ICYMI: Counterclockwise Edition (6/14)

Several decades ago, my brother and I played in a strolling dixieland band at Conneaut Lake Park, a delightful small amusement park that has since fallen on difficult times, and one of the things we noticed at the time was that small children would "dance" to our music by running in little counterclockwise circles. Lo and behold, researchers have discovered that turning counterclockwise is an unexplained but real human thing. We humans truly are a mysterious species. 

Here's your reading list for the week. Read it in whatever direction you like.

Why Schools Keep Relearning the Same Lessons

Matt Brady on how schools have an unfortunate tendency to simply lose expertise and institutional history.

Excerpts over excellence: How Seattle Public Schools is preventing middle school teachers from teaching full-length books

Julie Letchner provides a specific, local example of how one district confuses compliance with quality, and how full length books are kept out of the classroom.

The Screen Time Lies Powering i-Ready's Ed-Tech Crisis Response

Part 4 in series of posts at Epostasy looking at how i-Ready is a mess, and how they are trying to spin their way out of trouble.

K-12 Educational Reform: Always a “Silver Bullet”

Greg Wyman takes a look at reform history all the way back to A Nation At Risk, and the search for an education silver bullet.

What About All Those ONLINE Science of Reading Programs?

Nancy Bailey questions the use of more screen time to improve reading.

Florida AG Says School Boards Must Let Students Leave Class For Religious Instruction

Lifewise has come for Florida's students, and the state is only too happy to hand them over. 

Education voucher funds for college? Arizona ESA spending raises new questions for growing program

Craig Harris continues to be an absolute beast in covering Arizona's voucher grift. Here's yet another variation on this theft from taxpayers.

ACT and SAT---Sophist Wastes

Thomas Ultican looks at the resurgence of standardized testing support in California.

The ‘Generational Collapse’ in Literacy

Nancy Flanagan responds to the complaint from college professors that their students can't read. 

Ohio Legislature Keeps Advancing School Reforms that Don’t Work but Fails to Fund the Public Schools

Jan Resseger keeps track of Ohio education shenanigans, including the legislature's fondness for leaning into failed policies while refusing to support the public school system.

The One-Room Schoolhouse

TC Weber is a busy guy this week, with observations about everything from discipline to nostalgia

(Teacher) Life Work

Adrian Neibauer spins off from Donald Hall's book Life Work, into a layered and layered look at life, work, and teaching. Quite a nice read.

Tough Times for an Education Budget Hawk

Not sure I've seen this take from anyone on any side. Frederick Hess asks why bother with education cuts if we're just going to blow a mountain of money and saddle the next generation with mega-debt?

AI Ain’t So Smart

Russell Frank, columnist for StateCollege.com, thinks maybe his AI devices are not doing great work. Best line:

The Machine can do a lot of things that we mere mortals cannot. But it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, which means it may be artificially intelligent, but it isn’t artificially wise.

The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

Nothing like a good rant. This rant by Brian Phillips is pretty delightful. Thanks to Benjamin Riley for highlighting this in his fine Punk is anti-AI post.

The Federal Assault on History

The Organization of American Historians has released a report that attempts to summarize all of the current administration's attempts to rewrite or erase history.

This week at Forbes.com I took yet another pass at explaining why federal school vouchers are bad news. It's not just the money-- it's the fundamental change to the public education mission. I'd be delighted if you shared this one with your favorite elected state official. 

If you were a band kid in the early seventies, you listened to Maynard. We were lucky enough to see him live at Edinboro University every summer for a buck. When he scored a semi-hit with "Gonna Fly Now" that marked the end of MF Horn Maynard (concert closer: "Hey Jude") and the beginning of disco Maynard (concert closer: "Maria") but we didn't begrudge him his success, and later he moved back around to cool stuff like this:

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Arizona's Teacher Desert

This week in the New York Times, Fernando Santos and Motoko Rich took a look at the continuing teacher shortage in Arizona, where leaders continue to demonstrate that they understand neither education nor the free market forces that they claim to love.

Arizona's history with reformster nonsense goes way back. Bill McCallum was a professor at the University of Arizona back when he became one of the co-authors of the Common Core. Arizona has long camped out at the bottom of most education lists-- spending, test results, you name it, they've sucked at it. When reformy governor Jan Brewer backed Tea Party fave Doug Ducey all the way to the capital, that was not good news for education.

Ducey brought in reformsters Paul Pastorek, obliterator-in-chief of New Orleans schools, and Joel Klein, who never met a public school that he didn't want to shut down. Pastorek and Klein showed up to help promote the idea of a charter-choice non-public school system where children carrying tax dollars in their backpacks travel from school to school begging to be admitted. At that same event, Ducey (previous job: CEO of Cold Stone Creamery) declared a need for more positive view of Arizona:

"I believe that too many have fallen into a doom-and-gloom cycle where everything is wrong, where the cynic is winning, telling others that nothing is right," Ducey said. "I say it's time we shed an inferiority complex inside this state."

It's funny-- I would think that an acolyte of Competition and Free Market Forces would recognize that a good way to shed an inferiority complex would be to take steps to stop being inferior.

That has not always been the Arizona way. A year ago their legislature was seriously discussing a bill to shut educators up, barring them from "distributing electronic materials to influence the outcome of an election or to advocate support for or opposition to pending or proposed legislation." (It was shouted down in the 11th hour.) Arizona has also led the country in anti-Hispanic legislation, banning Mexican-American studies from the classroom.

Through all of this, Arizona has continued to have a teacher problem.

Last fall, Arizona schools were trying to fill teaching positions by recruiting in the Philipines. An Arizona Department of Education task force on teacher retention and recruitment issued a report in January of this year, and the picture was not pretty. Two years ago Arizona schools began the year with around a thousand unfilled teaching positions (out of a complete teaching force of a bit over 60,000). Going forward, things just look worse, with the impending retirement of up to a quarter of the current teaching force.

The report also shows the level of experience plummeting. In 1987-88, the most common experience level for teachers was 15 years. In 2011-12, it was five years. In 2013-14, 24% of first year teachers and 20% of second year teachers left their jobs "and were not reported as teaching in Arizona." In other words, just under a quarter of Arizona's newest teachers either left teaching or Arizona.

There are not too many mysteries about why Arizona cannot hold onto a complete teaching force. For starters, if you live anywhere else, you may think you know what low spending on schools looks like. But take a guess at what Arizona's per-pupil spending is, according to most recent reports--

$3,400.

That puts Arizona dead last in the US. So teachers in Arizona get bupkus in financial resources for meeting the needs of their students.

Can't they just fill in the gap out of their own pockets, like other teachers all across America? I'm sure they'd like to, and I'll bet many do-- but the pockets of an Arizona teacher do not run very deep. The report says that the average starting salary is $31,874. Keep in mind-- that's an average, which means that all sorts of folks are starting out a even less than that. The report notes that is an increase of 20% over 2003 starting salaries, meaning that teaching has grown far slower than "other degreed professions."

In the NYT article, we meet John-David Bowman, the 2015 Arizona Teacher of the Year. He hasn't had a raise since 2008. If he retires in twenty years, he'll do so with a salary under $50K.

Unsurprisingly, many Arizona school districts have frozen or cut spending. As the visit of Pastorek and Klein would suggest, Arizona has for years been pursuing a policy of cutting state spending, which leaves three options for local districts: A) raise local taxes to make up difference, B) let school spiral downward and be declared a distressed failure, or C) all of the above.

That man-made disaster suits some folks just fine. Among Arizona's many low, low grades in education, there is one high mark. The Center for Education Reform, a group devoted to pushing charters anywhere and everywhere, gave Arizona one of a handful of A's for being a great state for charters. The NYT article includes a quote from a parent who has reluctantly gone charter rather than send her small children into a classroom of forty students.

Protection for teachers? Well, the Fordham Institute issued a report back in 2012 ranking state teacher unions for power an influence in their states, and there we find Arizona dead last on yet another list. Arizona is a right to work state, with no collective bargaining rights. Tenure ("continuing status") still exists, but low test scores can be a reason to fire "tenured" teachers. And when furloughs are called for, districts may not consider seniority as a factor. (By which I don't mean "it might not happen" but rather "they aren't allowed to do it")

How bad is the attitude about education in Arizona? That same study of retention and recruitment includes recommendations for improving the situation. It includes recommendations for policymakers including:

* Elevate positive reinforcement for the role our educators play in ensuring success for all students
* Publicly acknowledge the value of the teaching profession and the critical need for effective teachers in all Arizona classrooms
* Help to improve the respect afforded educators
* Publicly acknowledge the value of the teaching profession

Let those sink in. The Arizona Department of Education thought these were things that policymakers needed to be told, implying that these are things policymakers didn't already know (after all, campaign consultants don't tell their candidates "Kiss babies. Say nice things about America. Remember to keep breathing.") It is bad enough in Arizona that "show teachers respect" qualifies as bold new policy advice.

So. Low pay, poor workplace resources, no job security, difficult work conditions, and no respect from state leaders. How could Arizona possibly have a teacher shortage?

You would think free market conservatives could figure this one out. If I walk into Cold Stone Creamery and say, "Give me a four scoop hot chocolate sundae with crushed nuts and strawberries, and I want to stand on that side of the counter and poke you in the nose while you make it. I'll pay you a quarter" I am not going to get my wish. If you want to purchase goods and/or services, and people won't sell them to you under the conditions you set, you have to up your offer. This is not rocket science. The invisible hand does not set prices based on what we'd like to pay; otherwise, we would all buy new cars for $1.50. But free marketeers always seem to want to bite the invisible hand that feeds them when it says that they have to fork over real money to pay for labor and materials.

The solution to Arizona's teacher shortage is neither mysterious or complicated. Pay a living wage. Take care of your schools properly. Provide the resources needed to do the job. Treat your teachers, both by word and by policy, with respect.

Ducey may have caught on, at least a little. Last Thursday he announced a plan to pump an additional $2 billion into schools. This will be financed by dipping into Arizona's state land trust permanent fund, a fund that gains money from sale of land and resources of the land held in trust by the state; currently that fund is enjoying success from stock market investments. So, yeah-- selling off publicly held resources and investing the money in the market. There's no way this could end badly.

It is tossing a bone to public schools. (Universities, which continue to take heavy hits, get no such bone.) It was greeted with "cautious optimism." But for now, I would not put Arizona on my list of Great Places To Pursue a Teaching Career. Not until Arizona policymakers indicate they have found stopped wandering in the desert and have finally located a clue.

Razing Arizona

The Arizona Capitol Times last week ran an op-ed from a concerned citizen who wants to stick up for the beleaguered common core standards. Rebecca Hipps bills herself as a descendant of some of Arizona's founding families, and as such, she doesn't want the pioneer spirit to be damaged by the ejection of CCSS.

Hipps is not actually in Arizona. According to her LinkedIn profile, she spent her first three post-college years in three different teaching jobs before heading to DC, where she has worked for the DC Common Core Collaborative, a charter school, Teach Plus, and O'Dell Education, an outfit that appears to specialize in the manufacture and sales of Core-related programs and PD. They were founded by Judson O'Dell, who was Dean of Students at a university in Argentina before coming to work at the College Board and Educational Testing Service. That's Hipps' current employer, so her love for the Core is not exactly a surprise.

When she discusses her fears about the core ditchery that Arizona is contemplating, she says this:

My greatest fear in Arizona repealing the CCSS is that poorly developed standards with a hidden agenda will take its place.

Yes, yes, I can see how one would worry that schools would be commandeered by a set of standards developed by educational amateurs and pushed forward with an agenda of opening up public schools to private corporations or cracking open and unifying markets for publishing companies. Seriously-- "poorly developed standards with a hidden agenda" is as good a description of the common core standards as anyone has ever written. It's as if for a split second Hipps forgot which side she's paid to be on.

Her list of reasons that Arizona students need the Core is the usual boilerplate. Critical thinking, writing, reading, mathematical reasoning-- because apparently Arizona teachers are currently unaware of these things. Hipps is afraid that without the Core, Arizona teachers will slide back to some lesser land of educational inadequacy.

Given Hipps' concern for Arizona education, it's curious that she doesn't mention one of Arizona's other outstanding educational features-- leadership in frequent and brutal cuts to education budgets in the entire country. Arizona has cut public ed spending steadily since the late oughts, and they rank 50th in college per-student spending. It's a wonder that Hipps did not bring this up, as it would seem that Arizona is a poster child for spending bottom dollar on education and getting bottom dollar results.

At least Hipps is able to speak out at all. Arizona's teachers, superintendents, principals and school board members have spoken up about the slash and burn methods of their state leaders, and the state leader response has been to float a law that will require them to shut up.

Arizona lawmakers have attached an amendment to Senate Bill 1172. It prohibits "an employee of a school district or charter school, acting on the district's or charter school's behalf, from distributing electronic materials to influence the outcome of an election or to advocate support for or opposition to pending or proposed legislation."

On the one hand, it's a good idea that Mrs. O'Teacher not give her class an hour of self-directed worksheets while she stuffs envelopes for the new ballot initiative. On the other hand, there's that whole First Amendment thing. And the law is so broadly worded that I imagine a citizen asking a school district employee, "I'm really worried about the new proposed law cutting all money to public schools. Will that hurt our programs here," and said school employee must reply, by law, "I cannot share any information about that with you." Other critics of the bill fear that it would even prohibit any discussion of educational programs that directly affect children with those children's parents.

And while I'm not concerned, exactly, I am curious-- would this law also prohibit charter schools from advertising?

The law is clearly one more attempt to push educators out of the political world. No more informational letters to parents and voters. No more taking a public stand against assaults on school funding by the governor and legislators. Presumably no teacher or administrator in Arizona could write a response to Hipps' op-ed-- at least not with any indication that they were writing their response from the perspective of a public educator.

In other words, Arizona educators can use their professional judgement and expertise-- they just can't let anybody know that they have any, or share what it leads them to conclude. Note that the law doesn't make any distinction between advocacy based on facts and that based on political preferences.

In New Jersey, charter operators have been trying to shut down Rutgers researcher Julia Sass Rubin, whose research has been embarrassing charter operators and the government buddies with the use of actual facts and fully-supported data. Their argument in NJ has been that Rubin shouldn't be allowed to mention her credentials-- in other words, she can share her data without explaining why it should be given credence.

But that's reformsterism, and as Hipps' plaintive cry for the Core and the amendment's inclusion of charters might indicate, Arizona's leadership is not so much pro-reform as it is just plain anti-public education. Hell, even DFER is on their case (turns out that Arizona has little money for schools, but lots for prisons). New governor Doug Ducey (previous job-- CEO of Cold Stone Creamery) has shown no interest in continuing the reformy policies of his predecessor Jan Brewer.

Governor Ducey (whose children attend Catholic school) was plain as day at his inauguration that tax hikes are verbotten and that all of Arizona's financial problems come from spending money poorly, not spending too little. He likes school choice, but has not explained how that will work, particularly if all the choices are brutally underfunded. But then, he seems to admire the model of such no-government paradises as Somalia; it would seem that school choice is not so important as making sure that all schools are underfunded and unregulated. This is all more than a little ironic-- have you ever been in a Cold Stone Creamery? Workers there are regulated down to how they must talk and behave for the customers, and franchise owners must spend enough money to do things properly.

Why, out of this whole constellation of issues, Hipps would find the possible ejection of Common Core to be most alarming and troubling is, given her employment history, not exactly a puzzle. But even from way over here in Pennsylvania, I can see that dumping a bad set of amateur-created standards is the least of Arizona's worries. Let's just hope that the people who can identify those problems are still allowed to talk about them.

Outsourcing, Teaching, and Not Understanding the Free Market

The destruction of teaching as a US profession continues to move forward.

Takepart yesterday reported on the increasing use of teachers from the Philippines to fill empty spots in the US. The article focuses on this move as a response to teacher shortages in Arizona, but it alludes to teacher shortages around the country.

This is a tricky subject. On the one hand, teacher shortages are a fairly predictable outcome of the continued assault on the profession. By stripping teachers of autonomy, dropping the pay level, reducing teaching to clerical script-reading work, removing all job security, gutting the parts of teaching that traditionally attract people, and denigrating the profession on a regular basis, the Folks In Charge have assured that teaching today is far less attractive as a profession than it has ever been. For example, given the current conditions there, what person in her right mind would pursue teaching as a lifelong career in North Carolina?

On the other hand, teacher "shortages" are being used as an excuse for any number of misbehaviors. The article mentions a group of Filipino teachers recruited to teach in Baton Rouge, and if gulf coast Louisiana, where 7500 teachers were wrongfully fired from the New Orleans school district-- if that part of the country has a teacher shortage, I'll eat my hat.

The importing of Filipino teachers is already revealing itself to be borderline human trafficking. Those Baton Rouge teachers won a $4.5 million suit against the "recruiters" who charged them $7K for their "applications" and demanded a cut of their wages. Turns out these kinds of shenanigans are not that uncommon.

Nor is the article very forthcoming on the wage issue. The income that the Filipinos make is described as ten times what they could make back home, but it doesn't address whether they are paid the same that a home-grown teacher would have made. Are they being hired at US bargain prices? It's hard not to suspect as much.

In US labor issues, management often develops a sudden lack of understanding of how the free market works. So let me refresh their sad memories.

The free market sets prices by a very simple mechanism. If you want to buy gold for a penny a pound, you offer that amount. If nobody will sell you gold at that price, you have to offer more. You have to keep offering more until somebody will sell.

It is no different for labor. If you want to pay a dollar a day to hire someone for a job, and nobody will take the job, you have to offer more, and keep offering more until someone says, "Yes."

If you have a labor "shortage," then unless you are on a desert island with just two other people, you don't really have a labor shortage at all. What you have is a Willing To Meet the Minimum Conditions Under Which People Will Work For You shortage. Even minimum wage employers, who in lean times will advertise that they're hiring for more than minimum wage, get that.

In a very real sense, there is no teacher shortage in this country at all. What there is is an unwillingness to make teaching an appealing profession that people will actively pursue and stay with for a lifetime. Depending on your location,it may be about money, or autonomy, or job security, or basic teaching conditions (if you're in some place like North Carolina, sorry, but it's all of the above). Another question the article doesn't ask is this-- why isn't Arizons headhunting in other states? Even Virginia (not exactly a teachers' paradise) recognized that North Carolina teachers were ripe for poaching. Why would you recruit teachers from the Philipines, unless you were specifically looking to recruit people who would work for less than the professionals here on the mainland?

Of course, if no one will sell you gold for a penny a pound, another alternative is to find somebody who will sell you really shiny metal that's sort of gold colored. And if your business model is actually about selling fake gold at huge profit to suckers who mistake it for the real thing, this arrangement is perfect. Since many of our reformsters don't really want lifetime career teachers anyway (too expensive, too uppity), refusing to meet the conditions for employment is a great way to shut out the "overqualified" labor they don't want.

That this brings human trafficking into the world of education is no surprise. Much of modern school reform is based on a disregard for the humanity of students and teachers, and one huge thrust of reform has been to define teaching down from a skilled profession to unskilled labor. Trying to profit from trafficking in that labor just seems like a logical extension of the ethics already in play. It's appalling and inexcusable, but it's not unexpected.