In contentious times like these, who should get our attention? Our support? Our opposition? It seems confusing, but I think I have an answer, or at least what brings clarity for me.
Yesterday the question ripping through the blogosphere was how to sort out allies and opponents. Are the Kochs opposing CCSS just as leverage to destroy public ed? Are progressive CCSS foes being played in this battle?
These are not new questions in the struggle for the soul of public schools. We've already become so accustomed to the current school reformy stuff landscape that we sometimes forget how....odd? unexpected? appalling?.... that public schools are under attack from Democrats, that Rhee and Duncan and Obama are supposed to be progressives. Or that some sharp, insightful criticism of CCSS comes from people who see the details clearly but add them up to get Communist Takeover.
When I was a union president facing a contentious contract negotiation and, ultimately, a strike, I learned that you have to take every idea on its own merit. You cannot look at the people around you, sort them into Friends and Foes, and then always agree with your friends and always disagree with your foes. I also learned that many people really want to have things that simple. Just tell me who I'm supposed to follow, and I'll do it. Don't keep asking me to think or help decide-- just tell me I should follow that guy right there and I will go ahead and imprint on him like a happy little gosling.
Well, we can't do that. As we keep discovering, the territory is confusing and complicated. We have, at least, the following players on the field right now:
People who support CCSSetc as a way to get their hands on the billions of tax dollars connected to education.
People who support CCSS as a way to make schools better; we just have to get rid of testing.
People who oppose CCSSetc because it's trying to privatize public ed.
People who oppose CCSSetc because government schools are the indoctrination wing of a totalitarian government.
People who support CCSSetc because rich people and/or the government must know what they're doing.
People who opposed CCSSetc because rich, powerful amateurs have no place redesigning education
People who oppose CCSSetc because they think the standards and material are lousy education
And the list goes on. Add to it people are simply pretending to be one thing while hiding their true agenda, and now we're down the rabbit hole of astro-turf activist groups and "philanthropists" out to buy their way to success.
Before you know it, we're into paranoid brain-bending. Are these guys trying to get us to defend CCSS so that they can accuse us of defending it so that their opponents will force it through? We would be better off trying to guess which glass has the iocane powder in it.
I continue to believe that our best move is to avoid the US political game of tribes and teams, where we "ally" ourselves with someone and agree to support each others' play no matter what. I suspect that is at least part of how teachers ended up betrayed by the national union leadership-- the Democrats are our allies, prominent Democrats say CCSS is swell, therefor, we will support CCSS.
The betrayal of union leadership is a fine example of how political calculations can lead you to betray your core principles. But the school reform has scrambled everything.
Hell, the school reform battle has even scrambled the language. After twelve years (Happy birthday, NCLB), the federally-leveraged enforcement of educational malpractice is not a challenge to the status quo-- it IS the status quo. These Masters of Reforming Our Nations Schools aren't championing reform at all; they've simply repackaged "stay the course" as "reform."
And if language is higgledy-piggledy, then politics are likewise upended. Progressive, conservative, left, right, Democrat, GOP-- none of it means anything. There are people wearing any and all of those labels who vehemently oppose CCSSetc, and there are people wearing any and all of those labels who support it whole-heartedly.
But here's the clarity part.
I think defining the movements in terms of CCSS guarantees confusion, because it lumps together people who want to save public schools, and people who want to see them destroyed. They may look like natural allies because they share an enemy. But their desired outcomes are the exact opposite.
Instead, let's define ourselves in terms of the real goal, the real intended outcome. Let's talk about what we want to see on the educational landscape when everything is done.
I'm starting to think of myself not as an opponent of CCSS and reformy stuff, but as a supporter of the traditional US public school. I've written about why before and will do so again, but this is already getting rambly. So let's just say that I will continue to support, push, agree with, pass along the words of, cheer for, and do whatever I can to further the work of people who believe in returning the public school system.
Yes, that's a slog, because people have spent so much time denigrating that system, insisting that it failed. We know that's not true, and the fight over the past year has done two things-- it has allowed supporters to amass the writing and analyses that disproves the allegations of failure. It has also allowed Americans to get a taste of the alternative, and it tastes awful. And no, I don't mean I want to go back in time to one-room schoolhouses and McGuffy Readers. The traditional US public school system that I know is vibrant and robust and filled with great teachers who are always growing into the future. One of the strengths of the system was always that it could move forward.
Being a supporter of US public schools rather than just an opponent of CCSSetc has another advantage. Supporters of US public schools are unified in what we want to see. Supporters of reformy stuff have a hundred different outcomes in mind, and the closer they get to the finish line, the more they will pull themselves apart in a hundred different directions. They can steal the pie, but then they have to divide it up.
Divide and conquer. Co-opt and betray. We can make ourselves crazy with this stuff. Instead, let's ignore the labels and keep our eyes on the ultimate goals. As you travel, you'll meet lots of folks who will share the path for a little while. But the best traveling companions are those who are headed to the same destination.
People who want to destroy US public education are not my friends, whether they are supporting CCSS or opposing it. I think it might be that simple. People who think they can support CCSS and support public education at the same time? Well, we need to talk.
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
Monday, January 6, 2014
Standardized Competition
The average citizen can be excused for not entirely understanding the Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools, because they often speak out of both sides of their mouths. For instance, MoRONS are big fans of standardization, but they also like school choice.
Mind you, they know better that to say "school choice" any more, a phrase that has become education politics kryptonite. On google's ngram viewer, "school choice" peaks in 2002 and has been dropping precipitously in popularity ever since. So we don't talk about school choice any more-- we just promote the flowering of charter schools and cyber schools and the creation of a "robust marketplace" where students can have access to quality education blah blah blah. The rhetoric has changed, but the goal has not-- students who can take their portable funding with them as they choose among schools that are vying in the marketplace.
Except, at the same time, we have the rise of Reformy Stuff clustered around the CCSS. Let's skip here for a moment the argument where you say, "Oh, but the CCSS are not a national curriculum." Have CCSS resulted in de facto national curriculum imposed through federal fiat and testing regimens? I suppose we could argue that another day (though frankly at this point I think that argument belongs on the same day that we argue about the flat earth), but for now, even media and supporters are no longer bothering to maintain the non-federal fiction about CCSS.
No, we live now in a world in which people think having every school in the country teaching the same content at the same time is a great idea. It should be possible for a peripatetic pupil to plop down in any classroom in the country and not miss a beat.. In fact, some states really like the idea of scripting. For some educational thought leaders, a perfect world is one in which every teacher is saying exactly the same word at exactly the same moment.
Ignoring for a moment just how creepy that idea is (spoiler alert: very), how, in that brave new standardized world, would schools compete?
Competition has always existed between schools. It's why schools are part of te formula for property values-- do you want a house in the district with the great science department, or the one with the award winning music program?
But in a brave new CCSS world, all schools are teaching the same stuff at the same time in pretty much the same way (maybe reading the same words from the same script), exactly how are schools supposed to compete?
Personalizing the instruction? That can't be it, because "personalized instruction" now means "plunking student down in front of computer to interact with software we've paid a nice licensing fee to use." That experience would be identical at any of the Brave New Schools.
Better teachers? In Brave New School, teachers are just content delivery specialists. Most will only have a shelf life of two-three years and no experience to bring to bear. Everyone now knows that teachers who have been in the classroom for years are the worst and should be pushed out so they can be replaced with enthusiastic new teachers. So I guess Brave New Schools will compete based on staff enthusiasm, though with regular deep staff churn, it's going to be hard to market teachers sight unseen.
Test scores? But but but-- if all schools are doing the same teacher-proof programs, shouldn't all Brave New Schools be getting the same test results? So that's a wash.
School leaders? Perhaps this is the key. A Steve Perry or Michelle Rhee could be the key. They don't need to have actually ever successfully done anything. I have called Rhee a celebrity spokesmodel, the Kim Kardashian of ed reform (and I'm going to keep doing it till it catches on), but the fact is she's making mega bucks for opening her mouth while I'm still blogging and teaching English in obscurity, so really, which one of us really understands how to play this game (spoiler alert: not me). Wave enough money at these guys, and you could recruit some real heavy hitters as school leaders. We've already got sports figures and rap stars in the ed biz. What kid wouldn't want to go to school with The Rock as principal?
Maybe those leaders would come up with new ways for Brave New Schools to compete. "Hey look-- at our school all the content delivery specialists wear funny hats!" Or fun lunches. Or a cooler mascot.
No if Brave New CCSS Schools are all doing the same things, and it really doesn't matter who the teachers are or the students are or where the school is or what kind of population it serves, then there IS no basis for competition in a marketplace.
So it's possible that CCSS and attendant Reformy Stuff actually tolls the death knell of school choice, and that with Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools fully empowered, vouchers and choice and other market-based reform is going to be killed dead deader deadest.
Of course, there's another possibility.
That other possibility is that the rules for Brave New CCSS Schools will not apply to everybody. It's possible that once we've dumped a giant pile of CCSS fertilizer on public schools, the marketplace will be ruled by schools that can say, "Hey, come over here where we aren't buried under a pile of soul-crushing educationally maladaptive baloney. Come over here where we let teachers teach and students are recognized as actual human beings instead of data-generating drones."
The other possibility is that one goal of Reformy Stuff is to take one group of runners in the race of life and tie their ankles together and duct-tape their hands to their heads so that another group of runners, the special group, the elite group, the group composed of The Right People, can have an unencumbered run at the finish line. The other possibility is that standardization is just for proles and drones, and that real education is to be reserved for only a certain few.
Mind you, they know better that to say "school choice" any more, a phrase that has become education politics kryptonite. On google's ngram viewer, "school choice" peaks in 2002 and has been dropping precipitously in popularity ever since. So we don't talk about school choice any more-- we just promote the flowering of charter schools and cyber schools and the creation of a "robust marketplace" where students can have access to quality education blah blah blah. The rhetoric has changed, but the goal has not-- students who can take their portable funding with them as they choose among schools that are vying in the marketplace.
Except, at the same time, we have the rise of Reformy Stuff clustered around the CCSS. Let's skip here for a moment the argument where you say, "Oh, but the CCSS are not a national curriculum." Have CCSS resulted in de facto national curriculum imposed through federal fiat and testing regimens? I suppose we could argue that another day (though frankly at this point I think that argument belongs on the same day that we argue about the flat earth), but for now, even media and supporters are no longer bothering to maintain the non-federal fiction about CCSS.
No, we live now in a world in which people think having every school in the country teaching the same content at the same time is a great idea. It should be possible for a peripatetic pupil to plop down in any classroom in the country and not miss a beat.. In fact, some states really like the idea of scripting. For some educational thought leaders, a perfect world is one in which every teacher is saying exactly the same word at exactly the same moment.
Ignoring for a moment just how creepy that idea is (spoiler alert: very), how, in that brave new standardized world, would schools compete?
Competition has always existed between schools. It's why schools are part of te formula for property values-- do you want a house in the district with the great science department, or the one with the award winning music program?
But in a brave new CCSS world, all schools are teaching the same stuff at the same time in pretty much the same way (maybe reading the same words from the same script), exactly how are schools supposed to compete?
Personalizing the instruction? That can't be it, because "personalized instruction" now means "plunking student down in front of computer to interact with software we've paid a nice licensing fee to use." That experience would be identical at any of the Brave New Schools.
Better teachers? In Brave New School, teachers are just content delivery specialists. Most will only have a shelf life of two-three years and no experience to bring to bear. Everyone now knows that teachers who have been in the classroom for years are the worst and should be pushed out so they can be replaced with enthusiastic new teachers. So I guess Brave New Schools will compete based on staff enthusiasm, though with regular deep staff churn, it's going to be hard to market teachers sight unseen.
Test scores? But but but-- if all schools are doing the same teacher-proof programs, shouldn't all Brave New Schools be getting the same test results? So that's a wash.
School leaders? Perhaps this is the key. A Steve Perry or Michelle Rhee could be the key. They don't need to have actually ever successfully done anything. I have called Rhee a celebrity spokesmodel, the Kim Kardashian of ed reform (and I'm going to keep doing it till it catches on), but the fact is she's making mega bucks for opening her mouth while I'm still blogging and teaching English in obscurity, so really, which one of us really understands how to play this game (spoiler alert: not me). Wave enough money at these guys, and you could recruit some real heavy hitters as school leaders. We've already got sports figures and rap stars in the ed biz. What kid wouldn't want to go to school with The Rock as principal?
Maybe those leaders would come up with new ways for Brave New Schools to compete. "Hey look-- at our school all the content delivery specialists wear funny hats!" Or fun lunches. Or a cooler mascot.
No if Brave New CCSS Schools are all doing the same things, and it really doesn't matter who the teachers are or the students are or where the school is or what kind of population it serves, then there IS no basis for competition in a marketplace.
So it's possible that CCSS and attendant Reformy Stuff actually tolls the death knell of school choice, and that with Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools fully empowered, vouchers and choice and other market-based reform is going to be killed dead deader deadest.
Of course, there's another possibility.
That other possibility is that the rules for Brave New CCSS Schools will not apply to everybody. It's possible that once we've dumped a giant pile of CCSS fertilizer on public schools, the marketplace will be ruled by schools that can say, "Hey, come over here where we aren't buried under a pile of soul-crushing educationally maladaptive baloney. Come over here where we let teachers teach and students are recognized as actual human beings instead of data-generating drones."
The other possibility is that one goal of Reformy Stuff is to take one group of runners in the race of life and tie their ankles together and duct-tape their hands to their heads so that another group of runners, the special group, the elite group, the group composed of The Right People, can have an unencumbered run at the finish line. The other possibility is that standardization is just for proles and drones, and that real education is to be reserved for only a certain few.
Saturday, January 4, 2014
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.]
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.]
Friday, January 3, 2014
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 31, 2013
"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.
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.
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.
Saturday, December 28, 2013
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.
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.
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