In 1841, the great American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson published "Self-Reliance," an essay which includes the line "Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string." Right now seems a good time for teachers to grab the iron in their hearts.
Teachers are, for the most part, good team players. We follow rules. We respect authority. And when people who are in positions of authority make rules, we try to behave.
If the teacher's manual gives an answer that doesn't sound right to us, we'll give it the benefit of the doubt until we double check. If district or building administration tells us to handle lunch money or attendance according to Procedure X, we'll go ahead and try to do that even if it doesn't seem like a very wise choice to us. We trust the people in charge, the responsible people. Sometimes, particularly early in our careers, we trust them more than we trust ourselves.
We're not suckers for just anybody. If some stranger walked in off the street and into the classroom declaiming, "Hey, I know exactly what your problem is. Here's what you should do," we would not imagine for a minute that this is advice we should take.
But of course that's exactly where we are. Except that the strangers have walked in off the street with bags full of money or previous success in some line of work or a note from our boss's boss saying, "I think this guy is swelleroonies!"
And these rich, powerful, well-connected amateurs are everywhere. They are running book companies, writing materials, running school districts. And of course they've engineered the biggest bloodless coup ever, a complete power grab for the entire American public education system.
Now teachers don't know who can be trusted. We want to be good soldiers, but now we don't know whose orders we're following. This is not scary because we are the subject of some evil conspiracy intended to suck our brains dry or make off with the family silverware. It's scary because, more than anything else, we want to do right by our students. In many cases we are the last, best advocate those students have. It's a tough fight, and traditionally we took strength from knowing that we were part of a large, committed army. Nowadays, we don't know who is watching our back and who is getting ready to stab it.
Imagine you're a surgeon, operating on somebody's brain. Your trusted supervisor is there, and her instructions begin, "First, get this chain saw started up..." That's teaching today.
Our unions, the textbook publishers, the state and federal ed departments, even in some cases our own district administrators-- all of them are telling us this chainsaw idea sounds pretty good. What do we do?
Trust yourself.
Emerson's point was simple-- the wise men of ancient times, today's captains of industry, the people who kibbitz from the back seat-- none of them stand where you are, see what you see, know what you know. Trust yourself.
There's been a bunch of kerflufflation over who actually created the Common Core. Shills have assured us that teachers were totally involved, in hopes that would shut people up. But they've missed the point. No critic that I've read or spoken to has said, "I think the CCSS standards are near-perfect, but since they weren't written by teachers, I shall hate them." No, the story was more like this:
1) Teacher looks at CCSS. Teacher says, "Hmm. These look like they were cobbled together by some amateur who knows nothing about teaching."
2) Teacher does some research.
3) Teacher says, "Well, that explains why these look like an amateur hack job. They were done by amateur hacks."
"The CCSS were not written by teachers" is not an excuse for not liking them. It's an explanation for why they are so unlikeable.
Lots of teachers were and are unable to trust themselves. But the further we wade into the Big Muddy, the more teachers are looking at the chainsaw they've been told to pick up and wondering if it's such a good idea. "This program I'm supposed to implement," they're saying quietly. "I'm not sure it's such a good idea." But they're saying it quietly because, you know, surely the book publishers and program designers and USDOE and all these smart, successful, powerful people-- surely they wouldn't be pushing actions that are bad for students.
Trust yourself.
When the directives you're looking at seem to go against all your teaching knowledge and instincts, trust yourself. When it seems like the directives for an English class seem to have been written by someone with far less expertise than you have, trust yourself. And if you are a newbie with limited experience to draw on, you can still trust yourself when it comes to deciding whom to trust. When it seems as if your directions are coming from people who don't know what the hell they're talking about, no matter how rich, powerful, important they may be-- trust yourself.
You are the one in the classroom. You are the one who knows your students. With years of teaching and training behind you, you are the one who knows how this stuff works. I'm not saying go Full Cowboy-- you should also be the one who knows when to get help from the right place when you need it. But you are a professional. You are an expert-- in fact, when it comes to the specific class you are teaching this year, you are THE expert.
Don't let yourself be ground down. Don't believe the message that you are a toady, a mere content delivery system, the source of all education problems. You are a trained, experienced professional. You're a teacher.
Trust yourself.
Monday, December 23, 2013
Sunday, December 22, 2013
Amplifying the Noise
Again, today, the disappointment of looking at Huff Post and finding one more bogus article by one more bogus source pretending to represent teachers. (I'm not linking to it here, and the rest of this post will make clear why). This is not a new occurrence-- from the bogus education voices of astroturf education groups to the highly-unlikely results of polls touted by the alleged leaders of what used to be a national teacher's union, teachers are finding their voices squeezed out of the way by people who pretend to speak for and about the current state of reformy stuff and education's future.
It's particularly frustrating because at this point there are many teachers with something to say who are in fact saying it, and still crowds are gathered around some snake oil salesman. How does this happen? How do we fix it?
It helps to remember some basics about how the internet and "news gathering" work today. Just remember two things:
1) Every click is a vote for whatever you just clicked on.
2) Nothing gets attention more than something that is already getting attention.
In the meat world, attention is a hard commodity quantify. The folks at Nielsen and the executives who depend their work have gone to tremendous lengths to attempt to quantify attention, and it's still an inexact science. The ad for widgets ran, but was anyone in the room? Were they paying attention to the carefully crafted depiction of the widget's many fin qualities, or were they picking corndog remnants out of their teeth?
But on the interwebs, attention is totally quantifiable. There are dozens of sites that will tell me how many people are looking at other sites. And if I'm somebody trying to find out what's hot in education, I can go to a site the Teach100 and just read today's ratings. If I'm a lazy fake journalist with a lazy aggregator, my work is already done for me-- I just have to look it up.
And that means that we all have the power to promote our favorite bloggy voices.
If I read something I like, I forward it. I put it on my facebook page. I tweet it. I link to it.
Diane Ravitch is a great example of how this works. She is extraordinarily generous in using her own clout to direct her audience to other writers. Remember-- if you like the writer that she has excerpted or quoted, follow the link to the source. It's a vote for that writer's web presence to grow. It does more than that, too-- it allows the conversation that we're all having to grow and spread.
Follow the other links you find. I'm trying to get a blogroll put together here (look over to your right and scroll) and many other bloggers are doing the same. If it hasn't happened yet, somebody is going to make a big current edublogger list. Use it and follow the links. Read what's there. If you agree with it, pass it on.
Most of us of a certain age are trained to be somewhat passive as readers. We sit silently, read, move on. But when we simply read something and then move on, we are not making the most of the powers we have here in webland. In the world of print, you acquire a wide audience because whoever runs the operation that publishes you decides you'll have a wide audience. To be a successful print writer, you need somebody's permission. Here on the web, you just need the active support of people who think you have something important to say.
I am not a heavy hitter in this conversation. I'm just a teacher from a small town high school in a mostly-rural area with a couple hundred regular readers across the country. But hey-- I'm just a teacher from a small town high school in a mostly-rural area, and I have a couple hundred regular readers across the country. That's the kind of amazing thing that couldn't have happened even a few years ago.
You don't have to be a voice to have a voice. If we push and forward and click and link, we can reach the point where people who are thinking of important voices in education automatically think of Mercedes Schneider or Jersey Jazzman or @the chalkface or any of the dozens of strong, articulate voices that are saying things that need to be said.
Follow people on twitter. Sign on as a follower of their blog. Leave comments on pieces you like (leave comments on pieces you hate, too) to let other readers see the imp[act of the blogs you support. Boost their numbers and their profiles. There is such a broad range of voices-- you can select the ones that most reflect your own priorities and attitudes. But each time you follow or like, you show the world that those writers have your attention.
And that attention leads to more attention. HuffPost and other sites like it may have ideologies, but their main ideology will always be "We like money." If you're going to draw a crowd for them, they will call on you instead of some stupid astroturf group.
Right now there are a little over 35,000 members of BadAss Teachers Association. That's not peanuts, but in a world in which the Justin Bieber fan page has sixty million likes, it's not really earthshattering. But BATS have become a nationally recognized brand that is sometimes turned to for quotes from their side of education issues because members have relentlessly pushed and tweeted and posted and retweeted and amplified the noise. Nothing gets attention better than already getting attention. With 35,000 BAT members on facebook, there are only 6,000 followers on Twitter. As much noise as the BATS have made, they could make far more. And if we added all the non-BAT people who are passionate about the state of educational reformy stuff...?
So-- you don't have to say something profound or clever or feisty. But you can amplify the reach of your favorite purveyor of profound clever feistiness. You can make education blogs from the right side of the issues climb up the charts so that when people go looking for voices in education, they find the ones we love.
It's particularly frustrating because at this point there are many teachers with something to say who are in fact saying it, and still crowds are gathered around some snake oil salesman. How does this happen? How do we fix it?
It helps to remember some basics about how the internet and "news gathering" work today. Just remember two things:
1) Every click is a vote for whatever you just clicked on.
2) Nothing gets attention more than something that is already getting attention.
In the meat world, attention is a hard commodity quantify. The folks at Nielsen and the executives who depend their work have gone to tremendous lengths to attempt to quantify attention, and it's still an inexact science. The ad for widgets ran, but was anyone in the room? Were they paying attention to the carefully crafted depiction of the widget's many fin qualities, or were they picking corndog remnants out of their teeth?
But on the interwebs, attention is totally quantifiable. There are dozens of sites that will tell me how many people are looking at other sites. And if I'm somebody trying to find out what's hot in education, I can go to a site the Teach100 and just read today's ratings. If I'm a lazy fake journalist with a lazy aggregator, my work is already done for me-- I just have to look it up.
And that means that we all have the power to promote our favorite bloggy voices.
If I read something I like, I forward it. I put it on my facebook page. I tweet it. I link to it.
Diane Ravitch is a great example of how this works. She is extraordinarily generous in using her own clout to direct her audience to other writers. Remember-- if you like the writer that she has excerpted or quoted, follow the link to the source. It's a vote for that writer's web presence to grow. It does more than that, too-- it allows the conversation that we're all having to grow and spread.
Follow the other links you find. I'm trying to get a blogroll put together here (look over to your right and scroll) and many other bloggers are doing the same. If it hasn't happened yet, somebody is going to make a big current edublogger list. Use it and follow the links. Read what's there. If you agree with it, pass it on.
Most of us of a certain age are trained to be somewhat passive as readers. We sit silently, read, move on. But when we simply read something and then move on, we are not making the most of the powers we have here in webland. In the world of print, you acquire a wide audience because whoever runs the operation that publishes you decides you'll have a wide audience. To be a successful print writer, you need somebody's permission. Here on the web, you just need the active support of people who think you have something important to say.
I am not a heavy hitter in this conversation. I'm just a teacher from a small town high school in a mostly-rural area with a couple hundred regular readers across the country. But hey-- I'm just a teacher from a small town high school in a mostly-rural area, and I have a couple hundred regular readers across the country. That's the kind of amazing thing that couldn't have happened even a few years ago.
You don't have to be a voice to have a voice. If we push and forward and click and link, we can reach the point where people who are thinking of important voices in education automatically think of Mercedes Schneider or Jersey Jazzman or @the chalkface or any of the dozens of strong, articulate voices that are saying things that need to be said.
Follow people on twitter. Sign on as a follower of their blog. Leave comments on pieces you like (leave comments on pieces you hate, too) to let other readers see the imp[act of the blogs you support. Boost their numbers and their profiles. There is such a broad range of voices-- you can select the ones that most reflect your own priorities and attitudes. But each time you follow or like, you show the world that those writers have your attention.
And that attention leads to more attention. HuffPost and other sites like it may have ideologies, but their main ideology will always be "We like money." If you're going to draw a crowd for them, they will call on you instead of some stupid astroturf group.
Right now there are a little over 35,000 members of BadAss Teachers Association. That's not peanuts, but in a world in which the Justin Bieber fan page has sixty million likes, it's not really earthshattering. But BATS have become a nationally recognized brand that is sometimes turned to for quotes from their side of education issues because members have relentlessly pushed and tweeted and posted and retweeted and amplified the noise. Nothing gets attention better than already getting attention. With 35,000 BAT members on facebook, there are only 6,000 followers on Twitter. As much noise as the BATS have made, they could make far more. And if we added all the non-BAT people who are passionate about the state of educational reformy stuff...?
So-- you don't have to say something profound or clever or feisty. But you can amplify the reach of your favorite purveyor of profound clever feistiness. You can make education blogs from the right side of the issues climb up the charts so that when people go looking for voices in education, they find the ones we love.
Friday, December 20, 2013
What Real Teachers Can Learn from TFA
Despite its recent setback in Pittsburgh, TFA continues to enjoy both success and public esteem and looks to expand their brand into Canada. This is a rotting raspberry seed in the teeth of real teachers throughout the country, but if we can put down the hate-sticks for a moment, there are things we can learn.
Before we start, let me just reassure you that this is not a defense of the spectacle of privileged youths stooping to use disadvantaged students as rungs on the ladder to success. Nor am I forgetting that TFA is an awesome display of mission creep, shifting from a vision of filling long-empty positions to one of replacing actual teaching jobs and teachers with revolving classroom doors. There are plenty of bad things to say about TFA, and I believe almost all of them, but that's not the point of today's exercise.
Look-- TFA is successful in many ways (few of them educational, but again-- not the point), and that means there are lessons to be learned.
Boost your team
Over the past few days, I watched #shinealighton roam across my twitter feed. It was TFA, just basically using twitter to shower attaboys on each other.
On the one hand, I thought, "How typical of the Stepford child chirpy pep rally groupthink mentality."
On the other hand, I thought, "Why don't we do stuff like that?" Why don't we. Why don't we post little notes, tweets, post-its, whatevers telling our colleagues "Hey, good job! Glad you're here doing your thing!"
#shinealighton took no real time or effort. Five seconds to type, a few seconds more to retweet. It would take next to nothing to create a simple local, state or national initiative in which we held up fellow teachers for fifteen seconds of appreciation. But we often lean into our classroom isolation and forget to connect with our fellow teachers.
Not all of us are wired for "unity" exercises. Plenty of us tense up every time our union or building staff create some sort of bonding exercise. But if you aren't a bonder, may I suggest an alternative-- individual appreciation. Doesn't have to be a big production. Just something short and sweet and simple that says, "Glad you're here. Good job." If TFAers can constantly tell each other they're awesome when they aren't all that special, why can't we tell people who actually ARE special that they're great?
People Want To Like Teachers
TFA's drive to brand themselves as a charity is offensively stupid. But the degree to which it has been embraced tells us something-- people want to support teachers. The spectacle of the fabulously wealthy TFA passing the hat may be bizarre, like a telethon to help Bill Gates put his kids through college, but it taps something that public school teachers have mostly failed to tap. People want to help teachers and students and schools, but they've never had some easy way to do it.
Pittsburgh shows that once people understand what TFA really is, they start to back away. So why are various corporations-that-shall-not-be-named cashing in so large on TFA-as-charity. Because people see the word's "teach" and "America" and think, "What could possibly not be right about that?"
Our anger at TFA is not helping here. TV shows people a stirring, heartwarming portrait of teachers in classrooms, and your buddy sees you and says, "Wow, that Teacher show was awesome. It made me really impressed with teachers," and you say, "Grr. Snarl. Those weren't teachers. Those were TFA plants."
What is he supposed to take away from that? Real teachers aren't enthusiastic and hopeful like that?
TFA shows us that desire to back schools and education and students is out there. TFA is tapping it. You know who should be tapping it? Actual teachers in actual public schools.
Teacher training
Oh, I hate to bring this up. It is true that five weeks of training to be in a classroom is a joke. But when TFA supporters are critical of teacher training programs, we know in our hearts that they have a point.
How many cooperating teachers have spent how many hours having conversations with student teachers that boil down to "The things that your ed professor told you to do are bunk." How many teacher lounges have heard conversations about how Teacher Farm State University isn't doing anything for future teachers except checking them for a pulse and making sure their check doesn't bounce.
Teacher training programs are the great soft underbelly of our profession, and TFA stabs us right in the gut. Programs in this country range from "Pretty Okay" to "Embarrassing."
How we fix it I do not know (though I do know five weeks of summer school is not the answer). One of the weaknesses of our profession is that we don't control our own entry paths. If I want to start a doctoring, nursing, lawyering, or physical therapizing program at my college, I have to convince doctors, lawyers, nurses, or physical therapists to let me. If I want to start a teaching program, I just need the permission of some bureaucrats at the state capitol.
Those of us who have the ears of college programs need to speak some harsh truth to them. When we have a student teacher, we need to tell her supervisors, "Here are the ways in which you served this future teacher poorly." And we need to be more actively involved in the first few years of our new colleagues. We can't just walk past his door and think, "Well, he's a grown up with a degree. Hope he does well, but it's on him."
Marketing
We are learning what is old news to other professions-- people don't love and respect you just because X is your job.
TFA has marketed itself relentlessly. It has sold its own picture of teaching and the people it puts in it. We have not.
We have let ourselves get sucked into arguing the negative. Our response to so much of what's out there these days is some form of "No, that's not true" and "No we don't" and "No they didn't." That's a classic case of letting other folks control the argument, and TFA has had total control of this debate.
We can't market "Not TFA." We can explain why having an experienced teacher in the same classroom for years provides much-needed stability for students and programs. We can explain all the sorts of things that make extensive training and experience a plus. We should not be arguing with TFAers as if they are our equals; we should be patronizing them and patting them on the heads like the cute little junior adults they are. I keep thinking that instead of screaming, "Back to the depths of hell that spawned you, you filthy unholy Balrog-- you shall not pass!" we should do more "Well, aren't you just precious."
At any rate, when the public hears "Teach for America," they imagine some fresh-faced well-scrubbed enthusiastic (white) teacher surrounded by happy (brown) children. What do they imagine when they hear "public school teacher." Mitt Romney lost electoral traction because he let the Obama camp create the public's picture of the Mormon flipflopper. We have a similar problem.
You can't create a picture by simply erasing somebody else's. You have to present a picture to take its place. TFA is very good at that. Public school teachers, so far, are not.
I believe that in the long run, results will tell the tale. TFAers will eventually paint themselves as cut-and-run dilettantes because, marketing or not, that's what the public is going to see. But the damage that will happen in the meantime means that we can't afford to just wait for more Pittsburghs. And we clearly can't wait for our unions to lead the charge (if TFA were smart, they would offer a big fat check to cover membership for all their faux teachers-- I'm pretty sure the national union would decide TFAers were swell). As with everything else in education these days, each of us is going to have to be his own Superman.
Before we start, let me just reassure you that this is not a defense of the spectacle of privileged youths stooping to use disadvantaged students as rungs on the ladder to success. Nor am I forgetting that TFA is an awesome display of mission creep, shifting from a vision of filling long-empty positions to one of replacing actual teaching jobs and teachers with revolving classroom doors. There are plenty of bad things to say about TFA, and I believe almost all of them, but that's not the point of today's exercise.
Look-- TFA is successful in many ways (few of them educational, but again-- not the point), and that means there are lessons to be learned.
Boost your team
Over the past few days, I watched #shinealighton roam across my twitter feed. It was TFA, just basically using twitter to shower attaboys on each other.
On the one hand, I thought, "How typical of the Stepford child chirpy pep rally groupthink mentality."
On the other hand, I thought, "Why don't we do stuff like that?" Why don't we. Why don't we post little notes, tweets, post-its, whatevers telling our colleagues "Hey, good job! Glad you're here doing your thing!"
#shinealighton took no real time or effort. Five seconds to type, a few seconds more to retweet. It would take next to nothing to create a simple local, state or national initiative in which we held up fellow teachers for fifteen seconds of appreciation. But we often lean into our classroom isolation and forget to connect with our fellow teachers.
Not all of us are wired for "unity" exercises. Plenty of us tense up every time our union or building staff create some sort of bonding exercise. But if you aren't a bonder, may I suggest an alternative-- individual appreciation. Doesn't have to be a big production. Just something short and sweet and simple that says, "Glad you're here. Good job." If TFAers can constantly tell each other they're awesome when they aren't all that special, why can't we tell people who actually ARE special that they're great?
People Want To Like Teachers
TFA's drive to brand themselves as a charity is offensively stupid. But the degree to which it has been embraced tells us something-- people want to support teachers. The spectacle of the fabulously wealthy TFA passing the hat may be bizarre, like a telethon to help Bill Gates put his kids through college, but it taps something that public school teachers have mostly failed to tap. People want to help teachers and students and schools, but they've never had some easy way to do it.
Pittsburgh shows that once people understand what TFA really is, they start to back away. So why are various corporations-that-shall-not-be-named cashing in so large on TFA-as-charity. Because people see the word's "teach" and "America" and think, "What could possibly not be right about that?"
Our anger at TFA is not helping here. TV shows people a stirring, heartwarming portrait of teachers in classrooms, and your buddy sees you and says, "Wow, that Teacher show was awesome. It made me really impressed with teachers," and you say, "Grr. Snarl. Those weren't teachers. Those were TFA plants."
What is he supposed to take away from that? Real teachers aren't enthusiastic and hopeful like that?
TFA shows us that desire to back schools and education and students is out there. TFA is tapping it. You know who should be tapping it? Actual teachers in actual public schools.
Teacher training
Oh, I hate to bring this up. It is true that five weeks of training to be in a classroom is a joke. But when TFA supporters are critical of teacher training programs, we know in our hearts that they have a point.
How many cooperating teachers have spent how many hours having conversations with student teachers that boil down to "The things that your ed professor told you to do are bunk." How many teacher lounges have heard conversations about how Teacher Farm State University isn't doing anything for future teachers except checking them for a pulse and making sure their check doesn't bounce.
Teacher training programs are the great soft underbelly of our profession, and TFA stabs us right in the gut. Programs in this country range from "Pretty Okay" to "Embarrassing."
How we fix it I do not know (though I do know five weeks of summer school is not the answer). One of the weaknesses of our profession is that we don't control our own entry paths. If I want to start a doctoring, nursing, lawyering, or physical therapizing program at my college, I have to convince doctors, lawyers, nurses, or physical therapists to let me. If I want to start a teaching program, I just need the permission of some bureaucrats at the state capitol.
Those of us who have the ears of college programs need to speak some harsh truth to them. When we have a student teacher, we need to tell her supervisors, "Here are the ways in which you served this future teacher poorly." And we need to be more actively involved in the first few years of our new colleagues. We can't just walk past his door and think, "Well, he's a grown up with a degree. Hope he does well, but it's on him."
Marketing
We are learning what is old news to other professions-- people don't love and respect you just because X is your job.
TFA has marketed itself relentlessly. It has sold its own picture of teaching and the people it puts in it. We have not.
We have let ourselves get sucked into arguing the negative. Our response to so much of what's out there these days is some form of "No, that's not true" and "No we don't" and "No they didn't." That's a classic case of letting other folks control the argument, and TFA has had total control of this debate.
We can't market "Not TFA." We can explain why having an experienced teacher in the same classroom for years provides much-needed stability for students and programs. We can explain all the sorts of things that make extensive training and experience a plus. We should not be arguing with TFAers as if they are our equals; we should be patronizing them and patting them on the heads like the cute little junior adults they are. I keep thinking that instead of screaming, "Back to the depths of hell that spawned you, you filthy unholy Balrog-- you shall not pass!" we should do more "Well, aren't you just precious."
At any rate, when the public hears "Teach for America," they imagine some fresh-faced well-scrubbed enthusiastic (white) teacher surrounded by happy (brown) children. What do they imagine when they hear "public school teacher." Mitt Romney lost electoral traction because he let the Obama camp create the public's picture of the Mormon flipflopper. We have a similar problem.
You can't create a picture by simply erasing somebody else's. You have to present a picture to take its place. TFA is very good at that. Public school teachers, so far, are not.
I believe that in the long run, results will tell the tale. TFAers will eventually paint themselves as cut-and-run dilettantes because, marketing or not, that's what the public is going to see. But the damage that will happen in the meantime means that we can't afford to just wait for more Pittsburghs. And we clearly can't wait for our unions to lead the charge (if TFA were smart, they would offer a big fat check to cover membership for all their faux teachers-- I'm pretty sure the national union would decide TFAers were swell). As with everything else in education these days, each of us is going to have to be his own Superman.
Thursday, December 19, 2013
Union Leaders: View from the Cheap Seats
These are difficult days for members of teachers unions. Our national
leadership has thrown their lot in with the CCSS crowd and added their
(and therefor our) voices to the chorus of folks saying, "Hey, we might
have banged CCSS up a bit taking it out of the package so fast, but with
a little polish and proper care, it will make a great centerpiece for
the living room."
They are dead wrong in this belief. That is not the issue. We're teachers. We deal with people who are wrong on a daily basis. The question is not "Are they dead wrong?" but "Can we work with them?"
I'm a practical person. I'm not a big fan of political purity tests, of demanding that a person be 100% in agreement with me or else be declared The Enemy. Every time a group I'm affiliated with throws someone out for expressing an opinion that "promotes disunity" or is one of those things "we just don't say here," I cringe. It's a terrible way to deal with humans and human complexity. Throughout history, people who have disagreed have worked together productively. Heck, our own Congress used to work that way.
So I don't need to hear my leadership say that they believe exactly what I want them to believe. But I need to know that I can work with them, that I can, to some extent, trust them.
As I've fallen down the twitterverse-blogoshere-facebook page rabbit hole over the past several months, it has been interesting to see how differently the two major presidents interact with teachers. It's rather a large contrast.
I am an NEA member, so AFT pres Randi Weingarten hadn't been on my radar much. I knew that she, like Van Roekel, frequently turned up in articles shilling for CCSS. But when I started in a-twittering (had an account for years, but never had anything to say-- now I have two accounts that I use daily), there she was. And I was impressed.
Weingarten is there all the time. And she engages with and responds to her critics, of whom there are many. And the thing about twitter is that it's a hard place to roll out a finely crafted PR piece. When you're responding within thirty seconds to someone who just called you a sell-out and a traitor, your response has to be pretty visceral. Weingarten-on-twitter is direct, plain, clear and open. She leaves the impression of being honest and forthcoming, not defensive and combative.
Now mind you, as far as CCSS goes, she hasn't changed my mind a bit. She thinks that CCSS can somehow be moderated and that it can somehow be surgically separated from the high stakes testing regimen. I think she's dead wrong on that. I think she's doing a giant misservice to her members by doing things like co-writing a pro-CCSS, anti-opposition letter to the governors. But I give her high props for actually, daily, regularly engaging the many members who want her to know that they think she's hugely mistaken. And I've come to believe that while she's pretty much completely wrong on how she's responding to CCSS, it's an honest wrong, a wrong that appears based in an actual concern for teachers and the profession. I'd be more impressed if what she was hearing changed her mind and she would put down the big mug of kool-aid, but I am impressed that she's at least listening. Maybe she's actually horrible. But that's not how she comes across.
Then there's my own union chief. Sigh. Dennis Van Roekel had lost most of my trust months ago. Hearing the "Well, if not CCSS, then what?" line from the NEA gathering said it all for me, and I've explored elsewhere why I think he needs to go. Nothing has happened then to change my mind.
NEA has not just cranked out the usual puff pieces about CCSS, but has actively campaigned for it with cooked poll numbers and flat-out lies. And I was kind of surprised to discover that Van Roekel's presence in the twitterverse is-- well, he has a carefully blocked profile that only allows a select few handchecked followers. He is following one person and hasn't topped fifteen tweets yet. This fits my personal experience-- I have never received an email response from Van Roekel (I hear that Weingarten answers hers pretty regularly).
From out in the cheap seats, dealing with NEA is like dealing with any other impersonal corporate structure. I suspect that the narrative of NEA leadership selling out to CCSS has traction in part because NEA leaders come off as the sort of people who would hang out with Gates and Duncan rather than actual classroom teachers.
NEA occasionally attempts to interface more organically with its members, but that usually results in ideas like the GPS network, a website/ghost town where conversations involve three people and advance at the rate of two posts a month.
Van Roekel also repeatedly apes the party line about CCSS being Just Swell if we could get corporate testing mitts off it. There's just not any reason to think that he believes it, or that he has any particular concern about what's happening in the trenches. Is he worried more about how trends in education affect teachers or more about how shifting tides affect NEA's political clout in DC? It certainly looks like the latter. Maybe he's actually wonderful. But that's certainly not how he comes across.
It's possible that, were I not just a rank and file teacher, and if I had closer access to the halls of power, I would see another side of these issues and realize a more comforting truth. But what I'm telling you is what I see from out in the cheap seats, and from out here Weingarten looks like a leader who has let politics sucker her onto the wrong path for making things better for her members, while Van Roekel looks like a corporate tool who is interested in his members only insofar as getting them to fall into line as he wishes gives him the political clout he's after.
Hey--- I could be totally wrong. But if I am, it's not up to me to fix it. Do not tell me that I would better understand if I got more involved in campaigning to be a super-secret sigma-12 decoder-ring level 42 national rep. I have a friend who does that-- I don't have that kind of time, and that's why I have union reps to handle the whole business for me (and I've paid my dues, including being a local president through a strike and tough negotiations, so I'm no slacker) so that I can get back to having a life.
No, if leadership wants members to get a certain impression, they need to communicate it-- and not with slick PR. Weingarten has the right idea-- actual communication with actual teachers even if they haven't been properly screened and vetted. Van Roekel either needs to come down out of his corporate tower, or (more likely) be replaced with someone who will.
These days I'm looking for national leadership that is ballsy, practical and, especially, open and honest with its members. I'm all too familiar with the POV that says rank and file need to be herded in the direction they need to go. But this rank (or maybe I'm a file) is real tired of being surrounded by my betters who know what I'm supposed to be doing. I don't need my leadership to be my puppet, but I don't have any desire to be theirs, either. I don't need them to consult me on every little thing, but I need to feel like my leaders are there to look out for me, not use me as cannon fodder. And most especially, I need leaders to finally develop some backbone and stand up to political monkeys, even if they are monkeys who have always been OUR monkeys. Stand up for us, even if it means making powerful Democrats sad.
They are dead wrong in this belief. That is not the issue. We're teachers. We deal with people who are wrong on a daily basis. The question is not "Are they dead wrong?" but "Can we work with them?"
I'm a practical person. I'm not a big fan of political purity tests, of demanding that a person be 100% in agreement with me or else be declared The Enemy. Every time a group I'm affiliated with throws someone out for expressing an opinion that "promotes disunity" or is one of those things "we just don't say here," I cringe. It's a terrible way to deal with humans and human complexity. Throughout history, people who have disagreed have worked together productively. Heck, our own Congress used to work that way.
So I don't need to hear my leadership say that they believe exactly what I want them to believe. But I need to know that I can work with them, that I can, to some extent, trust them.
As I've fallen down the twitterverse-blogoshere-facebook page rabbit hole over the past several months, it has been interesting to see how differently the two major presidents interact with teachers. It's rather a large contrast.
I am an NEA member, so AFT pres Randi Weingarten hadn't been on my radar much. I knew that she, like Van Roekel, frequently turned up in articles shilling for CCSS. But when I started in a-twittering (had an account for years, but never had anything to say-- now I have two accounts that I use daily), there she was. And I was impressed.
Weingarten is there all the time. And she engages with and responds to her critics, of whom there are many. And the thing about twitter is that it's a hard place to roll out a finely crafted PR piece. When you're responding within thirty seconds to someone who just called you a sell-out and a traitor, your response has to be pretty visceral. Weingarten-on-twitter is direct, plain, clear and open. She leaves the impression of being honest and forthcoming, not defensive and combative.
Now mind you, as far as CCSS goes, she hasn't changed my mind a bit. She thinks that CCSS can somehow be moderated and that it can somehow be surgically separated from the high stakes testing regimen. I think she's dead wrong on that. I think she's doing a giant misservice to her members by doing things like co-writing a pro-CCSS, anti-opposition letter to the governors. But I give her high props for actually, daily, regularly engaging the many members who want her to know that they think she's hugely mistaken. And I've come to believe that while she's pretty much completely wrong on how she's responding to CCSS, it's an honest wrong, a wrong that appears based in an actual concern for teachers and the profession. I'd be more impressed if what she was hearing changed her mind and she would put down the big mug of kool-aid, but I am impressed that she's at least listening. Maybe she's actually horrible. But that's not how she comes across.
Then there's my own union chief. Sigh. Dennis Van Roekel had lost most of my trust months ago. Hearing the "Well, if not CCSS, then what?" line from the NEA gathering said it all for me, and I've explored elsewhere why I think he needs to go. Nothing has happened then to change my mind.
NEA has not just cranked out the usual puff pieces about CCSS, but has actively campaigned for it with cooked poll numbers and flat-out lies. And I was kind of surprised to discover that Van Roekel's presence in the twitterverse is-- well, he has a carefully blocked profile that only allows a select few handchecked followers. He is following one person and hasn't topped fifteen tweets yet. This fits my personal experience-- I have never received an email response from Van Roekel (I hear that Weingarten answers hers pretty regularly).
From out in the cheap seats, dealing with NEA is like dealing with any other impersonal corporate structure. I suspect that the narrative of NEA leadership selling out to CCSS has traction in part because NEA leaders come off as the sort of people who would hang out with Gates and Duncan rather than actual classroom teachers.
NEA occasionally attempts to interface more organically with its members, but that usually results in ideas like the GPS network, a website/ghost town where conversations involve three people and advance at the rate of two posts a month.
Van Roekel also repeatedly apes the party line about CCSS being Just Swell if we could get corporate testing mitts off it. There's just not any reason to think that he believes it, or that he has any particular concern about what's happening in the trenches. Is he worried more about how trends in education affect teachers or more about how shifting tides affect NEA's political clout in DC? It certainly looks like the latter. Maybe he's actually wonderful. But that's certainly not how he comes across.
It's possible that, were I not just a rank and file teacher, and if I had closer access to the halls of power, I would see another side of these issues and realize a more comforting truth. But what I'm telling you is what I see from out in the cheap seats, and from out here Weingarten looks like a leader who has let politics sucker her onto the wrong path for making things better for her members, while Van Roekel looks like a corporate tool who is interested in his members only insofar as getting them to fall into line as he wishes gives him the political clout he's after.
Hey--- I could be totally wrong. But if I am, it's not up to me to fix it. Do not tell me that I would better understand if I got more involved in campaigning to be a super-secret sigma-12 decoder-ring level 42 national rep. I have a friend who does that-- I don't have that kind of time, and that's why I have union reps to handle the whole business for me (and I've paid my dues, including being a local president through a strike and tough negotiations, so I'm no slacker) so that I can get back to having a life.
No, if leadership wants members to get a certain impression, they need to communicate it-- and not with slick PR. Weingarten has the right idea-- actual communication with actual teachers even if they haven't been properly screened and vetted. Van Roekel either needs to come down out of his corporate tower, or (more likely) be replaced with someone who will.
These days I'm looking for national leadership that is ballsy, practical and, especially, open and honest with its members. I'm all too familiar with the POV that says rank and file need to be herded in the direction they need to go. But this rank (or maybe I'm a file) is real tired of being surrounded by my betters who know what I'm supposed to be doing. I don't need my leadership to be my puppet, but I don't have any desire to be theirs, either. I don't need them to consult me on every little thing, but I need to feel like my leaders are there to look out for me, not use me as cannon fodder. And most especially, I need leaders to finally develop some backbone and stand up to political monkeys, even if they are monkeys who have always been OUR monkeys. Stand up for us, even if it means making powerful Democrats sad.
Sunday, December 15, 2013
What's the Big Deal?
As much as I've churned words here and elsewhere, as strongly as I feel that American public schools are facing an unprecedented fight for their institutional lives, I have a confession to make-- tomorrow morning I'm going to get up and go to work at a school where things aren't bad at all.
I read-- oh, how I read-- about the scripting in New York and the slashing of staffs in Philly and Chicago and the bizarro demands being made of teachers across the country in the name of Reformy Stuff. I'm less than two hours away from Pittsburgh, where TFA bodies have been hired to come fill positions while graduates of my school who pursued a teaching career would very much like jobs. So I am aware of how bad it is getting out there.
And admittedly, I don't teach at Shangri-La High School (although now that I think of it, that would be a school where nobody ever got older, so I might well have the same students forever, so perhaps Shangri-La High School is not such a Shangri-La). We have felt the budget pressure from the state capital, and we've been living under the same test-or-else mandate as everyone else.
But nobody has tried to strap me into a pedagogical straightjacket. Our curriculum is loose and I have the kind of teaching freedom that teachers always used to have. I work with good people. I have a good boss. We get to try new things because we think they might be worth trying. We get to throw out is ideas that don't do so well.
We've started aligning things, and it's a process that looks a lot like alignment under NCLB-- it's not so much about changing what we do as it is about adjusting the paperwork.
Like many teachers and principals around the country, my colleagues looked at the CCSS and said, "Well, yeah. We already do most of this."
Every time I read a story that casually mentions how a school has been changed by CCSS ("Yes, back before the core we did strict rote memorization by banging students' heads against rocks, but with CCSS we use thinking and stuff") I want to cry. What exactly did some of these people think we were doing? Did they imagine a nation of Miss Grundys, sitting in a dull daze behind our teacher desk? Yes, there I was in a stupor, just picking up my teacher's manual and dropping it on my desk, over and over, hoping some edumacation would fall out or something. Lawdy lawdy thank you Chee-sus that CCSS came along and showed me how to DO MY JOB because in thirty-five years I had never once figured it out!!
No, I've been doing my job, and while I'm not any sort of superteacher, I think I do okay. So all the parts of CCSS that don't seem entirely stupid, at least at first glance-- I've been doing those, and so have my colleagues. So CCSS didn't motivate us to change anything major, except of course all the alignment paperwork that bureaucrats up the food chain want to see.
We are far from the front lines of battle. TFA's don't want to come here, nor do charters. Not yet. We're too small. There's not enough money to be made. That's bad news for us, because as the state funnels more money to the privates, it will funnel away from us (it's already happening to the tune of hefty six figures with the cyber-schools).
But when I update my colleagues on the mess that is CCSS et al, they often wonder what the big deal is. Here, far from the worst of it, CCSS looks like just another round of rewriting the paperwork. Heck, as recently as six or seven months ago, that's kind of what I thought. So I suspect that a large number of our teaching brethren are at that same "what's the big deal" place. Far from war, and rumors of war, it doesn't seem so bad. So what is the answer to "What's the big deal?"
Here are some thoughts to answer our not-yet-alarmed colleagues without launching into full ranting edu-wonk mode:
1) The ice is thin. See these horror stories from other school districts? About the only thing between us and that is an administrator or two who is holding off the worst of the reformy mess.
2) The retroactoive devaluing of teachers. In some districts, CCSS is like a foreman who shows up after a building is half-constructed and starts yelling at the workers to stop shirking. Then he takes credit for all the work that was done before he arrived. It's just bad for everybody when the narrative is that we never did a damned thing until CCSS lit a fire under us.
3) Alluded to above. As corporate dismantling and privatization of education advances, more and more money will be redirected away from us. Those of us in rural areas are in long term danger because we are such a small customer base. Imagine if the USPS went under and there were nothing but UPS and FedEX to deliver packages-- isolated areas would either be charged huge fees or simply be without service, because there's no money to be made driving an envelope ten miles back Bob's Road.
4) Available materials. Don't like the crappy new materials with COMMON CORE stamped all over them? Too bad. If the tide doesn't turn, that's all that will be out there.
5) They're teaching nothing but this baloney in teacher schools. Ed colleges are starting to turn out students whose professional expectation is that they'll show up, unpack a program, deliver the content, go home. If you've met, mentored, or co-operating teachered any of this bold new generation, you know how little you want to work next door to them -- for the 1-4 years that they're going to last in a classroom. We already know about people who leave the profession because of low pay, lack of autonomy, and high crazy pressure. Mark my words-- we're about to see the rise of teachers who leave the profession because nobody told them it would involve actual work.
6) Professional mobility. We're you thinking you'd go teach in New York after a few years here at our school? You'd better look again at what's going on there.
I know that there are a zillion other reasons for teachers to be upset, angry, actively cranky, or otherwise inflamed about the current state of education. But for people far from the front, people who haven't noticed more than a distant rumbling and some odd complaints on Faux News, people who aren't really feeling the heat personally, it is going to take a few to come up to speed.
It's up to you to help them. Screaming until your flecks of spittle are on their glasses won't get it. Explaining is good. (Mansplaining is not.) Offer links to pertinent and informative articles. Keep the rhetoric to minimum (nobody is coming to put teachers in gas chambers). Be smart about knowing who your allies, and be smart about being sand in the machine for the rest.
I read-- oh, how I read-- about the scripting in New York and the slashing of staffs in Philly and Chicago and the bizarro demands being made of teachers across the country in the name of Reformy Stuff. I'm less than two hours away from Pittsburgh, where TFA bodies have been hired to come fill positions while graduates of my school who pursued a teaching career would very much like jobs. So I am aware of how bad it is getting out there.
And admittedly, I don't teach at Shangri-La High School (although now that I think of it, that would be a school where nobody ever got older, so I might well have the same students forever, so perhaps Shangri-La High School is not such a Shangri-La). We have felt the budget pressure from the state capital, and we've been living under the same test-or-else mandate as everyone else.
But nobody has tried to strap me into a pedagogical straightjacket. Our curriculum is loose and I have the kind of teaching freedom that teachers always used to have. I work with good people. I have a good boss. We get to try new things because we think they might be worth trying. We get to throw out is ideas that don't do so well.
We've started aligning things, and it's a process that looks a lot like alignment under NCLB-- it's not so much about changing what we do as it is about adjusting the paperwork.
Like many teachers and principals around the country, my colleagues looked at the CCSS and said, "Well, yeah. We already do most of this."
Every time I read a story that casually mentions how a school has been changed by CCSS ("Yes, back before the core we did strict rote memorization by banging students' heads against rocks, but with CCSS we use thinking and stuff") I want to cry. What exactly did some of these people think we were doing? Did they imagine a nation of Miss Grundys, sitting in a dull daze behind our teacher desk? Yes, there I was in a stupor, just picking up my teacher's manual and dropping it on my desk, over and over, hoping some edumacation would fall out or something. Lawdy lawdy thank you Chee-sus that CCSS came along and showed me how to DO MY JOB because in thirty-five years I had never once figured it out!!
No, I've been doing my job, and while I'm not any sort of superteacher, I think I do okay. So all the parts of CCSS that don't seem entirely stupid, at least at first glance-- I've been doing those, and so have my colleagues. So CCSS didn't motivate us to change anything major, except of course all the alignment paperwork that bureaucrats up the food chain want to see.
We are far from the front lines of battle. TFA's don't want to come here, nor do charters. Not yet. We're too small. There's not enough money to be made. That's bad news for us, because as the state funnels more money to the privates, it will funnel away from us (it's already happening to the tune of hefty six figures with the cyber-schools).
But when I update my colleagues on the mess that is CCSS et al, they often wonder what the big deal is. Here, far from the worst of it, CCSS looks like just another round of rewriting the paperwork. Heck, as recently as six or seven months ago, that's kind of what I thought. So I suspect that a large number of our teaching brethren are at that same "what's the big deal" place. Far from war, and rumors of war, it doesn't seem so bad. So what is the answer to "What's the big deal?"
Here are some thoughts to answer our not-yet-alarmed colleagues without launching into full ranting edu-wonk mode:
1) The ice is thin. See these horror stories from other school districts? About the only thing between us and that is an administrator or two who is holding off the worst of the reformy mess.
2) The retroactoive devaluing of teachers. In some districts, CCSS is like a foreman who shows up after a building is half-constructed and starts yelling at the workers to stop shirking. Then he takes credit for all the work that was done before he arrived. It's just bad for everybody when the narrative is that we never did a damned thing until CCSS lit a fire under us.
3) Alluded to above. As corporate dismantling and privatization of education advances, more and more money will be redirected away from us. Those of us in rural areas are in long term danger because we are such a small customer base. Imagine if the USPS went under and there were nothing but UPS and FedEX to deliver packages-- isolated areas would either be charged huge fees or simply be without service, because there's no money to be made driving an envelope ten miles back Bob's Road.
4) Available materials. Don't like the crappy new materials with COMMON CORE stamped all over them? Too bad. If the tide doesn't turn, that's all that will be out there.
5) They're teaching nothing but this baloney in teacher schools. Ed colleges are starting to turn out students whose professional expectation is that they'll show up, unpack a program, deliver the content, go home. If you've met, mentored, or co-operating teachered any of this bold new generation, you know how little you want to work next door to them -- for the 1-4 years that they're going to last in a classroom. We already know about people who leave the profession because of low pay, lack of autonomy, and high crazy pressure. Mark my words-- we're about to see the rise of teachers who leave the profession because nobody told them it would involve actual work.
6) Professional mobility. We're you thinking you'd go teach in New York after a few years here at our school? You'd better look again at what's going on there.
I know that there are a zillion other reasons for teachers to be upset, angry, actively cranky, or otherwise inflamed about the current state of education. But for people far from the front, people who haven't noticed more than a distant rumbling and some odd complaints on Faux News, people who aren't really feeling the heat personally, it is going to take a few to come up to speed.
It's up to you to help them. Screaming until your flecks of spittle are on their glasses won't get it. Explaining is good. (Mansplaining is not.) Offer links to pertinent and informative articles. Keep the rhetoric to minimum (nobody is coming to put teachers in gas chambers). Be smart about knowing who your allies, and be smart about being sand in the machine for the rest.
Saturday, December 14, 2013
Why Teacher Merit Pay Is Stupid
Sometimes we forget the obvious, so let me spell it out. Here's why teacher merit pay will never make sense.
In a business, here's how merit pay is supposed to work. Watch carefully:
1) International Widgetmakers, Inc makes $1,000,000 more profit than originally projected.
2) CEO Mr. McMoneygutz says, "Wow, that's great. Let us share this bounty with the hard workers who helped earn it in the first place."
3) A large slice of the million bucks is divied up and handed over to grateful employees based on how much help they were in earning it.
In business, here's how merit pay sometimes actually works. Again, pay attention.
1) International Widgetmakers, Inc makes $1,000,000 more profit than originally projected.
2) CEO Mr. McJerkface says, "Hey, Board of Directors. You're so lucky to have me. You should give me a pile of that there extra moneys."
3) A large slice of the million bucks is handed to the CEO and hardworking employees get screwed again.
Notice what each of these versions of merit pay have in common: An extra stack of money lying around. That's why companies having lean times don't give out merit bonuses-- because to give out bonuses, you have to have extra money.
So to discuss the wisdom of teacher merit pay, we don't have to talk about its motivational qualities, or its philosophical validity. All we have to ask this question:
When and where has it ever been possible to describe a public school system with the phrase "has an extra stack of money lying around."
When a company does well, that means, by definition, that it has made a ton of money. When a company does poorly, it has NOT made a ton of money. But the amount of money a school district takes in is exactly the same regardless of how good a job it does.
Reformy business guys know this. In fact, it is one of the things that drives them crazy, because it offends their very understanding of how the world is supposed to work, just as their notion that a school whose students get low test scores should get less money makes us see red. It is one of the bedrock fundamentals on which private sector and public ed people disagree. Much of what has happened in education reform can be understood as business guys doing their damndest to force schools to conform to what they view as fundamental rules of the universe.
(There's a whole other piece of writing to be done about why the free market profit motive (which I happen to have a great deal of respect for) does not belong in many human service sectors. For now, I'll just observe that when your most beloved family member needs heart surgery, you do not look for the cheapest doctor you can find, nor do you want the doctor who is preoccupied with how he's going to make his mortgage payment. You do not want the doctor who will look at your beloved as some sort of obstacle standing between him and his pay check.)
No school district has extra money. (In fact, no school district "has" any money-- it all belongs to the taxpayers.) The only way to have extra money would be for the district to say, "Taxpayers, our teachers did so well this year we'd like to collect an extra three mils worth of taxes so we can pay them appropriately." Call me crazy, but I don't see that happening.
Merit pay is extra money. There is no extra money. So what we're talking about in schools is not "merit pay," but "pay." Any school district proposing "merit pay" is really saying, "See this bucket of money? We are going to let you teachers compete to see who gets the biggest chunks of it."
This is certainly a creative way to rewrite salary scales. But it is not merit pay.
In a business, here's how merit pay is supposed to work. Watch carefully:
1) International Widgetmakers, Inc makes $1,000,000 more profit than originally projected.
2) CEO Mr. McMoneygutz says, "Wow, that's great. Let us share this bounty with the hard workers who helped earn it in the first place."
3) A large slice of the million bucks is divied up and handed over to grateful employees based on how much help they were in earning it.
In business, here's how merit pay sometimes actually works. Again, pay attention.
1) International Widgetmakers, Inc makes $1,000,000 more profit than originally projected.
2) CEO Mr. McJerkface says, "Hey, Board of Directors. You're so lucky to have me. You should give me a pile of that there extra moneys."
3) A large slice of the million bucks is handed to the CEO and hardworking employees get screwed again.
Notice what each of these versions of merit pay have in common: An extra stack of money lying around. That's why companies having lean times don't give out merit bonuses-- because to give out bonuses, you have to have extra money.
So to discuss the wisdom of teacher merit pay, we don't have to talk about its motivational qualities, or its philosophical validity. All we have to ask this question:
When and where has it ever been possible to describe a public school system with the phrase "has an extra stack of money lying around."
When a company does well, that means, by definition, that it has made a ton of money. When a company does poorly, it has NOT made a ton of money. But the amount of money a school district takes in is exactly the same regardless of how good a job it does.
Reformy business guys know this. In fact, it is one of the things that drives them crazy, because it offends their very understanding of how the world is supposed to work, just as their notion that a school whose students get low test scores should get less money makes us see red. It is one of the bedrock fundamentals on which private sector and public ed people disagree. Much of what has happened in education reform can be understood as business guys doing their damndest to force schools to conform to what they view as fundamental rules of the universe.
(There's a whole other piece of writing to be done about why the free market profit motive (which I happen to have a great deal of respect for) does not belong in many human service sectors. For now, I'll just observe that when your most beloved family member needs heart surgery, you do not look for the cheapest doctor you can find, nor do you want the doctor who is preoccupied with how he's going to make his mortgage payment. You do not want the doctor who will look at your beloved as some sort of obstacle standing between him and his pay check.)
No school district has extra money. (In fact, no school district "has" any money-- it all belongs to the taxpayers.) The only way to have extra money would be for the district to say, "Taxpayers, our teachers did so well this year we'd like to collect an extra three mils worth of taxes so we can pay them appropriately." Call me crazy, but I don't see that happening.
Merit pay is extra money. There is no extra money. So what we're talking about in schools is not "merit pay," but "pay." Any school district proposing "merit pay" is really saying, "See this bucket of money? We are going to let you teachers compete to see who gets the biggest chunks of it."
This is certainly a creative way to rewrite salary scales. But it is not merit pay.
Friday, December 13, 2013
Poor-Baiting
As I've discussed before, slapping the title No Child Left Behind on the bipartisan Bush-era cluster of reformy claptrap was a bit of a tactical error. But in one respect it was a brilliant positioning of the pre-reform forces.
Most of us remember how it worked at the time. You could point out the pedagogical foolishness that came bundled with NCLB, or you could point out the foolishness of all-stick-no-carrot motivators for schools, or you could point out that not all students were exactly receptive and ready to grab the educational bull by its academic horns, or you could just point out the sheer mathematical impossibility of a system that demanded 100% of students be above average. It didn't matter; eventually you were facing this question:
So, since you don't support NCLB, tell me, exactly which children do you think should be left behind?
Annnnd you were done.
The Current Reformy Academics Program is borrowing a page from that book. It was on display on John King's studentsfirst-packed lovefest in NY, and it's on display in Michelle Rhee's latest heaping helping of deep-fried baloney over at Politico.
What about the poor kids?
The gummint is going to create and enforce these cool equalizing standards, and that will produce educational equality (for the love of God, can we all ALL just stop using the word "equity" incorrectly in all these discussions?). "Those rich kids with their white moms out in the suburbs will get to use these cool standards," the argument goes. "Are you saying you don't want these poor kids to have the same benefits?" The government has ordered funny hats for everyone; why should the uptown kids get funny hats while downtown kids have to wear berets?
It's an elegant argument, because it skips over the whole question of whether CCSS has any benefits at all. It also skips over the efficacy question-- if we buy all schoolboys big burly suits, does that mean they will all grow into them? It plays the race card, sometimes subtly, and sometimes not. And it plays the social status card. And it just generally gets us focused on this political card game when we should be over there playing chess or shuffleboard or some other game having to do with whether the CCSS are any damn good in the first place.
The answer to the poor kids question is already with us, however.
If the CCSS are such a great benefit, why aren't the private schools using them? And if equality is the motivator for reform, why aren't we talking about how to bring the benefits of those elite schools to poor neighborhoods (imagine the feds new program-- Harkness tables for everyone!)?
When the great Current Reformy Academics Program leaders are telling their stories about how much their own children and grandchildren are benefiting from CCSS, then we can talk.
Most of us remember how it worked at the time. You could point out the pedagogical foolishness that came bundled with NCLB, or you could point out the foolishness of all-stick-no-carrot motivators for schools, or you could point out that not all students were exactly receptive and ready to grab the educational bull by its academic horns, or you could just point out the sheer mathematical impossibility of a system that demanded 100% of students be above average. It didn't matter; eventually you were facing this question:
So, since you don't support NCLB, tell me, exactly which children do you think should be left behind?
Annnnd you were done.
The Current Reformy Academics Program is borrowing a page from that book. It was on display on John King's studentsfirst-packed lovefest in NY, and it's on display in Michelle Rhee's latest heaping helping of deep-fried baloney over at Politico.
What about the poor kids?
The gummint is going to create and enforce these cool equalizing standards, and that will produce educational equality (for the love of God, can we all ALL just stop using the word "equity" incorrectly in all these discussions?). "Those rich kids with their white moms out in the suburbs will get to use these cool standards," the argument goes. "Are you saying you don't want these poor kids to have the same benefits?" The government has ordered funny hats for everyone; why should the uptown kids get funny hats while downtown kids have to wear berets?
It's an elegant argument, because it skips over the whole question of whether CCSS has any benefits at all. It also skips over the efficacy question-- if we buy all schoolboys big burly suits, does that mean they will all grow into them? It plays the race card, sometimes subtly, and sometimes not. And it plays the social status card. And it just generally gets us focused on this political card game when we should be over there playing chess or shuffleboard or some other game having to do with whether the CCSS are any damn good in the first place.
The answer to the poor kids question is already with us, however.
If the CCSS are such a great benefit, why aren't the private schools using them? And if equality is the motivator for reform, why aren't we talking about how to bring the benefits of those elite schools to poor neighborhoods (imagine the feds new program-- Harkness tables for everyone!)?
When the great Current Reformy Academics Program leaders are telling their stories about how much their own children and grandchildren are benefiting from CCSS, then we can talk.
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