Why For-Profit Schools Must Stink

There are so many reasons to object to the privatization of public education, but it all comes down to the pie.

It's the financial pie, a pie that can only be cut into so many pieces. There's a reason that we associate top-notch private schools with rich folks-- every time a Philips Academy needs a bigger pie, they just pick up the phone to their rich parents and their rich alumni and before you can say "Summer at the Hamptons," the school is awash in newer, bigger pies.

Not so in public ed. The size of the pie is set by a combination of legislators and taxpayers, and that's all the pie there is. And that means that private operators, whether they're operating a voucher school or a private charter or one of those public-private hybrid charters (public when they want money, private when anybody wants to see what they do with it), your business model has to acknowledge one fundamental fact. (This includes "noon-profits" that are really for the profit of well-paid executives.)

Every piece of pie served to the students is a piece of pie that the operators don't get to eat themselves. Every cent they spend on students is a cent they don't get to pocket.

In privatized public schools, the interests of the operators are in direct conflict with the interests of the clients.

We already have examples in the marketplace of businesses with this same pie problem-- a human service industry where profit depends on providing the least service you can get away with.

Of course there was the health insurance industry. There's a reason that Tom Batiuk made a great joke out of calling an insurance provider "Denialcare." But the rules are in flux there now that ACA has come along to guarantee that every insurance executive will have a Lexus and a vacation home every American will have health care coverage.

So instead, let's consider the nursing home industry. Nursing homes have always faced a pie problem-- they have to provide service for human beings while trying to fund it with blood squeezed from stones.

This interactive map from 2010 shows ratings for US nursing homes. It doesn't look too bad at first, but if you use the features to knock it down by star ratings, it starts to look pretty awful. Of course there are some great nursing homes in the country, and not just the ones that graduates of Philips Academies go to when they get on in years. But a tremendous portion of that sector is 1, 2, or 3 stars.

Way back in 2001 the Kaiser Family Foundation conducted a survey about nursing homes. The breakdown of the info is pretty thorough, but some highlights include: For starters, 80% reported some knowledge of nursing homes. 80% believed the homes are understaffed.  65% believed the staff is undertrained, and 61% believed that there was a problem with waste and fraud in how homes were run.

Right now, polls about education routinely turn up the result, "American schools suck, but my neighborhood school is just fine." In the Kaiser poll, people who were directly familiar with nursing homes were MORE likely to believe some of the worst things about those homes.

But when you only have so much money to split up, your motive is to find ways to spend less. And if you are a service business, spending less means providing less for your clients. Cheaper service providers. Cheaper services. Fewer services. You are never asking, "What's the best possible service we could provide our clients." Instead, you are asking, "What's the cheapest possible service we can get away with? Where is there a corner we can cut?"

The problem with the profit motive in fixed-payment service industries is not JUST that those in charge can only make money by finding ways to spend less on their clients. The more toxic systemic effect is that those in charge are pushed to inevitably see their clients as their biggest obstacle rather than their primary purpose. We know that attitude is lurking just over the horizon anyway-- how many of us deal with a business manager in our district whose attitude is that it would be easy to balance the budget if we didn't have to spend money on all those damn teachers and students.

For-profit schools are powerfully inclined to stink because they must foster an adversarial relationship between the owner-operators, the clients, and the employees. All of that takes place in an atmosphere of scarcity, of "having to do without." Add merit-based pay in which teachers must compete for their piece of the pie, and you get a school "community" that is anything but supportive and collegial.

Can it be done? Sure. The map tells us the nursing home industry here and there is doing it. But entering the business is fighting a powerful tide. If you entered the business because providing the service is powerfully important to you, you will have to fight the tide, but at least you're motivated. But if you entered the business to make a buck or get good ROI, you are already swimming with a tide that is going to sweep away everything good about the schools you are running.

The World's Worst Boyfriend

I thought maybe it was just me, but yesterday's piece evoked some familiar feelings for other people as well-- the feeling of being in a toxic relationship.

The familiar feeling was the feeling of self-doubt. Am I crazy? I could swear I see a pile of rabbit poop, but my partner insists that it's a pile of magic beans, and he certainly seems to believe it, and after all, if we don't trust each other then what do we have? So either I can't trust my own judgment, or my partner is trying to pawn a pile of poop off on me. Does that sound like the current deal surrounding reformy stuff in education?

Well, sure. So I decided to see how our relationship as teachers with the leaders of our industry-- the Masters of Reform (e.g. Jeb Bush), our state and federal DOEs (e.g. Arne Duncan), some of our leading administrators (e.g. Steve Perry), and the Big Leading Voices who haven't actually accomplished anything but still have a seat at the table anyway (e.g. Celebrity Spokesmodel Michelle Rhee)-- stacks up against the classic Bad Relationship.

I'm going to use the "15 Warning Signs of an Abusive Relationship" that is distributed by The Women's Center . There are certainly other lists out there, and fine dramatic examples of this kind of abuse. But this one is widely distributed and accepted, so it should serve our purpose.

Are we, as a profession, dating the worst boyfriend ever? Here are the signs.

1) He pushes for quick involvement. Give TFA bodies five weeks of training and put them in a classroom as if they were full-fledged professionals. Institute CCSS and related reformy stuff RIGHT NOW. We can't possibly roll them out gradually or wait to check the validity and usefulness of all these programs.

2) There is jealousy. Are you following other programs? Don't. And that union you've been seeing on the side-- I made it my bestie so that when you cozy up to it, you're really cozying up to me.

3) He is controlling. You think? Look, sweetie-- your autonomy in the classroom is just causing all sorts of problems. Let me tell you what to teach, when to teach it, how to teach it-- oh, heck. Just take this script and read it.

4) He has very unrealistic expectations. Okay, okay. I've learned my lesson from NCLB-- 100% of students cannot be above average. But the effects of poverty and family life and other personal difficulties? You should just go ahead and erase all effects of those. Poverty wouldn't make a difference if you really cared about me.

5) There is isolation. I know I've already co-opted your national union, but if I could just wipe it out on the state and local level, that would be great. You don't need them. Just listen to me.

6) He blames others for his own mistakes. That messed-up evaluation? A computer glitch. Anything wrong with CCSS? That's an implementation hiccup. Despite the fact that I've been running everything my own way for fifteen years or so, everything wrong with public schools is still your fault.

7) He makes everyone else responsible for his feelings. Our first miss. There's no sign that feelings are involved. And as Uber-reformer David Coleman famously observed, nobody gives a shit about your feelings anyway.

8) There is hypersensitivity. Duncan's favorite word for his opponents? "Silly." We don't ever need to talk things over, and there is no room to discuss, because every criticism of reformy stuff is just because you're a big old silly poopy doo-doo HEADED MEANIE!

9) He is cruel to animals and children. Children should not be coddled. Children need to recognize that they are dopes, regardless of what their white suburban mommies told them. They need to be smacked into place with rigor. If they have problems with being poor and all, they just need to suck it up.

10) His "playful" use of force during sex. You know, I'm just going to skip over this one.

11) There is verbal abuse. Teachers have been called so many names at this point that it's hard to keep track. But you're responsible for everything bad in education-- there is literally nothing that is not teachers' fault-- and if we just have to keep mansplaining to you in clear, direct language, it's only because you're too stupid, obstructing and lazy to get it the first time.

12) There are rigid gender roles. Why can't you all be like nice lady teachers who play with the kiddies and then go home. Do what you're told. We'll let you come to the table if you're pretty and cooperative and make us look like we aren't a total boys' club (could you get me a coffee, Michelle), but we totally are.

13) He has sudden mood swings. I'm going to make some really nice speeches about how important teachers are and how we need to pay you well and support you in your work. Then I'm going to implement policies that kick you right in the teeth.

14) He has a past of battering. Strap up. There will be head injuries.

15) There are threats of violence. We are going to evaluate you, judge you, end your career, cut loose the dead wood, whip you into shape, kick your ass, and generally use whatever leverage and coercion we can to make you behave the way we want you to. And if you won't, we are committed to tossing you into the street. You can't make a new educational omelet without breaking a few eggs, and you look like a Humpty to me.

There are other parts of the pattern as well. There's always that sad girl who insists, "You just don't know him like I do. There's really goodness inside." Whether it's "he's only mean when he drinks" or "the CCSS are great as long as we're not testing," there are always sad girlfriends who will make excuses for the abuser. Part of it is not wanting to see how bad things really are. Sometimes part of it is also selfish-- if I'm the only one who can see the good, then I can save him, fix him, and show the world just how special I am.

So we're in a bad relationship. What do we do?

If we were in an actual relationship with another live human that met these standards, there would be only one thing to do-- get out. I want to be very very VERY clear about this. I'm having some fun and making a point but don't imagine for a minute that I want to minimize the awful danger of a truly abusive relationship. If this list is you in real life, get out. Get out now. (And I've kept to traditional genders for this for ease of reading, but if you're a man being abused by a woman, this is all still true). As teachers, we stay for the sake of the kids. If you have kids, get out and take them with you. Take them with you, and get out now. Is that clear enough?

For teachers, it's a slightly different situation. We can't take the kids with us, and we need to stay for them.

Some of us can't. Some of us have stayed as long as we can, and we just can't any more, and we have walked away. I try not to judge those folks. You can't do what you can't do.

Some of us have to adjust expectations. Teachers enter the biz with lots of golden fantasies about what it will be like, and one of those fantasies is a Chips/Holland dream of being loved and revered by the vast community of our students. It's entirely possible that to grow up as teachers we have to recognize that however much we love teaching, it's never really going to love us back.

But this is beyond that. We stay for the kids. We stay for the work. We stay because we are invested in the communities that house our schools. We stay because when times get tough you do what you have to do. And honestly, for some of us, things aren't so bad right where we are.

Beyond all that, we stay because when times are tough, when it's the very hardest to make a difference, that's when it's most importance that a difference be made.

I know some of you have been reading this abuser checklist thinking, "Yes, that's it!" But maybe I've started out with the wrong metaphor, and we should construct a different story. In the new story, we aren't the ones in the abusive relationship. Instead, if you want to be abstract, it's schools and education. If you want to be concrete, it's the students.

Either way-- we're not the ones dating the worst boyfriend in the world. We're the best friend of the person in the abusive relationship. We're the ones who are there to protect, to intervene, to say, "If you raise a hand to her again, I will put such a hurt on you that you won't see straight for a year." We're the ones who step in to take care of the abusee, assure her that she's not crazy, it's not her fault, she's okay, it gets better-- all those things.

We got into teaching because we knew there were people who needed our help. We had no way of knowing what kind of help they would need-- heck, we made a commitment to students who weren't even born yet-- but whatever it was they were going to need, we made a commitment to help them. We may not have expected that they would need help dealing with the very institutions that were supposed to be watching out for them, but that's one of the worst parts of abuse-- it's a betrayal of trust. Whatever. That's the help they need, and even though we didn't always expect it, it's the help we signed up to provide. We can do that. We're teachers, dammit. We're teachers.

Trust Yourself

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.