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.

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.

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. 

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.

Archives: The Hard Part

While the Institute is away at a corporate retreat, far, mostly, from the interwebz, I've arranged for some dips into the archives.

The most-read thing I've ever published, with close to a million hits on HuffPost. As noted, I would have been a little more careful if I'd known this was going to be so widely read.

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.

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.

Coleman's New SAT

The unveiling of David Coleman's New, Improved SAT Suite is just around the corner, and that means its time to ramp up the marketing blitz for this great new product.

The College Board website is freshly festooned with a festive font that shows that the new SAT Suite is ready to hang with the cool kids. I mean, you can follow the SAT on twitter! All the young persons are following the twitter, right?

The whole business seems charmingly cheesy in its commercial crassness, but it stands as one more part of David Coleman's crusade to redefine what it means to be an educated person in this country. We've been watching this come down the pike for a while; what can we spot now that it's almost here?

I Can Has Skillz

The new SAT comes complete with a new motto-- "skilled it." And copywriters have made sure that theme permeates the site. "Bank on skills." "Show off your skills." "Let's talk skills." "Skill Mail." "Calling all skills." "U of Skill."  "Skilled in class. Skilled for college." "Take the test that measures the real skills you've learned in class to show colleges you've got what it takes." Can you spot the unifying feature here? Only one of the blurby graphics mentions the K word-- "Show off the skills and knowledge colleges want most."

The SAT suite has been brought in line with the many unappealing qualities of the Common Core-- a disregard bordering on antipathy when it comes to actual content knowledge.

Granted, the SAT has always been a soul-sucking hypocrite when it comes to this issue, subjecting generations of students to verbal tests that claimed to measure reasoning while actually just being expensive, complicated vocabulary tests. But our new goal seems to be to turn the SAT into PARCC's step-brother. I could, if I wished, prepare my students for the Big Standardized Core test by doing nothing all year but reading newspaper articles and pages from storybooks, followed by multiple choice questions. Coleman wants to take the SAT to that place-- the place where a student's worth is judged by their ability to perform the right tricks.

This is the Coleman vision of education. An educated person doesn't Know Things. And educated person can Do Things. After all, what's the point in knowing things if you can't turn your knowledge into deliverables, use it to add value, grab it like a might crowbar that you can use to pry open the secret moneybanks of the world. Do you think Coleman had to know anything to write the Core or re-configure the SAT? Of course not-- he just had to Get Things Done. An educated person has marketable skills. What else do you need?

Co-opting Khan

Part of the new SAT initiative has been to try to shut down the lucrative SAT prep industry, and to that end, the College Board has teamed up with Khan Academy to provide free test prep of their own. There's even a nifty video of Coleman and Khan videoconferencing about how swell it all is; Coleman seems to think that the Khan academy stuff will achieve college and career readiness all on its own (because that's the core of what it's all about now).

Free seems like an excellent price, especially to build such brand recognition. I'm just going to go ahead and type "There's been such a demand for more tools that give more in depth preparation that we are pleased to make these available for a small fee" now so that I can link back to it a year from now when I want to show off my prognostication skills.

Not For Stupid Eggheads

The new SAT push has been weirdly anti-intellectual. The website is repeatedly clear about how it has thrown off the shambling shackles of smarmy smartitude, pointing out that the test will measure what you learned in high school (provided your school followed Coleman's blueprints) and what you need to succeed in college (a bullshit claim that's not backed up with anything concrete for the same reason that Coleman can list the tools you need to trap a Yeti). And this:

If you think the key to a high score is memorizing words and facts you’ll never use in the real world, think again. You don’t have to discover secret tricks or cram the night before.

Yup. They list the secrets of success: take hard courses, do your homework, prepare for tests (but not with test prep?) and ask and answer lots of questions.

So What's Inside?

In addition to links to the Khan stuff, the site has samples and explanations for each of the test sections. A page gives a general description, noting once again that cramming facts and flashcards won't be necessary, and takes a chatty tone, even using the word "stuff."

Reading

The reading intro includes a sideways definition of reading, opening with the lilting line, "A lot more goes into reading than you might realize — and the Reading Test measures a range of reading skills." That includes Command of Evidence, Words in Context, and Analysis in History/Social Studies and in Science.

A quick look at the sample questions shows selections including Ethan Frome, a piece about commuting's cost in productivity, a piece about turtles navigating sea migration, and a 1974 speech by Barbara Jordan (all excerpts, of course). The intro to the Jordan speech lets us know that it was delivered in the context of impeachment hearings against Richard Nixon, and it opens with this paragraph:

Today I am an inquisitor. An hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemnness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution as a whole, it is complete, it is total. And I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.

It also includes a quote from Federalist No. 65. Then it asks what the best description of Jordan's stance would be (correct answer-- an idealist setting forth principles). And, as seems required in standardized reading tests, a couple of question require the test-taker to speculate on the author's thoughts, feelings, and intent. This test is well-aligned with all the other BS Tests that Common Core has inflicted on us.

Writing and Language

Well, now I just want to punch myself in the brain. This is basically an editing exercise, with a certain amount of spelling, punctuation and usage questions, along with a few tasks that involve making the stylistic choice preferred by the kind of boring white-bread dull writers whose work is favored by test manufacturers. The goal is to insure that nobody on earth could have prior knowledge of the content, so the work is often selected from the Big Book of the Most Boring Damn Pieces of Writing Ever Written, so that it's a chore just to look at their lifeless prose spread out against the page like a patient etherized upon a table.

SAT Essay

I have a sneaking suspicion that Coleman oversaw this makeover personally. You'll read a passage, explain how the author builds an argument to persuade the audience, support your explanation with evidence from the text. You have fifty whole minutes to do it and--

You won't be asked to agree or disagree with a position on a topic or to write about your personal experience.

In other words, the top scoring essays should all be close to identical.

Worst. Standardized. Writing. Test. Ever.

The only good part is that it's optional. Somehow, I don't see any colleges finding this particularly useful.

Key Content Differences

So what's actually different about the test? Well, the College Board says these are the key changes--

Words in context-- "Many questions on the new SAT focus on important, widely used words and phrases found in texts in many different subjects." I'm not sure how the College Board measures importance of words and phrases, but I do know that description sounds like part of the cover copy for the dozens of new test prep books about to come out so that people know what to put on their flashcards when they're cramming the night before.

Command of evidence-- The College Board already knows what the point of a selection is, and they already know which words and phrases in the selection are the important evidence. In effect, the College Board has figured out how to turn a multi-paragraph excerpt into a larger, trickier multiple choice question. As always, no personal thinking or interpreting allowed. Read the selection and come up with the right answer, supported by the right evidence for the right reasons.

That's exactly how college works, right??

Math that matters most-- You know I'm not a math teacher. The CB tells us what Most Important Mat is on the test. But the methodology described seems... well... "Current research shows that these areas are used disproportionately in a wide range of majors and careers." So, you know-- know only the things that will help you get a job. College is High Class Vocational Training, right? That's what an educated person is, right-- someone who knows how to leverage what they can do into a nice payday?

Also, they repeat their line about how all this will be real-world related. You know, like Ethan Fromme and Barbara Jordan's 1974 speech quoting the Federalist papers in regards to Nixon's impeachment.

Oh-- that last part goes with the new SAT focus on US Founding Documents and the Great Global Conversation they started. Really.

Expanding the market 

Of course, the context of all this is not just David Coleman's desire to impose his own vision of education on the entire country. The context is also that the College Board needs to get revenue rolling into their cash-strapped coffers.

Some of this they have accomplished by conning some states into making every student take the test. And they've had government-backed success with other products, like the AP tests that are part of some schools' evaluation. I know I'm just a simple English teacher, but I would love to sit in on the conversation where a corporate rep convinces elected representatives that it's a good idea to make all the citizens of a state buy his product. It's impressive and unprecedented.

But that's not enough-- the SAT folks are also expanding their reach by adding new testy treats, like the PSAT 8/9, "a test that will help you and your teachers figure out what you need to work on most so that you're ready for college when you graduate from high school." It tests the same stuff as the SAT, PSAT and PSAT 10 (Oh, yeah-- there's a PSAT 10, too) so that your students can be using our products throughout their entire career. Ka-ching!! And what could be better test prep than taking the test manufacturers test prep test annually?

Not enough cross-marketing? Don't forget-- the PSAT will now give you recommendations for which AP courses you should be taking! Ka-chingggggggg!!

College Board's Big Roll of the Dice

This could go great for the CB. Just as the PARCC made noises about encroaching on their territory (why don't colleges just go ahead and use Core Test scores for college admission), the SAT is now positioned to push the various Common Core Big Standardized Tests right out of the market. They've already got the product, they have the experience, and they're run by the guy who wrote half the standards you're trying to test. Plus, they already have a long standing (if unfounded) claim to being monumental measurers of post-secondary preparedness.

With so much product and government backing, they could do the Coke and Pepsi trick of pushing all other colas off the grocery store shelves.

On the other hand, even more colleges could decide to do the right thing and stop holding their future students hostage to a money-sucking test industry that still, after years of playing this game, does not predict future college success better than a student's high school grade point average. The rewrite of the SAT could be David Coleman's New Coke, finally highlighting just how obsolete and useless his product is. This could finally kill the beast.

We shall wait and see. In the meantime, I will stay obnoxiously optimistic and partially positive. Also, I'll grudgingly round up test prep materials for my suffering juniors.

Collective Freedom

The tension between individual freedom and collective action, between what the individual wants and what the community wants, between the needs of the many and the needs of the few-- that tension has been with us since Day One. Puritans came here to declare,"This will be a place where people are free to worship as they please-- as long as it's a form of worship we agree with." Southern colonists arrived declaring, "This will be a land in which every man's efforts can enrich him-- unless you're an indentured servant or a slave, in which case, your efforts are going to enrich me."

We have a Bill of Rights enumerating the rights possessed by every individual-- and a long and robust history of debate and case law determining where those rights actual stop in the name of the greater good (First Amendment does not cover yelling "fire" or even "elephant stampede" in a crowded theater, et al).

This, it should be noted, is not a tension limited to governance. To get married and become a part of a tiny family collective, you give up some of your personal freedom. That's how it works-- if you insist on acting as if you live in the land of Do As You Please, your little collective will fall apart (trust me on this). Membership in a group requires sacrifice of personal freedom.

As a nation we tend to lean toward individual freedom and away from collectivism. Even when we occasionally do Socialist things, we don't dare call it Socialism. Too much collective action and people start talking about the government "taking away my hard-earned money" or inflicting its will on our choices.

Some charter/voucher school fans like to frame the argument along these lines. The decry forcing students to go to "government" schools. Why shouldn't parents have the freedom to choose whatever school they like? Why be forced into some sort of collective (that, they claim, wastes a bunch of tax money anyway).


This framing is not accurate, and not just because no state has yet invested the kind of money or demanded the kind of accountability that would truly make all choices available to all parents. No, there's another reason this is a false characterization, a reason that charters and vouchers vs. public education is about the tension between freedom and society in a slightly different way.

There are areas of community life where we have decided to sacrifice individual freedom for the collective good (and thereby actually increase individual freedom).

Roadways. We could make every individual responsible for the roads that he personally uses-- building them, maintaining them-- but given the different resources the folks have and the interconnectedness required for roadways, we would end up with a higgledy-piggledy system that didn't really serve anyone particularly well. Back in the 19th century, folks in my community would get together and spend Saturday building a new road, a project nobody could have completed single-handedly. And it takes a national collective effort to create that marvel of the modern world-- the Interstate Highway System

Likewise, we could make every citizen form and hire her own personal army, but the resulting hodge-podge would not protect the country.

Education (surprise) is the other big example. Rather than just let each family locate their own personal tutor, communities decided that they had a stake in making sure that all children were educated (eg Puritans require a Godly community of Bible readers, therefor we need to teach everyone to read). Communities pooled resources and elected a board to manage those resources in response to community desires. The structure got stickier when we decided that since some communities didn't have sufficient resources, we would also pool resources on the state level.

As with roads and armies, the collective pooling of resources involved people who would rarely if ever use the items being produced. But their interested were still represented by their participation in the collective decision making. Even if you don't have a child in school, you can still run for school board, call board members, attend meetings and make a participatory nuisance of yourself. Everyone who helps pool the collective also has the option of participating in the collective decision-making.

Collectives require people to chip in, and they require some authority to decide how the various interests at play can be moderated so that everyone sort of gets something they kind of want. In some countries, that authority is some sort of emperor/beloved leader/tyrant. In our society, the idea is to elect folks for that job. Bottom line-- you put in some money, voice your opinion, and may or may not get exactly what you want.

Sometimes it takes the collective to get the job done. These decisions do not happen without debate. We're in the middle of an argument about whether or not health care should be such a collective effort or not. And there are always wealthy folks whose argument is something along the lines of, "We have no problem providing the roads and security that we need, and we provide it just the way we like it, so why should the government force us to be part of a collective effort by stealing our resources. And really, everybody should have the freedom to choose their own stuff the same way we do. What? They can't afford to? Well, wave this magic wand of free marketry at the problem; I'm sure those folks will be able to get what they deserve in no time at all."

Or to put it more succinctly, "I've got mine, Jack. Go pound sand."

There are several possible explanations for this. Rich folks are way hella rich. Super-rich. Buy your own city and run it the way you want rich. That and cooperation and compromise are taking a hit as shared values. Take music for a moment. Decades ago, we had to share air space. We listened to the radio station (one of only a few) we listened to music that the station believed the collective wanted. Decades ago when I chaperoned bus trips, negotiating the music we would all listen to was part of the challenge. Nowadays, we all curate our personal collection that we hear through our personal equipment. We get exactly what we personally want.

So is that all the charter/voucher revolution is? A bunch of parents just saying, "I want the school I want." And then just exercising their choice.

No, it's not. And here's why.

When it comes to bus ride music, we have done away with the collective. We don't pool resources or share decisions-- everyone just brings their own resources and makes do with that. No collective resources, no collective decisions.

But the charter/voucher revolution keeps the pooled resources part of public education. Everyone is still part of the collective resource pool. The collective decision-making is, however, gone.

Earlier this week I jumped off a post about Flat Earthers to ask charter/voucher fans how a charter/voucher system would deal with a school that was just wrong. I didn't get much of an answer. The public would never stand for it, one said-- but how exactly would the public's non-standing affect the charter school's existence? In a charter or voucher system, who steps in to say, "No, that can't be a school." I used the Flat Earth example because while we can all agree that the earth is not flat, we must also agree that there might be enough flat earthers out there to support a Flat Earth Charter school. Parents voting with their feet will not keep it from happening.

What charter/vouchers get us is collective resources managed in individual freedom mode (again, ignoring for the moment that the resources committed to such systems don't give parents anything remotely resembling the choices they are promised). By focusing on the individual parent decision, charteristas and voucherphiles try to make the argument that choice is super-democratic. It's not.

What is going on here is a bunch of parents saying, "I'm going to choose this private school for my kid, and you taxpayers have to pay for it whether you like it or not." Christian fundamentalists can spend tax dollars to send kids to a sharia law private school. Muslim taxpayers can pay to send students to a militantly anti-Islam private school. Black and brown taxpayers can pay to send white kids to a segregated private school.

Choice advocates have long made the point that education tax dollars don't belong to the public school-- they belong to the students. Neither of those is correct. The money belongs to the taxpayers. To distribute it without giving them any voice is literally taxation without representation. What charter/voucher systems continue to lack (well, one of the things they continue to lack) is accountability measures that insure taxpayers that their money is not being wasted. Is that conversation about what constitutes "waste" going to be difficult and contentious? Sure. And I wonder if part of the push behind charter/voucher systems is a desire to avoid that discussion ("I want to send my kid to a flat earth academy and I don't want to have to go through a bunch of crap to do it") But if you're going to be part of a community, city, state and nation, you can't just Do As You Please and maintain your membership.

Cuomo to Teachers: Drop Dead

If you have not yet seen the letter from Cuomo aid Jim Malatras to ed leaders Tisch and King, you can find a copy right here. If you want to see just how direct and ugly an attack by a governor on his own state's public education system can be, you should read it. If you are a teacher in New York, you should read it twice.

I'll hit the highlights, not because the letter's particularly hard to parse, but because some things are just so ugly, they need to be held up to the light as much and as often as possible.

It opens with the observation that New York's low success percentages for proficiency on the Big Test are simply "unacceptable" and therefore Cuomo will make sure that the cut scores are set at more acceptable levels as determined by educators and not politicians. Ha! Just kidding. He's going to pretend that those proficiency numbers represent something other than political gamesmanship by the governor's office.

Speaking of proficiency, the next paragraph opens with this sentence:

Governor Cuomo believes in public education it can open up unlimited opportunity to our students.

I believe Malatras he is not a careful proofreader. I sympathize. I am the king of speedy mistakes, as my readers can attest. But I'm not on the state payroll, writing documents of record.

Malatras goes on to say that "virtually everyone" thinks the system must be reformed and improved, and I wonder if he's counting the people who believe that reformation and improvement start with getting Cuomo's grabby hands off public education's neck. But no-- three guesses where efforts to fix schools must be focused:

Part of the package will be to strengthen one of our most important professions teaching. While some seek to demonize teachers, Governor Cuomo believes the exact opposite wanting to reward excellence in teaching and by recruiting the best and brightest into the profession. 

(Yes, the letter is riddled with mistakes. No further comment). Those damn teachers. those stupid incompetent teachers that Cuomo loves so very much.

Malatras goes on to note that the governor doesn't have a lot of control over education, and that this represents a wise and rational distribution of power in running a state. Ha! No, kidding again. Cuomo doesn't have that kind of power, so he's going to use the budget process to just take it. He's asking Tisch and King for their input on Cuomo's ideas as matter of policy (leave the politicking to the legislature). Here are Cuomo's Twelve Awesome Thoughts, with a bit of translation. You're welcome.

1) The teacher evaluation system sucks because it's not failing enough teachers. How can we jigger it so that more teachers are failed by it?

2) It's too hard to fire bad teachers. Hard work is hard. How can we make it less hard to get rid of the teachers that we'll be failing more of once we straighten out the evalouation process?

3) How can we make becoming a teacher harder? Because if we make it really hard to become a teacher, then teachers will be better. Can we give them all a competency test? Recruiting best and brightest would be cool.

4) Cuomo would still like to get merit pay up and running, because the fact that it has never worked anywhere doesn't change his love for how it would reduce payroll costs. Because recruiting teachers (point 3) goes better when you tell them they might get well paid if you feel like paying them more.

5) Could we make the pre-tenure period longer, and could we make their certification temporary so that they have to get re-approved every couple of years. We need to make them stop thinking of teaching as a lifetime career, because that's how you recruit the best and the brightest.

6) What can we do about schools that suck? Particularly Buffalo, because we would really like to accelerate the hand-over of Buffalo schools to charter operators, who make much better campaign contributions than low-paid teachers.

7) Charters? Charters charters charters. Can we just increase the cap in NYC? A whole lot?

8) Education special interests have resisted using courses delivered by computer. Could we just go ahead and do that anyway? Because one college instructor with a computer = 143 high school teachers we could fire.

9) What about mayoral control? It looked like a great idea in NYC until they elected some bozo who didn't get the deal with charters until Cuomo had the legislature rough him up a bit. Mayoral control is better than a damn elected board, but mayors are also elected and those damn voters are a pain in my ass.

10) Should we combine some of the 700 school districts in New York? (This might be the only thing on the list that isn't either evil or stupid. I would make fun of 700 different school districts in New York, but I'm in PA and we aren't any better).

11) The damn regents are appointed by the legislature. Do you think we should fix that, because having to work with people not under his direct control is a real problem for the governor.

12) We're about to replace Dr. King. Is there a way to have a transparent process to replace him with someone I pick?

Oddly enough, the Cuomo office has no interest in looking at rampant testing, craptastic canned curriculum, or widely unpopular standards. I would have said that it was hard to blame these not-beloved-by-teachers programs on teachers, but since Rudy Giuliani found a way to blame the death of Eric Garner on teachers, I'm going to accuse Cuomo of slacking on this department.

Several weeks ago Governor Cuomo said that improving education is thwarted by the monopoly of the education bureaucracy. The education bureaucracy's mission is to sustain the bureaucracy and the status quo and therefore it is often the enemy of change. The result is the current system perpetuates the bureaucracy but, fails our students in many ways.Tackling these questions with bold policy and leadership could truly transform public education and finally have it focus on the student as opposed to the bureaucracy. 

Because having power centered in places that aren't the governor's office is just, you know, bad.

In a charming coda, Malatras notes that King might now give even better advice now that he is unshackled from the political demands of his office, because you know that John King-- he was always so constrained by his deep concern about public opinion, and his willingness to listen to the public just tied him up. Now as a federal bureaucrat hired outside any sort of approval system, he'll be free to disregard public opinion entirely. Because A) that's a good thing and B) it's not at all how he conducted himself in his New York job.

Man, I just hope all those New York teacher union officials who carried Cuomo's water throughout the primary season are really enjoying this unfettered direct attack against the profession and the public schools. Tisch and King are supposed to get back to Cuomo with their advice on how best to kick New York's teachers in the teeth by December 31, so to all my NY teacher neighbors, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Enjoy the holidays, because 2015 will bring open season on public school teachers in the Empire State.

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?