those issues rest solidly on the foundation of Not Enough.

Trust us. We will suck it up. We will make do. We will Find A Way. We will even do that when the people tasked with helping us do all that on the state and federal level instead try to make it harder. Even though we can't get to perfect, we can steer toward it. But if you ask me what the hard part of teaching is, hands down, this wins.

There's not enough.

The Hard Way

The Fourth of July is always a popular time for folks to reflect on what this country stands for, and we come up with many fine lists both of the best and the worst. Today, I'd like to add my own item to the list.

America stands for doing things the hard way.

When it comes to running a country, the easiest way to do it is to put one guy in charge and let him tell everybody how to do everything. He can be picked by heredity or tradition or power or wealth; he can be installed by a committee of Important People, or by the roar of the crowd, or even a legitimate-ish election. But the important part-- the easy part-- is that once you have him installed, you just let him run everything. No debates. no discussions, no big arguments about What To Do Next-- just let your Grand High Potentatial Poohbah decide it all.

There's a Less Easy but Still Pretty Easy way of doing things, which is to use an absolute democracy. Every issue that comes up, you vote on. The answer chosen by the majority is the answer the whole country uses, and discussion of the issue is over. If you're in the minority, you just shut up, and stay shut up.

We certainly toyed with all of these. Early on many citizens wanted to just crown George Washington King of America and be done with it. The founding fathers wrote all sorts of rules that they didn't want to be held to (all people are created equal, but not really) and many envisioned a country ruled by the votes of the Right People.

But instead, we dedicated our country to doing things the hard way. We wrote down a bunch of foundational premises for running a country, and then we set up a mechanism by which, over time, those principles could be interpreted and extended to their natural conclusions, even if the majority of founders didn't agree with those conclusions. The constitution is the ultimate exercise in saying, "Look, I'm going to agree to these principles, and every time I try to weasel out of actually following them, I want you to bop me over the head and stop me."

Furthermore, we set up a system based on the principle of not shutting people up, sorting them somehow into classes ranging from Those Who Must Always Be Listened to all the way down to Those Who Must Always Be Ignored.

The Framers had seen the many ways in which the easy way could go wrong, and somehow, they found the means of sitting down together with fellow citizens with whom they deeply and profoundly disagreed. 

We have always been annoyed by our own system. We're irritated by the way it fosters unending debate on every little thing-- even things that we thought were already decided. And good Lord in heaven-- can't the people who are Dead Wrong just shut up and go away? We waste time, energy, and money on processes that are inefficient and inconsistent. There's hardly anything in this country that we don't do the hard way, loaded with argument and controversy and inefficiency and ambiguity.

On top of that, our peculiar brand of running a country ties all of our citizens together, so that people in one community have to worry about, be involved in, pay taxes to finance decisions in other communities. Gah! Can't we just take care of our own and let those Others go hang? Having to be all tied together is just hard!

And so we are always bedeviled by folks who want to get America to do things the easy way. And with the unleashing of Citizens United, many of our wealthy citizens are doing their best to move us to an easier system, a system where the people who are Better just go ahead and settle issues for the rest of us. Also, why shouldn't I be able to just close the doors on my gated community, pay for my own police and fire company, and just not have to give a cent to those Other People?

This pressure to start doing things the easy way is felt all across our country, but we are getting hit by it head on in education.

When Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says we should just abolish school boards because letting voters get involved in school decisions is just inefficient and disruptive, he's searching for the easy way. When Bill Gates decides that all American students (well, all non-rich non-private school students) should meet the same standards, and those standards should be the ones laid out by this couple of guys he knows, he's looking for the easy way. When folks like the Waltons and Broads look for ways to break down the teaching profession so that we can have people in classrooms who just follow the instructions they're given, it's one more search for the easy way. When people across the spectrum agitate for a standardized test that can measure the complex learning achievements of every student in America, that's a search for the easy way. When charteristas think that simply unleashing the invisible hand of the market place will somehow create excellence in education (and, perhaps, help sort the Betters from the Lessers, while making some Betters a big pile of profit)-- that's a search for the easy answer, too.

There are two problems with the easy way.

The first is a moral problem. The easy way requires us to silence everyone who is not on the Right Page. If you lost the vote, if you're in the smaller group, if you're on the less powerful side, then you just need to shut up. The easy way seeks to stop all disagreement and discussion so that we can unite behind one clean, clear, elegant solution, and there is only one way to do that-- to silence everyone who doesn't agree.

Worse, and more morally repugnant, the easy way calls on us to ignore Those People entirely. It encourages us to think of them as Lessers, which somehow makes it okay to give them less-- less service, less support, less kindness, less consideration, because, hey, they're Less Than, and so they deserve to get less. We can abandon them because that's all they deserve. It is straight up immoral to treat other human beings as less valuable than our own tribe. And yet, that immoral behavior is always required by the easy way.

Which brings us to the second problem, the practical problem-- the easy way just doesn't work. Look back through history-- a nation or institution can sustain the easy way for a generation at most, but then things just fall apart. Turns out that silencing people thoroughly and forever is really, really hard. And it also turns out that engaging in immoral behavior over time comes with huge personal, institutional, and cultural costs.

Without the arguing and debating and voices that just won't shut up, you can't move forward. As a nation we have made many huge mistakes, but by and large we have been able to move forward and try to leave those mistakes behind, because the voices who could and would point out those mistakes were not silenced. The easy way lets you get stuck in a bad place.

By creating a government structure that doesn't support tyranny easily, we have made a commitment to doing things the hard way, and every time we have tried to weasel out of that commitment, it has cost us as a culture and a country.

So the current struggle in education against the forces who would like to reduce education to an easy solution is not just about education, but another version of our national struggle. There will always be people who want to silence others in the name of ease and efficiency, and they will always be wrong. To look at the rich, complex business that is the education of an entire nation's varied population of young people-- to look at that and think that there is an easy answer to How To Do It-- is to be both unAmerican and simply foolish.

Living in a pluralistic society is hard. Saying that human beings all have value and acting like you really mean it is hard. Dealing with people who don't see things the same way you do is hard. Educating the children of an entire nation is hard. That's all right. We're Americans, and 236 years ago, we made a commitment to doing things the hard way, because, in the end, it's the way that continues to lead us, slowly but surely, to a better version of ourselves as a culture. Don't let anybody con you into anything else.

Bad AI Writing Advice

There is so much bad advice for teachers out there concerning how to use AI in the classroom. Some of the worst advice surrounds AI use for writing assignment, and most of that bad advice is rooted in a fundamental misconception of what the purpose of the writing assignment might be.

I have a prime example here. It comes from Dan Sarofian-Butin who is a Full Professor in, and Founding Dean of, the Winston School of Education & Social Policy at Merrimack College, which is itself a pretty snappy little college just a stone's throw from Boston. His CV is a hell of a lot more impressive than mine. Nevertheless, I take considerable exception to his advice about the use of ChatGPT or similar LLMs in student writing assignments.

His piece is entitles "Teachers: It's time to make friends with AI" recently on eSchoolNews (though he has put out other pieces of a similar bent).

He opens by noting that the norm (at least in high schools) is that "AI is the mortal enemy of classroom teachers," while he wants his students "to use AI every day in class and for every assignment." He later describes a gap between "cognitive autonomy" (no AI) versus "cognitive outsourcing" (just have AI write the paper for you). Right off the bat, I feel that he's skipping over a continent's worth of middle ground, but okay. What should we be using our new best friend?

Sarofian-Butin offers an interesting taxonomy of the various degrees of having AI part of the process, noting minor and major amounts of "cognitive offloading." And that's useful because that's the territory where all of these discussions need to happen. Nobody (well, hardly anybody) is seriously arguing to have students just let the AI do it all, and folks who are anti-any-AI-at-all aren't going to be part of the conversation. For everyone else, it's an exercise in line drawing--which parts of the writing process can or should involve an LLM?

Sarofian-Butin has some answers. I don't much like any of them.

Sarofian-Butin thinks AI can be used as "scaffolding," particularly with the business of getting the writing started. He says that students used to come to his office unsure how to start their papers and he would spend 15-20 minutes brainstorming and prodding and pushing. But now...

Today, I teach my students a set of in-class AI prompts, based on a standard model of supporting writing, on how to brainstorm, focus, and develop their ideas. “I didn’t really know where to start,” wrote one student at the end of last semester, “and ChatGPT helped me think about questions, and I was able to start planning what I wanted to do based on the different options.” Another student wrote, “I started off with pretty much no idea and was able to use ChatGPT to find a topic that I’m interested in and I’m working with it to narrow it down.” When I now meet with students, our conversations are so much more productive, as we now have a focus.

Which doesn't sound so much like brainstorming as just generating a list of ideas from which the student can choose. I have had my share of those 15-20 minute sessions with students, and I am having a hard time imagine how one does that in a way that puts the work on the student, that helps them probe their own interests and half-formed ideas aided by what you know of the student and what you can see in their face and voice as they discuss--how do you do all that if you are a computer that has zero perception of the student themself? 

But Sarofian-Butin sees even more involved roles for the AI. Some of his topics are complex. So many variables, so much ambiguity, so many ways to define the issue. They're, you know, hard.

I therefore teach my students another set of AI prompts to help them see what good thinking about such issues looks like. This is formally known as a cognitive apprenticeship: “one needs to deliberately bring the thinking to the surface, to make it visible, whether it’s in reading, writing, problem solving.” AI is so good at doing this by walking students step-by-step through its output.

And now alarm bells are ringing, because AI is NOT so good at walking students through its output because it does not "think about" ideas in any human sense of the word. It cannot "bring the thinking to the surface" because it is literally not thinking at all. And some of the other tasks that Sarofian-Butin assigns to his composer's apprentice--

Seeing AI offer suggestions for a thesis statement or a paper outline in real-time, with explanations, is incredibly helpful. “The outlines,” one student commented, “helped me from getting too stuck on small details and reminded me to think about the big picture.”

He also suggests that AI might help students can find answers to "am I making the right argument" and again, an AI does not know anything about how good your argument is or is not. 

He reports that a student said that they know that ChatGPT is there to use as an assistant rather than a replacement.

Bad AI writing instruction advice all suffers from the same problem-- it presumes that the only purpose of the writing is to create the final product, an artifact to be handed in. As long as you have a final artifact to deliver to your professor, then the process is of secondary importance. 

No. We can say that we want every player on the football team to log an hour in the weight room three days a week. But that's hard, and the players are reluctant, and they're not sure they can manage it, so they go to the weight room and someone else puts the weights on, and someone else lifts the weights, and another person lowers the weights back down, and then the player fills out his log, and that final product, that log-shaped artifact is perfect and exactly what the coach asked for--except that it's not.

Writing is about making thinking manifest. Many of the problems Sarofian-Bution is address with AI are thinking problems, not writing problems. So what happens when we outsource the thinking parts of writing? 

I'm trying to figure out what a Sarifian-Butin student has actually done. The student selected a topic from an AI-generated list, picked out an AI thesis "example," followed the AI generated outline, made AI-suggested improvements, all while reading AI-generated "explanations" of the AI "process " (that are not actually a real explanation of how a real human might have done it). 

What has the student gotten from this process? What mental muscles did they develop? What critical parts of the writing process did they complete beyond filling in the blanks laid out by someone else? How can one know if they have used the AI as a crutch or had it carry them entirely? How is this superior to, say, watching someone else write an essay while explaining what they are doing? What problem is this solving (beyond a time-sucking parade of wobbly students asking for 15-20 minutes of advice, which is not a student problem)? 

How is any of this better than leaving them to struggle on their own?

Yes, I know-- left to their own devices, they will produce some really terrible essays. Believe me-- I may not match Sarofian-Butin's credentials in any other way, but after 39 years in a high school English classroom, I will bet I've read far more terrible writing than he has. And not once did I think, what this student needs is something that can do all the hard part for him. Did I think some could, would, and did benefit from human-to-human tutoring? Absolutely--but that involves a human being who can read them, hear them, respond to them, draw them out and sense when to back off. 

The thing about those terrible essays is that you don't get students to do better by doing the hard parts for them. They have to struggle and work and you have to coach and cajole and hold hands and kick butts and let them find their own voice and their own way.

This is at the heart of most student endeavors. I was a yearbook advisor for ages, and there is no question that they best way to get a good yearbook is to shove the kids out of the way and do it yourself. What do they get from that? Not a damned thing, but the book would look good. You could have a much more beautiful prom if you let adults do the decorating. 

And you would get much better student writing if you didn't leave it to students. 

But the product is not the point. The struggle, the growth, the learning, the human interaction, the heavy lifting is the point. Trying to reduce student involvement in the process gets a better product, but that can't be the whole point. Everything in education would run so much more smoothly if not for all the children. 

Too Much For Mere Mortals

When I was ploughing through the Pew Center survey of teachers, I thought of Robert Pondiscio.

Specifically, it was the part about the work itself. 84% of teachers report that there's not enough time in the day to get their work done, and among those, 81% said that a major reason was they just have too much work (another 17% said this was a minor reason, meaning that virtually no overstretched teachers thought it wasn't part of the problem at all). The other reasons, like non-teaching duties, didn't even come close.

Meanwhile, in another part of the world this weekend, Pondiscio was presenting on something that has been a consistent theme in his work-- Teaching is too hard for mere mortals, and we need a system that allows teachers to focus on teaching. 

Pondiscio has long argued that some aspects of teaching need to be taken off teachers' plates so that they can put more of their energy into actual classroom instruction. I've always pushed back, but maybe I need to re-examine the issue a bit. 

Plugging 47 Extension Cords Into One Power Strip

Certainly every teacher learns that there's never enough. One of my earliest viral hits was this piece about how nobody warns teachers that they will have to compromise and cut corners somewhere. It touched many, many nerves. We all have stories. My first year of teaching I worked from 7 AM to 11 PM pretty much every day. I had a gifted colleague who couldn't bring herself to compromise on workload, so once every nine weeks grading period, she took a personal day just to sit at home and grade and enter papers. And let's be honest--being the teacher who walks out the door as the bell rings, and who carries nothing out the door with them--that does not win you the admiration of your colleagues.

Being overworked is part of the gig, and some of us wear our ability to manage that workload as a badge of honor, like folks who are proud of surviving an initiation hazing and insist that the new recruits should suck it up and run the same gauntlet. On reflection, I must admit this may not be entirely healthy, especially considering the number of young teachers who blame themselves because they can't simply gut their way past having overloaded circuits. 

There's also resistance because the "let's give teachers a break" argument is used by 1) vendors with "teacher-assisting" junk to sell and 2) folks who want to deprofessionalize teaching. That second group likes the notion of "teacher-proof" programs, curriculum in a box that can be delivered by any dope ("any dope" constitutes a large and therefor inexpensive labor pool).

We could lighten the teacher load, the argument goes, by reducing their agency and autonomy. Not in those exact words, of course. That would make it obvious why that approach isn't popular.

Lightening the Load

So what are the ways that the burden of teaching could be reduced to a size suitable for actual mortals. 

Some of the helps are obvious. Reduce the number of non-teaching duties that get laid on teachers. Study halls. Cafeteria duty. Minute-by-minute surveillance and supervision of students. 

Some of the helps are obvious to teachers, yet difficult to implement. Most schools has a variety of policies and procedures surrounding clerical tasks that are set up to make life easier for people in the front office, not teachers in the classroom (e.g. collecting students excuses for absence, managing lunch money, etc). Then there's the tendency to see new programs adopted at the state or district level with a cavalier, "We'll just have teachers do that" as if there are infinite minutes in the teacher day and adding one more thing won't be a big deal. Imagine a world in which preserving teacher time was a major sacred priority. 

Some of the helps would be hard to sell because they would cost real money. Quickest way to reduce teacher workload? Smaller classes. Or more non-teaching hours in the day for teachers to use for prep and paperwork (hard sell because so many boards believe that a teacher is only working when she's in front of students). These are both tough because they require hiring more staff which 1) costs a bunch of money and 2) requires finding more of the qualified teachers that we already don't have enough of.

So what are we left with?

Hiring aids to do strictly clerical stuff like scoring objective tests and putting grades into the gradebook. There are also plenty of folks trying to sell the idea of suing AI to grade the non-objective stuff like essays; this is a terrible idea for many reasons. I will admit that I was always resistant to the idea of even letting someone record grades for me, because recording grades was part of how I got a sense of how students were doing. Essentially it was a way to go over every single piece of graded work. But that would be a way to reclaim some time.

But after all that, we've come down the biggie, and the thing that Pondiscio has always argued is a huge lift for mere mortals--

Curriculum and instructional planning.

The Main Event

As a classroom teacher, the mere suggestion of being required to use canned curriculum made my hackles climb right up on my high dudgeon pony. For me, designing the lessons was part of any important loop. Teach the material. Take the temperature of the students and measure success. Develop the next lesson based on that feedback. That's for daily instruction. A larger, longer, slower loop tied into larger scale feedback plus a constant check on what we'd like to include in the program. 

I like to think that I was pretty good at instructional design. But I must also admit that not everyone is, and that teachers who aren't can create a host of issues. I will also fly my old fart flag to say that the last twenty years have produced way too many neo-teachers who were taught that if you design your instruction about the Big Standardized Test (maybe using select pieces of the state standards as a guide) you're doing the job. I don't want to wander down this rabbit, but I disagree, strenuously. 

So is there a place for some sort of high-quality instructional design and curriculum support for mere mortal teachers. Yes. Well, yes, but.

While I think a school should have a consistent culture and set of values, I think a building full of teachers who work in a wide variety of styles and approaches and techniques is by far the best way to go. Students will grow up to encounter a wide variety of styles and approaches in the world; why should they not find that in school (and with that variety, a better chance of finding a teacher with whom they click)?

The point of hiring trained and eventually experienced professionals for the work is so that they can exercise professional judgment as they deal directly with students. A system that requires each teacher to teach the same lesson in the same way using the same language on the day at the same time is a system that erases most teacher autonomy and agency and eliminates their ability to exercise professional judgment. Sorry kids-- You're having trouble with this concept, and I know some ways to further get it across, but the script says we have to move on. Show me a school that says it's using this kind of curriculum with success, and I'll show you a school that is selecting students for whom it works and getting rid of the ones for which it does not (belief in a perfect system is terrible for students, because the unavoidable reasoning is that if my program is perfect, that failing student must be defective somehow). 

That said, the other extreme, in which individuals live in the land of Do As You Please is not a workable choice either. Autonomy and agency cannot be a license for educational malpractice. Lesson planning by googling the topic is a lousy way to do the job (and getting an AI lesson plan is just asking someone to google the topic and then summarize some of what they find). 

No Child Left Behind and the Common Core introduced the notion that good curriculum and instruction could be mandated by legislators, and unfortunately the idea has stuck with us (witness the states trying to mandate the Science of Reading). This is a terrible idea, and I would still say so even if the government were mandating my favorite instructional ideas. There are so many reasons why, but I'll just note Rick Hess's observation that you can require people to do X, but you can't make them do it well.

Right. Sure. Have We Ruled Out Everything?

Districts need scope and sequence that is coordinated, but not set in lockstep-required stone. Districts need a curriculum that is coherent, but not a straightjacket. Teachers need a library of instructional materials that provides a wealth of solid choices and flexibility. Most teachers develop such a library of their own over the course of their career, but few schools have any sort of mechanism for sharing those libraries (worth noting: having teachers compete for performance pay would actively discourage such sharing). 

Nor are there any real sources for high-quality materials. The government's attempt to create such a resource (the What Works Clearinghouse) is not particularly useful for a variety of reasons, and in general, the pipeline from the world of education research is--well, I wouldn't call it broken because it has never really existed. Researchers don't really understand what teachers do, and teachers don't really understand what researchers do, and neither has the time to figure it out, and nobody has ever emerged to effectively bridge the gap. Meanwhile, the water is muddied by every education publishing outfit which is intent on marketing its materials, and manufactures pseudo-research to do so. On top of that, toss in not-really-research-at-all stuff like TNTP's unserious Opportunity Myth.

The most effective pipeline for teaching materials remains teacher-to-teacher contact, the teacher who pops next door to ask, "Hey, have you got any good materials for teaching quadratic equations?" Some of the best program development is done in house in districts willing to spend the money and time to get their people to do the work. But both of these mechanisms, like the mentoring of fledgling teachers, depends on the luck of the draw. 

Evaluating, screening, collecting, promoting and uplifting effective high-quality materials is, unfortunately, not a job that actually exists. Thinky tanks and publishers employ people to pitch their particular stuff, and state and federal bureaucracies are too close to politics and too far from classrooms to be help. 

So, What To Do?

The task most sensibly falls to school districts themselves, or perhaps in the case of smaller districts, consortiums. A couple of thoughts about how to make that work.

The curriculum and instruction honcho should spend a full half of their time in the classroom. Maybe their own, maybe everyone else's. The notion that a program's effectiveness can be measured by checking the scores from the Big Standardized Test is bunk. Teachers evaluate instruction based on how it works in the classroom, which is a big complicated metric that is best measured with eyeballs. 

The curriculum and instruction honcho needs to be able to have difficult conversations with teachers on the subject of "That Doesn't Seem To Be Working. Why Are You Sticking With It?"

The curriculum and instruction honcho needs the time and resources to look regularly at What's Out There and do the kind of sifting through materials that allows libraries to be built. They need some research and stats background. They need to sift, and they need to field test, either themselves or via a trusted colleague. 

It's not a very sexy solution, and it doesn't scale up all that well, requiring district by district implementation. But it could work. Districts could also move to a teaching hospital model, where more experienced teachers manage their younger colleagues, a model frequently mentioned but rarely implemented. 

But somehow, someone has to manage the bottleneck that now exists between a huge ocean of instructional materials, research, and educational stuff (an ocean that is only going to get huger as the field is further flooded with AI crap) classroom teachers. Sorting through all that for the usable viable bits is, in fact, more than can be done by mere mortals who already have a day job teaching classes. 

Hang on. I'm Almost Done.

Yes, teaching as it has been conceived, with one person serving as clerk, instructional designer, curriculum developer, assessment manager, and classroom teacher (plus, in many cases, social worker and mental health worker), is to much for a mere mortal. It is a job for a couple of people. 

However, the two people have to be very closely coordinated, because all of the pieces of the job are closely tied together, and if they don't fit perfectly, the process of reconciling the bad fit just creates more work. And unfortunately, most of the people showing interest in the other half of the work are not so much interested in being part of a team as they are in pushing particular wares or agenda.

Part of the solution requires a shift in public opinion about what a teacher's job is. Everyone has seen teachers doing the classroom piece of the job; few have seen all the rest, and so as a culture we have a tendency to think of all the rest--the paperwork, the planning, the designing--as just something that gets thrown in for free. 

Teachers need support, the backing of a team, a system that provides them with access to high quality materials that suit the students they have in front of them. They definitely need more support than administrations (and old farts like me) telling them, "Just get in there and do all that stuff." They don't need lawmakers fearmongering with mis-interpreted NAEP scores in order to legislate curriculum and instruction. You get mere mortals to carry gigantic loads by connecting them to other mere mortals, by giving them real tools that empower them without binding them hand and feet, and by recognizing their humanity when considering plugging in one more cord.

Teaching And The Social Contract (TL;DR)

I didn't write anything yesterday, which is an unusual day for me, but I've just been trying to take it all in. I have family in Seattle, friends in Pittsburgh. There's a lot of mess out there tonight.

It's nothing new for our country, but it's never been laid out so starkly. The woman in Central Park deliberately weaponizing her status as a white woman to, at best, put a Black man in his place and, at worst, to try to harm him for daring to challenge her right to break the rules. The armed white guys threatening duly elected lawmakers with harm and worse, because masks make them sad; met by well-disciplined law enforcement who do everything to avoid escalating the situation (reminiscent of the Bundy family's armed attack on a US facility to protect their right to steal US resources-- nobody lost their cool there, either). A peaceful protest of the gazillionth unjust death of a Black man escalated.

One of the most useful lenses I've found in the past few days is this one, from Trevor Noah



In it, he talks about the social contract, the various sorts of deals we make as a society that keeps the society working. We pretend sometimes that it's people exercising authority, like police officers or school teachers, who keep the place working, but in the absence of some kind of contract, even if it's unspoken and unexplained, there aren't enough authority figures on the planet to keep things from falling apart--it's the contract that makes the center hold.

On some level, we understand this. I'm not the only teacher who spent his first year (or two) grappling with the knowledge that if every student in my classroom stood up, threw their books down, and said, "Screw this, I'm walking out," I would be helpless to do a thing. But both the school and I enter a sort of contract. In the later half of my career, I got in the habit of making my side more explicit. "I promise, " I would tell them, "that I will never knowingly waste your time. I promise that I will demand that everybody in this room be treated with respect and like a functioning adult." And also, "Let me start by admitting that we have been lying to you for years. Teachers tell you that you have to do this or you have to do that, and you and I both know that you don't have to do anything just because I ask you to do it."

When Jefferson wrote about government needing "the consent of the governed," he was getting at the same point. Governments-- really, anything wielding authority-- offer some kind of deal. Sometimes the deal that they offer is pretty brutal-- "Do as we ask, and we'll let you live." The American deal is supposed to be more aspirational-- "Work hard, be responsible, pay your dues, and you will become successful and have a comfortable life." But that deal has never been offered to everyone in this country. And we're in bigger trouble now because the government's side was supposed to be "We will maintain a level playing field and not exercise the power we've been entrusted either to enforce our personal biases or further our personal fortunes." That part of the deal is perhaps the more history-making part of the US experiment, and it's in obvious trouble at the moment. That and the part of the contract that says, "The law will be exercised equally for all citizens regardless of status or bias."

This contract is part of the purpose of public education.

You don't learn about the social contract from your parents, not right away. Your deal with your parents, in all but the most toxic of families, is that they love you no matter what. It's at school where we start learning about the contract; we usually talk about learning socialization or social skills, but we're talking about the conditions of many social contracts. Children learn about the different contracts they can make with peers (some great, some terrible), and they most especially learn about the deal that society, as represented by the teachers and administrators, will make with them.

They learn that it's complicated, that the institution will make a contract, and each different individual teacher will also make a contract, and they will all be different.

And this is where teachers and schools can blow it.

Individual teachers may offer a wide range of contracts, and it sucks. "Sorry," we say to some of our students, "but I'm not going to make that deal with you, that deal with all the good stuff, because you are not smart enough or white enough. I don't believe you will show the kind of behavior I require for that contract, so you can't have that one." Pat gets a contract that says Pat can get all the rewards and praise and support; Chris gets the contract that says Chris can get the chance not to be hassled and made miserable on any given day.

One of the best deals a teacher can offer is that you will actually hear and see the student. This is valuable to the student, and critical for the teacher as well, because people absolutely desire to be heard, and if they do not feel heard when they speak, they will keep raising the volume until they can be heard. The answer to pearl-clutching concerns about rioting and "That certainly isn't going to help their cause" is (at least in part) two-fold. First, what would help? Because if you're at the rioting part, that means the bus already drove past a bunch of quieter, calmer options, and you chose to dismiss them. Second, why isn't this also your cause? And here in 2020, you also have to ask-- just who is doing the looting and burning and vandalizing, because many bad actors have become quite sophisticated about using peaceful protest as cover for attempts to sow chaos and delegitimize the real protestors and even, apparently, usher in a new civil war. So racism making even demonstrations against racism worse.

But still--unheard voices will just get louder, even in your classroom. The power differential between teachers and students may lead you to imagine that you can just squelch the loud voices, shout them down, shut them up. That does not work. If you want proof of how poorly it works, go back to looking at the streets that are filled with protestors in America right now.

Because-- and this goes back to what you knew when you first started in the classroom-- you do not have power, not really. What you have is a contract, a deal, and if the folks on the other side come to understand that you do not plan to honor it, that there is no benefit to them in honoring the deal, then they will stop, and all your illusions of power and control are in trouble.

If you, as a teacher, are watching what's going on right now and thinking that the explanation for the riots in Minneapolis and elsewhere is something along the lines of, "Well, that's how Those People are," then you are a problem, not just as a citizen, but as a professional. There's no way that doesn't lead to your belief that some of Those Peoples' children can't really be expected to make the bigger, better deal, and so, instead, you make a deal based on managing their supposed deficits instead of fostering their strengths and potentials.

All of this--- all of this-- is why teaching about racism, about systemic bias and injustice, has to happen all the time and not just in response to the latest outrage. The classroom should not only be where we unpack what just happened, but where we get the tools to see it before and as it unfolds.

I'm grateful to the commentators who offered this framing. It's hard to talk about Big Things like Justice, but a contract is pretty simple. I'm reminded of one of the do-overs of the famous marshmallow experiments in which the adults made a deal, a contract with the children-- show some self-discipline, and you'll get more marshmallows. Then the experimenters showed, through some other actions, that they could not be trusted to honor the contract, and so the children ignored the deal as well.

So look at the deals you're offering in your classroom. What are you offering, and what are you asking for in return, and does that strike you as a reasonable deal? Do all students have a chance to make the same deal? Have you tried to change the deal unilaterally? Have you decided you can ignore it at will and just use raw power to paper over the lapse? And as a teacher, what are you teaching your students about the social contracts they'll deal with as adults?

Who knows what the days ahead hold? Most likely a confusing push of details and debate. But the basic issues-- the racism, the failure of those in power to make a hold up a decent social contract-- will still be hanging in the fall air (right next to the other stupid virus) and teachers should be finding a way to deal.

Having said all that, there's one last important thing that doesn't easily fit in the contract frame. That's the obligation we owe to fellow humans. I suppose we can call it a debt that we owe for the privilege of being alive plus all the other privileges we enjoy, but we have an obligation to be decent and supportive and kind and human to fellow humans, particular those who because of age or race or birth or resources have been denied what we have been given. "I've got mine, Jack," is not a legitimate social contract. We can do better. We have to do better. If people raise their voices in protest, and that fails, either because of the resistance of authorities or the subversion of bad actors, what do you suppose comes next?

Discovering Gloria Jean Merriex

Gloria Jean Merriex grew up in Gainesville, Florida. Gainesville is a city of extremes; on the one hand, it's the home of the University of Florida and has many of the features of a big college town; on the other hand, the southern and eastern neighborhoods of Gainesboro are home to crushing poverty. Charles Duval Elementary School is located in the center of an eastern neighborhood filled with crime and poverty.

Merriex saw teaching as a path out of the poverty of her neighborhood, but she did not choose to leave the neighborhood itself. Once she had her degree, she chose to teach at Duval Elementary, where for about twenty-five years she was a middle-of-the-road, competent-but-not-exceptional teacher.

I became acquainted with Merriex through the work of filmmaker Boaz Dvir; my nephew, who studied film at Penn State, had Dvir as a teacher and thought we might have a few things to say to each other. But years ago, Dvir was a professor in Florida who heard about Merriex and decided to tell her story. The result is a documentary in progress entitled "Discovering Gloria." I've watched a rough cut of the film, and it is a challenging and moving story.

Photo Courtesy of Discovering Gloria



The story, of course, is not about the first twenty-five years of Merriex's career. The story really starts with Florida's reform efforts, Florida's Big Standardized Test (FCAT), and Florida's assignment of letter grades to schools, back in the days when No Child Left Behind was the hot, new thing.

Duval scored a big fat F, and Merriex was troubled. Couldn't-sleep-at-night troubled.

The school having "failed," the state stepped in with strict pacing guides and mandated materials so that the school would be working toward Meeting the Standards. Meanwhile, Merriex faced the realization that she could not keep teaching as she had. It was a transformative moment for her, not just as a teacher, but as a person. She began to think about what she really had to do.

She dumped the state pacing guides and teaching materials. When she got caught, she begged Duval principal Lee McNealy for a chance to give her methods a try, and McNealy had the guts and trust to give it to her. So Merriex developed materials and approaches of her own, and for the early 2000s, her choices were a bit out there. She wrote raps and dances to do with her students for learning math vocabulary and basic processes. She used call and response in the classroom. She was stern and demanding in a classic sense, but she did constant outreach and made family connections in the modern teacher-counselor sense. She visited homes, saw to students' non-academic needs, provided instruction to entire families. Cooked classroom meals. mended school uniforms. Held Saturday classes for FCAT prep.  She refined and reflected, developed and grew more materials.

Duval became a miracle school, getting spectacular test results. Duval scored A after A, Merriex's students posting the greatest test score gains in the state. The school was filled with pride, the students confident and accomplished. Duval-- and Merriex--  became one of Florida's great success stories. Merriex created a math team, a group of students who toured and demonstrated their math rap and math skills. Merriex herself was in increasing demand, speaking and demonstrating her techniques for teachers and administrators from all across the state and country.

Merriex's story defies simple categorization. There is frankly much here that reformsters will like. The letter grade system shocked Merriex and her school out of their old ways. And once it was clear that Merriex was on to something, Duval's administration packed her classroom, having her teach forty or fifty students at a time. And the rough cut of Dvir's film tells the story of a student previously labeled learning disabled who blossoms and succeeds under Merriex's tutelage, an apparent confirmation of the "replace special ed with high expectations" reformster camp.

At the same time, reformsters should also note that Merriex completely dismantled and dismissed the state plan for how the courses should be taught. The pacing guide? Out the window. Dvir talks to one of the many academics who came to watch Merriex to try to figure out what she was doing; one striking feature was that Meriex would work completely out of the "normal" sequence and jump from one math subject to another in ways that defied conventional approaches. Yet somehow they worked.

Merriex met her students where they were, creating her materials to match their own concerns and interests. Her techniques defied "scaling up" because they were developed for the children of that neighborhood-- a neighborhood that she had known her whole life. It would never be possible to take five weeks to teach a bunch of college kids the Merriex Method and send them out into schools all across the nation in communities that they've never set foot in before. Merriex's techniques were custom made for students in that community by a lifelong member of that community.

Nevertheless, the Lastinger Center for Learning at the University of Florida decided to study her, even mounting cameras in her classroom intending to stream her lessons around the world. And the Kellogg Foundation-- one of the great reformster money-spreaders-- awarded the center grants to help fund the study. But Kellogg went one better-- in May of 2008, they awarded Merriex a grant to develop a national math curriculum.

Merriex appeared to be living proof of concept for the Hero Teacher.

On the day after the awarding of the Kellogg grant, Merriex suffered a diabetic stroke. She died at the age of 58. It is hard not to conclude that in order to be a Hero Teacher, Merriex had worked herself to death.

What are the lessons of Merriex's story? Dvir does a good job of providing some balance. The fact that he's been wrestling with this film for several years is, in part, a testament to how tricky a story this is to tell. If you watch the trailer, you'll note that the film is funded in part by the ever-reformy Kellogg Foundation, about which Dvir has this to say:

Although I received a grant from Kellogg., I’ve had 100 percent editorial and creative control. I never had even one conversation with Kellogg about the making of the film. I interviewed a Kellogg rep as part of the filming process, but he never asked me about what I was doing. He simply answered my questions. I’ve never even screened the rough cut for Kellogg! As I said, I’ve had complete editorial and creative control over this film – as I have and continue to have on all my films. I’m as strict as any documentary filmmakers get about this. Part of it is my journalistic DNA. Another part is that I do this work purely for scholarship and making a difference.

I've talked to him (and I trust my nephew as a judge of character) and I see the documentary as objective and journalistic in character. I don't smell reformy agenda here. 

As I suggested above, I think reformsters may rush to learn the wrong lessons from this story-- that you just need to find a super-teacher and clone her, that BS Tests are great for measuring and fixing education (a premise that everyone in the film accepts and nobody actually challenges), that if you just believe and try real hard then poverty and race don't really matter. But I think there are far more important lessons to be learned from Merriex's story.

One is the power of administration to protect teachers from bad state and federal policy. Merriex's story of transformation and achievement would never have happened if, in the very beginning, her principal had said, "Dammit, no. We scored an F, so there will be no experimenting. You get back in that classroom and follow the pacing guide the state sent us, and you follow it to the letter." But Merriex's principal trusted her, trusted her professional judgment, and trusted her commitment to her students, and so that principal let Gloria Jean Merriex do her thing. It was easy for everyone to fall in behind Merriex after the fact, and therefor it's easy to forget that Merriex and her principal were risking their careers and bucking the district, the state and the feds.

Another lesson is the limits of the administrative power-- the school still had to face having its success measured by the BS Test and a single letter grade.

Another lesson is the value of community connection. Merriex could figure out what needed to be done because she was of that community, in that community. She knew the language, the values, the streets and neighborhoods, the families. It mattered that she grew up there as a young black girl, to become a teacher in a 99% black school. All the fresh-scrubbed ivy league honor roll graduates in the world could not substitute for what Merriex knew by being of her community. There's a moment (it's also in the trailer) where Merriex's former principal tells the story of letting the teacher know that the school received an F and she appears to almost says "She just turned white" and then catches herself. If you like extra-close readings of moments, it's a resonant moment because if Gloria Jean Merriex had turned white, her success would never happen. If anything, Merriex achieved success in that school by turning less white, by more fully rejecting what the classically white education system told her she was supposed to do and by more fully embracing the culture of her community.

Also-- sitting each of those students down with a computer to work on their interactive adaptive education software would also have failed as a substitute for Merriex.

That points to another huge lesson- while reformsters may say, "Look, high standards and hard work erased the effects of poverty," that overlooks the fact that for Merriex, offsetting the effects of poverty was a second full-time job on top of her teaching job. Working with families, providing concrete support for students, providing emotional support for students and families and co-workers-- Merriex was doing all those non-teaching duties with every spare hour she had so that her actual teaching would have a chance of actually being effective. And ultimately, her second full time job of offsetting the effects of poverty required everything she had. To say that Merriex overcame the effects of poverty "just" with high standards and high expectations would be a lie.

I found it humbling to watch her story, to realize that while I can talk about dedicating my life to teaching, I don't mean anything like what Gloria Jean Merriex meant. I've written about the limits of what we can do as teachers, and most of us who teach are aware of those limits, but few of us push ourselves as close to (or over) those limits like Merriex did.

I will be sure to let you know when the completed film is finally released. In the meantime, here's the trailer for what is, for better or worse, a teacher story for the new millennium.

What if there were 50 standards?

(Part II of a series; Part I is here)

Sol Stern has been trying to cyber-argue with Diane Ravitch and Mercedes Schneider lately (you can read his latest thrash here and watch Schneider shrug it off here). His latest flight into the higher altitudes of Mt. Dudgeon builds to a roar and finishes with this closer:

If Diane Ravitch and other anti-Common Core campaigners on both the left and right succeed in their destructive mission, we will go right back to “50 states, 50 standards, 50 tests.” Ravitch and her allies can then celebrate their political victory—but the children in America’s schools will be the losers.

I know that I'm supposed to recognize that going back to fifty states, fifty standards, fifty tests is clearly and unarguably a Terrible Thing, but here I where I differ with the Fans of Standardization. Because I have yet to hear a single, solitary convincing argument for why having one standard and one test for fifty states is a Swell Thing.

I'm actually going to skip over the "one test" part of this, because my contention is that the correct number of high stakes standardized tests to give students is "zero," so we'll just set that part of the argument aside for another day. Let's just focus on my other assertion.

One set of standards for the nation is not a good thing. It's not even a human thing.

Yes, there are useful standards, such as standards for railroad gauge and electrical plugs. These sorts of standards are helpful because they make manufactured objects more useful. Everybody understands that schools are not for making useful manufactured objects, right? I don't need to go over that again, do I?


National education standards for live humans should fail. The notion that every state should produce exactly the same education at exactly the same rate is just so bizarre that I find it painfully difficult to argue against because I have a hard time understanding how anybody could think it's a good thing.

Within our country, we expect places to be different. That's normal. People are cool and  flinty in the Northeast and warm and gooshy in the South. People are all packed together in the city and all spread out in the country. December means one thing in Los Angeles and another thing in Syracuse. The human experience is very different depending on where you live.

Corporate forces have actively worked against that human variation for about 100 years, with a huge turbo-boost of standardization activity in the post-WWII period. To really make money, we need to get people to eat the same food, wear the same clothes, shop at the same stores, buy the exact same stuff from Wyoming to Delaware. Plopped down in the middle of any mall in America, you would be hard-pressed to guess where in the world you were standing.

This sort of standardization demands that everything unique and richly interesting about local human experience be erased, all pointy spots and rough edges be ground down. So tear down the Santa Monica Pier and put up a McDonald's. Knock down the 16th Street Mall in Denver and put up a Wal-Mart. Make the beaches in Hawaii available for developers to purchase directly. Condemn Clark's Trading Post and let an outlet mall have a shot at really opening up the Kancamagus Highway. You, dear reader. don't even know what all of these places are, because each is a unique local experience, and that's a good thing, because all together they add up to the rich, varied, human beings on Earth experience.

Why would we want to create a world where nobody ever needed to travel because there was nothing to see anywhere else that you couldn't see at home? Why would we want our ideal world to be one where nobody agonized over where to live because it didn't make any difference? What does "home" even mean when all places are pretty much the same?

"Calm down," I hear somebody saying. "We don't want to turn the world into a bland boring land of commercialized mediocrity. We just want to standardize education."

But local school districts are an expression of local personality. Sports teams are named after local features. School buildings are part o local history. Teachers are still, in many places, public figures of the same sort as city councilmen or police officers.

Schools' priorities, strengths, weaknesses, triumphs, disasters are an all expressions of and part of the local culture, which is in turn an expression of the live human beings who live in that community. You cannot turn schools into a chain. Yes, it's swell that you can walk into any Starbucks anywhere and get exactly what you would get at any other Starbucks, but that is not a worthwhile aspiration for a school. I do not see any value in a future in which, when you ask a student what makes his school special, he answers proudly, "Why nothing! Nothing at all! Isn't that awesome!"

What we want for every human being is that each person should know herself as a unique, valuable, and special, with something important and valuable to offer, a unique constellation of qualities and history, a product of individual hard-wiring and history. I don't mean we need to raise self-indulgent sociopaths, but no healthy society ever developed by saying to its young people, "We want you to grow up to be exactly like everyone else." And our schools have to express that value, and they cannot express that value if they are organized the principle of standardized mass-production.

Now, the other big argument for standardization is, "What if the local values are ignorance and dumbosity? What if-- given the freedom to school as they wish-- they choose poorly?' I hear you-- and that's where I'm going in Part III.

Should We Spare The Rod?

Classroom chaos is an issue. How bad is it? Why is it bad? What do we do? (Warning: this ended up being quite a ramble).

Daniel Buck raised a bit of an internet stir with a complaint about school discipline issues, "Don't Spare the Rod," that ends with this rather dark paragraph:

Schools fail when they lose sight of human nature. Children are capable of wickedness and cruelty. There is something rotten in the core of man. When schools deny this, when they fail to punish cruelty, the apple is left putrefying on the teacher’s desk.

Who is Daniel Buck?

We have met Buck before over the years. Buck is a teacher in Wisconsin who writes for the Foundation for Economic Education and The Federalist, among other outlets. Of The Closing of the American Mind he said, "The Bible taught me how to live but that book taught me how to think." He's not a union guy. He's a "senior visiting fellow" at Fordham. He got started in the conservative writing in college, and wrote for the now-defunct "The Lone Conservative" website. From reading his tweets, I learned that he would pay to keep the union rep out of the lounge and once shook Scott Walker's hand and thanked Walker "for all he's doing to improve education in Wisconsin." He dresses up for school, appears to take a serious and conscientious approach to the work. Back in 2019, he helped launch the Chalkboard Review, a right-tilted news and commentary ed site (which seems to have quieted down in the last year or so). And he's got a book in which he explains what's wrong with education. 

Buck has been busy, considering he started his teaching career in 2016. For his first four years he was in Green Bay public schools before switching to the Holy Spirit Catholic School, a move he has said was prompted by the lack of student discipline in public schools. He left Holy Spirit at the end of the 22-23 school year, and he now teaches at a private Christian school. I know this because I read the name off a lanyard in one of his pics, and while I usually like to show my work, Buck has chosen not to talk about at what school he teaches, and to publish the name of the school when he hasn't is a level of doxing that I'm not willing to do. But the nature of his current employment is important to our story. I'm just not going to get specific and this time I'll ask you to just take my word for it.

Buck's thesis, developed in multiple articles and social media posts is that education has been infected by a debilitating wokeness, that a combination of things like restorative justice and treating behavior as communication and, of course, that awful social emotional learning are leading to chaos in classrooms. 

Now, Buck's rhetorical stock in trade is the straw man, but anyone who knows a teacher knows that, post-pandemic, we've got trouble in classrooms across the country. There is not a day that I don't see some classroom horror story on my screen. So Buck and folks like him are not, I feel certain, making something out of nothing.

How bad is the problem?

Is it worse than ever? Hard to know--we haven't been quantifying this on any kind of national scale for a long time, but as someone who's been in the classroom for ages, I can't remember a time when it wasn't a concern. Not only a concern, but often characterized as "worse than ever." And that "worse than ever" has always been a localized thing. I remember coming back to my small town after teaching my first year in Lorain, Ohio, where fighting and disorder were common, I'd faced physical threats twice in my own room, and students came from environments where guns and knives were not unusual. When I came back home, I tried not to laugh at colleagues who were really, really upset about how out of control gum chewing had become. 

Buck has stories of his own. "A kid punched another child and then threw a chair at my colleague yesterday. He’s at school today. No consequence. Nothing," he tweeted just a week ago. And he's at a private Christian school, one that says that their "education helps each child learn his or her Identity in Christ and live out a God-given Purpose in life. We regularly discuss and practice the Actions that grow character based on who we are and what we have been called to do in our lives." Plus emphasis on college prep. (Buck doesn't claim that this is a public school, but he doesn't correct responses that assume so, either.) 

Are things worse these days? My gut says yes, and the most obvious cause to point at is the pandemic disruption of education that brought chaos into students' lives even as it gave them ample opportunity to lose the habits of "doing school." A year is a really long time if you're a child. I'm betting that every school building in the country could use one more counselor, at least.

Why is it so bad?

Can we also point at restorative justice and SEL and other such fuzzy-headed touchy-feely stuff. Surely that's part of the problem; even if these are solid programs, I would bet dollars to donuts that across the country, a decent number of schools are implementing them poorly. I will also point at the political climate, the rise of brutal, crude scorched earth, and even physical attacks on "enemies," which becomes even more of a factor when the "enemy" is the school. In some communities, students hear plenty of that language.

Conservatives like Buck also point to mission creep, the degree to which schools have been tasked with so much beyond simply "teaching the basics." Two problems with that (well, at least two). One is that it's really hard to get kids who are hungry or tired struggling with other issues at home to care about prepositions and times tables, or, even if they care, to have the mental bandwidth to engage productively. The other is that mission creep is constant and from all sides; right now even conservatives are saying that we need to spend more time on civics and history education and. Also, let's add more time on math and reading to get those test scores up. More time, more time, more time (but not more resources). 

Nor is mission creep a public school issue alone. Buck last week tweeted, "Overheard a teacher saying 'I’m not here to teach academics so much as life lessons' Ok… but can you also teach the academics?" Buck is teaching at a school that promises, "In Partnership with the Character Formation Project, we offer a Biblically-based journey that equips and trains children to live Christ-centered, fulfilling lives for Greater Purpose." Their mission statement lists as goals "Growth in wisdom, character, faith, relationship, service, leadership and discernment take significant time, experiences and diligence." It's not a bad list, but the Three R's it is not.

Yeah, I'm still waiting for an answer to "why"

The roots of the issue are both deeply philosophical and simply practical.

The philosophical part is hinted at in Buck's paragraph and the responses to it. Are human beings fundamentally good or fundamentally bad. Is there "something rotten in the core of man" that must be harnessed, tamed, restrained? Or are humans destined to grow into something bright and beautiful if we just give them what they need to do that and shelter them from forces that will twist and stunt them? Or are humans some kind of blank-ish slate upon which family and experience write any number of possible answers? Are we all doomed sinners, or do we each carry a piece of divine spirit that can be nurtured? Or do humans carry the potential for good and bad, developed and enhanced by the circumstances and people they encounter through life? 

It's a complex question, complicated by the fact that everyone has an opinion, even if they don't take it out and look at it often. There's a tradition that says folks on the left are in the fundamentally bad camp, hence their desire to put powers in place to rein in human tendencies toward naughtiness, while the right favors a free field that trusts people to do mostly the right thing, but that's a gross oversimplification. Also, if conservatives think we should trust grownups, why do they think we can't trust children? At what point is that magical transition supposed to occur?

It's not an issue that I'll sort out in a blog post, which is fine, because it could all be true or none of it could be true, and the answers for school discipline would be the same. 

So what is the best way forward?

In fact, the answers to school discipline requires us to set aside "either or" and pick up "and."  Many things can be true at once. Behavior is communication, AND behavior needs to have consequences. Social emotional learning is a critical unremovable part of what teachers do (iow, I don't care what you do, you can't NOT teach SEL), AND some formal SEL programs are junk. Schools have to be conscious of biases and prejudices that may adversely affect disciplinary processes AND disciplinary processes need to exist. Students need the class to be a safe space to learn, which includes both being free of disruptions by fellow students AND not worrying that some small step on their part might bring the hammer down on their own head.

We don't have to argue philosophy when we can talk practicalities. Maybe you pine for the days when students were raised to automatically fear and respect the authority of the school and its personnel. Maybe you wish we had classrooms in which all those different groups just pretended to blend in with the presumed mainstream. Too bad. Those days are gone, and you aren't going to bring them back. Maybe you still believe that a key part of school discipline is breaking the spirit of a disobedient child. Morally, I think you're dead wrong, but at the same time, I encourage you to stop trying because it just doesn't get you the results you think it will. Worse, it gets you to a place where your desire to be the boss has become a higher priority than meeting the needs of the child. And speaking of your own needs, if you are letting everything go because you want to never ruffle student feathers or make anyone sad, that is also putting your need for comfort ahead of their needs.

Much of your classroom order comes down to you and how you leverage your particular style and resources. Know your material. Be firm and fair and consistent. Build relationships, but don't break your own rules to do it. Don't take what they do personally. 

None of that is new. What's also not new is the root of most school chaos issues--

The front office.

Long before SEL or culturally responsive teaching or restorative justice, there were administrators who didn't back up their classroom teachers. Every teacher who has worked more than a decade has met them. The principal who has a friendly chat with the kid who you threw out of class and then send the kid back five minutes later, a big smile on their face. The principal who requires you to complete the 147-item checklist before they'll get involved. The principal who always takes the student's word over the teacher's. The principal who folds the minute a parent makes contact. The principal you avoid involving in any situation because you know he'll back the student into a corner and escalate the situation. The principal you avoid involving because you know that certain students can expect poor treatment in the office. The principal who is somehow never around when you need them. The principal who doesn't observe (or maybe understand) district policy. The principal who will do anything to avoid having to answer a phone and hear an angry voice on the other end. The principal who is too overloaded with stuff to do so they don't have enough time to deal with your student's issues (again--at least one more counselor in every building in the country).

I do not want for a second to minimize the importance of the individual teacher taking care of her business in her classroom. It's hard for an administrator to back up a teacher who is making bad choices in her own room. But one fundamental part of classroom management is for the teacher to know that the front office has her back. An ineffective teacher can make a mess out of one room; an ineffective principal can make a mess out of an entire building. 

None of these principals (or their brethren and sistern) needed any particular policies or program to implement their approach, but you can bet they embraced them when they appeared, because it's a big help, if you don't want to do your job, to have a policy or program to point at for the blame. 

And again--this entire issue is not simply public school. Buck's piece focuses on a bullying incident and the administrative non-response at his current school. He also mentions students smoking weed in the restroom, "roaming the hall in gangs of three or four," and a slack policy toward attendance. This is a K-6 private Christian school.

There's another level of irony here. You may think "spare the rod and spoil the child" is Biblical. It isn't, exactly. The Bible gives us 

Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them. (Proverbs 13:24).

If you punish (children) with the rod, they will not die (Proverbs 23:13b).

A rod and a reprimand impart wisdom (Proverbs 29:15a).*

The familiar variant comes from Hudibras, a mock-heroic poem by Samuel Butler (1613–1680) that brings up the notion as part of the satire of outmoded and Puritanical ideas. 

I swear I'm just about at the end of this post

We kind of forget what "spare the rod" means-- it means that if you don't beat a child, they're liable to grow up bad. It's an idea that never goes away (witness the earlier versions of No Excuse charters like KIPP) despite the fact that it has never worked particularly well, and it plays with bonus oddity in Buck's piece, which lands somewhere in the neighborhood of "If we don't bully these children, they will continue to bully each other." 

There's a whole other side trip we could take about bullying itself, but this has already rambled on long enough. My short answer is that if we want students to live respectful lives, it would be helpful to model respect for them, and starting with the assumption that they're rotten inside probably doesn't fit that model well. Nor would I argue that we show respect by sparing them any negative consequences for bad choices. It's a complicated balancing act between two extreme poles, neither of which is the whole answer by itself. Kind of like every other complex issue in education. 

One of my first superintendents used to start the school year with a story about a horse trainer asking rookies what the first step of training was; the punch line was "First, you have to love the horse." The student-to-horse comparison was questionable, but his point was solid enough-- it helps to care about the students you are supposed to teach. Some folks imagine a kind of false dichotomy, that either A) one is a hard-nailed taskmaster who focuses strictly on the three R's or B) one is focused only on warm fuzzy socio-emotional stuff and never does anything that might seem "mean." As it is unkind and ineffective to demand complete depersonalized compliance, it is also unkind and ineffective not to teach the students to read and write and all the rest.

My idea of the purpose of education is pretty simple-- to help students better understand the world, to help become their best selves, and to grasp what it means to be fully human in the world. It can't happen in an atmosphere of chaos and Do As You Please, and it can't happen in an environment in which rod-enforced compliance is valued above all else. And I hope that my children's teachers don't start from any assumption that A) they are perfect angels or B) they are rotten inside. 

*For the record, Proverb 29 also includes verse 7:  The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern.

Reuters: SAT, ACT, and Test Insecurity

A Reuters investigative team has been taking a look at the ACT and SAT testing industry, and finding a huge mess. We had already seen hints of the problems with, among other things, whistleblowing posts from SAT insider Manuel Alfaro. But this Reuters series, now at five articles plus sidebars, is sort of jawdropping.

The articles have maintained a remarkably low profile, so I'm going to give you links to all five with a short peek at each so you can pick and choose your faves. Bookmark this-- it may take you a while to work through all of these, but it's worth it.

Part One: Multiple Choices

Turns out the SAT has been breached, big-time and many times, overseas. And the College Board knew it. And they went ahead and used the compromised tests anyway. These "content thefts" is eastern Asia are a huge part of that regions test prep industry. Further, the investigation shows that the College Board knew that a Chinese website was the source of much leakage, but they still failed to limit seatings at Chinese administrations of the test (it would have cost them over a million dollars in revenue). Most interesting takeaway here-- the highly compromised nature of the SAT in Asia suggests that US students might be losing out on college spots to Asian students who have cheated for high SAT scores. And you know it's bad when the ever-hubristic David Coleman chooses not to comment.

Part Two: Cheat Sheet

Security for the new SATs released in March lasted roughly five minutes. The traditional low-tech solutions were used, of course-- test prep companies waiting outside test sites to ask students what was one the test. The internet was also not kind to SAT security. But the College Board's antiquated and long-porous security measures also buckled immediately. Chinese tipsters showed Reuters whole chunks of the test that had been hacked from College Board's computers. This is particularly damaging because the College Board routinely uses the form of the test given in the USA in overseas countries. And all of this despite being repeatedly warned that their security was not holding up. These security issues were clear before David Coleman implemented his "beautiful vision" of a new SAT. The College Board should have been ready to protect the new test. They weren't.

Sidebar: College Board Responds

Having been caught with their cyber-pants down, the College Board offered their own response, which breaks down basically to

A) Hey, nobody's perfect and we're working real hard on this stuff

B) We're totally working with Reuters on this because we certainly have nothing to hide

C) Look at how many people are taking our test! We makin' the money!

Part Three: Deception 101

Well, this is a new one on me. There is apparently an entire Chinese underground industry that helps students cheat to get into US schools, and then helps them cheat to get through the US schools. The story focuses on the University of Iowa, where Chinese nationals receive messages from a coaching service that will help them with homework, papers, and even take their exams for them. But Iowa is not even close to the only school where this goes on.

Part Four: Special Access 

The Global Assessment Certificate Program is supposed to help non-US students develop the skills to succeed in US schools. Turns out it also gives them an early look at the ACT so they can better succeed on that as well. The program costs about $10,000 for a student enroll, and says Reuters, "has emerged as one of many avenues in Asia used to exploit weaknesses in the U.S. college admissions process."

Oh yeah. And the GAC is owned by ACT. Reuters talks to a student who practiced the actual ACT he took a week before he actually took it. And they talk to a former GAC teacher who was sacked over complaints that he was cracking down on plagiarism and cheating. And the ACT has recently benefited from the SAT's belated attempts to create some semblance of test security in Asia.

Part Five: At Risk

When the College Board set out to redesign the SAT, they hired a consultant who told them, "Your security sucks. You need to fix that crap." (I'm paraphrasing). But that didn't happen, and a month after the new SAT was unveiled, someone came to Reuters with hundreds of leaked and/or stolen test items. Reuters sent them to the College Board to ask, "Are these real?" The College Board replied via attorney, saying that publishing the items would be Very Bad (presumably the implication was "sue-ably" bad).

Part of the issue can be laid on a procedural shift. Previously, test-manager ETS had housed test development, test items and the question bank, but under David Coleman, more of this work and storage was done in house. So, less "lock these nuclear codes in the super-secure bank vault" and more "I'll just put this in the locked drawer in my desk."

Bottom Line

There may be more to come, but this sure seems like plenty. For a guy whose "beautiful vision" of the test was one that related to the real world, David Coleman sure seems to have bungled the real world problem of test security. And how does anybody do business in China and not realize things are different there. Even Bill Gates eventually figured it out over a decade ago-- charge the Chinese too much for your intellectual property or designs, and they will just steal it and make it themselves for cheap.


The solution to the College Board's problems is simple-- they just don't like it. Most of these issues get much if every single SAT administration involves a completely different test. But the College Board doesn't want the expense involved in generating that much test material.

So here we sit, with an SAT that is increasingly useless and pointless, yet which has successfully sold itself to some states as a test for every single student in school. Coleman has, for the moment, converted his junk into highly profitable junk, but if the wheels keep coming off the car, he won't be able to drive it forever. Stay tuned. Meanwhile, two more prestigious universities announced they were dropping a portion of their SAT requirements.