I was in a CCSS training, and the trainer stopped to make an observation about how Kids These Days lack discipline and order. She even illustrated it with a story about her own child. And light bulb went on for me.
I have long considered that the Masters of Reforming Our Nation's Schools view children as widgets, as little programmable devices, as interchangeable gears, as nothing more than Data Generation Units. I had considered that these MoRONS were indifferent to children. What I had not considered was that reformers are actively hostile to children.
I have certainly heard people in the ed world complain about Those Darn Kids, and I have taught in the building with more than one person who blames all their classroom woes on terrible awful no good pretty bad students. I try to be understanding. If I hear it once or twice, I assume somebody is having a bad day. If I hear it many times, I assume somebody is a bad teacher.
But a hostile teacher is one thing. A movement that institutionalizes that hostility is a whole other level of awful.
After I wrote about my experience, other teachers shared more of the same. Tales of trainers talking about how Kids These Days need to be rigorously rigored into a state of rigor. And as I reread old materials, I could see the hostility bubbling beneath the surface.
Sometimes it is misplaced and out of date. There are still education commentators railing against the self esteem movement, and while I don't disagree with some of the criticism, it's like complaining that too many Kids These Days are spending too much time on their new computers and listening to the rap music. That ship has sailed, Grampa.
Sometimes it is not even beneath the surface. What is a "no excuse" school, except a school founded on the premise that Kids These Days are all hooligans that will take a mile if you give them an inch. Or even one of those new-fangled millimeters. And when Arne Duncan suggests that those suburban white moms have over-inflated images of the abilities of their coddled children, isn't he already suggesting that those over-protective parents need to step aside so their kids can be whipped into shape.
Or Frank Bruni's op-ed that unambiguously declared Duncan correct and opponents of CCSS a raft of child-coddlers:
Aren’t aspects of school supposed to be relatively mirthless? Isn’t
stress an acceptable byproduct of reaching higher and digging deeper?
Aren’t certain fixed judgments inevitable? And isn’t mettle established
through hard work?
The narrative here is not a new one. See if you can recognize some of the key points. We live in a meritocracy that rewards hard work and grit. Therefor, anyone who is poor and unsuccessful must have failed to show merit, hard work, and grit. If we have a lot of poor people, it's because they are all slackers-- and it starts when they're kids. If we could get to them when they were little and whip them into shape, then poverty would be gone. Fixing education would cure poverty.
So to fix poverty, we have to toughen these little slackers up. They need to be toughly uncoddled with rigorous excuse-free punches to their tiny brains. These children are one of the big obstacles to fixing our society (along with the teachers who won't properly kick their little asses). And just look at how dumb and lazy they are! Look at all the factoids about the things they don't know, and the low test scores they get! Back in my day, students got such much better scores and, buddy, we knew stuff. These kids have to be brought up to snuff.
Is your kid wasting time playing? Stop coddling. Did a lesson make him so frustrated he burst into tears? Good-- maybe he'll start taking school seriously now. Did he fail his big test? Let that be a wake-up call for you. Is his spirit being crushed? Then his spirit is too weak and whiny, and his spirit needs to get its act together.
That this sort of program should originate in the halls of power and privilege is unsurprising. These are men who must believe that their own vast success is the result of their own merit and awesomeness, not luck, timing, underhanded gamesmanship or simply the result of a privileged background. Nor is it surprising that they don't subject their own children to Reformed School, because they know that their own children already possess the qualities of virtue that they are so ardently trying to beat into Other People's Children.
Is this is some sort of bizarro generational theater in which Boomers are trying to fix the children they believe Millenials are unfit to raise? Are Americans having another Calvinist flashback?
I don't know. What I do believe is that the reformy movement carries a strong thread of anti-child fervor (or at least anti-Other People's Children), and that this belief that children should be beaten into shape rather than cherished and nurtured.
Look, if you ask my students if I coddle them, they will laugh at you and tell you that I am the least warm, most unfuzzy teacher they've ever dealt with. I believe in many of the virtues that these virtuous crusaders espouse. I even believe that sometimes love means facing hard, painful things.
But I had a superintendent once who used to tell a story about a horse trainer who was asked about the secret of his success. He asked his inquisitors what they thought the first step was, and they made many guesses, all dealing with technical horse trainy actions. Said the trainer, "First, you have to love the horse."
How we can possibly teach students we don't love or respect or value is beyond me. How we enter a classroom with a program that assumes they are unworthy, weak, and fundamentally deficient, and then teach effectively is a mystery. And how we start with the belief that our students are essentially worthless until a hero teacher fixes them-- well, that encompasses so much arrogant, wrong-headed, ineffective and just plain evil mess. If that's our attitude-- or the attitude that we are supposed to embrace-- I know one more reason that CCSS reformy stuff is destined to fail.
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Friday, February 7, 2014
Dear PACE: No.
The annual appeal to contribute money to PACE, the political action arm of NEA, is in my mailbox again, and once again I will ignore it.
There was a time, when I was a young teacher who still believed in moonbeams and magic, that I actively ignored politics. "Politics is dirty and yucky," I would say. "I am pursuing a noble profession, and I don't want to get any of that political shmutz on me." I probably wrinkled up my nose, then closed the door to my room to teach.
What can I say? I was younger then. Over the intervening decades I have better realized that while teaching verbs and sonnets to high school students may not be a political act, it is politics that shapes the ground on which we teachers try to walk. It is politics that sets our agenda, writes our marching orders, and increasingly fashions our curriculum. It is politics that decides who enters our profession and how they get there.
There was a time when we could guard the doors to our classrooms and filter out the worst of the outside, protect our students from what was stupid and wrong circulating through the edusphere. But politics has steadily eaten away at our power to do that.
So I've been a union president through negotiations and strike. I've written my representatives in Harrisburg and DC. I am no longer too good to stick my spoon in the political soup (a line that probably sounded better in my head).
So why not contribute to PACE, the arm of my union that finances political action on the local, state and national level? Why not throw some of my monetary weight behind the union heft?
Because my union has shown a complete lack of ability to use its heft effectively or wisely.
Here in PA, we stumped for Smilin' Ed Rendell who was, I guess, better than the alternative because he did not actually assault teachers with baby seals that he had clubbed to death himself. And if our state level choices weren't terribly helpful, on the national level we decided to support Barrack Obama, even after it became clear that his education policies were just as bad as anything we experienced in the Bush era. Race to the Top has been revealed to be not just NCLB on steroids, but NCLB in a permanent fit of roid rage.
PACE is the coke addict swearing that he will absolutely spend the money you give him on food this time. PACE is the bad girlfriend who begs for to take her back after the third time you drop her for sleeping with your cousin. PACE is the brother-in-law who swears that if you just give him another $500, that chinchilla farm in Montana will finally start to pay off. PACE is the abusive husband who argues that you should forgive because he only broke one of your arms and it could have been much worse.
So no, PACE, no money for you. It's frustrating, because I sure would like to have my voice heard in the political world, but you, PACE, are just a bad game of telephone where "Stop beating me" somehow emerges as "beat me some more." I do not know what the answer is to the problem of inaudible and invisible teachers in the political world, but you are clearly not it.
There was a time, when I was a young teacher who still believed in moonbeams and magic, that I actively ignored politics. "Politics is dirty and yucky," I would say. "I am pursuing a noble profession, and I don't want to get any of that political shmutz on me." I probably wrinkled up my nose, then closed the door to my room to teach.
What can I say? I was younger then. Over the intervening decades I have better realized that while teaching verbs and sonnets to high school students may not be a political act, it is politics that shapes the ground on which we teachers try to walk. It is politics that sets our agenda, writes our marching orders, and increasingly fashions our curriculum. It is politics that decides who enters our profession and how they get there.
There was a time when we could guard the doors to our classrooms and filter out the worst of the outside, protect our students from what was stupid and wrong circulating through the edusphere. But politics has steadily eaten away at our power to do that.
So I've been a union president through negotiations and strike. I've written my representatives in Harrisburg and DC. I am no longer too good to stick my spoon in the political soup (a line that probably sounded better in my head).
So why not contribute to PACE, the arm of my union that finances political action on the local, state and national level? Why not throw some of my monetary weight behind the union heft?
Because my union has shown a complete lack of ability to use its heft effectively or wisely.
Here in PA, we stumped for Smilin' Ed Rendell who was, I guess, better than the alternative because he did not actually assault teachers with baby seals that he had clubbed to death himself. And if our state level choices weren't terribly helpful, on the national level we decided to support Barrack Obama, even after it became clear that his education policies were just as bad as anything we experienced in the Bush era. Race to the Top has been revealed to be not just NCLB on steroids, but NCLB in a permanent fit of roid rage.
PACE is the coke addict swearing that he will absolutely spend the money you give him on food this time. PACE is the bad girlfriend who begs for to take her back after the third time you drop her for sleeping with your cousin. PACE is the brother-in-law who swears that if you just give him another $500, that chinchilla farm in Montana will finally start to pay off. PACE is the abusive husband who argues that you should forgive because he only broke one of your arms and it could have been much worse.
So no, PACE, no money for you. It's frustrating, because I sure would like to have my voice heard in the political world, but you, PACE, are just a bad game of telephone where "Stop beating me" somehow emerges as "beat me some more." I do not know what the answer is to the problem of inaudible and invisible teachers in the political world, but you are clearly not it.
The Heart of Instruction
In conversations about instruction with student teachers or mentees or other teaching colleagues, it always comes back to the question that is at the heart of all instruction:
Why am I teaching this?
If "heart of instruction" is too squishy, call it "the foundation of instruction" or "the philosphical underpinnings of pedagogy." The point is that all the decisions that we make in a classroom come back to this question.
All the questions surrounding instructional design-- What activities should I use? What questions should I ask? What pacing should I use? How should I direct discussion? What sort of assessment task should I use, and what should it include? -- all of these questions take us back to the heart of instruction.
Why am I teaching this?
Teachers of A Certain Age will remember the years in which we were encouraged to make our lessons relevant. "Make it relevant" is on my short list of Worst Advice Ever, because it assumes that the work has no relevance to begin with. Nobody tries to figure out how to make water wet. The material we teach should matter, and we should know why, and if we do not know why, we shouldn't be teaching it.
My students learn early on not to ask the eternal question "Why do we have to do this stuff?" unless they mean it, because I will answer them. Sometimes I answer them before they even ask. Thirty years ago, I might have struggled with this question, but today I can answer it for every unit I teach. But having an answer is not enough, because not all answers are created equal.
Consider Romeo and Juliet and all the reasons that teachers I have worked with have expressed, implicitly and explicitly, for teaching Shakespeare's classic contribution to the canon.
* I want students to grasp the soaring beauty of Shakespeare's language
* So that students can experience some of the process of turning words on a page into live theater
* The last guy to teach this class had it in his course plan
* So students can some day boast, "I have read a whole Shakespeare play and I know what it was about."
* To understand some of the literary techniques used in the play.
* I love these kids and I love this play and I want to share its awesomeness with them. It will be fun!
* All 9th grade English teachers are supposed to cover R&J
These disparate answers lead to entirely different units, and, of course, a few of them lead to really lousy units, because they aren't answers at all.
Here are some other bad answers to the question at the heart of instruction:
* Because it will be on the test, and if students don't do well on the test, we will all be punished.
* Because it's in the scripted lesson.
* Because somebody ordered me to.
These are bad answers because they don't help inform instruction. They don't give us purpose or direction; they don't help us make choices about instructional design or implementation. They lead to instruction that is bloodless, lifeless, joyless, pointless. They are the equivalent of kissing your wife "because that's what husbands are supposed to do."
It's an issue that's not new or uniquely related to the current reformy movement, but the bad actors of the reformatorium believe that these answers are not only not bad, but are actually admirable and worth pursuing. Why should we teach this? Because people with power say so, and because they'll punish us if we don't follow their orders. We don't need any other purpose other than financial threats and rewards, right?
Yet even the worst of reasons given don't fall to the level of "Because someone will give me money if I do and take away my money if I don't." Reform fails because it doesn't seem to understand why anybody does anything.
Teaching, like life, should have a purpose. Do it like you mean it. Move like you have a purpose. Know why you are teaching this, whatever this may be.Hold onto the heart of instruction.
Why am I teaching this?
If "heart of instruction" is too squishy, call it "the foundation of instruction" or "the philosphical underpinnings of pedagogy." The point is that all the decisions that we make in a classroom come back to this question.
All the questions surrounding instructional design-- What activities should I use? What questions should I ask? What pacing should I use? How should I direct discussion? What sort of assessment task should I use, and what should it include? -- all of these questions take us back to the heart of instruction.
Why am I teaching this?
Teachers of A Certain Age will remember the years in which we were encouraged to make our lessons relevant. "Make it relevant" is on my short list of Worst Advice Ever, because it assumes that the work has no relevance to begin with. Nobody tries to figure out how to make water wet. The material we teach should matter, and we should know why, and if we do not know why, we shouldn't be teaching it.
My students learn early on not to ask the eternal question "Why do we have to do this stuff?" unless they mean it, because I will answer them. Sometimes I answer them before they even ask. Thirty years ago, I might have struggled with this question, but today I can answer it for every unit I teach. But having an answer is not enough, because not all answers are created equal.
Consider Romeo and Juliet and all the reasons that teachers I have worked with have expressed, implicitly and explicitly, for teaching Shakespeare's classic contribution to the canon.
* I want students to grasp the soaring beauty of Shakespeare's language
* So that students can experience some of the process of turning words on a page into live theater
* The last guy to teach this class had it in his course plan
* So students can some day boast, "I have read a whole Shakespeare play and I know what it was about."
* To understand some of the literary techniques used in the play.
* I love these kids and I love this play and I want to share its awesomeness with them. It will be fun!
* All 9th grade English teachers are supposed to cover R&J
These disparate answers lead to entirely different units, and, of course, a few of them lead to really lousy units, because they aren't answers at all.
Here are some other bad answers to the question at the heart of instruction:
* Because it will be on the test, and if students don't do well on the test, we will all be punished.
* Because it's in the scripted lesson.
* Because somebody ordered me to.
These are bad answers because they don't help inform instruction. They don't give us purpose or direction; they don't help us make choices about instructional design or implementation. They lead to instruction that is bloodless, lifeless, joyless, pointless. They are the equivalent of kissing your wife "because that's what husbands are supposed to do."
It's an issue that's not new or uniquely related to the current reformy movement, but the bad actors of the reformatorium believe that these answers are not only not bad, but are actually admirable and worth pursuing. Why should we teach this? Because people with power say so, and because they'll punish us if we don't follow their orders. We don't need any other purpose other than financial threats and rewards, right?
Yet even the worst of reasons given don't fall to the level of "Because someone will give me money if I do and take away my money if I don't." Reform fails because it doesn't seem to understand why anybody does anything.
Teaching, like life, should have a purpose. Do it like you mean it. Move like you have a purpose. Know why you are teaching this, whatever this may be.Hold onto the heart of instruction.
Thursday, February 6, 2014
Note to CCSS Supporter
This morning Rick Hess of AEI featured a guest writer on his EdWeek blog. Kathy Powers is a reading and language arts teacher in Arkansas, where she was teacher of the year in 2011. She offered a defense of CCSS, and there were many things I wanted to say to her. But of course here in Blogsylvania, we like to have these conversations out in public. So here's my reply.
Dear Kathy;
You open by suggesting that some critics of CCSS sound a little overwrought, and I agree with you. There are people out there who feel mighty passionate about this issue, and that passion can lead them to overstate their case sometimes. I think I'm what passes as a moderate these days; let me offer my perspective on your observations.
Celebrating Student Individuality
You say that you are "pleasantly surprised over the high level of sophistication and creativity students have shown in their writing and logical reasoning under the Common Core standards," and that meeting one of the standards about synthesizing multiple texts and evidence to support a point has empowered your students. Then you give some concrete details about what happened when you "tasked my fifth grade students with answering the question, 'How does imagination lead to discoveries in the real world?'" And you described a project that did, in fact, sound pretty exciting. I'm not going to deduct style points for your use of "task" as a verb, but I am going to ask you one simple question:
What the heck did you do before CCSS?
Are you saying that you previously did not know how to do such a project, or are you suggesting that previously your administration would have forbidden you to do this kind of work? Surely you're not suggesting that you could never even conceive of such a project before CCSS came along.
My students routinely do multiple text writing assignments, and they always have to support their statements with specific text evidence. I've done that for thirty-some years. My honors 11th graders have a research project that requires them to search out primary and previously unused sources to create original writing about local history; I've been doing that for twenty years. (You can buy last year's product on amazon-- custom printing is a new wrinkle). I say that not in the spirit of nanny-nanny-boo-boo, nor to suggest that I'm an awesome educator. I think I'm a pretty average teacher-- and THAT is my point. The work I've been doing is good, solid teaching, but not unusual in the field, and like all the good solid teachers out there, I've been doing it without CCSS. What do I need it for? How will it improve my teaching by giving me "permission" to pursue all the educational goals that I've already been going after?
Iron Teacher
With all due respect, this paragraph is a non-sequitor. You start by saying it's great that all teachers will have the same standards. Then you talk about Iron Chef and proteins. I am not sure of your point. Because all teachers have the same standards, they will now be better suited for a televised competition based on an entirely inauthentic unrealistic situation? Are you suggesting that all restaurant goers in the nation would benefit if federal regulation required all restaurants to serve dishes based on the same limited set of proteins?
Love Local, Teach Global
You suggest here that education is the great mobilizer, that a good education gives students more options to travel far and wide in search of their dreams. You apply this to college in particular; our students need to be ready to compete for spots.
I keep hearing this argument, but I don't really understand the connection. Do we need standards to predict college success? We already know the best predictor of college success, and it's high schools grades, no matter what high school, no matter what local standards. Even the SAT, king of the standardized tests, doesn't predict as reliably.
Do we have a problem with students getting into college who can't hack it? I can believe this might be true, though I think some of the problems are self-inflicted by the colleges. And what I still need to know is, by what process did somebody establish that the standards included in CCSS are the ones that will insure greater college success? I'm willing to be convinced here, but I have yet to see any evidence.
Standards vs Standardized Tests
I have read too many recent articles touting the problems of Common Core when the real focus of the author's frustration was not with the standards themselves, but with the testing process which will be used next year to measure students' learning of the standards.
I agree (with the understanding that for some folks, "next year" is actually "last year"). People conflate the two frequently. You open by suggesting that some people hate tests because, like bathroom scales, they deliver news that nobody wants to hear. I would agree with that analogy if we assume that the bathroom scale is untested and uncalibrated. We have no reason to believe that the tests rolled out with CCSS measure what they claim to measure. Add the idea of an uncalibrated, untested scale that can get your pay cut or your job terminated, and surely you can see why people get a bit touchy.
You argue for waiting to test and properly implementing the standards, but here's my point-- as long as the tests are high stakes, determining the fates of teachers, administrators, schools and students, the CCSS simply don't matter. At all.
Look, the Core includes standards that we know will never be tested. Collaborative processes. Deep reading of long, complex texts. Things that will never, ever be on a standardized test. When all is said and done, we'll be right where we were under NCLB-- teaching to standardized tests that serve as de facto curriculum, depending on how hard our local administrators want to fight for us.
By Teachers, For Teachers
I agree absolutely that sharing and collaboration among teachers is a great thing. But as with the first point, I don't really see what it has to do with CCSS. Did we need CCSS in order to know how to share? I don't think so.
Kathy, I'm glad that implementation has not been a difficult adventure for you. If I judged strictly by my own experience, I would conclude that CCSS was a pretty harmless piece of bureaucratic ephemera. But I'm reading the stories from around the country. Stories about school systems shuttered and turned over to private charters because test scores are bad. Teachers who are disciplined because they are teaching Tuesday's prescribed lesson on Wednesday. Elementary students becoming discouraged and crushed because they cannot comprehend or meet the demands of their new curriculum. The implementation of that curriculum may be a local failing, or a state-level failing, or actually the fault of CCSS itself, but that doesn't matter to a child who, like any other abused child, assumes that the fault must lie in his own heart or head.
Unlike some of my more strident colleagues, I assume that many supporters of CCSS are pure in heart and intention, sincere in their support. I actually welcome hearing from those folks, because unlike the people who stand to make huge profits from reform, these sincere foot soldiers might be able to show me what there is to love in CCSS simply because I can trust their motives to be pure. But it hasn't happened yet, and it hasn't happened this time. Please understand that I say the following not with bitterness, anger or any metaphorical content. I say it as what I believe is literally true. You do not know what you are talking about.
Dear Kathy;
You open by suggesting that some critics of CCSS sound a little overwrought, and I agree with you. There are people out there who feel mighty passionate about this issue, and that passion can lead them to overstate their case sometimes. I think I'm what passes as a moderate these days; let me offer my perspective on your observations.
Celebrating Student Individuality
You say that you are "pleasantly surprised over the high level of sophistication and creativity students have shown in their writing and logical reasoning under the Common Core standards," and that meeting one of the standards about synthesizing multiple texts and evidence to support a point has empowered your students. Then you give some concrete details about what happened when you "tasked my fifth grade students with answering the question, 'How does imagination lead to discoveries in the real world?'" And you described a project that did, in fact, sound pretty exciting. I'm not going to deduct style points for your use of "task" as a verb, but I am going to ask you one simple question:
What the heck did you do before CCSS?
Are you saying that you previously did not know how to do such a project, or are you suggesting that previously your administration would have forbidden you to do this kind of work? Surely you're not suggesting that you could never even conceive of such a project before CCSS came along.
My students routinely do multiple text writing assignments, and they always have to support their statements with specific text evidence. I've done that for thirty-some years. My honors 11th graders have a research project that requires them to search out primary and previously unused sources to create original writing about local history; I've been doing that for twenty years. (You can buy last year's product on amazon-- custom printing is a new wrinkle). I say that not in the spirit of nanny-nanny-boo-boo, nor to suggest that I'm an awesome educator. I think I'm a pretty average teacher-- and THAT is my point. The work I've been doing is good, solid teaching, but not unusual in the field, and like all the good solid teachers out there, I've been doing it without CCSS. What do I need it for? How will it improve my teaching by giving me "permission" to pursue all the educational goals that I've already been going after?
Iron Teacher
With all due respect, this paragraph is a non-sequitor. You start by saying it's great that all teachers will have the same standards. Then you talk about Iron Chef and proteins. I am not sure of your point. Because all teachers have the same standards, they will now be better suited for a televised competition based on an entirely inauthentic unrealistic situation? Are you suggesting that all restaurant goers in the nation would benefit if federal regulation required all restaurants to serve dishes based on the same limited set of proteins?
Love Local, Teach Global
You suggest here that education is the great mobilizer, that a good education gives students more options to travel far and wide in search of their dreams. You apply this to college in particular; our students need to be ready to compete for spots.
I keep hearing this argument, but I don't really understand the connection. Do we need standards to predict college success? We already know the best predictor of college success, and it's high schools grades, no matter what high school, no matter what local standards. Even the SAT, king of the standardized tests, doesn't predict as reliably.
Do we have a problem with students getting into college who can't hack it? I can believe this might be true, though I think some of the problems are self-inflicted by the colleges. And what I still need to know is, by what process did somebody establish that the standards included in CCSS are the ones that will insure greater college success? I'm willing to be convinced here, but I have yet to see any evidence.
Standards vs Standardized Tests
I have read too many recent articles touting the problems of Common Core when the real focus of the author's frustration was not with the standards themselves, but with the testing process which will be used next year to measure students' learning of the standards.
I agree (with the understanding that for some folks, "next year" is actually "last year"). People conflate the two frequently. You open by suggesting that some people hate tests because, like bathroom scales, they deliver news that nobody wants to hear. I would agree with that analogy if we assume that the bathroom scale is untested and uncalibrated. We have no reason to believe that the tests rolled out with CCSS measure what they claim to measure. Add the idea of an uncalibrated, untested scale that can get your pay cut or your job terminated, and surely you can see why people get a bit touchy.
You argue for waiting to test and properly implementing the standards, but here's my point-- as long as the tests are high stakes, determining the fates of teachers, administrators, schools and students, the CCSS simply don't matter. At all.
Look, the Core includes standards that we know will never be tested. Collaborative processes. Deep reading of long, complex texts. Things that will never, ever be on a standardized test. When all is said and done, we'll be right where we were under NCLB-- teaching to standardized tests that serve as de facto curriculum, depending on how hard our local administrators want to fight for us.
By Teachers, For Teachers
I agree absolutely that sharing and collaboration among teachers is a great thing. But as with the first point, I don't really see what it has to do with CCSS. Did we need CCSS in order to know how to share? I don't think so.
Kathy, I'm glad that implementation has not been a difficult adventure for you. If I judged strictly by my own experience, I would conclude that CCSS was a pretty harmless piece of bureaucratic ephemera. But I'm reading the stories from around the country. Stories about school systems shuttered and turned over to private charters because test scores are bad. Teachers who are disciplined because they are teaching Tuesday's prescribed lesson on Wednesday. Elementary students becoming discouraged and crushed because they cannot comprehend or meet the demands of their new curriculum. The implementation of that curriculum may be a local failing, or a state-level failing, or actually the fault of CCSS itself, but that doesn't matter to a child who, like any other abused child, assumes that the fault must lie in his own heart or head.
Unlike some of my more strident colleagues, I assume that many supporters of CCSS are pure in heart and intention, sincere in their support. I actually welcome hearing from those folks, because unlike the people who stand to make huge profits from reform, these sincere foot soldiers might be able to show me what there is to love in CCSS simply because I can trust their motives to be pure. But it hasn't happened yet, and it hasn't happened this time. Please understand that I say the following not with bitterness, anger or any metaphorical content. I say it as what I believe is literally true. You do not know what you are talking about.
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Teachscape: Oh, The Humanity!
Poking around on line during another snow delay led me to the wonderland that is Teachscape.
Teachscape (for those who aren't already familiar) is one of those special places where the manufactured crisis in education meets the opportunity to make money from it. It is one of the limbs of the Gates-funded teacher-evaluation push, a path to that special tomorrow where there's a videocam in every classroom and teachers watch videos of other teachers so that they can develop their personal strengths as teachers by teaching the same way other teachers teach.
Teachscape offers training seminars and massive support for teacher evaluation frameworks (Wisconsin teachers, for instance, are learning what it means to relax and enjoy the loving embrace of teachscape in their evaluation process).
Mostly what one sees in cruising the site is that this is the corporate view of education writ large on a website. Teachscape is one more embodiment of the idea that schools can be run exactly like corporations. And while there is much to be learned about that viewpoint by paging through the site, I'm only on a snow delay today and not an actual cancellation, so let's just focus on one subsection. It's a tab on the main page, and it screams corporate louder than anything else, because on that main page you can click to Observation and Evaluation Management, Professional Learning or--
Talent Management. And when you click on THAT, you arrive at the section titled Human Capital Management.
The section starts by posing four scenarios that schools "needlessly" face. 1) A great teacher feels unrecognized and unsupported, so she leaves the profession. 2) A great principal retires and the district has to scramble find someone who will continue the work this leader started. 3) Students in a high-needs school need better teachers to help them make up their behindness. 4) "District administrators want to build accountability and task management into their strategic planning process and include progress reporting at all levels, but aren’t sure where to start." (I directly quoted #4 because it doesn't really translate into English).
But never fear--
With Teachscape’s human capital management solution, leading districts can proactively and strategically align resources and employee goals with overall objectives to plan for situations such as these so the district can be successful in meeting the needs of every one of its students.
Teachscape offers several products-- Teachscape Reflect, Learn and Advance. This is basically Teachscape Tall, Grand, and Venti.
Reflect appears to offer guidance and help in evaluation and observation, aligned to your district goals. With Learn, we throw in lesson plans, a library of recorded teaching examples, and the videosurveillance recording to build a local library. And with Venti we... well, we use all the tools in the other two systems plus some sort of rigorous fairy dust
to move to the next level of human capital management. This talent management system helps the district build organizational effectiveness by managing and developing employee skills, planning for succession in key positions, and assigning goals strategically to improve retention and advance the district’s objectives.
These programs are going to record, evaluate, measure, map and just generally micro-manage the hell out of your school's human capital. It will also strategically develop in-house talent, and when I connect several dots I get the feeling that we're once again assuming that teachers need a career path to advance into administrative or supervisory jobs because they couldn't possibly stay happy in a classroom role.
We can click on a research tab to see how all of this is supported by-- well, wait. We've got a link to some TNTP papers. Apparently Teachscape doesn't seem to know the difference between research and a literature search. Teachscape is the student in your class who writes "Coca-cola is proven to be a superior soft drink" and offers a research link to a Coke ad. So Teachscape fails on research and critical thinking skills. Will it surprise you to learn that elsewhere on the site, Gates Foundation papers are also cited?
I could provide more quotes, but they all read like the stuff above. It's clear that the closest anybody at Teachscape has ever been to a teacher is when photographing them in the wild. It's equally clear that when we want to improve teaching, the last people to consult are actual teachers. And it's clear that somewhere there are several failed companies missing their Human Resource department.
In fact, it's a good thing that "teach" is in the name, because nothing in the copy of the Human Capital Management materials would lead you to think that we were talking about schools or teaching or, least of all, places where young humans were sent to learn and grow as individuals. Teachscape defies satire because it is so ridiculously divorced from the real life activities and concerns of teachers or students or any other human beings that it seems like a joke all on its own. Except that it isn't. Wisconsin teachers, I am so sorry.
Teachscape (for those who aren't already familiar) is one of those special places where the manufactured crisis in education meets the opportunity to make money from it. It is one of the limbs of the Gates-funded teacher-evaluation push, a path to that special tomorrow where there's a videocam in every classroom and teachers watch videos of other teachers so that they can develop their personal strengths as teachers by teaching the same way other teachers teach.
Teachscape offers training seminars and massive support for teacher evaluation frameworks (Wisconsin teachers, for instance, are learning what it means to relax and enjoy the loving embrace of teachscape in their evaluation process).
Mostly what one sees in cruising the site is that this is the corporate view of education writ large on a website. Teachscape is one more embodiment of the idea that schools can be run exactly like corporations. And while there is much to be learned about that viewpoint by paging through the site, I'm only on a snow delay today and not an actual cancellation, so let's just focus on one subsection. It's a tab on the main page, and it screams corporate louder than anything else, because on that main page you can click to Observation and Evaluation Management, Professional Learning or--
Talent Management. And when you click on THAT, you arrive at the section titled Human Capital Management.
The section starts by posing four scenarios that schools "needlessly" face. 1) A great teacher feels unrecognized and unsupported, so she leaves the profession. 2) A great principal retires and the district has to scramble find someone who will continue the work this leader started. 3) Students in a high-needs school need better teachers to help them make up their behindness. 4) "District administrators want to build accountability and task management into their strategic planning process and include progress reporting at all levels, but aren’t sure where to start." (I directly quoted #4 because it doesn't really translate into English).
But never fear--
With Teachscape’s human capital management solution, leading districts can proactively and strategically align resources and employee goals with overall objectives to plan for situations such as these so the district can be successful in meeting the needs of every one of its students.
Teachscape offers several products-- Teachscape Reflect, Learn and Advance. This is basically Teachscape Tall, Grand, and Venti.
Reflect appears to offer guidance and help in evaluation and observation, aligned to your district goals. With Learn, we throw in lesson plans, a library of recorded teaching examples, and the video
to move to the next level of human capital management. This talent management system helps the district build organizational effectiveness by managing and developing employee skills, planning for succession in key positions, and assigning goals strategically to improve retention and advance the district’s objectives.
These programs are going to record, evaluate, measure, map and just generally micro-manage the hell out of your school's human capital. It will also strategically develop in-house talent, and when I connect several dots I get the feeling that we're once again assuming that teachers need a career path to advance into administrative or supervisory jobs because they couldn't possibly stay happy in a classroom role.
We can click on a research tab to see how all of this is supported by-- well, wait. We've got a link to some TNTP papers. Apparently Teachscape doesn't seem to know the difference between research and a literature search. Teachscape is the student in your class who writes "Coca-cola is proven to be a superior soft drink" and offers a research link to a Coke ad. So Teachscape fails on research and critical thinking skills. Will it surprise you to learn that elsewhere on the site, Gates Foundation papers are also cited?
I could provide more quotes, but they all read like the stuff above. It's clear that the closest anybody at Teachscape has ever been to a teacher is when photographing them in the wild. It's equally clear that when we want to improve teaching, the last people to consult are actual teachers. And it's clear that somewhere there are several failed companies missing their Human Resource department.
In fact, it's a good thing that "teach" is in the name, because nothing in the copy of the Human Capital Management materials would lead you to think that we were talking about schools or teaching or, least of all, places where young humans were sent to learn and grow as individuals. Teachscape defies satire because it is so ridiculously divorced from the real life activities and concerns of teachers or students or any other human beings that it seems like a joke all on its own. Except that it isn't. Wisconsin teachers, I am so sorry.
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Evaluating That
For the past couple of days, touched off (as near as I can tell) by the actions of teachers during the recent Georgia Ice-mageddon, twitter has been flooded by the #evaluatethat hashtag.
If you haven't seen it, go look. What you find is a long list of ways in which teachers do work above and beyond the scope of simply preparing students for a test. A teacher bought a student's family a fan for their apartment during a heat wave. A teacher bough a young lady a prom gown. A teacher paid for a student's physical. Bought books. Took couple to their first restaurant. Bought a family food.
And beyond the looking after physical needs, there are all the emotional items on the list. Counseling students through grief, despair, failure, loss. And the affirmations of a teachers impact. Meeting former students. Getting notes from former students . One of the tweets that will likely stay with me longest-- the students suicide who left a note for family and for the teacher, saying you did make a difference, I just couldn't beat the drugs.
What's the value in the #evaluatethat tag? I don't think of it as a way to get the word out to the non-teaching public. Some of them already know this about us, and some of them won't ever believe it. Some will point out that lots of folks go above and beyond the call of duty, and they aren't wrong. Snow plow drivers, cops, clerks-- there are lots of people out there who do a little more than they have to. I love us, but for me, the gold standard of underpaid, overworked, underappreciated work with humans is still set by nurses.
Of course, part of the issue is the whole notion of "above and beyond." It is true, I guess, that many of these acts are above and beyond the current job description of "being a teacher" (or snowplow operator or nurse or etc). They do not, however, fall outside the job description of "being a decent human person."
It goes back to what's wrong with "college and career ready." Because it is not enough to be good at your job. You need to be good at life. You need to be good at being a human in this world, and that is so much more than a job.
I've maintained for years that teaching is a kind of guerilla warfare, that many of us are fighting in the underground, doing what we can in spite of the authorities. Under the current wave of reformy stuff, this is more true than ever. Education is occupied territory, and we are members of the resistance, not powerful enough to directly oppose the forces that have taken control of our home. Instead, we save who we can when we can, chip away at the occupiers, and work toward the day when we can send them packing.
In the meantime, we have to do what we can to stay in contact with the rest of the underground and remind ourselves what we represent, what we fight for. I don't think #evaluatethat will change much. I think people who are imagining that occupiers will slap their heads and say, "Yes, yes, I've been so blind" are kidding themselves. But for the rest of us, knowing that we are not alone, that other people get it, that other people are also standing up for what is best and brightest, that we are not crazy for thinking that we are in a classroom to help nurture and grow real human people and not to just collect data, read a script and do some test prep-- I think knowing that is golden. Evaluate that, indeed.
If you haven't seen it, go look. What you find is a long list of ways in which teachers do work above and beyond the scope of simply preparing students for a test. A teacher bought a student's family a fan for their apartment during a heat wave. A teacher bough a young lady a prom gown. A teacher paid for a student's physical. Bought books. Took couple to their first restaurant. Bought a family food.
And beyond the looking after physical needs, there are all the emotional items on the list. Counseling students through grief, despair, failure, loss. And the affirmations of a teachers impact. Meeting former students. Getting notes from former students . One of the tweets that will likely stay with me longest-- the students suicide who left a note for family and for the teacher, saying you did make a difference, I just couldn't beat the drugs.
What's the value in the #evaluatethat tag? I don't think of it as a way to get the word out to the non-teaching public. Some of them already know this about us, and some of them won't ever believe it. Some will point out that lots of folks go above and beyond the call of duty, and they aren't wrong. Snow plow drivers, cops, clerks-- there are lots of people out there who do a little more than they have to. I love us, but for me, the gold standard of underpaid, overworked, underappreciated work with humans is still set by nurses.
Of course, part of the issue is the whole notion of "above and beyond." It is true, I guess, that many of these acts are above and beyond the current job description of "being a teacher" (or snowplow operator or nurse or etc). They do not, however, fall outside the job description of "being a decent human person."
It goes back to what's wrong with "college and career ready." Because it is not enough to be good at your job. You need to be good at life. You need to be good at being a human in this world, and that is so much more than a job.
I've maintained for years that teaching is a kind of guerilla warfare, that many of us are fighting in the underground, doing what we can in spite of the authorities. Under the current wave of reformy stuff, this is more true than ever. Education is occupied territory, and we are members of the resistance, not powerful enough to directly oppose the forces that have taken control of our home. Instead, we save who we can when we can, chip away at the occupiers, and work toward the day when we can send them packing.
In the meantime, we have to do what we can to stay in contact with the rest of the underground and remind ourselves what we represent, what we fight for. I don't think #evaluatethat will change much. I think people who are imagining that occupiers will slap their heads and say, "Yes, yes, I've been so blind" are kidding themselves. But for the rest of us, knowing that we are not alone, that other people get it, that other people are also standing up for what is best and brightest, that we are not crazy for thinking that we are in a classroom to help nurture and grow real human people and not to just collect data, read a script and do some test prep-- I think knowing that is golden. Evaluate that, indeed.
Sunday, February 2, 2014
Top Down
There are many many many many MANY reasons that top down reformatorium programs are a bad idea. But lets just focus on one for a moment.
Years ago our school had to implement a new graduation project program. Our principal met this challenge by putting a bunch of staff in a room to thrash out the details of how the new program would work. We met and we talked and we talked and we met, and eventually hammered out a whole program for the graduation project.
But we ended up with more than a workable program. We also ended up with a room full of people who understood how the program was supposed to work.
Management training 101 says that you want to give people the illusion of involvement in the creation of a program so that you will also get buy-in. But when you create new programs or reforms from the bottom up, your program creation is also your program training, and that is worth its weight in gold.
Apologists for CCSS keep blaming the various issues on a bad rollout. If only the implementation hadn't been flawed, they say. we would be gamboling through fields of common core daisies. But implementing CCSS from the top down absolutely guaranteed that the rollout would be flawed. The messed-up implementation is not a bug; it's an unavoidable feature.
Top down implementation means that none of the people who actually have to implement the program have any idea of what the program is or how it's supposed to work. Everything has to be explained to everybody, and that's a long process, a process not unlike a long game of telephone.
CCSS has been even worse than the average top-down implementation because it is so jam-packed with its own jargon. Teachers are sitting through training where hours are being devoted simply to getting everyone in the room to use the proscribed definition of "rigor." Teachers are spending days in seminars about "unpacking" the standards themselves, which is a nice-sounding way of saying "trying to figure out what the hell all this gobbledygook is supposed to mean to an actual classroom teacher.":
With bottom-up reform, everyone has been in the room working on a shared language of shared expectations together. That understanding emerges organically while the details are hammered out. But top-down reform has to be passed down in its entirety, all the way down to the actual words being used. The program becomes like bad stereo directions that are passed down as a xerox of a xerox of a xerox ad infinitum, each one presented by someone who has his own maybe-faulty understanding of what he sees on the bad copy that's been handed to him.
If the most genius edu-whizes in the world came up with the best school reform system ever and tried to implement it this way, there would be tremendous problems. Start with a hackneyed mess of garbled muck like CCSS, and you are absolutely guaranteed a flawed implementation.
Years ago our school had to implement a new graduation project program. Our principal met this challenge by putting a bunch of staff in a room to thrash out the details of how the new program would work. We met and we talked and we talked and we met, and eventually hammered out a whole program for the graduation project.
But we ended up with more than a workable program. We also ended up with a room full of people who understood how the program was supposed to work.
Management training 101 says that you want to give people the illusion of involvement in the creation of a program so that you will also get buy-in. But when you create new programs or reforms from the bottom up, your program creation is also your program training, and that is worth its weight in gold.
Apologists for CCSS keep blaming the various issues on a bad rollout. If only the implementation hadn't been flawed, they say. we would be gamboling through fields of common core daisies. But implementing CCSS from the top down absolutely guaranteed that the rollout would be flawed. The messed-up implementation is not a bug; it's an unavoidable feature.
Top down implementation means that none of the people who actually have to implement the program have any idea of what the program is or how it's supposed to work. Everything has to be explained to everybody, and that's a long process, a process not unlike a long game of telephone.
CCSS has been even worse than the average top-down implementation because it is so jam-packed with its own jargon. Teachers are sitting through training where hours are being devoted simply to getting everyone in the room to use the proscribed definition of "rigor." Teachers are spending days in seminars about "unpacking" the standards themselves, which is a nice-sounding way of saying "trying to figure out what the hell all this gobbledygook is supposed to mean to an actual classroom teacher.":
With bottom-up reform, everyone has been in the room working on a shared language of shared expectations together. That understanding emerges organically while the details are hammered out. But top-down reform has to be passed down in its entirety, all the way down to the actual words being used. The program becomes like bad stereo directions that are passed down as a xerox of a xerox of a xerox ad infinitum, each one presented by someone who has his own maybe-faulty understanding of what he sees on the bad copy that's been handed to him.
If the most genius edu-whizes in the world came up with the best school reform system ever and tried to implement it this way, there would be tremendous problems. Start with a hackneyed mess of garbled muck like CCSS, and you are absolutely guaranteed a flawed implementation.
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