Where Does High Quality Curriculum Come From?

Ollie Lovell's blog post is from Australia, but it fits with the ongoing discussion of the value of curriculum in this country. He notes that in a recent discussion about a variety of school issues, he kept coming back to the same place:

The fast and robust way to increase student achievement is to put high quality curriculum resources in the hands of their teachers (ref).

The fastest way to reduce teacher workload for early career teachers in particular is to give them high quality curriculum resources.

For PD centred around pedagogical content knowledge, we only see effective professional development when that PD is anchored to concrete examples that teachers plan on teaching. Without this, conversations become overly abstract and theoretical.

Student behaviour systematically improves when students are learning more successfully, or in the words of Rob Coe, ‘Success precedes motivation’ (ref). And this is greatly scaffolded by quality curriculum materials.

And when we address all of the above issues, we will see greater teacher retention, and an easing of our current teacher shortages.

In all of these instances, the devil is firmly encamped in the details. Does "increase student achievement" mean "raise test scores"? Because that's not my idea of increasing student achievement, and as we've been seeing for twenty-some years, a rich high-quality curriculum is not needed, or even preferable, for raising scores on the Big Standardized Test. Can a HQC reduce workload? That depends on how easy it is to implement, how well it matches the needs of the students and the skill set of the teacher, and how much prep and adaptation it requires. I would have agreed that solid lessons and instruction help with classroom management; I'm not sure that post-COVID we aren't seeing new behavior issues that are more resistant to that solution. And I'm pretty sure this oversimplifies the problems with teacher retention in the U.S. Maybe things are different in Australia.

So Lovell may be overselling a tad, but having a high quality curriculum does matter. I worked most of my career in a district that couldn't quite get its act together on curriculum. We went through many curriculum development cycles, but the district leaders could never quite commit the district resources (teacher release time, paying for extra hours, some useful leadership and direction) to get the job done. 

It was frustrating, and ultimately my department created something we could use on our own. That was also frustrating; one department member didn't feel like following the plan, so she just didn't, and there really wasn't anything we could do about it. And while building admins were willing to recognize that what we had created existed, that didn't keep them from still shooting for that old standby, Curriculum By Textbook, insisting we insert test prep drill, and occasionally unilaterally announcing that a Certain Book would no longer be taught because somebody somewhere might be upset. 

I will skip past the unavoidable eternal arguments about HQC (what is included and who decides) other than to note that they add another level of complexity to all of this.

But Lovell moves on to an interesting question-- if we want some HQC, where do we get it?

Getting expert level resources requires expert level knowledge, the kind that Lovell says is "hard to build." Not only do we need expertise in the content area, but expertise in teaching, and expertise in the audience for the instruction. The standards movement kind of skips past all three, assuming that if one sets certain standards, the content takes care of itself, the specific audience doesn't matter, and the teaching piece is where you blame educators for faulty implementation. The curriculum/materials industry has limited expertise in the first two and assumes that its actual audience is the people who make purchasing decisions in districts, not the people in the classroom who have to deal with it.

High quality curriculum does not come in a one-size-fits-all box right off the instructional materials rack. It is not prepared by some company hundreds of miles away. It is not googled. And it is not, God help us, created by large language model computer programming. The place you are most likely to find the expertise required is among the master teachers in your district.

Even the best instructional materials and curricular design stuff doesn't become an actual high quality curriculum until it receives its final shape from the master teachers who turn it into classroom instruction. This has been a point of frustration for folks who want to fix schools by imposing standards and instructional design-- once it hits the classroom, it is going to be delivered and interpreted by the classroom teacher. Master teachers are doing curricular design and redesign every day. That's the expertise we need to tap.

And as Lovell notes, even if we tap the expertise of the teachers in the district, we hit the time issue. When, exactly, are busy, swamped teachers supposed to do this? And are they supposed to do it for free? 

There can be other obstacles. Our do-it-ourselves program was thin on details because we'd hashed those out in conversation. And that gets to one of the other challenges in building a curriculum--exactly for whom are you creating it? Most of the district-directed attempts we made were not curriculum designed for teachers, but curriculum designed so that administration could have something to show the state. They weren't to help us teach, but to help administrators and bureaucrats prove that we were teaching. 

Or the most insidious curriculum purpose of all-- "I want to know that if you drop dead tonight for some reason, I can hand this curriculum to your replacement and everything will stay right on track in your classroom." It is the education version of "I want you to train your own replacement."

In a district with low trust between administration and teachers, curriculum is collateral damage. Can I trust you to do your job? Can I trust you to let me do my job? I'm going to argue that the loss of teacher autonomy over the past few decades is directly connected to curriculum problems. "I am going to hand you this curriculum in a box, and you will implement it with fidelity or else" is another way to say "I don't trust you to do your job." Fear and control never make a system better than trust and support.

Okay, this is taking longer than I expected. Let's get back to the question--where does HQC come from?

Lovell suggests an intriguing idea

How do we overcome large-scale expertise and/or time shortages to ensure that solid curriculum materials are accessible and usable by every teacher in our country?

To me, one of the most promising opportunities on the horizon is multi-school organisations, groups of schools working together, and under common governance, to share resources in a way that enables each to achieve much more than they could on their own.

I like this idea. It still has some major holes to fill, like what format and organizational scheme should they use? We were several times required to use a format that was basically a response to the Common Core Pennsylvania State standards, so that the result, had we ever finished it, would have been geared to proving to the state that we were checking off a list by "unpacking" and addressing the standards and not giving a teacher direction and support in designing instruction for the year. 

It's one of the great curriculum traps-- a document designed to prove to the state that you're doing your job is not a document that helps you actually do your job. 

I also recognize that multi-school design looks hugely different in a big district where such a program would be inside the district and in an area like mine, where such a program would have to be intra-district. 

I think back to our teacher-to-teacher design work and imagine what we could have done with more time, more support, and more teachers to provide perspective on what works in particular grade levels. We did okay, but with the additional resources, we could have created something really cool and useful for students across the county. If we could have tapped the varied and rich professional experience and research across the county, we could have accomplished so much more. 

A Teacher's Role In The Post-Truth Era

This piece from Sean Illing at Vox-- “Flood the zone with shit”: How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy-- captures the issue as well as anything I've seen in the past few years. Here are a couple of key bits:

We live in a media ecosystem that overwhelms people with information. Some of that information is accurate, some of it is bogus, and much of it is intentionally misleading. The result is a polity that has increasingly given up on finding out the truth.

How is that affecting the times?

We’re in an age of manufactured nihilism.

The issue for many people isn’t exactly a denial of truth as such. It’s more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth is knowable.

Illing suggests that this is deliberate, a strategy aided by technology and perfected by folks like Vladamir Putin.

In October, I spoke to Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born reality TV producer turned academic who wrote a book about Putin’s propaganda strategy. The goal, he told me, wasn’t to sell an ideology or a vision of the future; instead, it was to convince people that “the truth is unknowable” and that the only sensible choice is “to follow a strong leader.”

And there it is.

We're used to the idea of propaganda aimed at getting us to believe something in particular, that it is designed for linear goals-- we will get people to believe that a balanced breakfast is the most important meal of the day, so that they'll buy more cereal. By convincing people that X is true, we can get them to do Y. Our idea of good, traditional propaganda is that it is focused and on message. Repeat your main talking point. Chip away. (After a couple of decades of hearing it repeated, everyone will believe that US schools are failing.)

But in the information age, the era of computerized super-communication, we have Propaganda 2.0. We don't need you to believe X; we just want you to believe that you can't believe anything. We don't need to substitute our "truth" for the actual truth; we just have to convince you that the truth is unknowable, possibly non-existent. You have no hope of navigating this world on your own. Just give all your obedience to a strong boss; take all your navigation from Beloved Leader.

Does he contradict himself? Well, it may seem that way, but the truth is complicated and unknowable, so why should the truth he peddles feel any different. Does his truth seem to be contradicted by actual reality? That's only because you can't trust your own perception of reality.

So what does that mean in the classroom?

Most classrooms are well behind this curve. Grappling with the information age has been about shifting the teaching of research; I retired with several great library units gathering dust because the internet changed research from hunting for three sources to sifting through 100. It has been units about "digital citizenship" and "how to spot a fake story," which students still suck at (my experience totally backs up this research).

These are all fine things, but they aren't nearly enough.

First, every teacher should know about epistemology, because teachers have to tackle the question of "how is it possible to know things, and what does that even mean?" This, as numerous pundits have noted, is what Trump and Putin and others like them have managed to smash-- the notion you can know anything at all if you are an ordinary person without a very yuge brain and all the best thoughts.

We have to teach young humans how to know things. We have to teach them that things can be known.

More than ever, the classroom can't operate as an authoritarian space.

"You can just take my word for it because I know things you don't" is, in a post-truth era. This is equally true if the authority of the teacher has been usurped and displaced. If, for instance, you teach in a school that has subordinated teacher judgment to The Standards and/or The Test, and you've been reduced to a conduit for the curricular choices of others, that's also problematic (in the context of this conversation-- it's problematic for many other reasons, too).

Propaganda 2.0 seeks to divide the world into two groups-- those who Know and those that don't. A classroom shouldn't feed that world view. It should make explicit that not only can things be known, but there are pathways to that knowledge. Propaganda 2.0 says that the two groups can't be bridged; if you don't know, you'll never know. Students must be taught that they can know, that they can grow in knowledge and wisdom, most of all that they can learn to learn, learn to teach themselves so that they will always be able to study and understand on their own.

As a teacher, that meant tracing steps to a conclusion. Maybe I had to check an authority, but I always went back to figure out the path myself, because my teaching became more and more explicitly "This is how I figured this out."

The Big Standardized Test serves Propaganda 2.0 far too well, with an implicit statement that for any question there is one correct answer and someone else knows it and you have to figure out what that unseen authority wants you to say.

We all have to become comfortable with uncertainty.

One of the biggest selling points of authoritarianism is that it claims to know exactly what the answer is, and that's comforting, because most of us are never quite sure that we're getting it right.

The solution is not to seek certainty, because that's a hard place to get to. The solution is to be comfortable with uncertainty. To accept that it is part of the human condition to usually be somewhere below 100% on certainty at any given moment. To recognize that that uncertainty is a thing that makes us vulnerable to bad actors and bullshit artists. To embrace that the slice of uncertainty is the impetus to keep us moving and growing, and that it helps make us fully human.

And then, somehow to transmit all of that to our students. I won't say it's not tricky; Step 1 in running a classroom is to be the grown-up, the experts, the person who knows what the hell she is doing. But living with that sliver of uncertainty means that we don't wait to be 100% certain to act or talk. Live in the amount of certainty you have without ever forgetting that you could have to change your mind. Humility helps.

In the classroom this also translates into a place where it's okay to be wrong, because that's just part of moving forward. In an authoritarian, truth-free world there is no journey-- you either know the right answer or you don't, and that's it. There's nowhere to go from there (mirrored in the way that the BS Tests don't allow students or teachers to ever revisit the questions and answers-- you either chose correctly or not, and there's nothing more to do or say).

Process matters.

It's not just where you get; it's how you get there. That has to be an explicit part of the lesson. It has to be party of the curriculum because it is part of the challenge of being in the world right now-- knowing how to evaluate the process by which someone reached their conclusion. That has to be part of how to evaluate a conclusion (not just "does this conclusion support or contradict my pre-existing biases?").

Some of this is practical nuts and bolts-- for the love of God, can we all just learn the difference between correlation and causation? Some of it just means having read enough to have ground on which to stand when you start probing and picking.

Yes, we sort of started down this path a while back. But.

The calls for critical thinking, the call for evidence, the idea that we should drop straight sage on the stage teaching (though a sage can still cover al of the above)-- we've long accepted the idea that classrooms need to do more than just spoon information and facts into student crania. But we are still behind the curve, and it gets harder because the people who breathe Post-Truth America have children and send them to school and before I retired I was already dealing with students who simply insisted that some bullshit was true because some Beloved Authority said so and who did not believe that trying to actually support an idea is even a thing.

NCLB, Common Core, the BS Tests-- they've all made matters worse and pushed us back in the wrong direction. You can say it's because there are forces interested in keeping folks dim and malleable, and that may be true, but I think the Post-Truth Beloved Leader mindset is set in many of them and they are simply trying to enforce their world view. At the top, however-- yes. You find the Putins of the world who are doing the ongoing work of undermining the very idea of things being knowable.

In the Post-Truth world, "education" means a whole other thing and "thinking" is a dirty word. You can try to sell it by noting that if something really is True, then examining it and probing it and questioning it can only make its true-ness more clear and strong. But for the acolytes of Post-Truth, this kind of intellectual inquiry is a trick, a sneaky way to lure students into leading themselves instead of falling in line behind Beloved Leader.

For most of my career, I thought of teaching as a subversive activity. In a Post-Truth world, that is even more a fact of the teaching life. They are flooding the zone with shit, and they are looking to deliberately undermine and remove anyone who is doing too good a job of cleaning up their corner of the world. Journalists and teachers are always at the top of the damned list. (Not that I trust Noble Crusaders-- those folks are too close to cut-rate Beloved Leaders.)

You're flying in a plane.

The instruments are busted or sabotaged or simply untrustworthy, so you have to use your eyes and ears and you can only rely on those up to a point. The only way to complete the trip successfully is to teach all of your passengers how to fly the plane themselves and hope to God that they don't give too much credence to that asshat in the back who insists that he should be put in charge because only he can land the plane, and anyone who questions him should be thrown out of the hatch.

There are times in history, times when I imagine that people, particularly people with responsibility, looked around and thought, "Shit, why couldn't I be alive in less interesting times. I don't want this. I don't want this now." But sometimes the times just call on you, whether you want them to or not, and I suspect these are those kinds of times. They are flooding the zone with shit.

NPE: National Public Ed Report Card

Every reformy group in the country regularly issues "report cards" about how well states are pursuing one reformster policy or another. We have been long overdue for a report card for how well states are defending and supporting the public education system that is one of the pillars of democracy. Now that wait is over.

The Network for Public Education today releases its 50 State Report Card, providing a quick, clear, simple look at how the various states are doing when it comes to supporting public education.

NPE has developed the grade based on six criteria; the actual research and point breakdown were done with the assistance of Francesca Lopez, Ph. D. and a research team at the University of Arizona. And yes, NPE is aware of the irony of using letter grades, a rather odious tool of reformsters.

As a matter of principle, NPE does not believe in assigning a single letter grade for evaluation purposes. We are opposed to such simplistic methods when used, for example, to evaluate schools. In this case, our letter grades carry no stakes. No states will be rewarded or punished as a result of our judgment about their support or lack of support for public education.

States ended up with a GPA based on the six factors. The top state score was a 2.5 (Iowa, Nebraska, and Vermont) and the lowest was Mississippi with a 0.50. Let's look at the best and the dimmest in each category.

No High Stakes Testing

NPE looked for states that rejected the use of the Big Standardized Test for a graduation exam, a requirement for student promotion and a factor in teacher evaluation.

Grade A: Alabama, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Vermont

Flunkeroonies: Mississippi

Professionalization of Teaching

Here NPE looked at nine factors, including experienced teacher pool, average early and mid-career salaries, rejection of merit pay, teacher attrition and retention rates, tenured teachers, high requirements for certification, and proportion of teachers prepared in university programs. In other words, is teaching actually treated like a life-long profession for trained professionals, or a quick pass-through temp job for anybody off the street?

Grade A: Well, that's depressing. Nobody. Iowa and New York scored B's.

Bottom of the Barrel: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, and Texas. No surprises here, particularly with North Carolina and Florida, which have gone way out of their way to trash teaching.

Resistance to Privatization

Of course, dismantling public education and selling off the parts to profiteers has been a signature feature of reformster policies. So NPE looked at resistance to choice in all its various porcine lipstickery formats, resistance to using public tax dollars to pay for private schools, controls on charter growth, and rejection of the parent trigger laws.

Grade A: Alabama, Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and West Virginia

The Pits: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, and Texas. Ka-ching.

School Finance 

Equitable and adequate funding is the great white whale of education. Even when states put better funding formulas in place or are forced and fine by the courts to get their act together (looking at you, Washington), there's a whole lot of fail out there. NPE looked at per-pupil expenditures adjusted for poverty and district size, school funding as a part of state gross product, and how well the state addresses the need for extra resources for high-poverty areas.

Grade A: New Jersey. That's it.

Stingy McUnderfunding: Alabama, Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, North Dakota

Spending Taxpayer Resources Wisely 

This is where NPE sets its spending priorities (contrary to some critical opinion, pubic ed supporters do not simply believe that public ed should have All The Money). The priorities that NPE focused on were lower class size, less variation in class size by school type, more pre-K and full day K, and few students in cyber schools.

Grade A: Well, nobody. Montana gets a B.

Centers of Foolishness: Idaho, Nevada, and Washington

Chance for Success

This category looks at societal factors that can have an impact on student success. NPE researchers focused on proportion of students not living in low-income households, proportion of students living in households with full-time employment that lands above the poverty line, and how extensively schools are integrated by race and ethnicity.

Grade A: None. But ten B's, so there's some hope here.

Failureville: Alabama, California, Georgia, Mississippi, Montana, and Texas


The report comes with an appendix that gets into more detail as far as specific methodologies. In fact, one of the general strengths of the report is that it's very easy to take in the results at either a quick and simple level, or to drill down for more detail. In fact, the NPE website has a handy interactive map that lets you take a quick look at each state's grade breakdown. 

The report is handy for comparison, and for a depressingly clear picture of which states are beating up public education badly. It is transparent enough that you can discuss and debate some of the factors included in the findings. I can certainly see it as a tool for young teachers looking for a place to land.

Take some time to look through the report. It's not a pretty picture, but understanding where we are will help us develop more ideas about how to get where we need to be.

Is the Teacher Shortage Real?

We talk a lot about the current teacher shortage. I've posted about it numerous times. But the question remains-- is there really a teacher shortage?

A study released this month by the National Center for Educational Statistics suggests that everything we think we know about the Great Teacher Shortage is wrong. Or at least, it was wrong as of four years ago. The study is pretty straightforward, and it's worth making a note of.

The writers are Nat Malkus of the American Institutes of Research with Kathleen Mulvaney Hoyer and Dinah Sparks of Activate Research, Inc. AIR is also in the test manufacturing biz (SBA is their baby) and Activate is a "woman-owned small business" in the metro DC area focusing on research and policy. They created the report under the aegis of NCES, an arm of the USED Institute of Educational Sciences, so while none of these are without blemish, this is not another Gates-funded fake research project.

The report looks at four samples of data from the 1999-2000, 2003-2004, 2007-2008 and 2011-2012 school years, and it looked for answers to fairly straightforward questions:

1) What percentage of schools reported teaching vacancies or hard-to-fill spots?

2) What percentage of schools found these positions related to particular subject areas?

3) Did persistent hard-to-fill spots correlate to any school characteristics?

The report is easy to read through and contains lots of charts, but the answers reached by the researchers are not necessarily what we might expect. Let me just hit the highlights.

The percentage of schools reporting vacancies and hard-to-fill spots in 2011-2012 was down from 1999-2000. In fact it's the lowest of the four years.

Those percentages were also uniformly down for all subject areas, including math and special ed.

High minority schools still experience more staff challenges than low-minority schools, but 2011-2012 was still dramatically lower.

Title I schools have a harder time than non-Title I schools, but 2011-2012 was still better than all other years (I'm just going to write "pickle" every time this is the case, to save myself some typing.)

Large schools have it harder than small schools, but pickle.

When comparing city, suburban, town and rural schools, the most staff challenged schools have shifted over the four year. Cities used to lead the challenge with rural schools having the lowest percentage of staff challenged schools. In 2011-2012, suburban schools reported the fewest problems. Cities still has the most, but in all four categories, pickle. Big pickle.

I don't know what explains the pickle, and to their credit, the reports writers take a stance of, "We're just here to show you the numbers, not to make wild-ass guesses about why the numbers are what they are." The appendices give some number breakdowns and report on methodology, and while I am no trained stats cruncher, I don't see anything that sets off whopping alarms.

So am I thinking that I'll just stand down because the teacher shortage turns out to be all in my head? No. No, I'm not.

First of all, I have a certain amount of trust in my head, so I don't just throw away my head's ideas willy-nilly. I am , however, open to the notion that the teacher shortage is partly an artifact of the media's tendency to focus on a story thread and magnify it (e.g. the great shark summer of 2001).

In Pennsylvania, I know exactly why the numbers would reflect a not-shortage of teachers-- we've been shedding jobs left and right, dropping 2000-5000 teacher jobs (depending on who's counting) every year for several years. This is doing a great job of setting the stage for a teacher shortage, as college students repeatedly declare a major in Anything But Teaching. The ABT major is actually leading some college ed departments to shrink or collapse. The choking off of the teacher pipeline sets the stage for a combination of overcrowded classrooms and an actual teacher shortage.

My reading of teacher shortage bulletins is that teacher shortages are highly localized, and while the study's sampling of around 8,000 districts would ordinarily be plenty, I have to believe that the specific samples could make a huge difference.

But mostly what these results say to me is, "Holy smokes! We have plunged into a bad place very quickly over the last four years!"

Take for instance Scott Walker's Wisconsin. Here's a piece that lists the growing effects of Walker's gutting of the state's education system-- from November of 2011. In other words, the most recent data sampling in the study was being gathered just as Wisconsin schools were starting to feel the crunch. Quick quiz: have things gotten better or worse in Wisconsin since 2011?

Or North Carolina, another state that moved rapidly from a progressive education-supporting agenda to a state intent on driving teachers out.

Over the past four years, things have gotten far worse pretty quickly in schools across the country, from Race to the Top to Common Core testing. And in 2011, schools were seeing the last of federal stimulus money that allowed schools to keep hiring. When the stimulus money ran out, many districts starting cutting staff to match.


Take a look at this snip from the fed's chart on teacher employment. The first column is total teachers, column two is public, and column three is private (numbers are in thousands of teachers). 2011 is the last year for which we have hard numbers. Note that teacher employment peaked in 2008, and we've been declining since. Nothing like cutting 100,000 jobs to help reduce the number of vacancies you're trying to fill. Put another way, the study shows that 1999 was the worst in terms of unfilled jobs, but as we added more teachers, the vacancy percentages dropped. But then the last drop coincides with a drop in number of jobs to be filled. There are two ways to solve an unfilled vacancy problem, and we have now tried both. Which approach do you think is more likely to fix things in the long run?


I'm saving a link to this study, because I believe it sets the stage for what's to come. I expect that when the next data set is added from further inside the reformy abyss, we'll see charts with upward hooks. I believe that the story will be, "Well, things were getting better, but then ed reform switched into overdrive, and it all want to hell pretty quickly."In short, nothing in this report contradicts the perception that a troublesome teacher shortage has appeared in the last four years.

I get that the Teacher Shortage is a complicated issue, for reasons including the desire of everybody on every side of the education debates to use talk of the shortage to support whatever point they'd like to make. But this new report definitely doesn't make me think that everything's actually okay, and I look forward to seeing more data when it finally appears.

River To Classroom

I've finished off my first two weeks with students, and as usual I'm pushing back against a combination of general chaos, the inertia that has to be overcome to get students moving again, and my own sense of urgency about What Must Be Done (in the time I don't have to do it).

So it's this time of year that I particularly appreciate my kayak.

I live in a small town, and my back yard butts right up against a river. I will throw in some pictures of the view at the end here so that you can be appropriately jealous. I'm also a short walk from a rails-to-trail bike path, but it's kayaking on the river that I find head-clearing.

Because I put in and take out in my back yard, and because I'm not crazy about physically and psychologically punishing myself, I always start by heading upriver. And at this time of year, every stroke reminds me of teaching and the work that I'm starting again.

I've done the trip a hundred times over now, and yet every trip is different. It's different both because, of course, the waters in a river are always new, so the river is never the same in that kind of deep thinky kind of way. But the river is also never the same from year to year in more specific ways-- sand bars appear and disappear, trees rise further above or collapse into the water. And the river changes from day to day as well, levels rising and dropping with the weather. This passage may be deep enough to move through today, but next week the water may be too low and the rough bottom bed will bar the way.

Because my small journey will be affected by the river and the weather and the wind, it's pointless to plan in any exactlingly careful way. Certainly the path is predictable in a general sort of way. I know I'm going that way, upriver. But hug the right bank, tack across the center, pass up the left bank and slip up in the quiet space below the island--?  I can't predict any of the steps with accuracy until I'm there, on the river. I may have a rough idea, and then change it when I see a barrier of rough ripples thrown up in my path.

I may take some side trips. When the water is high enough, I can cut up behind the big island and into a series of channels and lagoons that are sweet and quiet and beautiful. I may encounter herons or a flock of geese or deer on the bank and decide to stay and look before pressing on.

The hardest, zenniest part for me is staying focused on where I am. About a half mile up river is a small island, and there the current squeezes through to become both fast and rough, and pushing up past that is always tough-- I know a half dozen paths to slip past the island, and it's always hard to know which one will work (sometimes it comes down to something as simple as a small series of rocks in the wrong place). But if I clear the island, about a mile up the water piles up, waiting to shoot into the narrows, and there is what amounts to a mile-long lake in the middle of the river. If I can make it there, then the next part of the trip is easy going.

But I can't think about any of that. Particularly in the rough places, my focus has to be on the next several feet of river, not the next half mile. I can't suddenly jump ahead, skip forward. I have to put my energy and focus into where I am. For the same reason, it's not always a good idea to start the journey with a specific upriver destination in mind. If I set a goal of two miles upriver, and I can't make it, I turn whatever I do accomplish into failure. Instead, I commit to keep going as long as I can, and then I go goal by goal-- to that next tree, to that next rock, to that ripple. Sure, I have a direction and a purpose, but I have to focus my energy on where I am, not some place far out ahead. I cannot force it. I cannot bend the river to my will, but I can listen to it, pay attention, make use of its particular currents and eddies.

Eventually, I've gone far enough. I usually don't know where that will be ahead of time, but I know it when I get there. I've been out on the river long enough and it's time to get home. I'm out of energy for another big push. The wind is not on my side today and it's kicking my ass.

So I turn around and finish the trip-- still focusing on where I am. There's no way to skip over the space between me and home-- I have to travel that stroke by stroke just as I did upstream. I'm never not aware of the big picture, the stretch of the valley, the green spread across the hills, the silky sliding surface of the water, the river winding out before me and behind me. But my focus has to be on the next stroke, the next obstacle, the river bed sliding past me, a foot or two at a time.

Every trip is different. Every trip brings its own set of circumstances, its own issues and opportunities, and each time, the river and I work out today's definition of success. No matter my hopes and dreams, on any given day, I can only accomplish what I can accomplish, but if I keep my focus, I often find myself traveling farther than I imagined I would.

That all feels like the work of teaching. Focus on the here and now. Know where I am. Know where we're headed. Be patient but push hard. Hear and see what my students bring into my classroom. Remember that I cannot dictate, cannot force the exact journey; the trip we take this year is one that we'll work out together.

The Teacher Career Ladders

Teaching-- a field where you can start at the middle and work your way up to the middle.

Many commenters on many sides of various tracks periodically note that one of the problems with the teaching profession is that there is no career path. You start out teaching a bunch of kids in your classroom, and thirty-some years later, there you are, still teaching a bunch of kids in your classroom. You are probably better at it for any number of reasons, but you're doing the same job, with the same responsibilities for the same classroom teacher pay.

Lots of folks (again, from all sides of all tracks) note that this is certainly not one of the more attractive features of a teaching career, and that we could probably hang onto teachers more easily (those of us who actually want to, anyway) if we could offer some sort of career advancement. Unfortunately, here are the teacher ladders that have presented themselves to date.

The Escape Ladder

The problem with a career ladder is that it adds non-teaching tasks to a teacher's day. There are some traditional career ladders open to teachers that involve moving up to administrative or supervisory jobs. If I had to guess, I would bet the two most common reasons that teachers do not climb that ladders are 1) being an administrator looks like a miserable job and 2) they don't want to leave teh classroom.

Administrative jobs have been so hamstrung and depowered that they have lost the luster that usually makes advancement appealing. The usual desire to climb a career ladder goes something like this: "At my level I can see problems to solve that would make The Work go better, and if I climb up a rung or two, I'll be able to effect those changes and make the place work better." But in schools it looks like you have to climb a ladder to the clouds before you can actually get your hands on the power needed to straighten out much of our mess.

Even lesser jobs, like taking on dean of students or athletic director, mean less classroom time. Career ladders lead not to another, higher step in a teaching career, but to another career entirely, a career where you no longer get to do the work you went into the biz to do in the first place. Teaching, even after a few decades, requires a huge hunk of your regular day, and all of your school day-- nobody is sitting in the lounge thinking, "Boy, I just have so much time left over after handling classes-- I need another project to fill up all this empty time."

The Vapor Ladder

Nevertheless, many teachers take on extra projects and responsibilities anyway. Committee chair. Heading up the implementation of New School Program #1452. Taking responsibility for applying the lessons from that cool in-service.

All of these in-house teacher-leader career steps have one thing in common-- the teacher holds the job at the pleasure of the administration.

Teachers all across the country can tell similar stories. Teacher brings back great idea to school with desire to implement, and administration says, "Sure, but you can't have any money, you can't use our facilities, and you'll have to meet with people on your own time. Whip up an implementation plan and we'll tell you whether we'll let you do it or not (Spoiler alert: not)." Teacher gets job of heading up a program and is free to lead as long as she does exactly what her administrator tells her to do. Teacher heads up and leads a program implementation, only to come to school one day and discover that somebody else is now leading meets that she is not even notified about; nobody even bothered to tell her she wasn't in charge of Project X any more.

In other words, teachers are given tasks, but not ownership. They're allowed to ride in the front seat of the bus, but they can't drive. A real step on a career ladder gives you ownership and the power to chart a course, to make your mark by using your judgment to make things better.

The Invisible Ladder

Every organization has it. There's the organizational chart that's written on paper, and then there's the real organizational chart, the one that describes how the company really works.

Schools are no different. In your building, there are teachers who have unofficial roles. "Call Ms. Clearheart if you need help with that software." "Stop by Mr. McWhittlebutt's room if you need some extra paper supplies." "See Mrs. Johnsonville-- she has the key to that closet." "Check with Mr. Gallonoches about that-- he's always in charge of that event."

There's a certain amount of regard and responsibility that comes with these unofficial jobs, and they can be really important, a part of your institutional tradition.

But they don't come with any of the trappings of a real career ladder. They usually don't pay more, and since they're unofficial they are more vapor jobs, jobs that can be taken away by administration for any reason at any time.

The Ladder of Imaginary Excellence

Reformsters often propose a career ladder based on excellence-- teachers who demonstrate their awesomeness can move up a step, get more pay, bigger desk, maybe a tiara. Perhaps we could give them a big raise and have them teach 300 students, or just oversee a bunch of teacher apprentices.

I understand that many reformsters feel compelled to fix what they view as major design flaw in the teaching profession-- people who get a raise every year (well, unless they're in North Carolina) whether they did anything swell to earn such an advancement. Even as I'm compelled to note that the private sector is filled with examples of people who get huge bonuses even when they've, say, crashed the entire economy, I get their point. I think there are compelling reasons to do it the way we do, but that doesn't really matter because (I'll type this for the gazillionth time) we do not have any system at all at all at all that can tell us which teachers would deserve advancement in a merit-based system.

And even if we could, there's another issue-- financing such a system. No school board is going to go to the public and say, "We have so many excellent teachers that we need a five mill tax hike to pay them properly."

Plus, the idea of a system in which teachers climb a career ladder by taking on more supervisory jobs gets us back to a career ladder that leads away from the classroom.

Can It Be Done?


Okay, I started to lay out my ideas here and it tripled the length of this post, so I think I'd better mull it over and save all of that for another, better-focused day. Suffice it to say that my idea would require some major structural and cultural changes. Also, getting rid of administrative jobs. At the same time, we could probably do a little with simple things, like office space and autonomy.

So it's not easy, and it's especially not easy if what you're really trying to do is come up with a system that would let you scrap tenure and reduce the total cost of staffing. But I can agree with those from all sides of all tracks that the current version of a teacher career ladder looks suspiciously like a step-stool, and is probably not optimal.

Why a Teacher "Shortage"?

This originally ran two weeks ago, and yet we're still talking about the issue. It's almost as if there's some sort of real problem.

August is apparently our month to contemplate a teacher shortage. Or reports of a teacher shortage. Or a completely fabricated teacher shortage. The issue has had play all the way from the blogoverse to the New York Times to the Ed Week blog department.

What nobody seems to be able to answer is why, exactly, we're having this conversation? What is causing the shortage-- or at least the repeated reporting of one. What is the actual problem?


It's Teachers Bailing Out

One repeated argument is that the shortage isn't anything special, but teachers and reform-resistors are exaggerating in order to argue that bad policies are driving teachers out of the field. Every anguished "Why I Am Leaving Teaching" column is just a crowbar with which to whack away at the reformster machinery.

This is an odd argument, like saying to someone you're beating up, "Oh, you're just crying because you want me to stop punching you in the face." Well, yeah.

But it's not just teachers making the point. The state of Arizona ran a study on recruitment and retention and came up with suggestions like "treat teachers with respect."

It's the Economy, Stupid

There's a teacher shortage because the economy is better. Because there are so many great jobs out there, this argument goes, college students are saying no to teaching.

There are three problems with this theory.

First, the recovery has added a disproportionate number of crappy jobs. "Why become a teacher when I can go work at McDonalds," said no college student ever.

Second, this theory could be best supported by a historical argument. Simply show the figures indicating that every time the economy gets good, we have a teacher shortage. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Third, what this theory describes is not a teacher shortage, but a teacher pay gap. When National Widget Works can't hire all the widget engineers it needs, it takes steps to make the job more attractive by improving pay, benefits and work conditions. Is it possible that the only real shortage is a shortage of willingness to do what it takes to recruit?

Well, It's Complicated

Once again, nuance and detail are trampled by a herd of rhetorical bulls. Many states report shortages in STEM area, in special ed, and in ELL. Some states have trouble recruiting to rural areas. On the other hand, nobody is reporting a pressing shortage of elementary teachers. And I don't think anybody on any side of this issue is claiming that we have more than adequate numbers of non-white teachers in the field.

It's Manufactured

Just as it's argued that teachers are over-selling the shortage to score points against reformster policies, we can argue that reformsters are using shortage rhetoric to promote their own policies.
The most obvious example is New Orleans, where officials fired over 7,000 teachers and then said, "Dang! We have a teacher shortage. We'd better ship in lots of low-cost Teach for America temps to help us with this dreadful shortage!" Nevada has embraced its teacher shortage as a way to speed former cocktail waitresses into classrooms, and West Virginia boasts a guy who feels qualified to teach biology because his wife's a nurse.

If your state is run by folks with little love for the teaching profession, then reports of a shortage are good leverage for alternate certification plans to put people in classrooms who don't even have a college degree. That leads us to--

It's a New Definition of "Teacher"

Some places "solve" their problem of a teacher shortage by simply redefining "teacher" as "a sentient human able to occupy a classroom." By this definition, there are hundreds of millions of teachers in this country. See? No shortage at all.

It's the Busted Pipeline

I've talked to the president of a college that was founded as a teacher's college and is now radically slashing its education department. She echoed many national reports-- students are not going to college for teaching.

Nobody knows why for certain, though there are certainly popular theories. Teachers have been badmouthed and the profession denigrated. Today's college students have had nothing but teachers who had little autonomy, were tasked with test prep and spent time in clerically-intense data collection, and it just doesn't look like fun.

Teaching was once a stable job, paying decent-if-not-awesome wages, offering job security and promising a good prospect of finding work. All of that has changed. Ironically, the opening of alternate certification means that a teacher shortage and a tight job market can exist side by side (again, think New Orleans with 7,000 out of work teachers and a teacher shortage all at the same time).

So, Is There Really a Shortage?

It's true that rhetoric about teacher shortages serve the interests of both reformsters (We need more alt cert and TFA) and the resistance (Look what they're doing to our profession). But just a look at the numbers shows us that some regions are looking at empty jobs they are having trouble filling.

But does that mean a shortage? Nope. It's one more version of the widespread corporate refusal to deal with demands of the invisible hand. We didn't send jobs to China because we couldn't find the workers in the US, but because we couldn't find them for what corporations wanted to pay. Tech companies have yelled "shortage" in order to import cheaper labor.

The invisible hand is very clear. When you can't get what you want for X dollars, you need to offer more. The world is filled with human beings who have the ability to morph into any kind of worker you want-- if you offer them motivation. Good lord, even Frank Bruni, not exactly a whiz on the topic of education, gets it at least a little (even if he doesn't understand why he's part of the problem).
If you're having trouble filling a teaching position, make a better offer. It really doesn't get any more complicated than that.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

Rick Hess's Cage-Busting Lessons

Rick Hess has been busy promoting his book about Cage-Busting Teachers, and he reported ten lessons that he learned out on the circuit. As always I find Hess worth paying attention to because (unlike some of his reformy brethren) he's not sloppy or lazy in his thinking. So what did he learn (and, by extension, think the rest of us should get)?

1) Schools and leaders are hungry for teacher leadership. Well, they say they are. Which, of course, is often the problem. Most of us have had encounters with administrators who project a clear message of, "I would love to see some teachers step up and become leaders in pursuit of exactly what I tell them to pursue." This is a recurring issue that I have with Hess's cage-busting model. Sometimes the cages are built strong, wired with electricity, and coated in poisonous venom.

2) Advocates on all sides of the reform/public ed issue love the idea of cage busting teachers. I think that's probably true, but only if we get that there's a wide number of ideas about what a CBT is and what obstacles need to be busted.

3) Hess agrees. Everybody likes CBT, but nobody knows how to grow them. I have some thoughts. But Step One is for administrators to let go of the notion that teacher leadership has to look like they want it to and result in the outcomes they demand.

4) Reformers have focused too much on getting rid of bad teachers, while teachers have not focused on it enough, but everybody should focus more on giving great teachers what they need. Hess is landing near the Hero Teacher Fallacy here, but he's not completely wrong. Guys like Andy Cuomo who believe that there are a gazillion terrible teachers who just need to be found and jettisoned are wasting their time.

5) Veteran teachers are used to a culture that has no respect for excellence. Yes, I'd say that's true. And this:

I've been struck at how enthusiastically these educators describe the lift provided by modest recognition, and how appreciative they are for some of the perks that twenty-something policy types take for granted.

Yup. I've argued for years that money discussion would be less contentious at contract time if districts just offered to treat teachers like respected grown-ups. But they don't.

6) Teachers don't code switch. Sigh. I hate it, but I know he's right. Too many teachers don't get how to function in places that aren't their classroom, and are bad at the most essential part of dealing with people-- understanding what those peoples' priorities and foci are. The most cringeworthy argument I hear teachers make to advocate against a policy is offering some version of, "But this makes me sad.."

At the same time, it's hard not to resent the underlying power dynamic here-- to be heard, teachers have to learn to speak the language of policymakers and boardrooms and suits and even think tanks. Why is it that none of these people have bothered to try learning our language?

7) Reasonable and polite teachers should speak up. We know that Hess prefers his cage busters polite and genteel and not speaking up loudly, rudely or at inappropriate moments. This remains the weakest part of Hess's position-- he's concern trolling and tone police in one, worried that if teachers speak up too loudly or too rudely, gosh, they just won't be taken seriously by the People Who Matter. I won't deny that there are some teachers who are in a seemingly permanent state of High Dudgeon (and reformsters who are stuck in a state of Righteous Crusading Against Infidels). But I'm reminded of something I've said often-- if people don't believe they are being heard when they speak, they will keep raising their voice. If someone is yelling at me, nine times out of ten it's because they don't believe I hear them. If I don't like being yelled at, it is often within my power to stop it. It's not that I'll listen to them when they adopt a proper tone; it's that when they know I'm listening, they'll get quieter on their own. Just saying.

8) While Hess reminds us that reformsters by and large mean well, he reminds reformsters that teachers actually have to make all these bright ideas work.

That power and precision accorded to accountability systems, teacher evaluation systems, turnaround models, and the rest is sometimes disturbingly disconnected from an interest in how this affects the actual work of the teachers who are expected to make these deliver.

9) Teachers surprise Hess by actually being quite open to New Stuff. Well, yes. We're always looking at new stuff, trying new things, and experimenting like Doofenshmirtz hunting for a great new Teachinator. Reformsters have made this mistake over and over and over and over again, assuming that because we don't like their stupid new idea, we don't like any new ideas at all. Reformsters consistently fail to ask the question that teachers, experimenting in our classroom every day, always ask-- Does this actually work? Does this actually help me teach students?

10) Policymakers and Other Important People listen to teachers better when teachers provide concrete specific examples of what they're talking about. Fair enough.

My cage busting problem (and I freely confess that I have not yet read the book) is that Hess's whole model seems to assume a maintenance of a certain power status, with teachers on the bottom. In the wrong light, Hess starts to sound like a solicitous parent saying, "Of course, you can come sit at the grown-up table, just as soon as you act grown-up and show us that you can handle it."

What he says sounds reasonable, and it may in fact be a clear dose of Realpolitik, but to get at what troubles me, let me propose an alternative book. In this book Hess (or someone) says, "For too long we've been trying to keep teachers locked up and constrained, forcing them into the shape we demand of them. So let's release them from the cage we've built for them. Let's stop talking to them about how to do their job, shut our mouths, sit down and listen to the experts, the teachers who have devoted their lives to education. And maybe after we have listened and learned, we can prove to them that we deserve to be listened to and our ideas deserve to be considered. But first we need to free them to do the work they know." The author of this imaginary book could call it Cage-Busting Policymakers.

But that's not the book he wrote. And while teachers do need to step up and are (and have been) doing most of the heavy lifting of the teaching world, Hess's assumption that of course policymakers, whether elected or self-appointed, are rightfully in charge, and teachers are, by default, rightfully not.

Hess's best insight is that too many teachers are so used to being caged and powerless that they don't test the limits and they don't break through some bars that are weak and pointless and deserve to be busted. But he is disingenuous to avoid acknowledging where those cages came from in the first place, or the huge number of new cages that have been built in the last fifteen years.

Damn. I'm going to have to read his book.

The Substitute Shortage

One of the surprises of my look into state by state teacher shortages was the widespread reporting of a substitute teacher shortage. I knew we had a problem in my region. I didn't realize it was a problem everywhere.

Several writers have tried to parse out the problem and offer solutions, but I don't find anybody doing any serious research on the issue. So until that turns up, let me fill the void with more speculation and anecdotal evidence. You're welcome.

One writers specifically singles out the ACA as NOT a problem. Many folks were worried that districts would cap substitute hours to avoid having to pay health care costs, thus effectively reducing the number of total sub-hours available. But that shortage-by-Obamacare assumes a pool of subs who wanted to work all the time, and that may not be a safe assumption in any markets. So maybe a culprit, maybe not.

That same source also suggests that greater absenteeism is a culprit--iow, we need more subs. Can we get teachers to miss less school? The writer suggests that an increase in in-service training is the problem. And so we can chalk up the sub shortage as another side effect of the reformster movement.

Fewer people in the teacher pipeline also seems a good bet. Fewer people coming out of teacher programs means fewer people "auditioning" for jobs in school districts.

I would bet we are losing some of those as well. Here comes an anecdote.

When I came back to my area, I started out as a sub. I was single; I sank my nest egg into a mobile home in a trailer park. Back then (early 80's) a day of subbing paid $50. Two days of work paid my lot rent, and after that it was all gravy (well, spagetti and generic sauce, anyway). I couldn't have supported a family on sub pay, but I could live independently. But in thirty five years the going sub rate in my region has gone up about thirty-five dollars. If it had kept pace with inflation, the sub rate would be at about $130.

Point is this. In 1981, I could live on sub pay and hold on until a job turned up. Nowadays, subs may take on another easy-to-schedule job like waitressing and still not be able to support themselves. A teacher hoping to land a real gig may end up taking themselves out of the pool because of their selfish desires for food and shelter. In many areas, teaching has joined the long list of modern jobs that you can't afford to break into unless you have well-off parents or a good trust fund.

The other common sub back in the day was a nice lady with a teaching certificate who had stayed home to raise kids and, now that they were older, was ready to earn a little pin money to supplement the main income her husband brought home. That scenario is by the wayside as well, of course.

Bottom line: lots of people need to make a living too badly to stay available to sub pools.

This dovetails with another oft-cited culprit--an improving economy that means people can do better and get an actual job. I'm not sure how much this holds water, but the argument is out there.

Many states have come up with many creative ways to fill their sub gaps. NEA has a whole list, and some of it is a little horrifying--  Georgia and Florida are among the states that only require a high school diploma to be a sub. But opening the doors wide to any warm body is not a great answer, either. Pennsylvania years ago tried a Guest Teacher program; with a little training, anybody who'd ever held down a job could become a substitute teacher. We had lots of folks sign up, but very few of them survived their first few encounters with actual students. (Turns out that while your office subordinates may have listened to you because you were the boss, sixteen year olds are less so inclined.)Substituting is hard work-- in some ways more grueling than having a regular classroom assignment-- and lots of folks find out they'd just rather not.

Substitute shortages are a good example of our avoidance of obvious solutions. How could we possibly convince more people to become substitute teachers?

Pay them more.

Yes, there are other factors that would help. Nothing will lose a sub faster than a building where nobody is in charge and no discipline is maintained. And it's nice to make subs feel at home, like part of the team, and not like a stranger who's supposed to know what to do through some sort of psychic power. But mostly it's pretty simple. If people can't afford to live on the wages you're paying, people will take any other job except the one you're offering.

A good sub pool is critical. A good sub keeps classes moving forward and makes sure that the needs of students are met even if the regular teacher must miss. A bad sub means it will take me three days to make up for the one day I had to miss. A good sub honors the promise that a school should make-- no matter what, we will get you the education you were promised. It seems obvious that we do not want to draw subs only from the pool of People Who Couldn't Find Anything Else To Do In The Whole World.

Heck, you could get crazy and hire permanent subs as some districts do-- a person who is hired at a full contract with full benefits and who is there every day to cover whatever needs to be covered.

Substitute shortage is yet another problem to which we know the solution. It's just that the solution costs money, and we don't wanna. A good substitute teacher is worth her weight in gold, but we prefer to offer only peanuts. 

Teacher "Shortage" Reflections

Assembling my recent post on teacher shortages gave me a lot to reflect on, but since the piece was already a gazillion words long, I saved that reflection for another post. Here is that post.

In no particular order, here are some of the things that jumped out as I did my national tour.

Spin Is a Thing

I deliberately searched through general press coverage. I didn't dig deep for True Facts, and I stayed away from direct reporting by teachers' unions. So what I found yesterday was a better reflection of what people are saying than what is necessarily true. I don't have to tell you those aren't always the same. Statements about shortages fell largely into these categories--

* OMGZ!! We have barely any teachers and we must must MUST certify anything that moves as a teacher right after we invite as many Teach for America folks we can find into the state.

* Look at that teacher shortage! It's proof that the people who run our state suck with a sucky suckiness that really sucks.

* We want to have good schools. We are paying attention to what's happening, and we're trying to make smart, responsible choices about how to handle things.

The third group seems to lack a certain sense of dramatic crisis mode in their press coverage. The other two, not so much (and I say that knowing that group two includes people who share many of my concerns and allegiances about education).

I suspect that this relates to how some of the results came in. Many people expressed amazement that Ohio is not talking about teacher shortages; that may be because charters really have increased demand or it may be because running for president is easier if you don't have one more education crisis at home. Likewise, folks let me know that many parts of California are wielding the layoff ax with verve, in a way that would belie any claims of shortage. If there's a disconnect between reality and reportage, that's a story, but it's not one that this citizen hack faux journalist had the time to run down, yet.

Teacher Diversity

Only two states were talking about it. Why this issue keeps falling off the front burner is beyond me. It's critical that our teaching force shift to reflect the new reality of diversity in our student population, but it's just not happening, and nobody in a position to make a fuss is doing much about it. In all the talk of recruitment and retention, nobody is talking about getting non-white, non-female teachers into classrooms and keeping them there-- and we should be talking about it a great deal.


Shortages Are Not All Bad

Teacher shortages aren't so bad if you're a teacher looking for work. And relatively mild ones can be a help.

Here in PA teacher training programs are drying up and shutting down because of low, low, low enrollment. That low enrollment is undoubtedly related to the fact that everybody knows a teacher who can't get a job, or who had a job that she lost when the district shut down a school because of financials pressures created by our genius leaders in Harrisburg. Should we turn a corner some day (hey, it could happen), we're going to go from teacher glut to teacher shortage very quickly, and once that happens, it takes years for college students to get the memo that, yes, there are teaching jobs again.

So a little bit of shortage equals an encouraging job market that helps draw people into the field (assuming, of course, that you haven't North Carolinaed everything up and made teaching hopelessly untenable as a career).

The Substitute Thing

I should have known. I mean, we're in substitute trouble here even though we ought to be loaded with teachers who want to get a job.

This is going to need its own piece, because it's not clear what it means. Some writers consider it a sign of teacher shortages. In my area, I consider it a sign of two things-- 1) that no human being not living in a van by the river could ever live on sub pay and 2) the former sub pool of nice housewifey ladies with teaching credentials who wanted to make a little grocery money on top of their husband's real salary-- that group is now living on Hippogryph Lane, just past the unicorn farm.

But it is clearly a national issue, with all sorts of implications, and none of them are good. I'll definitely get back to this.


The Real Shortage

It's not teachers-- it's working conditions conducive to maintaining the nation's teacher force. If we discovered that our armed forces were comprised of six skinny guys with slingshots, we'd want to know why recruiting was broken, and we'd try to fix it. We wouldn't try to punish the six guys for not being one hundred bulky man-mountains. We wouldn't try to make it harder to legitimately get into the armed forces while simultaneously picking up the slack by grabbing random people off the street. And we wouldn't try to change the job description of a soldier (Anybody who can make a mean face should do) so that we could fill up empty spots without paying any attention to what we were filling them with.


As I've said many times, it is mysterious that so many free market acolytes don't seem to get this. You offer what the market requires you to offer. Instead, many states are trying to bite the invisible hand that has ceased to feed them.

Summer Opportunity

It's time for the beginning of summer break. That means a time of opportunity for teachers, ranging from the personal to the professional. But the greater availability of teachers also means that summer is a time of opportunity for policy makers and education deep thinkers.

Even policymakers and edubiz advocates who want to involve teachers in the Ed Conversation (yes, I think there are such people) can find it challenging to do so during the school year, because those of us who teach are busy doing our jobs. Simple ways of connecting and conversing that work in the private and government sectors ("I'll just pop in to your office for an hour or so tomorrow afternoon to go over the details") do not translate at all to the teaching world ("I think I can take five minutes out of lunch to run those forms up to the office"). Lobbyists and thinky tank types take long working lunches while first grade teachers go seven hours without peeing because they don't have the time. Legislators hold hearings about education, but no teachers are there because they are working (and if they do take a personal day to be there, they may wait in vain an entire day to speak).

Much has been made of the Media Matter study showing that only 9% of evening cable shows about education included educators as guests. I have no doubt that the 9% reflects a common belief that teachers are not worthy experts when it comes to speaking about education. But I also wonder how much the 9% is influenced by the need to tape segments during the day, or the need for a guest to be in a studio at a late hour on a school night. I've had that conversation and had to tell a booker that, no, I can't even do a quick fifteen minute phone segment because at that time I will be helping fourteen-year-olds tell the difference between adjective and adverb clauses.

This has always been the disadvantage for teachers with legislators and policy makers. While a teacher is busy doing her job in a classroom, a lobbyist is being paid to be available to talk to Important People on any day at any time. Perhaps this is part of why so many policy makers don't seem to love us-- they hear, "I don't have time to talk to you because I'm doing more important things, like collecting lunch money from seven-year-olds." It's possible that teachers are accidentally triggering legislators' sad memories of withholding parents who were always "too busy."

But summer is different. Summer offers opportunity for communicating across the gap between teachers and the creators and pushers of policy.

Teachers can (and should) channel time and effort into contacting their elected representatives. Tell them what you think about the various assaults of testing and evaluation and charter takeovers and the rest of the mess of reformsterism. Do it on a regular basis. If it's hard to get everything you want to say into one email or letter, write twelve. Call them up. Make sure that policy makers have every opportunity to hear your voice.

Teachers can (and should) take the time to read up on issues and learn about the policy discussions going on. I am still astonished at the number of teachers who just don't know much about what's happening, who know that something's going on that is making their job harder, but they don't know what's being done, by whom it's being done, or where it's being done. The days when teachers could ignore policy and politics and stay happily cocooned in their classrooms are gone. If we're going to advocate for our students, we have to understand the forces arrayed against them and us.

Meanwhile, reformy advocates could reach out to teachers. Not carefully vetted, pre-selected, chosen for their willingness to agree with policymakers teachers, but actual working teachers who aren't necessarily fans. Read the blogs. You don't have to agree with them, and you don't have to like them.

But when people are being honestly and sincerely critical of you, the very least you can learn from them is how your work is coming across. Communication is not just about what you said; it's about what they heard. Reformsters have the opportunity to get a very clear picture of what public school advocates hear them saying. All that's necessary is some listening.

Folks can even reach out across the gulf. As my esteemed colleague Jennifer Berkshire has noted, some public ed advocates and some reformy folks do share some things-- a passion about education, a frustration with large lumpen bureaucracy, even an inability to shut up about the topics. It is always a mistake to assume that the people who disagree with you do so because they are greedy, stupid, or evil. In this day and age, it is child's play to reach across the divide with a tweet or an email. During the summer, teachers have the time for that sort of thing. People who are sincerely interested in doing something about US education should take advantage of a chance to contact real experts in the field.

Every summer of my career, I've made it my business to try to Learn Stuff. It is a great opportunity, a real privilege that I have as a teacher. Now more than ever, it's an opportunity that all of us should be taking advantage of.

Showing Up

Teaching is a relationship, and the first rule of relationships is that you have to show up.
Take it from a previously-divorced guy. You cannot maintain a relationship through proxies, in absentia, on autopilot, or by wearing a big, thick mask. You have to be present. You have to be honest. You have to show up.

Many teacher-reforming ideas trip over this simple truth.

Attempts to "teacher-proof" classrooms by using carefully constructed lessons and word-for-word scripting are attempts to make showing up irrelevant. Whoever shows up in the classroom, the reasoning goes, the lesson will go on exactly the same. But teacher-proofing a classroom is like husband-proofing a marriage, trying to come up with some set of rules so that it won't matter who shows up to fill the husband role, the marriage will work just fine. That's crazy talk. If the teacher doesn't really show up as a living, breathing human being, students cannot be engaged.

Likewise, I doubt the usefulness of computer-based learning. Certainly for limited amounts of drill or simple instruction, a computer screen works as well as a book. But if there is no context of a relationship to go with it, nothing happens. I can imagine a day when something might-- after all, readers enter relationships with the works that they read. But that's because the authors enter their own works as living human voices. The default in computerland is still to create an inhuman, person-free voice, and when it comes to relationship, that will always make a better barrier than a door.

I don't mean to suggest that we show up in the classroom like a raw exposed nerve or searching to have our own needs met. It is still a teacher's role to be a responsible, professional adult.
But we have to be honest. We have to be available. We have to be present. We cannot be effective with messages such as "I would be honest with you, but we have to move on with this lesson plan" or "I'm not going to be open to what you have to say because it's not on my script."

Showing up, really listening, really looking, speaking honestly-- these are all the most fundamental way we show that we care. To follow the script or the mandated pacing plan is to send the message, intentional or not, that we don't really care about our students or what is going on in our classroom.

This is the scary challenge that some teacher wanna-be's can't bring themselves to face. I remember still the moment during student teaching when I realized that I could not just keep the important parts of myself locked safely away from the classroom, only to be used when I was out of school. Not if I ever wanted to be any good. I would have to listen-- not just pretend to listen or try to construct some proper but artificial response. This is one of the reasons that we can all use the down time of summer-- it is hard to be in a classroom when you aren't sure how to be in the world.

One of the fatal flaws of almost every teacher reform program is an soul-strangling inauthenticity, a desire to have the teacher perform certain tasks almost by remote control, without actually showing up in the classroom.

But by showing up, by being our actual selves (still, mind you, grown up professionals), and by being present with our students, we actually model for them a whole approach to life. And we model courage. Because hiding behind a mask sends a message of, "Don't go out there-- it's not safe," but walking out into the world, head up, eyes wide, tells them that the world (even this little classroom corner of it) is a place where they can thrive and grow and more fully be themselves. The most fundamental thing we all teach is how to be more fully human in the world, and to do that we must be present, in a relationship with the world and the people in it.

We must show up.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

The Myth of the Hero Teacher

Oh, that hero teacher.

Larger than life. Leaping tall filing cabinets with a single bound. Taking a few moments out of every day to personally reach out to every single student and making that child feel special, while at the same time inspiring greater levels of smartitude just by sheer force of teacherly awesomeness. The Hero Teacher shoots expectation rays at students, making them all instant geniuses.

The Hero Teacher is featured in movies and television, from Sidney Portier's Sir to William Daniels' Mr. Feeney. The Hero Teacher usually has only one class (Feeney is the ultimate example, staying with his students through their entire academic career), and limitless time and resources to Change Their Lives. The Hero Teacher is committed, miraculous, transformative.

The Hero Teacher is also a giant blight on education.

The Hero Teacher haunts the dreams of real live teachers, taunting us with a level of perfection we will never achieve. We will skip over the 100 students we reached to obsess about the twenty we didn't connect to at all because if we were real Hero Teachers, we would have connected with every last student.

Worse, the specter of the Hero Teacher tortures and twists education policy as well.

See, if Hero Teachers are real, then our education policy should be built around finding and retaining them. Hero Teachers are imbued with some teacherly gift (maybe they're born with it, maybe they were infected by another Hero Teacher) and so we don't have to develop and support such people-- we just have to find them. It's possible that some of them aren't even teachers, so we need to make it easy to bring them into the schools from whatever line of work they're currently in. They certainly don't need any special training, because a Hero Teacher just has It.

If Hero Teachers are real, we don't have to address the system. We don't need to build a school that is a community with systems and processes for providing support and development. We don't need to try to develop a good system; we just have to root out the Bad Teachers and hire more Hero Teachers.

This is what reformsters are talking about when they proclaim that we must find the most excellent teachers and pay them really well (though a Hero Teacher would never actually ask for a  big salary, because noble)-- find the Hero Teachers and get them to teach everyone. Maybe they could have teaching assistants, or maybe they can just teach 200 students at once (because, after all, they are awesome Hero Teachers). Maybe this is appealing in part because ten well-paid Hero Teachers are still cheaper than fifty moderately-paid regular old teachers. And the as-yet-unrealized requirement that states have a plan for moving highly effective teachers to problem schools is also based on the Hero Teacher story-- we find a Hero Teacher and we send that Hero off to trouble spots, where Hero Teacher will heroically Fix It All.

It's not poverty. It's not systemic failures. It's not crumbling infrastructure. It's not a lack of resources (because a Hero Teacher can MacGyver instruction out of two rocks and a shoelace). It's not the absence of a system to build community, stability, and the room and help to grow as a professional.

No, it's just that we haven't found enough Hero Teachers yet (or maybe, as some reformsters posit, we actually need to find Hero Principals or Hero Superintendents or Hero Charter School Operator).

The Hero Teacher narrative is appealing, but it's lazy, and it lets everybody else in the school and community escape responsibility-- the responsibility to do the best they can for the pieces that they work with, the responsibility to be an active part of a community, the responsibility to help build and grow and lift up the people around them. Effective schools do not run on Hero Teachers, but on strong, stable, supportive communities, and that is no myth.

Teacher Diversity Matters

I cannot believe the conversation about classroom diversity is still popping up.

It's all the more puzzling because I haven't heard anybody say that teachers from a variety of racial and cultural backgrounds would be bad (and I live in an area where hearing someone say that wouldn't necessarily surprise me).

But the picture is pretty simple. Our nation's student body is now not mostly anything, but our teacher pool is overwhelming white and female. We need more teachers who are not white and/or female. Some teachers who are white and/or female seem to hear this as "You are not fit to do your job." I don't think that's the point. Diversity in the classroom matters-- and not just in the obvious areas where mostly-black student populations are taught by mostly-white faculties.

Several years ago in my district, we had an elementary school with 100% female staff. Teachers, administration, lunchroom, custodians-- every single adult in that building was a woman. That meant that students who lived with a single mom could go weeks at a time without ever seeing an adult male. That was simply a bad idea any way you cut it. Boys need to see bigger, more adult versions of themselves, and girls need to see functional adult men (the same holds true if we reverse the genders, but it's beyond-improbable that students could find themselves in a school with no adult women).

Children connect to similarities. Small children will get excited about simple shared superficialities (Look! We both have blond hair!) while older students will choose clothing and hairstyle so that they can look like other students and thereby cement a bond. When they find similarities with adults, it helps them imagine what their adult selves could be.

It seems like basic common sense to me that-- at a minimum-- students ought to be able to look around a school and see adults who look like them. It seems like good educational sense that they should also find adults in their school who build their sense of who they can be and what they can become, as well as adults who can understand the place they're coming from.

All of us stand in a classroom, equipped to make certain connections. I have been in the school (student and teacher) for forty-some years, and my own background has a lot to do with music and performance. I have no organized team sport background, which makes me a little bit of an outlier in this neck of the woods. I'm not a young guy, and I am ancestors-on-the-Mayflower white. I'm on wedding #2 after a decade-long interregnum, and I've raised two children. So, basically, I'm a fluent native speaker of some languages/codes, and not so much of others. That's fine. We don't need an entire staff of people who all come from the same place, are rooted in the same culture, or speak the same version of the language.

This just seems self-evident to me. The more different voices we have in a school, the better off the school is. First, because that improves the odds that each student will find a voice that speaks to him or her. Second, because everyone else gets to hear and experience voices different from their own.

A hard part, apparently, is keeping those voices unranked, to avoid the suggestion that some voices are somehow better, more valuable, more correct than others. But the hardest part is actually getting the varied voices in the room.

I teach in a rural/small town setting. In all the years I've taught here, I've had three African-American colleagues in the entire district (which is three more than some other local districts can claim). We have a very small percentage of students of color, and most of the people who apply to work here come from here, so there's a bit of a cycle that is hard to break. And like most schools in PA, we barely have the money to function, let alone do things like headhunt to fill positions (for which we already get a good quantity of applicants, so administrators feel little pressure to reach out). We do not have a very diverse student population or teaching staff, and that's a problem for a district that has little daily experience of the big, wide world outside our area (I have had parents who don't like to come to school events because they didn't like "city driving" in our town of 7,000 people).

Connecting to that outside world is a challenge for rural kids. When they turn television, they do not see people who live like they do, and when rural life is shown, it is either some cartoon bumpkinny Dukes of Hazzard hick version, or it's just laughably wrong (like all the television "small towns" that have a local tv station.

This has to be even worse for my rural/small town students of color, who don't see people like themselves pretty much anywhere.

We need more teachers of color, not as special "guests" (or as the building "specialist" in talking to "those students") but as full partners in the work, and we don't need them only in large, urban, mostly-black school systems. How we get there I have no idea. Black men are entering the profession at a high rate, but they are leaving it at a high rate, too. That's a problem; I don't see how anybody can assert that it isn't. It's not a problem that will be solved by TFA, who are aggressively courting black men in order to provide them with the worst possible experience of teaching. This is not a great recruitment technique.

The teaching profession, now more than ever, needs to be broad and deep, but instead is becoming narrower and shallower. If our goal is to impart the full range and richness of human understanding and experience to students from a full range of culture and background, it makes sense to enlist a full sampling of human beings to do that work. Instead, the profession is drying up and people are avoiding it in ever-increasing numbers. This is not a good thing for the country, and it is foolish to pretend otherwise.