PA: Failed Candidate Not Done Attacking Public Education

David McCormick is currently best known as the guy who couldn't beat a carpetbagging grifter in the GOP primary for a US Senate seat. But he's apparently not done yet.

McCormick started out as an actual Pennsylvanian, though he had to come back from Connecticut for the campaign. He's got a PhD from Princeton, worked for McKinsey, and had a great hedge fund career. He served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs under Georg W. Bush. He's a trustee of the Aspen Institute.  And lest you mistake him for some elitist candy-ass, know that after he graduated from West Point, he was an Honor graduate from Ranger school (I had a brother-in-law who was a Ranger, and those guys don't play). McCormick got in the habit of saying he served as a Ranger; he didn't. 

He apparently backed Jeb Bush, but did not donate to the Trump campaign either time, though Trump ultimately offered him the Deputy Secretary of Defense job (he turned it down so he could keep hedge funding). McCormick's wife, Dina Powell, served as Deputy National Security Advisor for former President Donald Trump from 2017 to 2018. She also served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs from 2005 to 2007 under former President George W. Bush.

In his run for Pat Toomey's seat in PA, he was heavily portrayed as a liberal Wall Street Republican. "Nice guy," said Trump, "but not MAGA." 

Well, apparently he's working on that. He recently appeared on a Philly radio talk show, where he was asked about the dreaded wokeness in America's education system. Here's the reply, as flagged by American Bridge 21st Century: 

Our schools are failing, in terms of teaching our kids the ability to compete on a global stage. But more than that, they're teaching them that America is not exceptional. If you look at the history that's being taught, and the key to preserving America is that our children believe it's exceptional and they fight to keep it that way. And so that's my biggest issue. And this all became clear during COVID, because all of a sudden, parents could see that the history that was being taught, the sexualization that was happening, particularly in our elementary schools, they could see that teachers were making decisions that were not in the best interests of their children. And that's why we've got to break the back of our teachers' unions and our public school system and give kids choice and get parents more involved. And if there was ever a case for that, we've seen it recently.

It's all the hits, including some oldies like the "compete on a global stage" trope, plus new standards like "during COVID, everyone saw that schools are awful." So let's "break the back of the teachers' union" and of course all so we can involve parents and give kids choices. 

Hats off as well to the call to teach American exceptionalism.

All of this is consistent with his original campaign materials, which tried hard to capitalize on culture wars and MAGA outrage.

Now McCormick has a book-- Something Something Renew America-- and GOP establishment types are reportedly urging him to go after Bob Casey's Senate seat in 2024. The could turn into quite the primary, as failed gubernatorial MAGA Jan 6 apologist and Christian nationalist Doug Mastriano is also "praying about" a run for that seat. Either one would make a terrible Senator and a threat to public education in the US. 

ICYMI: Family Visit Edition (3/19)

The West Coast branch office of the Institute is in town for a visit, including the newest addition to the office (picture to follow). So I've spending extra time in the actual physical world. But I've still put together a reading list for the week. Read and learn.

A public school teacher's perspective on vouchers

Texas teacher Cecily Riesenberg offers one of the best speedy dissections of the school voucher issue you're likely to read. From the Amarillo Globe-News.

Preaching to the Choir: Greg Abbott Tours Private Christian Schools (Exclusively) to Make the Case for Vouchers

Forrest Wilder at Texas Monthly notices that Greg Abbott's voucher pitch seems to be aimed at a very specific audience:

Of the seven schools the governor has visited on his “Parent Empowerment Tour,” not a single one has been a public school or a secular private school or a religious school affiliated with Catholicism, Islam, or Judaism. Not even a Montessori. If the goal was to reassure critics that Abbott’s embrace of vouchers wasn’t a recipe for draining the public school system while subsidizing the children of wealthy Christian conservatives in private schools of their choice, well, none of those critics were around to hear it. The governor was quite literally preaching to the choir.

Gov. Abbott To Pay For Buses To Transport Voucher Supporters To Austin

Yeah, there's a lot of Texas on the list this week. Reform Austin has inside scoop that suggests Governor Abbott is spending some money on astroturf for the big voucher push.

Texas asking for trouble if it pours billions into unaccountable ‘school choice’ scheme

Jimmie Don Aycock was a Texas legislator, and he'd like to point in particular to the complete lack of accountability for taxpayer dollars in the Texas voucher plan.

Dallas Has a Problem with Zombie Astroturf Groups

Heck of a piece of research and reporting from Steve Monacelli, showing how some of Dallas's noisiest groups are part of some huge dark money machine. From the Texas Observer.

Texas has taken over the Houston school district. Educational outcomes have not always improved in other states that have done so.

NBC News reports on the state takeover of Houston schools, correctly noting that the history of school takeovers does not suggest that this is going to end well.

And now we're done with Texas. Moving on to the rest of the country.

At risk in Pennsylvania schools - books, political talk, LGBTQ policies

Chris Ullery in Phillyburbs takes a nicely comprehensive look at the various reactionary moves against speech and reading in Pennsylvania.

Parents Defending Education’s Hit and Run Job on Milton Public Schools

Maurice Cunningham is an expert at tracing money trails in astroturf groups, and he has spotted some Parents [sic] Defending [sic] Education [sic] shenanigans in Massachusetts.

Preparing Minority Students for College Success Deserves Conservatives’ Support

Let Robert Pondiscio at the American Enterprise Institute explain to conservatives why they should not be trying to make A Thing out of college prep programs aimed at minority students.

Kansas legislators’ war on the poor opens worrisome new front: School vouchers and tax avoidance

The Kansas Reflector has emerged as a major defender of public education in that state, and Clay Wirestone, opinion editor, has lambasted the voucher plan being pushed there. Here he argues that it's a boondoggle for the rich.

Kansas ‘school choice’ plan is a money transfer from rural taxpayers to urban families

The Reflector isn't alone. Here's the editorial board of the Kansas City Star arguing that vouchers are just a cash grab for the rich.

‘Heartbreaking’: Dozens of RI children with special needs not receiving education

From Eli Sherman and Steph Machado at WPRI. What happens when a district completely failed to fill special ed spots? Special needs students get hung out to dry.

Empowering Teachers: A Strategy For Teacher Retention

Nicole Wolff at Stories from Arizona about an approach that might actually help retain teachers called Visible Learning which ironically she learned about in Houston. 

How one university is creatively tackling the rural teacher shortage

Wyoming has some good ideas about how to better train and support teachers (thereby increasing the odds they'll stick around). Nichole Dobo at Hechinger has the story.

ALL Students Deserve a "Positive Learning Environment"

Steve Nuzum pens a letter to the South Carolina legislature on the subject of their newest Don't Say Gay bill.

Teen Mental Health Distress Didn't Start with the Phones

John Warner pushes back on the recently published assertion that teen mental health crisis kicked off in 2012 (because smartphones). He brings receipt, and points instead toward toxic meritocracy.

How Stressing Preschoolers and Kindergarteners Could Lead to Mental Health Problems

Nancy Bailey points to another possible cause, and she's got research to go with it. 

Why Is the Republican Party Suddenly Weakening Child Labor Laws?

Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire at The Nation point to the disturbing history of child labor and the recent push in red states to weaken child labor laws.

Inside the “Private and Confidential” Conservative Group That Promises to “Crush Liberal Dominance”

Yes, that means they're coming for education, too. ProPublica put a whole reporting team on this story of the next group to try to take over the country.

Here's how an AI tool to catch child abuse may flag parents with disabilities

For your "reasons not to trust AI tools" file, this AP story is heartbreaking. 

For the Dedicated Teacher

Finally, the indispensable Mercedes Schneider with indispensable advice for teachers who need to master one simple word. 

Over at Forbes.com, this week I was plugging the new book from Alexandra Robbins (and I'll keep plugging it, because you ought to read it). And I took one more swipe at the continued misuse of NAEP proficiency. 

Our newest VP. Her portfolio includes drool.

If you want to stay caught up on everything coming out of the Curmudgucation Institute, I recommend subscribe to my substack version. It's free. 

NH: School Opponent Ousted From Board

It has been around a year since Free State Libertarians tried to defund public education in tiny Croydon, New Hampshire. This week, the citizens ousted the school board member who pushed the school-gutting plan through.

Ian and Jody Underwood moved to New Hampshire, part of the Free State movement that imagines that if they can get enough Libertarians to move to the Granite State, they can remake it in their own anti government image (read A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear for a fair and sometimes hilarious look at how it's going). Ian became a selectman, and Jody got on the school board. 

The district serves only about 80 students, and because it can't support more than a tiny elementary school itself, it has a model for what an honest-to-God school choice program would look like-- full tuition for students to attend the school of their choice. 

But that's expensive, and in a town hall meeting held during a blizzard, Ian sprung an unannounced motion from the floor--a 50% budget cut for education, based on just $10K per student. That's one of the lessons of Croydon--that folks on the far right are far less interested in actual school choice than they are in simply slashing government and taxes. 

That $10K did not come close to covering the tuition for the upper grade students. Newport's tuition rate is about to rise to $17,880. Private tuition costs are, with only two exceptions, also higher than the $10K. And of course the costs of special ed, transportation, and administration. So in the end, each student would not simply get a $10K pseudo-voucher from the school.

The Underwoods said it's all good. "This gives us an opportunity," said Jody. "This is going to force us to step back and figure out a good way to do this [based] on what we know about how people learn, so that we can keep costs down." Another board member cautioned against a "failure of imagination." Options like a virtual school or learning pods with new New Hampshire BFF Prenda were also tossed out.

People were pissed. The school board meeting two days later drew a crowd of 100 mostly-angry people, destined to be even more frustrated to learn that the budget passage was legal and binding and couldn't simply be reversed. 

That was not the end of the story. Residents were worked up, and they discovered that they could call a special meeting by petition. They went door to door. They held two calling events. They wrote letters to the editor. They enlisted assistance from surrounding communities, including teachers, administrators and boards of nearby districts.

Jody Underwood reportedly said the board had legal advice to not advertise the special meeting (she says she said no such thing). Meanwhile, Ian Underwood was blogging increasingly angry posts: parents don’t understand how children learn, the special meeting was actually not legal, the school district wanted to take money by force, and a piece in which he argues that majorities in a democracy are a big problem.

In the end, the budget was restored. (You can read my accounts of these events here and here--I did some actual reporting and talking to sources and everything). 

Folks on the winning side said they knew the fight wasn't over, and at the recent town meeting, they proved it. Angie Beaulieu was one of the architects of Croydon's choice plan, and pretty unhappy about the Underwood's plan. Beaulieu defeated Jody Underwood 229 to 36, as decisive a pasting as one could expect to see.  

Last year, Underwood insisted to me that she was misrepresented, that the budget cut was fair and square. She was not happy about being outmaneuvered by her fellow citizens a year ago, and I don't imagine she's any happier about this latest defeat. 

PA: Board Member "I don't care what the law says."

Penncrest is a small rural district up the road from me, a district that has been mirroring the reading suppression battles of the more famous Central Bucks district (and by mirror, I mean that some folks on the Penncrest board appear to be literally copying some of the Central Bucks work). 

But CB is a big district in the busy part of the state, and Penncrest is a tiny district up in the wilderness, so it's not getting much attention. But it's worth paying attention to, because here in the rural school region, it's not unusual for board members to say the quiet part out loud because they don't realize they shouldn't. That happens a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the rest of the state doesn't pay much attention to what rural districts do. Someday I'll tell you the story of a local district that fired a teacher for being gay, didn't bother to cover that reason with even a tiny fig leaf, and was really surprised when they were dragged into court and lost. 

Penncrest has been trying to wield a tiny tattered fig leaf over its motivations for a new set of rules aimed at getting LGBTQ+ books out of its libraries, even as some board members have been quite clear about what they mean by "sexualized content," and while we're at it, all that racism stuff, too. 

Board member David Valesky on LGBTQ books in the library:

Besides the point of being totally evil, this is not what we need to be teaching kids. They aren't at school to be brainwashed into thinking homosexuality is okay. Its [sic] actually being promoted to the point where it's even 'cool'.

Board member David Valesky on books about race in American history:

"I don't have an issue if we're giving books that's targeting education of the Civil War and slavery and there is racism even today, but this is obviously like shoving it down every corner," he said.

Valesky said there were four books on the list that "openly promote the hate group Black Lives Matter."

"That's a group that is for destroying," he said. "They aren't protecting Black lives."

Board member David Valesky on the possibility of legal challenges to the board's new rules:

If we go to court over it, so be it, because at the end of the day we’re standing up for what’s right and for what God has said is right and true.

Those legal issues may in fact occur soon, but in the meantime, the board is setting up a citizen's committee to review naughty books. And in discussing that, board members ended up talking about what was revealed in some emails unearthed by a Right To Know request. 

I believe the terms in the policy we presented are clear. I honestly don’t care what the law says, as long as what I said is right before God. They can change the word at any time in state and federal laws. I’m just concerned that if this policy is pulled, then we have a minimum of 3 months until we can vote on it again. The remainder of my time on the board is uncertain at this point.

Yes, that's member David Valesky again (emphasis mine). Member Jeff Brooks brought it up with the suggestion that maybe the committee should include people who actually care about the law. Valesky said that it was taken out of context, but it's hard to imagine a context in which "I don't care what the law says" doesn't mean "I don't care what the law says." And given the context of Valesky's previous comments, it's hard not to think that he means that he doesn't care what the law says.

Don't blame Valesky just because he's the one who keeps saying things that end up in the paper; he's part of a board majority that appears to agree with him (and plenty of members of the public, some of who hit my comments sections with posts too rude and slanderous for me to put up). And what this board nakedly displays is the same stuff that's behind curtains and masks and tiny fig leaves in other places where the culture wars are being imposed on districts.

What can we take away?

1) It has nothing whatsoever to do with school choice (not really an option in this rural area) and everything to do with imposing the Correct Values on the school system-including all the other people who use it and pay for it. 

2) "Sexual content" means any dirty heterosexual stuff and any mention of LGBTQ persons at all (and it's all "porn" that is favored by "groomers.")

3) No conversation about race-related issues is possible because the terms and targets will move on a sentence by sentence basis.

4) They answer to nobody but God, as they conceive Him to Be.

Penncrest has a bunch of seats open for election this year, and in this neck of the woods, it's an unpaid position, which means community members sign up to get a load of grief for free, and the ongoing battle over these issues in Penncrest seems unlikely to resolve any time soon. We'll see what happens next, but I can practically guarantee that whatever it is, it won't be pretty. 

Democrats Unveil Their Parents' Rights Thing

Well, I'll give them this much: rather than simply bitch about the House GOP proposed Parental Bill of Rights, the House Dems came up with a thing of their own. Since what the Dems are proposing is actually a "resolution" rather than an actual bill, it will have even less impact on reality than the GOP bill, whose main feature is its full-throated support of rights that parents already have. 

The Democrat's resolution is 8 pages long: the first is the intro, the next six are a bunch of "whereas" clauses, and then we finally arrive at what is resolved. 

The whereas's are a big bunch of the usual: schools are crucial public good, invest sufficient resources, cornerstone of democracy, all students benefit from diverse schools, education includes all [insert list here], skills needed to contribute to multiracial, multiethnic, diverse society, benefit from full history, special needs, students benefit from seeing themselves reflected in books etc, enough psychologists and counselors, broad definition of parents, parents want and deserve safety and dignity, parents eager to partner with educators, partnership, access to information about how students are doing, parent involvement is complementary and essential to, not separate from, the work of educators, schools hostile to LGBTQ students bad, dignity and respect and pronouns and names, discrimination bad, censoring books bad, cultural competency, mental and emotional health support for educators, gag law limitations bad, threats against teachers and schools bad...

And that's mostly it. I highlighted the one because I think maybe that was the one they really wanted to hit. But mostly it's a list so long that it becomes a sort of background hum, an list that reads like an attempt to throw everything and the kitchen sink at us, a display with so many points that it fails to have any real point. 

Anyway, the resolved part has four items. Resolved that the House of Representatives:

1) recognizes that schools are important and should be supported

2) "celebrates and encourages" the engagement of students and parents in the process, and collaboration in support of students is good

3) urges adoption of materials that are historically accurate, reflect diversity, and encourage critical thinking' 

4) "promotes the implementation of practices that reduce disparities, eliminate discrimination, and make elementary and secondary schools safer, more inclusive, and more supportive for all students."

And the point of this is... what? We already know who's going to vote for and against it. We already know how many people are going to be moved by it (spoiler: zero). We already know how much effect it will have on education policy (spoiler: also zero). 

It clarifies what Dems professes that is different from what the GOP professes? It ends the, "Well, then, what's your bright idea" conversation about the GOP bill. It creates the unusual spectacle of the GOP calling for more federal government intrusiveness than the Dems. 

It mostly says the right things. And while I'd rather have politicians saying the right kinds of things rather than other stuff, talk is cheap. Obama knew how to say the right thing about education. Heck, on his good days, so did Arne Duncan. But Democrats are far past the point where lip service for public education means much. Actual concrete actions in support of public education would mean far more. And if you want to talk about parental rights, I'll offer the same addendum I offered for the GOP bill:

The right to paid parental leave for 12 weeks after the child is brought home.

The right to wages sufficient to raise a family.

The right to affordable, quality child care so that parents can earn those wages.

The right to send their child to a fully funded, fully professionally staffed school.

The right to universal health care to guarantee the health and well-being of every child.

More political theater is not what anybody actually needs. I mean, if political theater is your job, then you do you. But both sides are going to need more than this for any kind of standing ovation.

ChatGPT Will Power Personalized Learning

I don't get into the business of predicting the future often, and predicting tech future seems particularly pointless as it's an area dominated by aspirational marketing rather than actual prediction.

But I think I've found a use for ChatGPT and its brethren.

The problem with personalizing learning has always been capacity.

Earlier personalized learning systems (think that SRA reading box from your elementary days) were really personalized pacing systems. Everyone traveled the same path, but at their own personal pace. Subsequent attempts to personalize learning have attempted to create multiple branching paths, but the problem remains capacity and inventory. Do you create a worksheet about subject-verb agreement problems focused on 1920's automobile design on the off chance that some day, you may have the student who needs exactly that? You do not. 

But generative text bots can help fill this gap.

I cannot tell you how many hundreds of worksheets I created in my career, and I don't even want to think about the hours I spent on them. Custom made for classes (this class is having trouble telling adjective and adverb clauses apart, so let me bang out a worksheet focused just on that). A small cast of recurring characters with improbably names (so that I would never be targeting current or future students). The years I started every class with a three-sentence editing exercise. 

I've tried ChatGPT at generating basic grammar and usage worksheets. It does fine (sometimes, for no apparent reason, it even throws in an answer key). Even if I were taking time to edit the sentences to more carefully match what I needed (and fit my particular classroom sensibilities), ChatGPT would still be a time saver.

Likewise, I have no doubt that various purveyors of computerized personalized learning products are at this very moment figuring out how to incorporate the new generation of generative textbots to provide the kind of personalization they always claimed they were already doing. Scan the student response, generate a new exercise. Do I think that having software teach a child this way is ideal? I don't. Do I think we've arrived at the point where it can be done? I do. It's cheap, quick, easy, and solves one of the central problems of computerized personalized learning.

Check back later, when standardized test manufacturers start using chatbots to reduce the costs of coming up with test items. 

Asking Teachers To Do Fewer Things Better

At the Fordham Institute blog, Robert Pondiscio and Jessica Shurtz talk about the idea of improving student outcomes by asking teachers to do fewer things better. While we disagree on some points (I'll get to that in a minute), the basic idea is sound.

Anyone who has taught for more than a couple of years has had the experience-- administration announces that you will need to add one more thing to your plate. It may be a state mandate ("Our young people need help with modern widget issues, so let's require schools to include a widget lesson in their curriculum") or it may be a new program requirement ("We're adding the new Hooray For Sticks literacy program so you'll need to make room for daily lessons") or it may be the admin's newest resume bomb ("In my continuing quest to put 'change agent' on my resume, I have decided to add this cool thing to our curriculum") or it may be the result of some passing whim ("I just read an intriguing article about instructional weasel spit...") but the end result is that classroom teachers are regularly asked to add one more task to the list of tasks they already don't have enough time for.

The piece hits on themes that have been consistent through Pondiscio's work. The education system needs about 4 million teachers, which suggests that most of them are going to be ordinary mortals, and any approach to education premised on a plan to find a bunch of superteachers and put them in classrooms is not a very good plan. On this we agree. It has occasionally been the plan, like the occasional vogue for the Super Sardinemaster model, in which we put an awesome teacher in a classroom of a few hundred students and/or shoot her out to a few hundred students via the interwebs. Race to the Top included the notion that we could identify super teachers and move them around to where they were needed, an idea that ran aground on the question of how--how to identify super teachers, and how to move them around.

We all know that "some teachers are more effective than others," except that when we say that, it's really shorthand for "we all know that some teachers are more effective at some things with some students on some days, depending on who you ask." Which is probably why we haven't made much progress with finding ways to identify great teachers and figure out what makes them great.

Many folks think it's really easy to identify really good and really bad teachers, which may be true, but the vast majority of teachers are neither super-awesome or terribly terrible. Which brings us back to Pondiscio and Schurz's point, which is that the system needs to figure out how to get the best work out of those folks in the regular human middle.

I can think of several suggestions, including a good training system and less reliance on measures that don't actually measure anything useful (lookin' at you, EdTPA and Praxis). Pondiscio and Schurz center on cutting the teacher workload-- 

Let’s not ask what more teachers can do. Ask instead what are the things that only a teacher can do. Everything else should be a job for someone else.

True that. Of course, it would require hiring those people and paying them, which is where many districts start to balk. But it is true that education consistently pays out a lot of money to do grunt jobs. Did I need a Master's Degree to supervise all those study halls, or more to the point, did my district need to hire someone with a Master's Degree and at the top of the pay scale to supervise study halls? But these kinds of "duty periods" give districts the illusion that they are getting "free" labor as well as playing to the all-too-common assumption that if a teacher isn't in a roomful of students, she isn't really working and the district isn't really getting their money's worth. 

Pondiscio has long argued that teachers should be freed up of the need to plan lessons, and when he says. "While many educators argue, often strenuously, that their autonomy is sacrosanct, and for allowing teachers to build a curriculum around their students’ interests or customize their lessons to maximize their engagement..." he could be talking about me. 

As with so many educational issues, I think lesson planning falls on a continuum. On one end of the scale, we find "teacher proof" lessons in a box, scripted for delivery "with fidelity" by people who may have the title of "teacher," but are simply content delivery units. On the other end of the scale, we find teachers who just do whatever the heck they want to on any given day. 

The scripted version probably has more supporters out there, if for no other reason than some folks find the McDonaldization of education appealing. If we've got all the lessons in a box, then we can hire any schlubb (or maybe some AI algorithm) to read the script. Low costs, no unions--for some folks it would be paradise. On the other end of the scale, I'm not sure many people are fans of the Teacher Land Of Do As You Please other than the teacher herself (and I'll bet that her colleagues support that model less than anyone). 

To be clear--both models are bad. A canned lesson created by someone who has never even met the students and is delivered by someone who makes no attempt to meet the students where they are is bad teaching. A teacher who just kind of follows her muse wherever it may lead on the taxpayers' dime is irresponsible. 

The answer lies somewhere in the middle (and probably not exactly in the same place for every school). It is both useful and helpful to provide the teacher with something, some guidance, some pathway, some sort of direction about what is expected of them in planning their lessons and laying out the road ahead. Simply dumping a teacher into a classroom and saying, "There you go-- good luck teaching them whatever" is not how you set people up for success. This is how many districts end up with a textbook-dictated curriculum--teachers resort to just opening the book and start heading through it, page by page.

And Pondiscio and Schurz are correct to hint that more autonomy equals more work on things other than analyzing student work, providing feedback and other important work that may vary by grade level and subject matter (as a high school English teacher, I spent so many hours rereading the novels I taught as well as reading about them; my wife the elementary teacher has no such issue, but the sheer volume of lesson planning she has to do boggles my mind). 

Somewhere in the midst of this continuum is the sweet spot, and I think the sweet spot is this. If you are doing your job, then when you use created materials and pre-developed lesson plans, you still go through the process of fitting that to your particular class, adapting it to student interests and needs. If during the adaptation process you conclude that it would be less work to just design your own damn lesson, then you have sailed past the sweet spot. Good teaching materials make it easier to do your job. 

There's a whole other conversation to be had about lesson planning as a paperwork exercise that exists to "prove" to the office that you're doing your job or to add to some district analysis of which standards the district is covering or to feed some admin's dream that if he has all your lesson plans on file he can replace you easily. Generally, lesson plans that are for the use of someone other than the actual teacher are a waste of teacher time.

And there's also a shift in all of this that occurs over time. Throughout my career, my year to year goal was to add one or two more balls to my juggling act while building a bigger and bigger foundation on which to build everything else. You get better at this stuff, the longer you keep at it, and you have to build less and less from scratch (however, if you just pull out last year's materials and walk through it without question or revision, you're no better than the teacher reading from the canned script). 

You learn how to reduce your own extraneous workload. Still. The last few years of my career, I carried a lot of frustration because administration was adding extra workload faster than I could trim. The pandemic and its various side effects amped that up big time. That amping includes both the additional responsibilities tossed on teachers ("Why don't you go ahead and teach all your classes live and on line?") and in the loss of time to get stuff done. I talked to former colleagues who lost their clerical work period to cover someone else's absences every single day for a year. This year, I have lost track of how many specials (art, music, phys ed) my children have lost because the teacher was pulled to cover an absence. 

If you want to piss off an administrator, in one of those Here's Your New Responsibility meetings, raise your hand and ask, "What would you like me to stop doing so I have time to do this?" The question needs to be answered, but it never is. 

In his 2016 book Leadership for Teacher Learning, Dylan Wiliam observes that when teachers are asked to identify something that they will stop doing or do less of to create time and space for them to explore improvements to their teaching, they fail miserably. “They go through the list of their current tasks and duties and conclude that there is nothing they can stop doing or do less of because everything that they are doing contributes to student learning,” he writes. “In my experience, it is hardly ever the case that teachers are doing things that are unproductive. This is why leadership in education is so challenging. The essence of effective leadership is stopping people from doing good things to give them time to do even better things.”

Yes, that. It's yet another issue where the answers can't be scaled because they are very specific and very local. But every administrator in the country ought to be working on it.