The Charter Effect On Teachers

Unions, we have been told, have a deleterious effect on  teachers, forcing them to accept lousier deals than they could get in a free market where they each negotiated their own deals. In such a market, schools would compete for teachers, bidding up the salary offers. Teachers could negotiate from a place of strength. No teacher would ever want a union ever gain.

I confess that there was a time when I thought this might be true. Long ago, I thought that whatever their flaws, charter and choice systems would turn popular and successful teachers into sports stars, with schools throwing money and cars and lord-knows-what-else at them.

There were several factors I didn't reckon with, the chief one being the degree to which the charter industry would view teachers less like LeBron James and more like Pat the fry cook. I didn't foresee that charterpreneurs would imagine a system where the teacher was just a fleshy bot, a particularly lifelike animatronic content delivery device with a shelf life of only a few years. I failed to realize that a teacher's ability to walk away would be overshadowed by a school's ability to fire teachers for any reason at all.

Over the years the anecdotes kept rolling in to show me how wrong I was. But there was also some actual research, like this report from Public Source in Allegheny County PA (the county that surrounds Pittsburgh). I missed this report when it came out two years ago, but it's worth looking at now.

Public Source did a separate report about charter staff turnover. The turnover is high, and that's destabilizing for students, but charter operators have generally considered it a feature, not a bug. Is it related to teacher pay and job security? That's the question Public Source asks in this report.

They actually start with the question "Will charters and cybercharters honor Right-To-Know requests?" and the answer was mostly, kind of. But that was the data the report had to work with.

So do charter teachers in Allegheny County enjoy high wages, driven by competition? The answer is no. Charters are not filled with teachers who jumped ship from public education because someone waved big money at them. The report did find a correlation between teacher pay and student results, so there's that. But it also found that charter teachers could expect to make less money than their public school counterparts. Median pay for charter teachers was about $10,000 less than the public school teachers in the county.

Charters offered some explanation for low teacher pay, including the idea that charter faculty are mostly newbies, just starting and so gettin bottom dollar (so I guess the old reformy refrain about how fresh, new teachers are better to have than old, crusty teachers does not inform pay scales).

But some charters are coming up with creative ways to handle turnover...

To improve teacher retention at Propel Schools, financial incentives have been added in recent years, said Superintendent Tina Chekan.

They include pay bumps at the five- and 10-year thresholds and bonuses for teachers who participate in the Teacher Career Pathways program through which they seek ways to have impact beyond their classrooms by helping to coach or train colleagues.

So a pay scale that you move up as you stick around. Also, extra pay for extra duties. That is completely not revolutionary, and as noted before, seems to fly in the face of the reformy notion that zippy young teachers make a better staff than crotchety old ones. It's almost as if experience with the school population combined with the stability the school gets from staff continuity- it's almost as if that stuff has real value.

The study also found some charter staffs deciding that they did, in fact, need a union. Not just for issues of pay, but "the lack of job security and the desire to have a voice on issues like curriculum and best practices." As noted by said Carol Mintus, who served as the union president at the former PA Learners Online Regional Charter School [PALO].

When you have teachers who fear day after day for their jobs, they are not able to put the energy into teaching that they need to. If teachers aren't secure, eventually it's the kids who suffer.

The report does not mention the other issue here; if charters are the school of last resort, the school where teachers go to work when they can't find work elsewhere (and remember-- we're in the middle of a nationwide teacher shortage), what does that tell us about the quality of charter schools?

The golden age that charters were supposed to usher in for teachers still hasn't appeared; all indications are that we should not hold our breath.

Guns Headed For The Classroom

Of all the bad ideas.

I know there are folks who believe in their heart of hearts that arming teachers will make schools safer, or that putting armed police in the building will be helpful. But there are so many bad signs.

I want to believe that school resource officers can be helpful. Earlier this month, a school shooting was likely averted just up the road because students at the school felt comfortable enough with the SRO to turn in the students who were planning the attack.

But when I see stories like the one of the Chicago cops dragging a sixteen year old student down a flight of stairs, or see the video of a Florida cop body slamming an eleven-year-old, I have to conclude that sooner or later, some child is going to be killed in school.

I have even more misgivings when I see what a rush some states and districts are in to put guns in the hands of teachers.

A school district in Ohio apparently just decided that teachers should be able to carry in school after a three-day twenty-seven hour training. Three days. That seems like... not very much.

But that's still better than Oklahoma, where a bill just came out of committee to allow teachers to have guns in their classrooms with zero-- that zip, nada, none-- hours of training. Previously the state allowed only those withe peace officer or armed security guard certificates to carry, and those require 240 hours of training.

The potential for disaster here is huge. Were I still teaching, I'm not sure that finding out my neighbor was packing in the classroom next door wouldn't have me dusting off my resume. Guns in the hands of untrained amateurs in my building would be a deal breaker, on par with an unshielded nuclear reactor in my closet.

If you think I'm overreacting, consider this list of firearm screwups in just the last five years, courtesy of Giffords.org.

A gun was found unattended in an elementary school bathroom. No, not that other time. No, not this time, either. This time when it was left over the weekend.

A teacher was helping students do cartwheels when a loaded pistol fell out of his waistband.

A teacher lost it in a road rage incident, then took the other person's phone at gunpoint. Then he took the gun to school.

A kindergarten teacher came to school with a loaded gun. Oh, and she was drunk.

A student took a security guard's gun out of its holster.

During a lockdown over a false report, a security guard accidentally fired his gun.

A teacher unintentionally fired a gun in class. A student was hit in the neck by bullet fragments.

A sheriff's deputy unintentionally fired his gun in a classroom. The classroom was empty, but the bullet passed through the wall and hit the teacher next door in the neck-- fortunately not hard enough to break skin.

A school custodian thought he's caught kids trying to break in; he chased them down and pointed his gun at them.

While breaking up a fight, a school security guard pulled a gun on a student and threatened to kill him.

While a security guard was trying to subdue him, a student reached into the holster and pulled the trigger, firing the gun.

A wrestling coach got in an argument with a thirteen-year-old wrestler, then pulled a gun on him in the restroom.

A school resources officer committed suicide by gun while students were in school.

A teacher locked himself in an empty classroom and fired shots out the window.

This is just a fraction of list collected by Giffords.com.

Guns in schools-- even in the hands of trained professionals-- are an invitation to trouble. Arming teachers is a bad idea, and unlikely to be of any help in worst-case scenarios. The window of opportunity is tiny, the chance for collateral is huge, shooting accurately in high stress situations is hard, and the confusion on the scene, particularly as police arrive, just makes things worse. And for the whole rest of the year, you have a firearm in your school. Teachers have to be aware of all the many things they usually have to be aware of  while keeping track of that gun at all times.

Guns in school do not make people safer. They have the potential to make problem situations worse, they are a constant hazard to all students sand staff, and they will not even help should an active shooter situation occur. The price is too high, the payoff too low. To make things even worse by arming teachers with zero training is hugely irresponsible.

Melinda Gates Achieves Peak Epic Cluelessness

Sigh. Melinda Gates seems like a nice lady who means well, but her recent interview at the New York Times Magazine is a master class in how living in a very wealthy bubble can leave you out of touch with the rest of the world and an understanding of your place in it.

It starts in the very first paragraph.

“There are absolutely different points of view about philanthropy,” says Melinda Gates, who, along with her husband Bill, heads the charitable foundation that bears their name, aimed at increasing global health and reducing poverty. Its endowment, at $50.7 billion, is the largest in the world. “But we’re lucky to live in a democracy, where we can all envision what we want things to look like.”

Well, we can all envision what we want things to look like, and then become in a political process to support and elect leaders who then work within a democratic-ish government to pursue that vision. Only a few of us can use our vast wealth to completely circumvent the entire democratic process to impose our vision on the rest of the world.

This woman.

David Marchese, who I'm betting has read Anand Giridharadas's Winners Take All,  opens the door wide for Gates to consider one of the deeper issues of modern philanthropy by asking, "When you meet with other wealthy philanthropists, do you find that anyone is grappling in a serious way with their own culpability for problems, like growing income inequality, that are at the root of issues they’re trying to solve?" Do you get that it's very possible that you are spending money to amelliorate conditions that you have created?

She whiffs.

There are absolutely people thinking about this. Then there are others who, no, they’re comfortable with how they act. But one of the reasons the Giving Pledge has been so important is that in some countries — in India, in China — we’re starting the discussion about philanthropy. I will say that of the 190 who have joined the Giving Pledge so far, some of them joined because it looks good. But I’m stunned by how many visits we’re hosting at the foundation now with philanthropists — not even billionaires, millionaires — asking us: How did you think about philanthropy? How did you do it?

Nope. The question is not "Should rich folks give back" but "Should rich folks look at changing the system that made them unreasonably rich to begin with."

But Marchese will give her another chance, and makes his real question pretty clear:

When you’re in Giving Pledge meetings, would it ever fly to ask people not just to give more but to take less?

She is not having it:

Look, there are going to be lots of points of view in the room about that topic. But I think you frame it as: What do we want for our democracy? How do we want the country to look and act and be 50 and 100 years from now? I will tell you that many people in that room want better outcomes for low-income people in this country. They want to see things get better

Note the term "low-income people." Not "people who end up with the short end of the short end of the stick because we've rigged the system so that some of us get most of the stick to ourselves." No, the "low-income people" suggests that their poor status is part of their nature. You can't change it by, say, distributing the spoils of industry more equitably to begin with; you just count on wealthy people to make those low-incomers a little more comfortable. You know, so "things" can get "better.'

Also, what I want for my democracy is to not see it circumvented and stage managed by rich people, thanks.

And Marchese, God bless him, is not giving up:

One of the recurring criticisms of large-scale philanthropists is that they aren’t interested in any redress of the economic systems that create inequality. But in order to rectify inequalities, doesn’t a radical rethinking need to happen?

And Gates again completely rejects the question:

Bill and I are both on the record saying that we believe in more progressive taxes.

Nope. That is not a radical rethinking. Gates thinks it is because, she notes, many of the places they hang out tougher taxation is not a popular idea. But redistributing income is not the issue-- distributing it differently in the first place is. But the philanthropic dream here is for low-income people to somehow get a better deal without the rich having to give up their spot at the top of the heap. You really need to read Winners Take All.

Marchese gives up and moves on to ask Gates about her privilege, and she replies with some borderline bizarre observations that--well...

You have to be in the community with people who don’t look like you. When I read about a shooting, maybe in the south side of Seattle, I’m not living the experience. Whereas if I have a friend who’s a person of color, they most likely are living that experience or know somebody who was part of that community.

So... all Black people in Seattle know each other? All Black people in Seattle have experience with shootings?

Also, she wants to people to feel comfortable in her house, even with all the art and hugeness, so she's willing to wait in her yoga pants and unmadeup face while they pet the dog and -- sorry, I can't get over the "person of color" shooting experience thing.

Also, they watch tv. And it bugs her that tech people think that an app can solve anything, which is a useful insight, particular if she were to make the leap from "app" to "technocratically engineered system."

Gates's book included some revelations about her past in an abusive relationship, and here she is insightful enough to understand that there are women in the world going through things that are far worse.

Then it's on to politics. She notes that the current administration is problematic (Bill Gates told Chris Hayes that he had to explain to Donald Trump that HIV and HPV are not the same thing, twice), but luckily Congress still controls a lot of the process "so we are working with Congress more than ever." Imagine the level of privilege involved in being able to talk about Congress as just another organization that you work with.

You remember that line about how being able to disregard politics is a sign of privilege? Gates explains that she doesn't get involved in, say, financing candidates for office who support Roe v. Wade because she doesn't want to be out in a particular political "bucket," which would interfere with her ability to build coalitions and work on stuff. Though she doesn't say so, it seems this is just one more way in which the democratic process is an obstacle to implementing her vision.

Gates also apparently doesn't count the political money they spend to push their education agenda; for instance, the over-a-million spent to push charters in Washington state.

Marchese re-raises Peter Singer's question about the value of a human life versus a $100 million home.

We certainly spend money on ourselves. You see it in the house that we built. We won’t have that house forever, though. I’m actually really looking forward to the day that Bill and I live in a 1,500-square foot house.

But they do think about this stuff. Like, they decided to stop using bottled water and just get it out of the tap.

So we try to live those values as much as we can and do the best we can. But the one thing that I want to be really clear is that a vast majority of the huge funds that we have, these billions of dollars, they are going back to society.

But again-- the question of giving those dollars back is not nearly as interesting as the question of why they should have them in the first place, giving this couple the power of a small country and letting them decide how that power and money will be used. Marchese asks about when that downsizing will happen, and she doesn't know, but probably after the last kid is out of the house. Of course, the foundation will keep them coming back to Seattle part of the year, "But I assure you, if we decide to spend six months somewhere else it will be in a smaller house." Which I guess is rich person downsizing-- your second home is smaller.

Then we get to education, where Marchese suggests that maybe their work there has been inherently antidemocratic and that they've spent money in a way that "maybe seems like it's crowing out people's actual wants." But once again, the view from Gates Mountain is... different.

Bill and I always go back to “What is philanthropy’s role?” It is to be catalytic. It’s to try and put new ideas forward and test them and see if they work. If you can convince government to scale up, that is how you have success. But philanthropic dollars are a tiny slice of the United States education budget. Even if we put a billion dollars in the State of California, that’s not going to do that much. So we experiment with things. If we had been successful, David, you’d see a lot more charter schools. I’d love to see 20 percent charter schools in every state. But we haven’t been successful. I’d love to say we had outsize influence. We don’t.

Plenty to unpack here, starting with a nice clear statement of goals for charter schools-- 20%, or one charter school for every four public schools. Then there's "try and put new ideas forward and test them," which rather glosses over the fact that we are testing these ideas on human children. The entire national education system is suffering through the goop that is Common Core-- an entire generation-- and it's just an experiment. And the idea that Gates doesn't have outsize influence is so counter-reality that one hardly knows where to begin. Name anybody-- anybody at all-- who has had as much influence as a private citizen on public education. There is literally an entire cottage industry, paid for with Gates dollars, that does nothing but promote various Gates-favored reformster ideas.

Marchese presses her on the outsize influence thing, and she has an example that doesn't prove her point;

I went and met with a group of three dozen parents in Memphis. We thought we had a good idea for them. They were having none of it. So we didn’t move forward.

Let's think about this. The parents were able to show influence by influencing Gates. In other words, Gates was still the major actor in this example. That's not what no special influence looks like. No special influence looks like "We went to Memphis and nobody would even meet with us. We try calling officials and they won't even answer the phone. We e-mail top education movers and shakers and they don't even respond." That's what no special influence actually looks like-- you know, like a teacher.

Also, Gates thinks a lot about contraceptives.

Melinda Gates is no dummy, so it's hard to understand how she can have such huge blind spots, but here's modern philanthropy in all its glory. There's no question about the inequity of the situation-- of course we're super-rich and those people aren't and there's no reason to think about why that is or how we're helping to create it. There's no question about our right to operate as a privater, unelected government-- hey, we're just regular folks trying to impose our vision on the world, just like anyone else. We have no special great power and therefor no great responsibility. Also, we'd like experiment on your kids with a few ideas we have.

FL: Charter Thievery And The Worst Legislature In The USA

Imagine. You live on the 300 block of your city, and your neighborhood is starting to look kind of run down, mostly because the city has redirected a ton of your tax dollars to the neighborhood on the 400 block. You try to fight city hall, but that's futile, so instead, you get the neighborhood together, and you collect money from amongst yourselves to upgrade sidewalks, clean the streets, refurbish the curbs, and just generally fix the place up. And then the city sends a message-- "That money you just collected? You have to give some of it to the neighborhood in the 400 block."

Congratulations. You live in Florida.

Florida's elected Tallahassee-dwellers have pretty much dropped all pretense; under Governor Desantis, the goal is to completely demolish public education, with no more cover story than to insist that the resulting privatized system is still a "public school system." I have seen better gaslighting from a fourteen year old saying, "I did not throw that pencil at Chris" even though he watched me watch him do it.

The Tampa Bay Times offers some background:

Let’s check the record. For years, Republicans who control the Legislature have attacked teacher unions as the enemy and complained about under-performing public schools while starving them of financial resources. They would not let local school districts keep additional tax revenue created by rising property values. They gave them little or no money for construction and renovation. And last year, they increased base spending per student by a grand total of 47 cents.

We'll put Swampland Charter right here.

Florida has been systematically starving its public school system, so some districts took the most logical step available to them-- they levied taxes on themselves to raise teacher salaries, replace programs that were cut, and basically use their own local money to reverse the problems caused by state-level neglect. They stepped up to solve the problems the state caused.

Last week, Florida GOP legislators pooped out a proposal to stop all this locally controlled self-reliant bootstrapping (because, you know, conservatives hate local control, self-reliance, and bootstraps, apparently, now). The bill, proposed by the House Ways and Means Committee led by Rep. Bryan Avila, R-Miami Springs, says those local districts must hand over some of those tax dollars to charter schools or the state will just cut their state funding even more.

This is just nuts on so many levels. In addition to pissing on the conservative values of local control and self-reliance, this also thumbs its nose at one of the traditional arguments for charter schools-- that competition will make public schools up their games. I'd call bullshit on that point, except that's exactly what happened here-- with their ability to compete hamstrung by Tallahassee tightwads, these local districts found a way to be competitive, including competing for teachers in the midst of Florida's well-deserved and completely predictable teacher shortage.

This is legislative thievery. This is as if lawmakers bought their own restaurant and then imposed a tax on all other restaurants so that no matter where you eat out, the legislators' restaurant gets paid.

Tallahassee isn't even trying to be sneaky. The message is clear; they want charter schools to get the money, and public schools to get the shaft.

Meanwhile, the tax increases were passed for very specific amounts earmarked for very specific purposes, and if charters get to take a cut, the full amount of money won't be there, leaving local authorities to figure out, once again, how to overcome the state's inflicted financial challenges. And don't get any smart ideas about other taxation avenues; the state wants local sales taxes to now be approved by a two-thirds vote rather than simple majority.

It's thievery, and it's one more step toward the goal of turning Florida into a state with no public education system, but plenty of education-flavored opportunities to make a private fortune out of public dollars. And it would just be a mark of shame for the state alone, were Florida not Betsy DeVos's idea of how a privatized, voucherized is supposed to be set up.

Arne Duncan Makes Me Want To Punch Myself In The Brain

Arne Duncan still has a gift. I'm not talking about his ability to continually get bookings as an education, though that certainly counts as a gift in the sense that he has done nothing to earn it. No, I'm talking about his preternatural ability to raise my blood pressure.

He still hasn't gone away.

This morning, as the Board of Directors naps, I am scanning through a batch of edu-reporting that comes across my screen. I am looking at a summary of various stories from the balonyfest that is ASUGSV, when I get to a summary of a discussion of the "real" lessons of the college admissions scandal, and there I find this:

Arne Duncan, managing partner at Emerson Collective and former U.S. secretary of education, pointed out that students from wealthy families who score low on college readiness exams still have a better chance of graduating college than high-scoring students from lower-income families.

Well, duh. You might imagine that the very next sentence would be something like, "That's one more piece of proof that my policy of basing all district, school, and teacher accountability on scores from standardized tests based on allegedly college and career ready standards was a bunch of bunk, completely misguided, and a huge mistake that I now deeply regret." Ha, just kidding. Nobody familiar with Duncan would imagine that because another of Duncan's gift was a complete disconnect between the words that came out of his mouth and the policies that came out of his office. Duncan could-- and did-- wax rhapsodic about the importance of caring teachers building relationships with students in making a difference, and then go right back to demanding that those teachers be judged on their standardized test scores. He could talk about the importance of evidence and then go back to pushing policies for which there was no evidence-- or, as is the case here, pushing policies for which there was contrary evidence. Maybe the reportage here just cut out the moment of self-revelation and contrition, but history suggests not.

I mean, dammit, Arne-- you just admitted that test scores don't really tell us anything about college prospects, but here we all sit, saddled with test-centered policies that you set in cement for the whole country.

Duncan is reportedly a nice guy, but he is probably Trumpian in his ability to talk out of all sides of his mouth without a single apparent moment of reflection or self-examination.

And Lord knows there's a lot to examine. For my money, while Betsy DeVos is a truly awful and unqualified Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan inflicted far more actual damage on the US public education system. Duncan owes the students, teachers, and parents of the US a huge apology. But we're never going to get it; he'll just keep saying things that we used to say to him in an attempt to get him to realize the wrongness of his policies, only he's never going to connect the dots. He'll just smile that derpy grin, head off to his next cushy edu-guru gig, cash some more checks, and never actually see all the destruction he caused. All that and periodically raising my blood pressure.

ICYMI: Finish Those Taxes Edition (4/14)

Personally, mine are already mailed in. My circumstances changed so much this year I have no idea whether I took a bigger hit or not. But regardless of your tax status, here are some pieces from the week for your edification. Take a read, and support these writers by passing on their stuff. Remember-- when you amplify a news media piece about education and it garners more hits, you help convince editors that it's worth their time to cover education.

Most Vouchers Go To Students From Wealthier Districts

This is not a new piece, but it's a reminder that in Arizona, where vouchers have bloomed, they are rarely used by poor students to "escape" terrible schools. Good to keep in mind as vouchers enjoy a new push across the country.

The Plot Against America: Inside the Christian plan to "remodel" the nation.

A deeper dig into the UDSA Today piece about copy-paste bills. And it does get to education and vouchers.

If We Don't Work On Pedagogy, Nothing Else Matters   

Not sure I agree with every single word of this essay from Robin Pendoley, but it's at the very least a place to start a discussion.

Betsy DeVos Can't Be Bothered 

Mary Sanchez at the Orlando Sentinel has kind of had it with the typical Betsy DeVos Congressional hearing performance.

The Toll College and Career Ready Education Has Taken On Students

Nancy Bailey talks about the damage done by this policy obsession.

LeBron James Opened a School That Was Considered an Experiment

Remember how King James was going to throw his weight and money behind a public school? Erica Green takes a measured, thoughtful look at how that's going. Worth reading not just for the work of the school, but to remember what journalism that is neither puffing up a miracle school nore tearing down an edu-disaster looks like.

DeVos's Staff Blocked Researchers

Jan Resseger looks a little more closely at how the department tried to thwart research about their spending on charter schools.

Beverly Cleary's Birthday

Not strictly an education story, but the woman turned 103 this week. Damn! Here are some nice birthday pieces from Oprah, Southern Living, and Scary Mommy.  

Ron Desantis Has Big Hairy Audacious Goals For Florida Education

An excellent overview of just how very much trouble public education is in in Florida.

Betsy DeVos Quietly Making It Easier for Dying For-profits To Stick It To Students  

DeVos remains a fan of business; of students bilked by business, not so much. Here's one small, quiet way she's looking out for the former by sticking it to the latter.

Benchmark Assessments Don't Actually Do Any Good

Some thoughts about repeatedly weighing the pig.

Softly Killing Public Education

Add the St. Louis Dispatch to the list of newspaper editorial boards that have figured out that the push for vouchers is a push to kill and replace public education.

Bad Ideas and Educational Scripture  

Should we listen to the experts or to teachers (trick question).

Putting The Pieces Together   

The Momma Bears connect the voucher push of guys like Governor Lee to the drive to kill public education.

Obstacles To Building Better Writers

Writing well is one of the great uber-skills, a quality that will open an infinite number of doors in a student's life. Unfortunately, we are living through a golden age of bad writing instruction, driven by high stakes testing and shrunken, meager ideas about the very purpose of education.

In 39 years, I had some success in teaching students to be better writers. If you are a teacher intent on building better writers in your classroom, there are several positive steps to take, but we'll get back to those another day. The first step is to avoid several major obstacles that will thwart your progress and send you down paths that do not lead to your desired destination.

There Is Little Useful Research Base To Help You

These days we call for research and evidence to support instructional approaches in the classroom, but there is no meaningful research to speak of when it comes to writing. The available research is based primarily on the one question--does this technique raise test scores. That's generally problematic, but it's particularly problematic because there is no good standardized test of writing, because there is no good simple objective standardized measure of good writing. The closest we come are tests that run writing samples past experienced human readers (not tests that run writing samples past scorers who are briefly trained and given simple instructions to follow), and then we will still deal with some bias.

Look, we know there are no universally agreed-upon objective measures of writing. Pick any writer, no matter how revered and successful, from Shakespeare to Hemmingway, and I will find you experts who can explain why that beloved scribe is really a hack. The canon is full of writers who cannot manage both content and technique. And of course the canon itself is regularly rotated as our ideas about great writing shift and change.

So if someone tells you they have come up with an objective, standardized test that shows how well someone writes, they are full of baloney. And if they say they want to show you some useful research based on the results of that test, they have taken their baloney, ground it up and fried it--but it's still baloney.

There Is Only One Shortcut, And You Won't Feel Good About Using It

Over the years, many teachers have developed their own little shortcuts for dealing with that giant stack of papers. Some are ridiculously reductive, like the content area teachers who scan the essay to find certain key terms. The unfortunate truth is that if you assign 150 essays, you will have to read and respond to 150 essays. There is one corner you can cut. Students get better at writing by repeatedly writing, week after week. Frequent writing is far more effective than assigning one large writing project every nine or twelve weeks. But that creates a mountain of paperwork. The shortcut is for some assignments to only be read without a teacher response on the paper. You won't feel good about it, but the alternative is to imitate a former colleague of mine who used to take a personal day each quarter to sit at home and grade papers for twenty straight hours.

There Is No Substitute For Being A Writer Yourself

Band directors need to play instruments. Coaches need some athletic background. Great teachers of literature have read the works they teach. There may be exceptions, but they are few and far between. If you do not do some sort of writing yourself, your instruction is going to be empty second- and third-hand hints borrowed from other sources. There is no larger roadblock than trying to teach students to write when the last thing you wrote yourself was a college paper 20 years ago. When you stand up in front of your class or make marks on a student paper, you literally do not know what you are talking about.

There Are Traditions That Need To Be Discarded

If you are of a certain age, you were taught that first you must know the parts of speech so that you could build a sentence, and that you must build sentences before you could build a paragraph, and then build paragraphs so that you could build an essay. Today, there are still teaching methods built on the notion that the basic building block of a piece of writing is the sentence.

I disagree. The basic foundation of a piece of writing is not a sentence--it's an idea. Before you can write anything, you have to have an idea to write about. The traditional technical approach is helpful in learning how to write essays strictly for school (and for teachers whose writing instruction is based on this technical approach), but not for real writing for the actual world. The majority of writing problems are not technical problems--they are thinking problems. Should students still learn nouns and verbs and sentences and paragraphs? Absolutely. When there's a knock in the engine and the car won't run right, you need the knowledge to tear it down and fix the issue. But if you have no destination in mind, being able to build a car from scratch can't help you.

Once you get past these obstacles, you are ready to take some positive steps toward building better writers. In other words, once you climb this small mountain, the ascent to the far higher summit can begin

Originally posted at Forbes