The Gadfly Made a Video [Updated]

[Update: Today somebody over at Fordham apparently took a look at this and responded, a bunch, on twitter while I was busy teaching students about the past's intrusion on the present in Light in August. I mention that last part as an example of the odd juxtapositions that can happen when the interwebs intersect with the meat world. At any rate, while you might have been hoping that Fordham's tweets were some sort of epic thunder at my offensive mockery, they were more on the order of clarification and mockery of my mockery, which is of course only fair. At any rate, since this is my first go-round with a thinky tank, I've added some of that dialogue to the original piece where it can all be viewed in context.]

Mike Petrilli over at Fordham went and made himself a wacky video. And it is...um... Well, remember when your sad uncle used to get drunk and dance with the stuffed animals in your sister's room? This is...um... well, it has higher production values. And it tells us way more about these folks than they probably meant to share.

Petrilli is the junior half of Finn and Petrilli, the thought leaders who have steered Fordham Institute to a leadership role in education reform based on... well, based on something. They most recently scored big by getting a bundle of Gates money to examine CCSS and another bundle to help spread the word how awesome CCSS is. So kind of like one of those labs that does research on health effects of tobacco sponsored by R J Reynolds. I'm not going to unpack all of that here-- you can read a much more thorough account by the invaluable Mercedes Schneider on her blog.

Bottom line: these guys are members of the Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools club.

You can watch the video here. Or you can save that pleasure until after reading about it. Or you can just never watch it ever. I'm going to talk about what we can learn about these folks from this video, and while it may seem like I'm making some big stretches based on just a little 2:20 clip, it's becoming apparent over the course of this blog that that is what I do. So here we go.

INTRO
I suspect that one motivation for making this video was to show that the Fordham gang are just as "fun" and "zany" as anybody out there. However, they tip their hand immediately.

First, we show a clip of the original source material ("What does the fox say") just in case, you know, people don't get it. It's the kind of thing you do when the only frame of reference you have is your own, like your annoying aunt or that know-it-all at the library or NBC news try to tell you about something cool that has been famous already for six months, but they only just learned about it and it never occurs to them that other people might know things that they do not.

There are only two possibilities here. Either nobody at Fordham thought to say, "You know, the original has 300 million hits and thousands of other parody versions-- I don't think we need to explain to anyone what we're doing," or they know that their audience is so disconnected from current culture that this will have to be explained to them the same way you have to explain Netflix to your great-grandmother.

But showing us the clip isn't enough. Mike Petrilli laughs at it. Specifically, he laughs at the jump cut to "What does the fox say." He means to laugh as if this reveal is the most hilarious things since Gene Hackman poured soup into Peter Boyle's lap. He actually laughs as if he is trying to imitate the way that "humans" laugh at things they believe are "funny."

So if the goal of this clip was to show that the Fordham folks are zany fun guys, just like the rest of us, that ship has sailed (and been blown up in the harbor) within the first twenty seconds.

A QUICK PHONECALL

Petrilli is interrupted by a phone call. It's from Mr. Broad (and we finally have confirmation, for those of who weren't certain, that "Broad" rhymes with "Toad"). Petrilli has a conversation with him as if Broad had never heard of Fordham before, all so that we can set up the lead in line, which really ought to be "What does the gadfly say"-- but Petrilli muffs it and so we get "What does Gadfly say?"

You might call that a small thing. But I'm a part-time hack musician as well as a hack writer, and I tend to automatically distrust people with a tin ear. And this is a very produced video-- it's not like we couldn't have gone back and done it right.

[Update: Pamela Tatz, editorial associate at Fordham, was late to the twitter party, but offered Since we're apparently tweeting you corrections...Mike meant to say "What does Gadfly say." We were trying to squeeze syllables. :). So it's an artistic choice. She alsocorrectly pointed out that SNL also opened their parody with a clip of the original. Since I am one of those old farts who complains that SNL has never been as good since John Belushi died, I had missed that and stand corrected. I stand by my critique of the opening line, but I will spare everyone the English teachery lesson on how meter is more important than syllable count.]

This sequence gives us our first straight on view of Petrilli's face. As an English teacher, you sometimes regret that you don't have more opportunity to use some really great words, like "unctuous" and "supercilious." Petrilli's face corrects that problem. Maybe it's just anticipation for the wacky shenanigans to follow, but he already looks damned pleased with himself. It's not quite Bitchy Resting face, but it's still kind of annoying.

THEN THE FUN

I'll take back half of my deduction for tin ear, because while it might have been autotuned a tad, Petrilli's voice is more than up to the demands of the song. Kudos, sir. [Update: Joe Portnoy, media manager st Fordham, assures me via twitter that there is no autotuning. Fair enough. I thought I might have detected a faint autotunetang, but it could easily have just been a production artifact.And Mike Petrilli himself tweets that vocal credit goes to @brainofmatter & @VictoriaEHSears]

But the lyric itself is interesting, because it requires Petrilli to reduce the major players to a single simple sentence. So "Randi whines" and "Diane's become a kook." Criticism of the critics- no surprise there. But "Arne says 'sorry'"? Did Fordham just call Duncan an apologist? Well, maybe not, but it's fun to hear it that way. And it certainly wasn't a tribute to his stalwart leadership. "Michelle fires them all" is also an interesting choice of defining characteristic.

And then all musical holy hell breaks loose. Again, credit to Petrilli for swinging for the fences. He attacks the lyric with-- well, I'm not sure. Anger? Heartburn? Kind of like the awkward kid in school who isn't really sure why that other kid always gets a solo and he doesn't, so he's going to sing hard. So hard. He's going to sing like a boss. He's going to sing the hell out of this. He's going to kick each note like he's punching back at every jerk who ever gave him a swirly.

The office staff (mostly young enough to be interns) is game. We're all in shirtsleeves-- see? no sports coats on, just like the video = wacky relaxed shenanigans! The film editor is fast enough to keep the general awkwardness from really registering, but watch it a few too many times and you can tell that the think tank did not test for dancing skills when hiring. There is one piece of sound judgment here-- at no point do they attempt any of the backup dance moves from the video. And Petrilli looks very proud of his dance moves, but in his defense, he does not suck.[Update: Petrilli tweeted that last line and responded "I shall now die happy."]

At this point we're replacing the nonsense lines from the original song with nonsense lines from Fordham's policy recommendations, so I'm enjoying the parallel. Did Petrilli mean to suggest that "Smaller classes? We say no" was the equivalent of "Ringdindingdingdingdading"? Probably not, but I'm going to go ahead and draw that conclusion anyway.

FINAL THOUGHTS
Final effect? People making wacky shenanigans out of policy ideas that are being used to destroy public education? It's a hard thing to parse-- how would "Springtime for Hitler" have come across if it had been staged by the Nazis themselves? I am not meaning to suggest that Fordham = Nazis, but I do wonder what we're to make of people making themselves look more ridiculous that we could make them look on purpose.

It is part of the tone deafness problem. I want to shake them and say, "Did you not see this? Do you not know how you look, both awkward and opposite-of-cool, while making jokes about policies being used to destroy peoples' careers?" Somehow while shooting for cool and relaxed and with it, they've hit uncool and callous, thereby suggesting that they are imbued with so much hubris and arrogance that they either can't see or don't care (because only unimportant people will be bothered, and they don't matter). Perhaps Petrilli and his well-smooched tuchus have been insulated from honest opinions from so long that he just doesn't know. This is the education industry equivalent of those bankers' videos of obscenely wealthy parties, the Christmas cards from wealthy apartments, the total lack of understanding of what things are like out there on the street, because the street is just for the commoners who don't matter.

It's an oddly fascinating train wreck. Is it awesomely funny because it's so awful, or is it too awful to be funny? Whatever the case, it gives a strong 2:20 feel for what sort of attitude permeates Fordham, and it is just as bad as we ever imagined. Maybe worse.

[Update: I'll note that Michelle Gininger, media relations manager at Fordham (which is starting to feel more like a PR firm than a thinky tank) also passed along some of the tweetage. Additionally, Joe Portnoy tweeted "So far this wins for favorite negative review of #WhatDoesGadflySay." So Fordham's response to this blog fell somewhat short of full Darth Vader or even medium Donald Trump. Make of that what you will. At the very least, I think they showed better judgment in how they responded to the video review than they did in making the actual video in the first place.]

Test Administration Ethics

I've been perusing Pennsylvania's DOE "Ethical Standards of Test Administration," the study of which is required in order to pass your PA Assessment Administrator quiz (otherwise you lack the wisdom to proctor The Test). Because that whole business is farmed out to Data Recognition Corporation, it's hard to know how much of the ESTA to attribute to bureaucrats and how much springs from the fertile minds of corporate data wranglers.

The link is there in case you want to wade through this in its entirety. I just want to take a few moments of my blizzard-related late start to hit the highlights.

The ESTA are broken into three sections-- before, during, and after test administration-- and each  is split into do's and don't's. The ESTA document is six pages long, so let me just highlight some selected instructions representative of my own categories.


Communicate to students, parents, and the community what the test does and does not measure, when and how it will be administered, and how the results will be used.
I am particularly interested in that "what it does not measure" line, because supporters of reformy stuff have been remarkably quiet on what the uber-tests are NOT good for. If someone is willing to admit what the tests won't do, we might be able to make some progress in that conversation.

Maintain a positive attitude about testing.
This instruction is repeated three times. Seriously? It's the leading portion of the instructions with the subtext, "Be a happily obedient minion!"

Teach to the Pennsylvania Core Standards*.
Look- The Core and The Test are conjoined twins sharing one brain. I understand people who deny that, because I was in that place once, but here is the sixty gazillionth clue that these babies were never meant to crawl a separate path. Use the Core to prepare for the test. Use the test to measure the teaching of The Core. Without each other, neither has a puspose.

Make contingency plans for unexpected disruptions during testing. All school personnel must know what to do in the event of a fire alarm, bomb threat, HAZMAT incident, unruly student, etc
There's something special about equating an unruly student and a HAZMAT incident. This is the best of a series of instructions with the subtext "We're going to assume that test day is the first day you have ever worked in this school building ever and that you therefor have no knowledge of how anything works there."

Make sure the testing environment is comfortable and has appropriate lighting.
There is also a series of instructions for which the subtext is "We're going to assume that you are as smart as stone."

Do not... possess unauthorized copies of state tests.
One would think that The Tests contain directions to a lost city of gold, and I suppose given the amount of corporate investment opportunity resting on the backs of all this reformy stuff, that's not entirely off the mark. But there are tons of instructions dictating a level of safety and security usually reserved for matters of national security or the ingredients for Col. Sanders chicken coating. Test administrators are admonished not to look at the tests long enough to memorize questions, not to copy anything down, not to "discuss, disseminate or otherwise  reveal contents of the test to anyone." The precious must be kept secret and safe.

Do not... coach or provide feedback to students. Do not...erase or change student answers.
Because you're just a teacher, you've probably never given a test before. Don't help the students at all. Don't read portions of the test to them. Don't answer any questions about the test. Don't "alter, influence or interfere" with the test in any way. Subtext? "We know that we have highly motivated school districts to cheat on these. Rather than try to address how we have created a systemic incentive to cheat, we're just going to tell you real hard not to."

The directions suggest that the Commonwealth's subcontractor for this gig is used to dealing with untrained unmotivated minimum-wage grunts, because the directions are straight from the  Spell Everything Out For You On The Assumption That You Will Do What You're Told, No More, No Less manual. This is not how professionals speak to other professionals; this is how semi-professionals position themselves for future appearances in a courtroom.

But I do give these guys credit, because they have brought something new to the Orders for the Minions table, and that's the title. Let's look at it again.

Ethical Standards of Test Administration.

Damn. Doesn't that sound fine? Doesn't it sound like a higher calling, a noble undertaking? Yes, this is a far, far better test I administer than I have ever administered before.

I can totally see this catching on. Fast food restaurants will present training sessions about Ethical Principles of Hamburger Preparation. Shop 'n' Save will train its workers in Ethical Methods of Scanning Groceries. My garbage collectors will pause at the curb to have philosophical discussions-- "Yes, we could throw this bag of trash on the truck as you've described. But would that be the ethical way to load the garbage?"

I assume that the use of use of "ethical" here is supposed to serve a couple of purposes. One is to position these instructions as having a stronger moral imperative than the instructions on hooking up a blu-ray player. And that helps fuel the most important subtext here-- "You are not just a wage slave hired by the state's contractor to deliver and protect their proprietary, revenue-generating material, but a person tasked to follow a higher  imperative sewn into the very fabric of the moral universe." And yet, I have to conclude that in this case "being ethical" means "doing as you're told."

The guiding vision here is "maintaining the integrity of the test environment" and the "validity of the test," and boy, couldn't we all just write a few thousand words about what high stakes testing (prepared by corporate edu-biz for the state to use in implementing reformy stuff) has to do with those two goals. I don't have time, so let's just say this-- I would LOVE to maintain the integrity of my classroom environment, and would welcome the chance to see some valid tests.

Hey, I don't have such a high opinion of myself professionally that I'm above administering a lowly standardized test. And during the day, I'm "subject to assignment," so the district could tell me that my job is to watch grass grow or snow melt, and that would be my job (poor use of district resources, but still my job).

But this feels a lot like sticking me under a fast-food-preserving heat lamp and telling me I'm on vacation in Hawaii. It feels like telling a six-year-old you have a "super important job" for him before handing him Klondike wrappers to put in the wastebasket.

Tell me what to do. Give me my instructions. Just don't lie to me about them. And understand that I may find it ethical to make fun of you.



*PA is one of those states that has its own version of The Core because either A) we can totally do better or B) it's politically expedient to distance ourselves from CCSS. You decide. As with other similar states, the differences between our core and The Core are on par with the differences between Mary kate and Ashley Olsen.

"Raise the Bar," or Not

While we're talking about watching our language--

Just in the afternoon, I've stumbled across the image of raising the bar on the education world about five different times. Here's what's wrong with "raising the bar."

Raising the bar is a perfect image for the idea of one-size-fits-all education. After all, it only makes sense if there's just one bar and it's set up in the only place where people jump. It's a metaphor that is repeatedly employed, and yet falls apart with very little examination.

Are we raising the bar for a high jumper, or a pole vaulter? Has to be one or the other, because here at the Common Core Track and Field Meet, there can only be one event.

What happens if we raise the bar for the 100 yard sprint? What if we raise the bar, but we set it up behind the jumping line? What if we raise the bar for the shot put? If we raise the bar for the limbo, isn't that rejecting excellence?

What if we raise the bar for swimmers? Should we raise the bar at basketball games, or should we raise the basket? Can we raise a bar at the band concert? Should we raise the bar for the dance group, or the drama club?

"Raise the bar" is the verbal equivalent of the oft-shared cartoon that shows all the different animals in school (the one where the fish fail because they can't fly). "Raise the bar" demands that we reduce the whole complicated business of education to one simple act that must be performed by every single student. "Raise the bar" insists that the whole wide range of human endeavor and achievement does not matter-- just the ability to get up over that bar. Use "raise the bar" with me, and I get the idea that your vision of what education is about is tiny and cramped and fails to reflect the full range of human awesomeness.

Let's Drop "Privatization"

As we continue the struggle with reformy stuff, we should always keep a close eye on our vocabulary. I think we need to stop talking about "privatization."

I understand the word's appeal. It seems to speak to a movement to move schools out of the public sphere, to make education policy and financing captive to the whims of our new corporate overlords. It is also a relatively shiny new word. Google ngram shows trace elements of it from 1920 on, but it doesn't really take off until the early 1980s with a peak in the mid-90s. That would suggest a word without much baggage, but I don't think it's the word we want.

"Privatization" suggests a neat, complete takeover. It makes it sounds as if the Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools just want to buy up all the schools and run them themselves. It certainly conjures up a scary picture-- slick, gleaming, soulless schools where uber-standardized children are stamped into uniform blank-eyed Stepford students.

But that picture, horrifying though it may be, is seductively wrong. It allows us to assume two comforting things-- 1) that privatized schools might be awful, but they will still be functioning which means that 2) there will still be hope of a revolution in which we recapture the front office and return the school to its rightful function. Maybe it will be like a private school, and many of those are quite fine. We imagine that the school is a big machine and privatizers will capture it and turn it to manufacturing ugly hamster cages. All we'll have to do is find a way to get the machine back and reset it to make pretty handbags.

But that's not what the MoRONS have in mind at all. From Philly to New Orleans to Chicago to LA, they've demonstrated that they no more want to privatize school than a junkyard wants to privatize your car.

What we're seeing is nothing new in the business world. One business often buys out another simply to get at inventory, a brand name, a customer base, or manufacturing capacity. They buy the company, take what they want, and discard the rest.

None of these MoRONS want public schools. In some cases, they want the branding (TFA uses the word "teacher" to help brand itself as some great humanitarian enterprise). In some cases, they want free use of real estate (e.g. the now-very-nervous charter schools of NYC). But mostly they want just one thing-- money.

Money. Government grants. Revenue streams from programs. Income from the Right Students. Money. Money moneymoneymoneymoney money MONEY!

Everything else about the public school system is unimportant to the MoRONS. The parts of the system they care about are the parts that keep the money flowing. Everything else is unimportant. It's a business decision. Anything that keeps the money coming in is good. Anything that costs money without providing ROI is bad.

So MoRONS are about dismantling the system, keeping what makes them money, throwing out the rest. Given the chance, they will gut schools like you scoop the seeds out of a cantaloupe. They are not interested in privatizing. They are interested in dismantling the machine, selling the parts, and scrapping the rest.

Teachers too expensive. Find a way to scrap 'em. Some students provide bad expense-to-income ratio? Get rid of them. Some schools too hard to get ROI from? Abandon them. Make sure that curriculum, programming, materials, and evaluation all work in a perfect circle, each buddy handing money off to the guy next to him, around and around and around. We don't need an education system; we just need a revenue transfer system.

All the MoRONS really need is enough of what looks like a school system to convince government to keep giving them money. And since they generally get to help government write the rules about how money is handed out, they can make that process completely streamlined.

And it's not just an urban fight. The big money is in urban schools, so that's where the MoRONS have focused so far. They may never turn their attention to rural schools (though in PA, cyber-charters are sucking small districts dry already), but even if they don't, they will redirect school tax dollars to the profit centers in big cities, leaving rural schools to sip fruitlessly at ever-drying pools of spare change.

"Privatization" is a seductively dangerous word because it suggests we're in a fight over who runs the public school system. I'm thinking we're actually in a fight over whether that system will continue to exist. We're not talking takeover; we're talking destruction. So let's all stop using the word "privatization." However, if you want to keep using the acronym MoRONS, you have my enthusiastic permission to do so.

The Hard Part

They never tell you in teacher school, and it's rarely discussed elsewhere. It is never, ever portrayed in movies and tv shows about teaching. Teachers rarely bring it up around non-teachers for fear it will make us look weak or inadequate.

Valerie Strauss in yesterday's Washington Post put together a series of quotes to answer the question "How hard is teaching?" and asked for more in the comments section. My rant didn't entirely fit there, so I'm putting it here, because it is on the list of Top Ten Things They Never Tell You in Teacher School.

The hard part of teaching is coming to grips with this:

There is never enough.

There is never enough time. There are never enough resources. There is never enough you.

As a teacher, you can see what a perfect job in your classroom would look like. You know all the assignments you should be giving. You know all the feedback you should be providing your students. You know all the individual crafting that should provide for each individual's instruction. You know all the material you should be covering. You know all the ways in which, when the teachable moment emerges (unannounced as always), you can greet it with a smile and drop everything to make it grow and blossom.

You know all this, but you can also do the math. 110 papers about the view of death in American Romantic writing times 15 minutes to respond with thoughtful written comments equals-- wait! what?! That CAN'T be right! Plus quizzes to assess where we are in the grammar unit in order to design a new remedial unit before we craft the final test on that unit (five minutes each to grade). And that was before Ethel made that comment about Poe that offered us a perfect chance to talk about the gothic influences. And I know that if my students are really going to get good at writing, they should be composing something at least once a week. And if I am going to prepare my students for life in the real world, I need to have one of my own to be credible.

If you are going to take any control of your professional life, you have to make some hard, conscious decisions. What is it that I know I should be doing that I am not going to do?

Every year you get better. You get faster, you learn tricks, you learn which corners can more safely be cut, you get better at predicting where the student-based bumps in the road will appear. A good administrative team can provide a great deal of help.

But every day is still educational triage. You will pick and choose your battles, and you will always be at best bothered, at worst haunted, by the things you know you should have done but didn't. Show me a teacher who thinks she's got everything all under control and doesn't need to fix a thing for next year, and I will show you a lousy teacher. The best teachers I've ever known can give you a list of exactly what they don't do well enough yet.

Not everybody can deal with this. I had a colleague (high school English) years ago who was a great classroom teacher. But she gave every assignment that she knew she should, and so once a grading period, she took a personal day to sit at home and grade papers for 18 hours straight. She was awesome, but she left teaching, because doing triage broke her heart.

So if you show up at my door saying, "Here's a box from Pearson. Open it up, hand out the materials, read the script, and stick to the daily schedule. Do that, and your classroom will work perfectly," I will look you in your beady eyes and ask, "Are you high? Are you stupid?" Because you have to be one of those. Maybe both.

Here's your simile for the day.

Teaching is like painting a huge Victorian mansion. And you don't actually have enough paint. And when you get to some section of the house it turns out the wood is a little rotten or not ready for the paint. And about every hour some supervisor comes around and asks you get down off the ladder and explain why you aren't making faster progress. And some days the weather is terrible. So it takes all your art and skill and experience to do a job where the house still ends up looking good.

Where are school reformy folks in this metaphor? They're the ones who show up and tell you that having a ladder is making you lazy, and you should work without. They're the ones who take a cup of your paint every day to paint test strips on scrap wood, just to make sure the paint is okay (but now you have less of it). They're the ones who show up after the work is done and tell passerbys, "See that one good-looking part? That turned out good because the painters followed my instructions." And they're most especially the ones who turn up after the job is complete to say, "Hey, you missed a spot right there on that one board under the eaves."

There isn't much discussion of the not-enough problem. Movie and tv teachers never have it (high school teachers on television only ever teach one class a day!). And teachers hate to bring it up because we know it just sounds like whiny complaining.

But all the other hard part of teaching-- the technical issues of instruction and planning and individualization and being our own "administrative assistants" and acquiring materials and designing unit plans and assessment-- all of those issues rest solidly on the foundation of Not Enough.

Trust us. We will suck it up. We will make do. We will Find A Way. We will even do that when the people tasked with helping us do all that on the state and federal level instead try to make it harder. Even though we can't get to perfect, we can steer toward it. But if you ask me what the hard part of teaching is, hands down, this wins.

There's not enough.

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.