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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Leadership and Taking Risks

Nancy Flanagan had a great piece last week at EdWeek. "Defining Teacher Leadership" kicks off with her reaction to this handy meme:

She finds the first part is right on point. But the second part?

Most of the school leaders I encountered in 30 years in the classroom were good people, but the overwhelming majority were cautious rule-followers and cheerleaders for incremental change. The principals followed the superintendent's directives and the folks at Central Office looked to the state for guidance. Most recently, everyone has experienced the heavy hand of the feds--for standards, assessments and "aligned" materials. "Successful" leaders hit benchmarks set far from actual classrooms.

That sounds about right. As does this:

If I had waited for my school leaders to be risk-takers before feeling comfortable with change in my classroom, decades could have gone by.

I'm not sure we need school leaders who are risk takers; it's not the modeling that is most important. The biggest power that principals and superintendents have is not the power to demonstrate risk, but the power to define it.

School leaders get to decide two key aspects of risk-- what constitutes going outside the lines, and what possible consequences go with it. Principal A may run a school where getting caught with students up out of their seats in your classroom may win you a chance to stand in the principal's office while you're screamed at. Principal B may run a school where you can take students outside for an unscheduled sit on the lawn session and all that happens is you hear a, "Hey, shoot me an email before you do that the next time." Principal C, unfortunately, may run a school in which I'd better be on the scheduled scripted lesson at 10:36 on Tuesday, or there will be a letter in my file.

School leaders also get to decide how much they will protect their people. If you're teaching a controversial novel or running a project that may bring blowback form the community or from administrators at a higher level, will your principal help protect you from the heat, or throw you under the bus?

In other words, school leaders don't have to take risks -- they just have to create an environment where it is safe for teachers to take risks.

And teachers do share some responsibility in this risk-taking relationship. I have always had a pretty simple rule (like many rules, I figured it out by breaking it early in my career)-- if I'm about to do anything that could conceivably lead to my principal getting a phone call, I let him know what's going on, and why, and how, ahead of time. He can't support me if he doesn't know what I'm up to.

And of course, risk definition has been partially removed form local hands. Teachers now have personal ratings and school ratings and a host of other reformy accountability consequences riding on teacher choices. It makes leaders more risk averse, and that means clamping down on teacher risk taking as well. The last decade has not exactly fostered a risk-taking atmosphere.

The reformy movement has muddied the water on the other element of risk-- what, exactly, we are risking. Reformsters have tried to move us from , "Oh, no! That lesson didn't actually help my students master the concept I was teaching, meaning we lost a period of school and will have to try this again tomorrow" to "Oh no! We have low scores on a standardized test and must now lose money or be closed or fire somebody." Accountability and new standards and the Big Standardized Test have convinced too many administrators that teachers that take risks are now taking huge risks for enormous stakes and maybe we had all better just take it really, really easy and play it super, super safe and get back to those nice new test prep materials we just bought.

So I don't need my school leaders to model risk-taking for me. I just need them to provide me with a workplace where it's okay safe for me to try a few things and see if I can find interesting new paths for success. Which, ironically, is exactly what I am supposed to be providing for my students. If doing my teaching job is like changing a flat tire in the rain, I don't need an administrator who is changing another one of the tires on the car. I need someone who will make sure my tools are handy while they hold an umbrella over my head to keep the rain off me.

ICYMI: Some weekend eduwebs reading

Here's some edureading for the weekend.

Five Cynical Observationa about Teacher Leadership

I mean to include Nancy Flanagan's insightful list about how teacher leadership isn't happening last week, and then, somehow, I didn't. But here it is. These days Flanagan is one of the consistently rewarding bloggers for Ed Week-- save your limited freebie reads for her.

Educators Release Updates VAM Score for Secretary Duncan

Educators for Shared Responsibility have come up with a VAM formula for evaluating Education Secretaries. Not entirely a joke.

Classroom Surveillance and Testing

At the 21st Century Principal, John Robinson makes the striking observation that our classroom data collection bears a striking resemblance to the tools of surveillance and, well, spying.

Drinking Charter Kool-Aid? Here Is Evidence.

Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig has provided an essential resource. You may not read through it all today, but you'll want to bookmark it somewhere. Here's a very thorough listing of legitimate peer-reviewed research on the effectiveness of charter schools. Handling of special populations, segregation, competition, creaming-- it's all here, and all the real deal. You will want to keep this resource handy.

Stop, Start, Continue

Not always a fan of things I find at Edutopia, but this is a short simple piece focused on three things teachers should stop doing, three things we should start doing, and three things to continue doing. A good piece for sparking a little mental focus.