Pandemic Testophilia

For one brief, shining moment, even Betsy DeVos almost got it. In the spring of 2020, as the nation grappled with the realization that a couple weeks of lockdown were not going to get us past COVID-19, DeVos made one of her rare uses of the Us Department of Education's authority to offer a blanket waiver for states to skip the Big Standardized Test mandate. 

“Neither students nor teachers need to be focused on high-stakes tests during this difficult time. Students are simply too unlikely to be able to perform their best in this environment,” she said. Which was close to the truth that students and teachers simply had more important stuff to worry about. 

For a few moments, back before the pandemic became a political football, most of the country grasped that there were more important things for schools to be focused on than the annual Rite of Testage. 

But by the fall of 2020, the moment had passed. The BS Test would be required, DeVos declared, And the entire world of testophiles was poised to make sure that the pandemic interruption would be brief. Within a year, Learning Loss had been weaponized to help drive a sense of urgency that we had better get back to full on testing Right Now, and somehow this was all taken seriously despite the fact that it was all based on data from folks who make their living selling test materials. It was as if a blue ribbon panel of heroin addicts and dealers announced that the nation has a terrible heroin shortage.

Testophiles in the media have helped to feed the manufactured sense of urgency. The New York Times has always loved it some BS Test mandates. It's a leading manufacturer of NAEP panic, with absurd declarations that "the pandemic erased two decades of progress in math and reading." It's a foolish claim for a variety of reasons, but it fully captures the notion that schools exist not to provide an education for students, but to crank out annual scores, like some sort of BS Test stock market. 

They are still at it, with a new article about a "surprising" rebound for students (who is surprised, other than people like the Times that tried to rouse test support by screaming about a "crisis"), an article that does not actually look at students at all, but focuses on test scores, using charts that absurdly render test scores as years "behind" and talking to corporate testocrats like Thomas Kane and Margaret Spellings. 

Nothing has changed about testophilia in the last twenty-some years. It still assumes that the most important focus of education is the cranking out of Big Standardized Test scores. It is still a narrow, cramped, meager view of education. It is still the greatest toxic force in the country's public schools. 

Testophilia reduces everything not-on-the-test to secondary importance in schools, organizing priorities not around educational richness or variety or depth, but around what is on the BS Test.

Testophilia has reconfigured and gutted the teaching of English, producing a generation of students who haven't read entire works of literature because they've been too busy reading short context-free excerpts and answering sets of reading "skills" multiple choice questions.

BS Testing gets us scripting and lockstep instruction and teacher-proof canned curriculum which are all not so much about education as they are about training students to get better scores on the tests.

And in the post-pandemic world, we face a generation of children who have been through a variety of disruptive events and displayed a variety of results including rampant absenteeism and in-school misbehavior, and testophilia insists that of all the challenges faces students, the one we should be focusing on is their test scores. 

And none of this is what parents want for their children or students want for themselves. Former students talk to me often; none of them say, "Boy, what I really treasure from my time in your class is that work we did to get ready for the state test." No parent says, "I hope that my child can learn to be happy and productive and feel smart and brave and just generally become their best self, but none of that is as important to me as making sure that they do well on that state test."

If it seems as if I'm saying the same things about the Big Standardized Test that I've been saying for years--well, I am, and so are others. Dammit, Daniel Koretz's 2018 book The Testing Charade ought to be out of date and it's not. But testocrats and testophiles are pumping out the same old baloney, still insisting that we can't possibly know how students are doing without test results (except that one, tests don't tell us what they claim to, and two, they don't tell us anything we can't learn other, better ways). Gosh, they still say, test results help us focus resources where they're needed (except that one, they mostly don't and two, the resources they do focus are aimed at test scores). 

Test results will help teachers teach, and tell parents the Truth about how their students are really doing. Except that the data generated in vague and minimall and, in most cases, way too late to be useful. 

We get the same bullshit about how lower test scores mean lower life earnings and the education that the BS Test allegedly measures will somehow fix economic inequality (it won't). Or we get new bullshit about how we will reduce testing by doing more testing (a variation on the old "sure, we'll deprioritize this but not really").

Yes, sure, the BS Test has its place, perhaps, as one more measure in a robust and balanced multi-pronged assessment system, one data point among others. But we are so far from that, so very very far from that, like someone siting in Capetown arguing, "Yeah, under certain circumstances this could be a stop on the road from Cleveland to Seattle." 

I hate that we're still here, hate that we've now been at it so long that a generation of students have grown up and gone to teacher school thinking that test-centered schools are normal, hate that folks who want to dismantle public education can point to what the BS Test has done to public schools as a selling point for vouchers. I hate that testophilia has empowered bad school administrators and made it some kind of radical stance in some schools to want to offer students a full rich education. I hate most of all how testophiles and testocrats have dehumanized education, treating what is most rich and rewarding and joyful and humane about education as some sort of irrelevant and distracting because it's not On The Test, hate that at this moment of crisis and opportunity when students need a more humane educational system, the testophiles are out there screaming, "no, no, don't do that! Get back over to that testing stuff!" I hate that it has changed--for the worse-- the whole idea of what school is for.

Schools and students and teachers have more important things to be focused on than the Big Standardized Test. If only policymakers could realize that. 

Sec. Cardona's Bold Bowl Of Oatmeal (And That's Okay)

This is a critique of a pronouncement from Education Secretary Cardona, with a special twist ending. We're going to Raise The Bar: Lead The World.

That's the title, a thing stripped of any poetry or sense, of some new initiative thingy that the United States Department of Education is embarking on. Secretary Cardona rolled it out in a "major address." And if you're wondering what, exactly, they're talking about--well, let's drill down into the language of the announcement and see what we can find.

The press release is appropriately vague, speaking of "global engagement" and making "a call to strengthen our will to transform education for the better, building on approaches that we know work in education" and a "collective will to challenge complacency." The department tweet is even more obtuse, exhorting that "we must step up, seize this opportunity & maximize the potential of our students, our schools, and our country." It all seems vaguely familiar.

This new--well, I guess we call it a "direction" which I suppose is less definitive than an "initiative" but more focused than a "general inclination"-- thing comes with three "focus areas." 

• Achieving Academic Excellence
• Accelerating learning for every student
• Deliver a comprehensive and rigorous education for every student 
• Boldly Improve Learning Conditions
• Eliminate the educator shortage for every school
• Invest in every student’s mental health and well-being
• Creating Pathways for Global Engagements
• Ensure every student has a pathway to college and career
• Provide every student a pathway to multilingualism

A, B, C--get it? The actual goals are about as generic as one can get, with nary a specific actionable item in sight. I'm not even sure what "global engagements" are. Do we want our citizens to outdo workers in other countries? Bring the jobs back here (as if that is in worker control)? 

We can tease out some more specific notions from the actual text of his speech.

The speech, like the press release, really really wants you to know that the American Rescue Plan includes a "historic" $130 billion thrown in the general direction of schools. 

What we do need is a collective will to fight complacency and status quo in education with the same passion we used to fight COVID. We need the same spirit of unity and bipartisanship we had in the first two months of the pandemic, when we looked past red and blue, and tapped into our humanity, courage, and American spirit.

That's a bold choice of comparison, because education is still dealing with people whose passion is to fight against the fight against covid, a passion that they have indeed transferred to education itself. "No masks" and "No vaccinations" shifted pretty quickly to "No naughty books" and "No telling kids to be nice." He says at one point that culture wars aren't the answer, but maybe he doesn't get where they're coming from. Nor does getting nostalgic about a period that was a two-month blip in the larger narrative seems unlikely to yield help.

But I really take exception to the "complacency" line. I know a lot of teachers, and while they might be described as tired, beleaguered, passionate, overworked, committed, professional, and doing their damned best, I can't say I know many that are "complacent."

But from there we move on to the ABC's of this new thingy.

Academics? We get this baloney:

As much as it is about recovery, it’s also about setting higher standards for academic success in reading and mathematics. It’s unacceptable that in the most recent PISA test, an assessment which is done internationally, our students scored 36th place out of 79 countries in math.

Bringing up our rank on the PISA is an automatic disqualifier from the Take Me Seriously derby. We have always ranked low on the PISA, and nobody has ever correlated that performance with anything. We always get beaten by Estonia. So what? If you want to convert education to a Prepare for the PISA model, it could be done--all you'd have to do is give up any pretense of actual educating.

What specific academic advances does he have in mind? "Science of literacy" and "strong decoding," and I'm not going to get into the reading wars because (spoiler alert) winning the reading wars and teaching students to read are two different things. Financial literacy. High standards aka stop grade inflation. STEM. Pre-K. And this bold stance:

It means that we pursue good pedagogy in a well-rounded education that includes and embraces the Arts—and reject a school experience that is narrowed to only what is tested.

It tells you something about the last twenty-some years of government edumeddling and general bullshittery that it's even a thing that a statement by the secretary of education saying that "good pedagogy" is a thing we should pursue. 

We need to recognize once and for all that standardized tests work best when they serve as a flashlight on what works and what needs our attention – not as hammers to drive the outcomes we want in education from the top down, often pointing fingers to those with greater needs and less resources.

This is a true thing. Federal education people should say it, and they have, many times. It's a fine thing to say, but if it is not immediately followed by "And so we will call on Congress to end federal mandates for standardized testing as a measure of school effectiveness, teacher quality, and student achievement," it doesn't mean a damned thing. Especially when it's coming from the guy who defended the BS Test at a time when it was clearly a waste of valuable time and resources.

Then we're on to better learning conditions. Cardona calls for better mental health supports, with more counselors, somehow. More professional development on trauma informed practice (because one more PD session will totally take care of that). 

Let’s not have pandemic amnesia and forget how schools closed because they did not have enough teachers.

Yeah, too late on that pandemic amnesia thing. Teachers are important and we should pay them more, he says, with various rhetorical flourishes. The administration is ready to throw a bunch of money at teacher development and retention. Higher salaries. Career ladders like Master Teacher and Teacher Leader. Cancel college debts. Actually listening to teachers and respecting their opinions. These are all nice ideas that we have heard before (though admittedly not in the previous administration, so thanks for setting that bar low, Secretary DeVos).

Pre-K through college connection. Career and technical education. Watch for the rollout of a "new pathways initiative" which will "include very specific plans on how our high schools should be evolved to meet the career and college pathways of today and tomorrow." Micro-credentials. Career pathways create options. 

This cradle to career stuff will help our graduates "compete on a global stage," and whenever I hear that magical phrase I want to know if A) better educated widgets will somehow cause corporate bosses to bring back jobs to the US and B) what sort of education prepares students to compete by agreeing to live on subsistence wages. Cardona seems to love the cradle to career model; I've complained about his support before. 

Also, multilingual stuff is good.

Then it's the big finish, including something Cardona cribbed from the Betsy DeVos playbook. In a list of parallel structures exhorting folks to join in:

If you believe that it’s worth taking a few lumps as we challenge the protectors of the status quo in education: join me on this journey.

What status quo, and which protectors? Seriously. Because one status quo I can think of is the continued use of the Big Standardized Test, and that piece of status quo is protected by the federal government. So go ahead and get started on that one, will you? 

The speech and the thingy that it introduces seem like the usual lukewarm bowl of unflavored oatmeal, and in a way, I guess that's okay. Here's a bit from early in the speech:

We have seen shiny silver bullets from the federal level promising to “fix” education. We’ve seen big initiatives with clever names that promise everything, only to fade away after the sense of urgency is over.

That’s not what this Administration is about.

This Administration is about substance, not sensationalism in education. It’s about real solutions to complex issues, informed by real experience – with an unrelenting focus on the instructional core.

Okay, I'm not sure that it's clear what the heck this administration is about when it comes to education, but the idea here is sound.

Any Secretary of Education who stands up to say, "Hey, here's a Great New Thing that will fix education in this country" is full of it. Doesn't matter if the Great New Thing is National Standards or a Big Standardized Test or a federal grant competition/bribery system or even Freedom Scholarship Vouchers--anyone who thinks they have a silver bullet for education is full of enough fertilizer to turn the moon brown. 

The speech that I would most trust from a Secretary of Education would be one that admits that there's nothing special or exciting that the feds can do, other than make it possible for states to support teachers in doing the work. 

That's the big secret of education. Doing the work. Getting good people to do the work, and then removing as many obstacles and providing as many supports as possible. We've lost our way educationally in this country by a sustained bipartisan effort to do the inverse--providing obstacles and removing supports. The federal government has treated teachers with distrust and tried to micromanage them, and bot directly and indirectly empowered the very people who want to put obstacles in the path of public education. 

It's not drudgery. It's not a grind. But the work is slow, steady, unglamorous work, and every attempt to turn it into drama of operatic proportions just gets in the way. The work is about relationships, and though teacher-student is a relationship different from others, it still thrives not on the Grand Gestures but on the daily maintenance. 

It's not just that I'm not looking for fireworks from the bully pulpit in DC-- I distrust them. And while I find nothing in this bland compendium of committeefied bureaucrat-speak to get excited about, I can't imagine what a secretary of education could say that would excite me. 

But do you know how I know for absolute certain that Raise the Bar is a nothingburger?

Here's the twist ending. Although the tweet that brought it to my attention went up March 31, the press release and speech about Raise the Bar happened back in January. And since then...?

It made it obliquely into Cardona's Not Gonna Take It Anymore interview with Politico ;ast week:

“I was hired to improve education in the country. I’m not a politician. I’m an educator. I’m a dad, and I want to talk about raising the bar in education,” Cardona said in an interview with POLITICO last week. “But I won’t sit idly when some try to attack our schools or privatize education.”

In that interview he went to actually say some stuff, like calling out bogus culture war baloney. In an op-ed run in Florida, he actually pointed out that parent's right rhetoric was just a fig leaf for a push to defund public schools (a point on which I'd say he's exactly correct). 

“Our students are as [emotionally] dysregulated as they ever have been in the last twenty years. The surgeon general reminded us that we’re in a youth mental health crisis, where one in three high school girls has considered suicide in the last three years,” Cardona told POLITICO. “I’m tired of folks looking to get political points by attacking vulnerable students, vulnerable communities and attacking our schools.”

He added: “If we’re not standing up for our students, who will? I feel it’s time.”

In other words, let's get all this crap out of the way of doing the work. I would take one education secretary like this over a hundred of the kind that pump out oatmeal like Raise the Bar. It remains to be seen if he can sustain it, or if we're just going back to oatmeal.

AEI's Back To School "Blueprint"

Everyone has ideas about how schools can re-open again, from thoughtful and responsible educators to gun-waving loons on the steps of capitals. So why not have the American Enterprise Institute take a shot at it by calling together a reformsters' roundtable to look at the issue.

The blueprint brought together a "task force" loaded with familiar names-- Chris Cerf, Sharif El-Mekki, Kaya Henderson, Candice McQueen, Nina Rees, Gerard Robinson, Andrew Rotherman, Hanna Skandera and John White, to name a few. But hey-- they aren't waving guns or yelling threats at people in masks, so that makes them part of the rational part of the right tilted world, so let's see what they've come up with.

Let me begin with a digression on the nature of thinky tanks

Rick Hess and John Bailey are the nominal authors of this, and I want to pause for a moment to note that they offer an actual explanation for why thinky tanks should even be messing with this kind of thing:

At times like this, think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute can play a constructive role. Because we are not burdened with the day-to-day responsibilities of serving students and families, we have the luxury to look further ahead. We can also bring together experts and veteran leaders who are versed in the particulars of what schools are facing and give them a platform to share their recommendations and guidance. Equally important, we can do all this with a degree of autonomy and independence, which can be more difficult for professional associations or partisan entities. 

The "this is our only job" argument is indeed part of the thinky tank raison d'etre; not having another day job does automatically give these groups an outsized voice in discussions about the work that keeps the people who actually do it too occupied to easily weigh in on it. It gives them the financial freedom to advocate for their point of view in outlets that don't pay a living wage for writing. And it gives them time for things like this.

"Autonomy and independence"? I don't really buy that part-- AEI, like most all thinky tanks, has its agenda. Think tanks are not research labs; they don't approach issues by asking, "I wonder what the answer is." Think tanks start with "Here's the answer we want to argue for-- let's craft an argument for it." Sometimes their chosen argument is a matter of their ideological bent; sometimes they are hired guns. And, of course, that's why they tend to assemble "experts" who fit the conclusion they want.

"We are not public health experts," they admit. Well, no. Nor are they education experts. Experts in the ins and outs of policy wonkery, but this task force is most devoid of anybody with real classroom experience (no, your two years with Teach For America and that charter you ran do not make you a teaching expert).

All that said-- the prospect of starting school up in the fall is scary and uncertain and unlike anything we've tackled lately. I firmly believe that solutions will be very, very specific and therefor the successful solutions will be crafted by the people there on the ground. But that doesn't mean we can't look at what this crew came up with.

Premises

The group assumes that school will open in the fall, but that we probably won't have a vaccine, so all manner of accommodations will be needed to deal with Covid-19. Those are fair assumptions.

Guiding principles? That decisions are best made by people close to the situation. That schools will have to figure out how to serve all students. That schools will need help from state and federal sources to provide resources that schools have had no time to prep for. Let me underline that--in Pennsylvania, teachers would have prepared their budgets for next fall around 6-8 months ago; meanwhile, districts don't get solid numbers for state financial support until this coming summer. It's a screwed up process that is extraordinarily ill-suited for the current problems.

Also, the health stuff piece is complicated and hard. I am summarizing brutally here.

So here are the areas that the committee recommends addressing

General Stuff

Coordinate with the community, mostly because the business of tracking and avoiding Covid-19 will occur everywhere. That means lots of good communication with the school system.

Also, regulatory flexibility. This is not wrong (PA, for instance, waived the 180 day requirement for this year), but it's a tricky issue. Of course, Reformsters have a whole list of school regulations that they would like to sweep away. So while the "hugely expedited timeline" for fiddling with regulations advocated here isn't wrong, it also requires some vigilance-- e.g., just how close Betsy DeVos came to saying that everyone could just scrap all regulations regarding students with special needs.

Privacy issues. For sure. I'm personally a bit shocked at how many people are adamant that they will not cooperate with contact tracing, a hugely important tool for figuring out where the disease is and where it's headed. Basically, someone asks you who you've been around since you got sick, and there are people out there determined to resist to the max. Add the issues surrounding juveniles and FERPA and HIPPA and this is going to be a contentious area. And it should be-- as with flexible regulations, a necessary response to the pandemic could be used to slip more shenanigans through.

School Operations

Everything will need to be deep cleaned, regularly. Protective gear for everyone. Playgrounds and sporting events may have to shut down. Not impossible, but not going to be cheap, either.

School meals? One of the areas of the blueprint where the committee basically says, "Yeah, this will be hard and schools are going to have to figure out what to do. Which is honest, but not very blueprint. Ditto for transportation. It's the fancy beltway equivalent of my local mechanic looking at engine pieces flying out through the hood of my car and saying, "Yeah, well, that right there's gonna be a problem."

Whole Child Supports

Educating the “whole child” is not a single set of courses, policies, or activities, but rather a mindset that should inform both school reopening plans and the support students receive.

Schools should consider an SEL needs assessment "to understand the full range of student and faculty needs" and I suppose an assessment could be any number of things, but I'm suspicious of any instrument that claims to know exactly what the SEL standards are and I'm doubly suspicious of anyone who needs these kinds of tools to connect with live human beings. The committee suggests connecting with "national organizations to provide the expertsie and support for schools and systems," and I'm not even sure who they could be talking about.

But here's a concrete solution. Since extracurriculars and sports are "critical" components of SEL, and schools will be hard-pressed to continue them, then let's privatize them. I am not sure how that helps-- do sports played by private athletic associations somehow involve more distancing? Also, one of the SEL benefits of extracurriculars and sports is that these groups are identified with the school itself (even more hugely true in rural areas like mine).

They do correctly identify mental health supports as a biggy. I'm not sure we can over-estimate some of the problems stemming from social distancing and isolation itself; there are students who haven't interacted with anyone but immediate family members for weeks, and that's likely to add to any stressors they're already dealing with. Add in financial issues, job loss, and plain old toxic family dynamics, and some students will be returning with huge amounts of emotional baggage.

So hire more counselors. And sign up for that telemedicine thing, because an internet counselor might help.

School Personnel

Here, more than anywhere in the plan, the group misses the boat.

Plenty of staff is over 55, so the group suggests getting rid of them. Early retirement incentives. Reassign the olds. This will obviously create some staffing shortages, so they have some thoughts. One is to "relax" class size regulations, presumably to allow larger classes, which is problematic for many reasons, not the least of which is that maintaining social distancing in a classroom of 100 students is nearly impossible unless you're holding class on a football field.

They suggest relaxing regulations in order to recruit from neighboring states-- but if all the states are going to be experiencing this shortage, which state would have all the excess teachers? And of course, that old favorite-- loosening certification requirements. All this to get the older teachers out of there, which is coincidentally a lo9ng-time goal of this crowd and their arguments against seniority protections.

There's another issue here as well. So we retire Mrs. McGeezer for her own safety, so that if Pat brings the virus to school, she won't get it. But what if Pat just gives it to Chris, another student who then takes it home to the grandparents. Removing the old folks doesn't really reduce the spread. Most importantly, since this report was whipped up, evidence has increased that plenty of the under-55 crowd are in danger from the virus as well.

The group would also like to take this opportunity to reframe the old argument that contractual obligations limit the district's freedom to Do Stuff. So they'd still like to see contractual limits on schedules, class sizes and work hours to go away, only now the idea is that this would be for the teachers' own good.

Money is going to be tight, so the group suggests looking for corners to cut and ways to right-size the district. Also, look to philanthropists to help plug the gaps. Sure.

Academics

There will be problems, particularly if there are more shutdowns.

Some of the suggestions for coping are a little silly, like getting ahold of the curriculum provider for help in using the publisher's materials to identify student learning gaps, modify instruction, etc. Is there any particular reason to think that book publishers have a better handle on current issues than actual classroom teachers?

Also, have printed copies of materials, and make adaptation for students with special needs. Yes, there is much of this report that may intend to just be thorough, but comes across as suggesting that teachers are dullards and dolts. Recommendations stop short of "Don't forget to eat food" or "The sun generally rises in the East," but they comer pretty close at times.

I do like this one-- have drills for internet education stuff, like fire drills. Which makes sense except that every teacher has a story about that time that they checked and checked and checked their tech, but when showtime came, the whole thing crashed. (See also: a few thousand frustrated AP test takers who had no trouble with the practice tests but whose actual test failed).

Time? Well, alternate days, longer days, longer years, summer school. Also, they'd like policymakers to consider using this opportunity to go with competency based education over seat time.

And once schools open-- test, test, test to see where students are. I just addressed this elsewhere, but the short answer is that teachers do this every regular fall already and now how to manage intake of new students, thanks. But as good fans of high stakes testing, these guys are afraid that by canning the Big Standardized Test this spring, we've missed all sorts of super-important data that's unavailable from any other source. They should relax.

Distance Learning

They don't call for replacement, but it's "better than nothing" and can support instruction. But now that we've been forced to use it, maybe check to see what worked or not.

Connectivity matters, and the report calls for every student to have a device and the "connectivity they need," which is a hell of a big ask. They also recommend take home mobile ho0t spots, which is not a solution if there's no connectivity for the hot spot either--it's like giving hooking their tv up to coaxial cable that isn't connected to anything on the other end.There are a lot of folks who have no connection, and a lot of other folks who have a crappy connection, and because connectivity is the realm, mostly, of private businesses, that's not going to change soon. It's just not cost effective to run the necessary infrastructure miles off the beaten path just to reach a handful of families. It's the same problem as mail delivery, electrical connectivity, and roads--there will not be a solution until government gets in the drivers seat. High speed high quality internet connection should be a public utility. Until it is, the solutions they propose are not actually solutions.

They also call for professional development, and here we hit a curious problem-- who exactly is going to deliver the training. Cyber-schools have had years and years to devote single-mindedly to the challenge of distance learning, and they have no real success to point to. There are teachers out there who have got a good handle on it, but they will be hard to locate and hard to connect to all the teachers who need the assistance.

When it comes to distance learning, mostly what we've got is a tool that few folks really know how to use effectively.

Blueprint?

Well, maybe a little. As is often the case on Food Network competition shows, this might have worked better if you hadn't given it that name. Because a blueprint is specific detailed instructions, everything you need in order to build something. This is not that. It's more of a List Of Things Somebody Is Going To Have To Figure Out, and that's really the most I would expect from a bunch of reform advocates, faux education experts, and thinky tankers. The detailed plans are going to have to come from people who are actually there on the ground, doing the work.

Some of the things on this list are obvious, some hardly explain anything, and some are off the mark. Read through if you like, but understand that far more useful things will come from local teachers and administrators, even if they aren't wrapped up in slick reports.

Why It's Important To Say There Is No Teacher Shortage

I've been saying it. Tim Slekar has been saying it. Other people who aren't even directly tied to teaching have been saying it.

There is no teacher shortage.

There's a slow-motion walkout, a one-by-one exodus, a piecemeal rejection of the terms of employment for educators in 2019.

Why is it important to keep saying this? Why keep harping on this point?

Because if you don't correctly identify the problem, you will not correctly identify a solution (see also every episode of House).

It's not lupus.

"We've got a teacher shortage," leads us in the wrong direction. It assumes that, for some reason, there just aren't enough teachers out there in the world, like arguing there aren't enough blue-eyed people or enough people with six toes. It assumes that "teacher" is some sort of solid genetic state that either exists or does not, and if there aren't enough of them, well, shrug, whatcha gonna do?

"We've got a teacher shortage," argues that we've had the meat widget equivalent of a crop failure. The drought and the dust storms were just so bad this year that we didn't get a full harvest of teachers. And when the harvest is slow, what can we do except look for substitutes?

That's where teacher shortage talk takes us-- to a search for teacher substitutes. Maybe we can just lower the bar. Only require a college degree in anything at all. Louisiana is just the most recent state to decide to lower the bar-- maybe we can just let anyone who had lousy college grades but still got a job doing something, well, maybe we can make that person a teacher.

Or maybe we can substitute computers for teachers. A few hundred students with a "mentor" and a computer would be just as good as one of those teachers that we're short of, anyway, right?

We need to stop talking about a "teacher shortage" because that kind of talk takes our eyes off the real problem.

Teaching has become such unattractive work that few people want to do it.

This is actually good news, because it means that we can actually do something about it. The resistance to doing so is certainly very human-- if we convince ourselves that a problem in our lives is something that just happened to us, then it's not our fault. Unfortunately, that also means we have no power. Stan Lee told us that with great power comes great responsibility, but the converse is also true-- with great responsibility comes great power, so when we accept the responsibility, we get some power that comes with it.

Anyway. The most obvious answer folks land on is "Offer them more money," and that is certainly an Economics 101 answer. If you have a job that people don't want to do, offer more money to do it. If teaching paid $500,000 a year, there wouldn't be an unfilled job in the country. But as the #RedForEd walkouts remind us, money isn't the whole issue.

Respect. Support. The tools necessary to do a great job. Autonomy. Treating people like actual functioning adults. These are all things that would make teaching jobs far more appealing. I've often wondered how much job satisfaction you could add by giving teachers actual personal offices, some space of their own. These are all things that any school district could add, on their own, almost immediately (well, maybe not the offices).

There are other factors that make the job less attractive. The incessant focus on testing. The constant stream of new policies crafted by people who couldn't do a teacher's job for fifteen minutes. The huge workload, including a constant mountainous river of stupid paperwork (is there any wonder why special ed positions are among the hardest to fill). The moves to deprofessionalize the work. The national scale drumbeat of criticism and complaint and repetitively insisting that schools suck, teachers suck, it all sucks.

The continued pretense that there is some sort of deep mystery about why teaching jobs are hard to fill, as if it's just an a mystery wrapped in an enigma covered with puzzle sauce. Shrugging and saying, "Well, there's just a teacher shortage," is a way for everyone responsible, from the building administrators who do a lousy job of taking care of their people all the way up through legislators who continue to beat down public education, to pretend innocence, to say innocently, "Well, it's not like there's anything I can do about it."

And, we should note, this all piles on top of more specific problems, like the dire need to get Brown and Black teachers in the classroom. Again, folks just shrug and say, "Well, you know, there just aren't that many teachers of color" as if that's because of some act of God.

We know exactly why so many teaching jobs are hard to fill. But the folks with power would rather not bother exerting the effort to actually fix the problem. After all, it would be hard, and expensive, and anyway, why go to so much trouble over a bunch of whiny women. Even after being dragged to some level of understanding by teachers, many legislators have turned away and gone back to denial.

"We have a teacher shortage," is a fig leaf with which we are trying to cover the Grand Canyon, but many folks are only too happy to play along rather than rock the boat. Because "disruption" is only good for some folks.

So don't say "We have a teacher shortage." Say "we can't convince qualified people to take this job": or "we won't try to make these jobs attractive enough to draw in qualified people." Stop pretending this is some act of God; even the dust bowl turned out to be the result of bad human choices and not nature's crankiness. If we start talking about what-- and who-- is really responsible, perhaps we can fix the problem-- but only if we start with the correct diagnosis..

Not Quite Seven Reasons To Ditch Teachers Unions

The Foundation for Economic Education may be the oldest libertarian thinky tank in the US, and they are a missionary group, set "to make the ideas of liberty familiar, credible, and compelling to the rising generation." So it comes as no surprise to find them running an article entitled "7 Reasons To Say Goodbye to the Teachers Union."

Author Daniel Buck is a bit of a mystery on line, but he lays claim to a masters in education and a teaching job in someplace that's urban/diverse; probably 9th grade English, judging from all the Romeo and Juliet tweets. And writes/edits for a site called "The Lone Conservative." From reading his tweets, I learned that he would pay to keep the union rep out of the lounge and once shook Scott Walker's hand and thanked Walker "for all he's doing to improve education in Wisconsin." He dresses up for school, appears to take a serious and conscientious approach to the work, and he's in his second year of actual teaching. If I worked next door to him, I think we'd get along and I'd probably like him. But this thing he wrote...

Preliminary disclaimers

I should say right up front that I am not knee jerk booster of the union. I've been a local president, and I've been on the phone telling my state president what he's messing up. A scan of this blog will find more than a few criticisms of the teachers unions. I know some reasons that the teachers union has, at times, made me want to ditch it.

Detach me from this carousel, and I will win the Kentucky Derby

Also, I'm aware that some folks may see this post as punching down at some teacher newbie for some not-very-well-informed opinions, but Buck appears to have his big boy pants on, and I'm not going to call him names-- but when something like this gets put into the world, that requires a response also to be put into the world.

At various times in my career, I considered reasons to ditch the union. Let's see if Buck actually came up with seven.

The wind-up

There's a pull quote about supporting teachers, not unions. Buck says, sure, unions did swell things in the past, but we no longer have troops stationed in Cold War locations like Germany (little comfort to my brother-in-law who's being deployed to watch Russians from Poland in a few months). But just so we're clear-- Buck is arguing that teacher unions should be dissolved.

Here are his seven reasons.

They are advocacy groups as much as unions.

What he appears to mean is that they are a liberal advocacy group, NEA has committed to things like being for Black Lives Matter and against Confederate monuments. The unions give most of their money to Democratic candidates.

This is half a valid point-- the unions contain a huge number of conservative and GOP members whose interests are not necessarily reflected in support for Hillary. I have always chafed a bit at some non-education issues that the union takes a position on-- and they've taken some bad stands on education issues as well (Common Core, anyone). And don't even get me started on the boneheaded early-in endorsement of Clinton.

At the same time. Politics shapes how teachers do or don't get to do their jobs. It hasn't always been true, but for the past twenty-some years, some of the biggest obstacles to being able to just do the work have been created by politicians (Common Core, anyone). If teachers don't collectively advocate for the politics most likely to create better conditions in schools, who will. And if you teach children of color and you can't see why advocating for the removal of statues raised to honor those who fought to keep Blacks as chattel-- well, you need to get some more schooling yourself. Buck also lists arming teachers as an issue that NEA should be leaving alone. Nope. That's not a conservative-liberal issue, that's a stupid-not stupid issue. If I were still in a classroom, you can be damn sure I'd expect the union to do its best to keep guns out of my building.

I expect teachers unions to advocate for issues that affect public education, and that means politics.

They have more money in politics than just about everyone.

Buck notes that unions contribute more to politics than other individuals, which is true if you compare the union to one person at a time, but of course that's not how it works. Look at this report from the (not union affiliated) Network for Public Education for examples of how billionaires, working together, outspend everyone.

Now, truthfully, if this were a few decades ago, I'd be sympathetic to this point. I'd be troubled that the unions were throwing this much money into political campaigns. But now we live in a post-Citizens United world, a SuperPAC world, a world in which rich folks can exert as much financial pressure on the political world as they like-- hell, with dark money tools, they can do it anonymously.

So why shouldn't teachers fight back? After all-- union political contributions are not teacher dues, They are contributions collected voluntarily and specifically for political purposes. Why shouldn't unions be free to pass the hat to collect the contributions of teachers, contributions that carry far more weight bundled than individually. The Kochs and Waltons and the rest can do whatever they like when it comes to wielding political influence? Why should teachers be limited?

Mind you, in my universe, everyone would be limited. Contribution limits, and no dark money ever. But until that happens, we play by the rules we have.

Their policy ideals won't cut it.

Here Buck offers a salad of old talking points. Unions want more money for school, but we already spend too much without a return-- except of course "return" here means "higher test scores" and just from his Twitter feed I know that Buck knows better  than to think that test scores measure what matters.

He also resurrects whinging about "hard to fire" and strict pay scales. It's old and tired. He's correct to note that a lot of money is spent badly by districts and states, but there are better solutions than taking the money away, and anyway, what does this have to do with unions? They advocate for this stuff? So what. Every contract was negotiated by two sides. If your contract truly makes it impossible to fire a teacher, it's because your board did a lousy job. Otherwise, it's only hard to get rid of terrible teachers if you have administrators reluctant to do their jobs.

They block meaningful reform

Unions block the reforms that will structurally change a broken system and in return, promise increased funding, which will, in turn, be drained away by the broken system. Namely, they oppose school choice, merit-based pay, standardized tests, and the Praxis, an entrance exam for teachers.

This echoes the worst, looniest anti-union rhetoric in which the whole public school system is just a scam perpetuated by the union in order to make the union rich. From this premise, we get the notion that opposition to reform is not based on a professional judgment that such reforms are bad for education-- it's all just to keep the money flowing. All the "teachers are swell it's the union that's bad" rhetoric in the world can't mask how insulting this is to actual teachers. Yep-- they're all just corrupt money-grubbers who want to keep children deprived of real education.

The four issues that Buck mentions are all issues that can be debated by reasonable people-- but not if you assume that only evil, selfish, or stupid people would oppose you. In fact, all four policies have ben shown to have terrible flaws, and more thoughtful reformsters are willing to discuss some of those issues. But if you assume that all opposition is just corruption speaking, you'll never get a step closer to improving your ideas.

They breed a culture of entitlement

Again, the "I like teachers" slip is showing. Naughty bad teachers just keep adding because the union protects them.

The unions tell us that we, the teachers, deserve our jobs and better pay regardless of the success of our students, but in reality, we deserve more money and respect only if we do our job well. To suggest anything else is a disservice to the profession.

I don't know that I've ever heard the union say that. Part of this is about job protections, in which case the union says that a teacher get deserves to be fired for a reason, not an administrative whim. Buck need only imagine some left-wing administrator who's out to get rid of him because of his conservative views to understand why a union and job protections are useful here. We don't have enough time to get into the pay question, other than to point out that the insurmountable obstacle to merit pay is the lack of any sort of reliable way to measure teacher merit (spoiler alert-- it's not test scores).

They bargain for mediocre benefits.

The old "if they just gave me the money, I'd be much better at investing it than the state." The pension situation varies from state to state. As a retiree, I can tell you that my pension is pretty good. For nearly forty years, I've considered it one of the compensations for my job, including the fact that I didn't have o become a part time portfolio manager. Buck is sad that the retirement benefits he's offered don't allow him to invest more, but of course he can invest more if he wants to. I benefit from a fixed benefits plan (a rapidly vanishing animal, I know). I wonder what the effects would be of a do-it-yourself fund in a year like 2008 if a district was up to its ears in top-dollar teachers, none of whom would consider retirement because they couldn't afford it.

We can bargain for ourselves.

Oh, honey.

Buck has a story to tell about how a fellow teacher was falsely accused of hitting a student, and the principal "under convoluted district rules" wanted to fire him. That teacher walked into the office with test scores and student testimonials and student projects-- oh, and video records that showed his innocence. This, somehow, is proof that teachers can negotiate for themselves. I'm unimpressed. There was no negotiation here, no "convoluted" rules-- assaulting a student is a pretty straightforward offense-- and no part of the defense that mattered except the proof of the facts of the case.

But I'd ask Buck, once again, to consider how this would have gone if the teacher in question was one the administration didn't like, or if the administration had a friend's child he wanted to give a job, or a touchy liberal who wanted an excuse to get rid of a pesky conservative staffer. How well would "negotiating for yourself" go then?

Self-negotiation has one other major problem. Districts are going to have a finite pile of money for personnel, which means teachers will be negotiating against each other in a zero-sum game. What does that school look like, where supporting another teacher means taking money out of your own pocket? And while this might still look like a good idea to Buck now, I invite him to imagine being thirty-five with a family talking to an administrator who says, "Why should I give you a raise when I can hire this twenty-four year old for less than I pay you now?"

That's before we even get to issues like a coach not playing a school board member's kid enough, or a single teacher who turns down date requests from the wrong people, or a teacher who belongs to the wrong church or wrong political party, or a teacher who tries to stand up for a mistreated student and is told to stop rocking the boat.

The history of teacher pay is not the history of People In Charge saying, "Let's give them a raise and better working conditions. It'll cost us money, but it's the right thing to do." It isn't even the history of People In Charge acknowledging market forces. We're several years into a widely observed teacher "shortage" and still nobody wants to acknowledge that the Free Market tells us what to do-- make the job more attractive. If entire states won't budge in order to close staffing gaps of hundreds or thousands of teachers, what makes Buck imagine a world where an administrator says, "Well, Mr. Buck, we certainly want you to be happy, so here's a big fat raise."

Is that seven, yet?

As I said, I totally get the frustration, I really do. Union leadership is often slow to act and can do a really lousy job of listening to membership. Every time the firing process has to be defended because some yahoo with a teaching certificate did something stupid, I cringe. I rail away every time some union person uses "unity" to mean "shut up and agree."And there is nothing like the crappy feeling that comes when you see the new contract terms and realize that things important to you did not make the cut this time.

But the unfortunate reality is that an individual teacher has virtually no power over work and pay conditions, and the People In Charge have no reason to want to give her any. As it is, unions don't have all that much power and are regularly getting more of it stripped away. You will notice that in a state like, say, Wisconsin, the stripping of union power is not followed by the state and school districts saying, "Phew-- at last we can give you all the money and job security that the union stood in the way of."

Teachers need some level of protection to make it possible for them to be teachers; right now, the best way for them to get that is via unions. Yes, that's inconvenient for some folks who would like teachers to shut up, sit down, know their place, and accept what the People In Charge feel like giving them. That's why folks like FEE are always happy to find teachers like Buck to make their case for them. It's so much simpler when you can get obstacles to power to just unilaterally surrender.

So, not quite seven reasons to ditch the union. And I'm not even going to get into all the ways that non-union members benefit from the union they disdain. In the meantime, Daniel, hit me up on Twitter at @palan57. We can cyber hang out and talk about how to do cool R&J video projects, and I promise not to hassle you for being a free rider.

Why Are We Still Testing

It's the season of testing again, a season that has no come so many times that lots of folks don't even question it any more? But it's a question that needs to be asked about the Big Standardized Test-- why, exactly, are we still doing this? We've had a variety of answers over the years-- let's see how they hold up.

The Bathroom Scales

Take the test! It's just like weighing yourself on the bathroom scales! Early on many reformsters suggested that weighing the pig would make it gain weight, but that's stupid. So we weigh the school-- then what? That "then what" is a huge part of the problem, but the other part of the problem is trying to use the read-out on the bathroom scales to determine how tall, how healthy, and how well-adjusted the weigh-ee is. This was always a really dumb analogy.

Compare and Contrast

The BS Tests would let us compare a rural school in Idaho with an urban school in Michigan. It would let us compare every third grader to every other third grader. This is no longer possible-- different states have different sets of standards, and there are a wide variety of BS Tests being given, so we're back to comparing apples to watermelons.

Evaluating Educators

By soaking BS Test results in magical VAM sauce, we were supposed to get data that would let us tell the difference between good teachers and bad teachers. To begin with, that assumes that your definition of "good teacher" is "one who gts students to score well on a single math and reading test," which is not very helpful in sorting out, say, science or music teachers. And that's before we get to the insanity of using BS Test scores to "evaluate" teachers who have never even met the students whose scores are being used. Plus, VAM has problems. So many problems that there's a long list of folks who don't think it should be used for this purpose.

Informing Staffing Decisions

It was a fond dream that test-based evaluation would lead to evaluation based hiring, firing and compensation policies. This balloon never lifted off the ground, perhaps because the teacher pipeline has dried up so badly that schools are in no hurry to inflict a staffing shortage on themselves, and because some states are already paying teachers so little that they don't need a ginned-up excuse to pay teachers even less. Also, as noted, test-based evaluation of teachers doesn't work. If you're a principal, who are you going to believe-- test data, or your own eyes, ears, and brain?

Scaling Excellence

The failed evaluation piece means that another dream is also dead. That's the dream in which BS Test results are used to identify super-duper teachers, who are then tasked with spreading their super-duper teacherly wisdom to other less super-duper teachers. In fact, states were supposed to have a plan for moving good teachers to low-achieving schools, but that never happened because it turns out rendering educators is illegal in the US.

Helping Schools in Trouble

The BS Tests were going to help us identify schools that were "troubled" or "failing" or "sucky." One might argue that we can already find these schools without any trouble, but I suppose a case can be made that numbers you can wave at politicians might give some heft to that identification. The problem here is what hasn't happened. "Look, this school is clearly having trouble, so let's get them additional resources and help," said no legislature ever. Instead, the low-achievement label is used to justify targeting that school for destruction. Low scores can be used to justify the launch of charter businesses, or even the gentrification of entire sectors of a community. Low-scoring schools are not targeted for assistance; they are targeted for dismantling.

Address Inequity

We would find where non-wealthy non-white student populations were being ill-served. Anyone who can't figure that out without the BS Test is a dope. And as with the last point, the problem has been that the data hasn't so much been used to find schools that need help as it has been used to find schools that are vulnerable and ready to be turned into somebody's business opportunity. Instead of focusing our will to address educational inequity, test-based accountability has highlighted our lack of will (and wasted the good intentions of some folks).

Informing Instruction

Teachers were going to get their data spreadsheets and figure out, with laser-like precision, how they needed to change their instruction. But right off the bat it became clear that data about students in your class would only arrive long after the students had departed for their next classroom. Then the security issue reared its stupid head-- I can see student scores, but I am forbidden to see the test itself. (For that matter, students who are so inclined are unable to see their specific results to ask "What exactly did I get wrong here?") This means I can tell that Pat only got an okayish score, based on some questions that might have asked about something about reading that Pat apparently answered incorrectly. How can that inform my instruction? It can't. It doesn't. The BS Tests "inform instruction" mostly by encouraging teachers to spend more time on test prep. That's not a good thing.

Letting Parents Know How Their Children Are Doing

Under this theory, parents have no idea how their children are doing in school until the BS Test results appear. Assuming for the moment that the parents are that disconnected, the information provided is minimal, scoring a few categories on a 1-3 or 1-4 scale. A BS Test provides very non-granular data, less nuanced than a report card-- and based on just one test. There is nothing for parents to learn here.

Unmask the Lies

Of course, guys like Arne Duncan were sure that once the BS Test revealed the Truth-- that US schools are super-stinky-- folks like the fabled suburban white moms would have to face the Truth that their children were actually doing terribly. And then we tried talking about the honesty gap. Basically, a whole bunch of folks started with the premise that schools and the teachers who work in them largely suck and the BS Test would be a tool for revealing the Awful Truth (for some folks, you can also insert a screed about a vast union scam and conspiracy here). Somehow, that never happened. It's almost as if the vast majority of teachers don't actually suck.

Redefine What It Means To Be Educated

I don't know that this was a very widespread goal, but it was certainly near and dear to the hearts of guys like David Coleman, who had a good idea of what he did and didn't approve of in education, and dreamed of using standards hard-wired to high-stakes tests to force people to see things his way. Very few hearts and minds have been won at this point.

As a Backdoor Method of Imposing State and Federal Amateur Top-Down Control of Curriculum in Local Schools

Okay, this goal has kind of worked out. Many school districts have redesigned their curriculum to "align" with the BS Test (not the standards, but the "anchor" standards, or standards that will be tested). Heck, some school districts have restructured the district itself to accommodate the test (what's the best to handle the fact that 8th graders tend to do poorly on these tests? either fold them into your high school, or lower your "middle school" years so that they include elementary tests.) Test-centered curriculum affects students scheduling, with students who come up short on the practice tests may find they have to schedule around double math or double reading (no art, music, or history for you, kid). Within math and English classes, teachers are directed to use "data" from practice tests to "inform" their instruction, which fo course necessitates dropping content that is not On The Test.

So yes-- this particular goal of the BS Test is being achieved. It's just a very bad thing.

Bonus Paranoid Goal

You may believe that one of the goals of the testing regime is to destabilize, dismantle, and destroy public schools. I think some reformsters really thought this was going to help, and you can spot them because they are acknowledging that they failed. I think other reformsters weren't necessarily scheming, but when this came down the pike, they smelled an opportunity. And some reformsters absolutely want to see public education dismantled and the pieces sold off. BS Tests have been a useful tool in selling the narrative that public schools are "failing," that students are "trapped" in terrible public schools. In fact, BS Testing has been a kind of two-fer, because if you want to claim that public schools are failing, you can argue that they are now tied up in testing and following stupid government rules. Hey-- it's even a three-fer, because reformsters who want to move on to the Next Big Thing can say, "Yes, this test-centered reform is awful-- what we really need is Personalized Competency Based Learning Education Stuff!"

But How Else Will We Know How Schools Are Doing?

It's a fake question, because it assumes that BS Tests are now telling us how schools are doing, and they aren't. Nobody's definition of a Good School is "one in which students score well on a once-a-year math and reading test." There are so many things that matter in deciding if a school is a good one or not, and the vast majority (perhaps all) of them are not measured by the BS Tests.

So, Back To The Main Question

The Big Standardized Test was launched into schools with big goals, big plans, big dreams-- and none of them have come true. We've been doing this for oh so many years now, and if we were going to reap benefits, we would be awash in those benefits right now. We are not. Not by the measure of the supposedly "gold standard" NAEP test, not by college success, not by an economic and cultural renaissance caused by an influx of super5-educated young people.

Some of the goals associated with the test were not worthwhile goals to begin with. Some of the results have proven to be hugely undesirable. I don't believe that anyone associated with test-centered accountability said, "Oh, and let's try to make young children really stressed out to the point that they are crying and pulling hair-- that would be cool!" And yet, here we are.

Here we are spending a buttload of tax money on a product that has not delivered on any of its promises-- a buttload of money that could be spent to make schools better. Here we are shortening the school year so that even less instruction can take place.

Here we are continuing with the testing regimen even though, after two decades, we don't have a shred of evidence that it is doing any good, and a ton of evidence that it is doing harm.

So why are we still doing this?

Inertia? Affection for the status quo (which test-centered schooling now is)? Corporate lobbying to keep the tax dollars flowing? Policy leaders unwilling to confess they screwed up? Because legislators understand education as well as they understand the internet?

I don't know the answer. But I do know what we should do next.

Stop.

Just stop.

Cancel the BS Tests. Throw them out. Have an honest conversation about which of the above goals are worth pursuing and how best to pursue them. That will take time; it won't be easy. Maybe there will be a place for the right tests, used correctly, in the future. Maybe. But what we have now continues to do serious damage to US public education. It's costing us so much, both in terms of money and human toll and opportunity costs, and it is giving us nothing in return

Stop. Stop the testing. Stop it completely. Stop it now.

Just stop.

Teaching in the Machine Age (Or Not)

The Christensen Institute is devoted to "disruptive innovation," or as a five-year-old might put it, new and creative ways to kick over the big stack of blocks.

For the big stack of blocks that is public education, Christensen has the big boot of personalized computer-driven education-favored product. And a new part of their pitch is the recently released report/PR prospectus, "Teaching in the Machine Age: How Innovation Can Make Bad Teachers Good and Good Teachers Better" by Thomas Arnett.

Hi! I'm your new teacher, and here's my human assistant.

Arnett is a Senior Deep Education Thinker at Christensen, which is impressive since it was only five years ago that he was finishing out his two years with Teach For America in Kansas City. He then spent three months at Achievement First in 2012, and moved on to Senior Education Research Fellow at Christensen in 2013.If we dig deeper, we find that between 2002 and 2009 he was at Brigham Young earning a BS in Economics, and later did some graduate work at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, including (and you'll want to remember this) Data Mining, Applications of Operations Research,Management of Software Development for Technology Executives, Innovation Ecosystems, plus Commercialization and Innovation: Strategy. So, no education.

This is the guy who's going to tell us how The Machines will help us do our jobs. Yay. But I have read this so you don't have to, because this trend toward Personalized Competency-Based Software-Centered Education has been poised to become the Next Big (Money-making) Thing, so we need to know what they're thinking. Here we go.

Introduction: Welcoming Our New Computer Overlords

Computers just go smart enough to win chess games and Jeopardy, so clearly they are ready to help us run the world. They are doing All The Things, which raises the question-- will join "assembly line workers, personal accountants, taxi drivers, sports journalists, and family-practice doctors" in the list of workers whose jobs "fall prey to machines." Wait! What? Family-practice doctors have been replaced by machines? I have got to pay closer attention to Dr. Fee the next time I stop in.

But fear not, teachers.Complex social skills are required for teaching, so we can't be automated. However, the part of teaching characterized by non-teachers as "dispense information and assess student's knowledge of rote facts and skills"-- well, Arnett hints he's not so sure you need a human for that.

But computer-centered education is still a solution in search of a problem, so Arnett proposes the problem-- getting a high-quality teacher for every student. He even proposes reasons for this problem. There are teacher shortages, fed by low pay and low prestige. Schools are bad at hiring the best teachers. Teachers are burning out and leaving what with the grueling hours etc etc, which exacerbates the shortage issue.

Fortunately, technology can help with these problems. Not by improving teacher pay, work conditions or prestige, silly. No, we're going to "commoditize professional expertise."

Commodi-what??

Commoditize. Which means basically the same as commodify, which means to turn into a commodity. Innovations can do this, and we're going to talk about doing it many, many times in this report.

These innovations simplify and automate some of the tasks of experts, making expert-quality work less scarce and more widely available. 

In other words, some skill sets are rare and therefor expensive and hard to get, like, say, getting Lebron James to play for your basketball team. If you could commoditize basketball skills, though, you could maybe come up with a hundred basketball-playing robots of comparable skill, and everyone could have Lebron on their team. In sectors like the restaurant biz, we solved this issue years ago by turning high-skill jobs (guy with skills and training to be a chef) into low-skills jobs (guy with ability to stick basket in deep fryer). But if we could commoditize teaching...

How could we do such a thing? What sorts of innovations would help commoditize teaching so that we wouldn't have to pay a bunch of money to highly trained professionals with a rare skill set?

Innovations That Simplify Professional Expertise

It used to be hard to diagnose scurvy. Now any mook can identify it by consulting with Dr. Google. Once we learn a lot about some deep, complex area of expertise, we no longer have to depend on highly trained skill sets to deal with the issues. Non-experts can just follow the rules and the procedures laid down by actual experts and-- voila!-- anybody can do the job just like a pro!

Innovations That Automate Professional Expertise

As the understanding of a field moves from expert intuition to rules-based practices, parallel developments in the field of computer science make it possible to automate many tasks that historically required the attention of experts.

After you've reduced expertise to simple procedures, any idiot can do the work like an expert. And "any idiot" always includes "anything run by a computer." Computers can now fill out your tax returns and figuring out your credit score.

What Happens To Commoditized Professions

Good question. Perhaps we should all ask the next gas station attendant we meet.

First, Arnett says that after commoditizationizing takes hold, non-experts can step in to do all sorts of work that previously required professionals. There may be a slight hole in his argument here:

For example, using rules-based medical science and the latest diagnostic equipment, middle-skilled professionals, such as nurses, can diagnose and treat many conditions

Yikes. I am absolutely not telling my mother- or sister-in-laws that as nurses they are just middle-skilled folks. If Arnett is ever in need of health care, I recommend that he keep this observation to himself as well.

Second, he says, the handling of so many tasks by computers and other drones frees up the trained expert to do more experty things. For instance, doctors can stop scanning test results and leave that to the computer while they go consult with patients about treatments and complications and other inquiries like "Holy hell are you telling me that my tumor diagnosis came from some machine and not an actual human!!??"

Arnett lays all this out in a chart to show that computers can do any algorithmic stuff, non-experts can just follow orders, and experts can use their "human cognitive flexibility" to handle creative problem solving and "engage in complex interpersonal communication."

Also, all the cool data and information that the computers and meat widget drone assistants collect will give the experts many more chances to come up with cool ideas as they sift through all that data.

See? There's still a place for carbon-based life forms in this brave new world. Just fewer of them, and cheaper ones. Feel better yet?

Arnett Puts His Foot In It

As he works his way around to explaining what all this has to do with teaching, Arnett says a Dumb Thing:

In industries, such as teaching, where professionals are under great pressure to do and accomplish more than they have in the past, assistance from non-experts and computers can be a huge boon to professionals

First, teaching is not an "industry." Teaching is "manufacturing" and it does not result in a "product," any more than ministers manufacture married people or couples manufacture children.

Second, teachers are not under pressure to do and accomplish more. Not really. We're under enormous pressure to waste a lot of time on malpractice like Common Core-based curriculum and tons of time doing test prep in order to get test scores up. So we are under pressure to do more pointless timewasting and less actual teaching.

Disney Animation

Arnett illustrates his point by talking about Disney animation, trying to show how the advent of computer tools gave animators all sorts of new capabilities and stuff they could do, shifting from the slide-rule computed camera tracking shots of Peter Pan to the CGI-guided swoops of Beauty and the Beast. He might have thrown in color issues as well-- the animators of Fantasia had to turn to things like fruit jelly to come up with colors they wanted, while modern animators have a rich and wide palatte to chose from. Hey, they've even made some big hits with this technology. I hear the young people really like the Frozen and the Finding Nemo.

On the one hand, I see Arnett's point. Technology has broadened the available possibilities for creators of animated movies, allowing experts in the field to imagine and create things far beyond what was available in the past.

On the other hand, his point is stupid because schools do not create commercial properties from scratch, but instead help develop and support live human beings. Because people aren't products. Animators start from a literal blank slate to create their products, and animated films don't have an opinion about what they want to be when they're created. Arnett needs to read that cute inspirational story about the blueberries.

"Create an awesomely marketable product" is not the gig in education. His analogy is terrible. But now he's ready to go back to the main questoin.

Will Innovations Replace Teachers?

Wellll......

If you were wondering what part of reformsterland Arnett hails from, he will now cite authorities like the Brookings Institute and Bill Gates.

Simplifying teacher expertise is no big deal-- heck, textbooks are an old tech version of that, saving us all from the trouble of coming up with our own materials. I actually have spent some time thinking about this, resulting in my decision a few years ago to stop using the grammar textbooks my school bought for our classes. I dumped them because they kept my teaching tied to their pace, their ideas, their examples, and their limited practice materials; I decided I would rather take my cue from my students and what they needed and how they could best be helped to understand. Could i have done this when I first started out? Probably not enough hours in the day-- and the fact that I can type materials up on a computer and have them printed out on a machine on the other side of the building certainly helps, so I guess I both object to and agree with Arnett's point.

Or maybe my point is that if you aren't very careful, labor-saving (or labor-transferring) technology will tell you how to do your job instead of helping you do it.

Arnett really wants to talk about automating part of the teaching process, having computers assign the materials and assess the materials and collect all the data from the materials, and not for the first time, I am kind of non-plussed by the way that folks like Arnett talk about all these hunks of adaptive teaching software as if it descended from a cloud, given some sort of divine breath by some higher power. I, on the other hand, view them as if some stranger knocked on my classroom door and said, "Hey, I'd like to come teach your class using my own materials." Is there any reason to believe that this stranger knows my job better than I do, that this stranger has any level of expertise that I should respect? I ask this question as an experienced teacher who has never yet seen a textbook that did not have its share of bonehead materials and just-plain-wrong baloney, clearly written and published by someone who had no idea how it would actually play out in a real classroom. Why should I believe that software will be better?

Software is written by people. Why should I trust those people or hand my classroom responsibilities over to them? There may be perfectly good answers to both of these questions, but we won't get to them if we keep pretending that computer software is magical and not just one more human-written teaching tool.

Arnett even has the nerve to bring up Pearson's WriteToLearn, yet another footnote in the long sad history of trying to get computer software to teach writing.

But now Arnett wants to talk about three specific situations in which it would be awesome to commoditize teachers and hook students up to a friendly computer.

#1 When Schools Lack Expert Teachers

Arnett believes that if you don't have a top-notch teacher to teach a class, some computer software would be great. He tells a long story from India to illustrate this point. He's heavy on how the human touch is still needed-- but boy do those magical computer programs make a difference, and I decide to take him even less seriously because he starts talking about measuring learning gains in some sort of linear fashion (these students learned had 2.5 times the gains of those students-- what does that even mean?? Test scores? Because I'm pretty sure India needs more than just people who do well on bubble tests.)

#2 When Expert Teachers Must Tackle an Array of Student Needs

Gosh, differentiation is just, you know, soooo hard! What would make it way easier is to have all of the students hooked up to computers that could automatically differentiate and spit out scads of data which the teacher can then pore through in her copious free time.

It's true-- meeting the needs of every individual student in the classroom is challenging. Oddly enough, Arnett doesn't discuss one obvious solution, which is to hire more teachers in order to create smaller class sizes, a known winner of an idea, but also an idea that doesn't make any money for all the people heavily invested in computer teaching software. More teachers and smaller class sizes would also provide no help to guys who went to Carnegie Mellon to study Data Mining (I told you to remember) which is so much easier when you've got the students doing all their work on the computer.

Arnett wants to sing the praises of Teach To One, one more teaching program in a box. I remain unimpressed.

#3 When Expert Teachers Need To Teach More Than Academics

So, always.

Increasingly, advocates are calling for schools to place greater emphasis on fostering students’ deeper learning and noncognitive skills. Recent research shows that noncognitive factors—such as goal setting, teamwork, emotional awareness, self-discipline, and grit—are strong predictors of how likely students are to persist through college and succeed in the workforce.

Oh, honey. This is the kind of thing that people say when they're young and impressed with themselves and they don't actually know very much at all about the teaching profession. This is the part where the TFA reformster comes breathlessly out of the classroom to declare, "Boy, those kids have like emotions and feelings and stuff and sometimes they have problems that they want to talk about and, man, I thought I would just teach math and reading and stuff but they really need other things and, dude, it's just hard!"

His exemplar here is Summit charters, a group that can barely acknowledge the non-academic needs of its staff, let alone its students. And Brainology. And project based learning and competency based education and basically every version of hooking up students to computers rather than humans. Or as I heard one parent comment, "I don't know whether to send the Christmas card to my child's teacher or to his computer." If the software (or rather, the software writer) is handling all the curriculum, practice and assessment, while the present live human is handling mentoring and non-cognitives, who is actually assisting whom?

Arnett offers data and theories. What he fails to offer is any evidence that computer-centered schooling is superior to any other model. In the end, he tries to dial it back and argue for a sort of teacher-cyborg, a expert (or near-expert) who is so computer-enhanced that she accomplish great new things with the help of her new technopal. Or maybe it's a computer teaching, and the human is just its attendant, and that's what is supposed to work so great. But evidence? There's none, just as there's no solid evidence that Arnett really understands what a teacher does in a classroom.

If you've been in teaching for more than a decade, you've been here before. Some salesman, who may have spent a year or two in classroom before deciding it wasn't really his gig, stops by to sell something. He doesn't seem to really understand your job, but he assures you that if you just buy his product and change your whole practice to match what the product is supposed to do, you will accomplish awesome things. Thanks, dude, but I'm already overstocked on snake oil.

16 Policies for the Next President

Bellwether Education Partners, a reliably reformy right-tilted thinky tank, recently issued a compendium of policy ideas for the next President. "16 for 2016" comes with sixteen writers and sixteen ideas, though it's not entirely clear which candidates it's aimed at-- presumably not Hillary, whose contacts among the right-leaning world of corporate education privatizing are probably better than Bellwether's, and presumably not Trump, who neither takes nor comprehends advice.

Hmm. What do all these policies have in common?

So let's think of this as both a thought experiment and a look at the kind of policy ideas reformsters will be pitching to Congress, as well as a signal of the kinds of things reformy types would like to push these days. I have read this so that you don't have to, but since there are, in fact, sixteen of these things, I am going to summarize pretty brutally here.

1) Seed More Autonomous Public [sic] Schools

Sara Mead argues that we've proven that bad urban schools can't be turned around, but (citing a 2015 CREDO study) some charters do some better with some students similar to the urban poor students. So instead of trying to turn around low-performing schools, let's just open a bunch of charters to replace them. This is not so much about improving education as it is about opening markets to charter profiteers.

2) Transform School Hiring

Chad Aldeman has a point-- many schools have crappy hiring practices. He observes that it is a homegrown business, with the majority of new teachers working within twenty miles of their home town. And if you read here regularly, you already know how much I agree with this:

Despite complaints of a “teacher shortage,” districts act like the laws of supply and demand don’t apply to teachers, and they treat teachers as if they’re immune to financial incentives. 

Aldeman recommends adding performance tasks to the hiring process (something that many districts do "unofficially" by using hopefuls as substitutes before finally hiring them). Why is any of this part of recommendations on the federal level? Because some of these ideas are costly, and Aldeman suggests some federal grant incentives to help districts, particularly poor ones, do better.

3) Bring the Blockchain to Education

Oh, this dumb idea again.

Technocrats are sure that teacher professional development can be handled just like bitcoins, and that we can just plug teachers in to earn badges that show their competencies. This is a dumb idea for so many reasons, but the biggest one is that this kind of competency-based learning ignores what we know about authentic assessment. My earning of a badge doesn't measure any competency except my ability to earn badges. On top of that, these sorts of proposals (many companies are working on this model) have staggering implications as far as data privacy-- to work we need to put everything there is to know about you in a data file, and that data file needs to be open to the world, all maintained by whatever corporation manages to win market control, partnered up with the federal government. What could possibly go wrong?

4) Share the Risk of Student Loans

Andrew Kelly checks in with a new idea-- make colleges and universities share the risk on the loans their students take out. Practically, speaking, this might mean charging institutions a percentage of the outstanding balance on "non-performing" loans. This might arguably make institutions more interested in keeping their costs affordable. Kelly acknowledges that it would also give them an incentive to take very few low-income students who would be more likely to default on their loans. Colleges and universities point out that this holds them accountable for behavior completely out of their control. I'd like to point out that it would also give colleges and universities an incentive to cut programs that don't reliably lead to big loan-paying incomes.

5) Get Schools in the Fight Against Child Sex Trafficking

On the one hand, definitely. The writers are absolutely correct in saying that schools should be a safe haven for students, and that the school community is a good place to both keep a watchful eye and inform people about what to watch for. On the other hand-- hell, one more social ill that schools have to somehow fix on top of everything else. Do you suppose someone will finance this, or will it be one more unfunded mandate?

6) Scale Great Mentoring to Reach More Kids

Steve Mesler, Olympic gold medalist and  co-founder of Classroom Champions, thinks that we should have mentors out there to help every students to "persevere like an Olympian" (and he has a company to work on it). Scaling up mentoring for all kids means "a shift away from the one-on-one model" to a (surprise) computerized online techy model. There are some folks with super-cool ideas. Just give them about $90 million of grant money and they will whip this right up for you.

7) Network Early Childhood Education Providers

The Head Start "network" is not getting the best results. Let other early childhood providers network, share best practices and, of course, drive it all with data while encouraging innovation. In other words, rip the early childhood biz out of the cold. clammy hands of the feds and surrender it to the warm, friendly embrace of private corporate providers. But keep that federal money flowing.

8) Give Good Food To Kids

Local foods for local schools. A cool concept, but as acknowledged by the writers, depends on the capacity of local farmers. The writers get into a lot of the wonky bits of this, and it reminds me that the US food system is a behemoth that has been both absorbed and seriously warped by huge corporate interests; in many ways, it resembles the future that corporate interests seem to have planned for education. So while I like the idea of Farmer Jones bringing his harvest to my school cafeteria, I'd need a lot of reassurance that we're talking about anything that homey and simple.

There's also a bit here from Tom Colicchio (yes, that one) talking about putting quality over cost, which is another idea that I like except that, of course, the cost factor will be fought tooth and nail. He offers some wonky info about procurement procedures that might help.

9) Make Competitive Grants Work

Yes, sure. Also, make pigs fly out of my butt. Competitive grants are a hallmark of the Obama administration, and they work exactly as you would expect-- the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and the rewards go to the people who are good at the grant-grubbing process, not the people who are good at education. Juliet Squire suggests that the process would be better if the feds were more clear about accountability and implementation, and if they didn't require that grant applicants propose unrealistic goals. Those are not bad ideas, but they don't address the fundamental badness of the competitive grant idea itself.

10) Build Charter Schools Like Affordable Housing

What James Wilcox means is not "build charters like crappy, poorly-maintained housing that nobody who had a choice would choose." What he means is "offer lots more tax credits to people who build charter schools." These would presumably be over and above the generous breaks offered under the New Markets Tax Credit that allows investors to double their money in seven years. Because throwing money at public schools is terrible and stupid, but throwing money at charters is awesome and smart.

11) Connect Career and Technical Education to Real Post-Secondary Opportunity 

I'm a huge fan of CTE-- while other parts of the country are trying to get it back, here in my region it never left and it has always been super-excellent education for many of my students. And any such program benefits from a high school version of a job placement program.

However, what Alex Hernandez reminds us is that there's a slim line between offering job placement services for students and turning a CTE program into a taxpayer-funded training program for specific industries and employers. Hernandez suggests that we could even go as far as apprenticey programs (we call them work release here) where students leave school and learn in the workplace. All of this is great as long as the school system maintains its commitment to the students and NOT to their future employers.

12) Provide Sector Agnostic Federal Support for Schools

Andy Smarick's argument is detailed and developed, but it boils down to one more privatizer plea for the feds to stop favoring public schools, which is pretty close to getting the feds to drop their commitment to a public school system in this country.

13) Expand Accountability in HIgher Education

This reformster argument always puzzles me, because the higher education system comes really close to their dream of a free market education system. But Michael Dannenberg loses credibility right out of the gate by citing the US News rankings. But he has an ear-worthy argument here about institutions of higher learning that have become endowment investment businesses with universities loosely attached-- and which somehow fail to reap the rewards of their funding wealth. He also scolds them for calcifying inequality rather than erasing it. He is perhaps oversimplifying (poor students fail to thrive at big time universities for reasons other than affording the education), but he has a point. Of course, part of his point is that the feds must interfere with this market and take a stronger hand in telling management how to manage and spend its money.

14) Creating Real Second Chances for At-Risk Youth

It's legit to note that some alternative schools are more holding pens for problem students than a legitimate attempt to find an alternative path to success. I'm less impressed that Gary Jones pivots from there quickly to the notion that the feds should finance more private (charter) schools to meet the need. Who exactly are we creating second chances for?

15) Give Education Power to Families

Ben Austin likes school choice. He pretends to be shocked that federal law does not explicitly note that education exists to serve the needs of children, on his way to making the old argument that schools put adult interests ahead of student interests. This is a bad argument based on a flawed premise-- public education was never about providing a service strictly for students, but about creating an American public that is educated and prepared to participate in a democracy. Students and their parents are stakeholders in the system, but so are future neighbors, employers, taxpayers, co-workers, and fellow voters. Austin would like the system to be changed so that it explicitly is all about the children and so that parents can file more lawsuits. He appears to want more Vergara's, and not ones that get reversed on appeal.

RiShawn Biddle wants more choice, because " we know that expanding school choice and empowering parents can be key to improving student achievement," which is a bold statement, a ballsy statement, a statement for which there is not a speck of evidence. Biddle wants a charter choice system, and he deploys all of the same old arguments, including all the ones that have been repeatedly debunked (waiting lists? really?).

16) Democratize Data

Aimee Rogstad Guidera is here from the Data Quality Campaign, an advocacy group for lots of folks who hope to make a bundle playing with data. She's here to argue that schools should be data mining like crazy, and using the two smoke screen arguments preferred by all the folks who want to make a mountain of money in the data mines-- parents need it, and teachers need it. This is baloney. Teachers are already prodigious collectors of data, and it is far more deep, wide, and nuanced than anything available from the  Data Overlords. Parents who want access to rich data about their children (you know-- the human beings that they have raised from birth and who live in the same house) can get ahold of the child's teacher.

Neither of the groups need the prodigious mountains of data argued for here, but talking about them is far less off-putting than saying, "If you let us collect all the data about your child, we can make a mint selling it to various other interested parties." And no-- I have no idea what it means to "democratize" data

So there you have it

Some points worth thinking about, and a whole lot of swift repackagings of the same old reformster profiteering sales pitches. As I said at the top-- Clinton already knows all of this and all Trump really wants is a tub of gasoline and a blowtorch, so I'm not sure to whom this pitch is aimed. But it's on the reformster radar, so it should be on our as well.