Learning Made Visible

"Thank you for putting into words what I felt, but couldn't say."

I've been writing for a long time, though it took the current education situation to make me really prolific (311 posts so far in 2014). But if I had a nickle for every time I've heard the above sentiment, I'd be writing on really fancy, expensive equipment. If I have any writing gifts, one of them seems to be finding a way to articulate an idea or feeling that helps crystallize or clarify it for some readers. They read what I've written and say, "Yes, that's it. That's what I mean." They get a clear picture of the idea. But let me ask a question about that.

Before they read my words, before they were able to borrow my words and use them, did they have any grasp of that idea at all?

I know the teacher shorthand, the saying, "If you can't explain it, then you don't really understand it." But "explain it" is a pretty barn-side-sized target to hit. If I sing a love song that someone else has written to my wife, does that mean I don't really love her? If I forward a blog post instead of writing one myself, does that mean I don't really understand the content of it?

I ask because the Common Core, like all standards-based and outcome-based educational approaches, is founded on, as one pro-Core blogger put it, "the basis of establishing definable, observable, and measurable outcomes." It is one of the reformsters favorite ideas-- if you can't measure it, it doesn't matter.

Think of it as the corollary of that famous quote from CCSS architect David Coleman-- "Nobody gives a shit what you think or feel." In other words, people only give a shit about what you do.

When we fully shift to an outcomes-based view of education, however, we create a whole raft of problems for ourselves.

Now the goal is not to understand calculus or Great Expectations; the goal is to act as if you understand calculus or Great Expectations.

This is always A goal, and a teacher's challenge is always to design tasks that can be best completed by someone who actually understands the material. Standardized materials generally suck for this. The task designer needs a good knowledge of exactly was and wasn't covered in class, and when it's time to assess, a knowledge of the student who performed the task.

Let's say, for instance, that the task is to provide a speech about Pip's development. A student stands up and gives a halting, awkward speech. Is it halting and awkward because the student doesn't know what he's talking about, or does that actually represent the best speech he's ever managed to get through? Only someone who knows him will be able to tell.

Now, someone is going to pop up now and say, "No, no. Making allowances for your knowledge of the individual is wrong. There has to be an absolute scale against which all speeches are judged. If a student delivers an F speech because he's awkward and a bad speaker, it's still an F speech." And that is true in a system in which we're focused only on the performance task, if we aren't trying to assess how well he understands Pip, but just how well he can act like he understands Pip.

We add more to the challenge when we define "understanding" as "understanding as I do." This is not just an educational problem-- it's a real world problem. Look no further than our own educational debates and consider how many people are convinced that their opponents must be either stupid or deliberate liars, because anyone who really understood the situation would understand it the same way I do. Under CCSS, this has turned into the bizarro world of New Again Math, where we are requiring students to act like they understand math in a particular way, or it doesn't count.

These problems of performance tasks are always with us, but if we accept an outcomes-based view of education, performance tasks are transformed from a tool for measuring our success (student understanding) but the entire purpose of school.

If our goal is to train students to complete standardized performance tasks, our work is simple. Throw an assignment on their desk, collect it, and teach them to act like they understand.

But if our goal is for them to understand, our job is much harder. If we are, in fact, going to give a shit what they think, they we are going to have to find a way to unpack that understanding and rally search their performance of tasks for signs that they get it. We are, in fact, going to have to model critical thinking as we give their work a true close reading. Because not everybody can get their understanding unpacked and displayed by writing a blog or giving a speech or interpretive dance. 

Put another way-- if you can't measure it, that might not mean it doesn't matter. It might just mean your measuring is faulty.

Behaving As Expected

"You just didn't react the way you were supposed to."

This is another thread that runs through support of the CCSS complex. There's nothing wrong with the policy or program; people just didn't react the way they were supposed to.

For instance, Anne Hyslop over at Real Clear Education, called concern over test-and-punish a "state of mind, not state of reality." Policy is not responsible for the death of support-and-improve, she says. Her argument is two-fold.

First, there are some accountability policies out there, but they don't really kick in for a couple of years, so what's the big deal. Also, when your spouse has filed for divorce, but the divorce isn't actually final yet, your whole family should be able to have a perfectly fine Thanksgiving dinner together.

Here's a fairly predictable set of school system behaviors (at least, fairly predictable for anyone who works in a school system). If you tell schools that everybody on their staff will have to clear a five-foot hurdle in three years, they will start making staff jump this afternoon.

Which brings us to Hyslop's second point. "What is incompatible with the support-and-improve mindset is the choices of some elected officials, school administrators, and educators." The policy is great. It's fine. It's just that all the human beings who are involved in implementing it are doing it wrong.

This refusal to behave as expected is frequently frustrating to reformsters, particularly systems fans. They set up this really cool system and, in their heads, people are going to respond to the system in a particular way. And then those damn actual real live human beings insist on NOT doing what they are supposed to.

I believe there are reformsters who really, truly think that the new generation of standardized tests will end test prep, and the students and teachers will respond to these new tests by plunging into rich curriculum materials and getting their critical thinking on. But by allowing high stakes (from third grade promotion to keeping a school open) to be attached to the tests, they have absolutely guaranteed that schools will give renewed focus and devotion to test prep.

The irony here is that teachers understand this problem all too well. There's not a teacher alive who doesn't remember planning a lesson on the assumption that students would react in a particular way and realizing (sometimes with disappointment, sometimes with horror) that they aren't going to react that way at all ("When I did my marshmallow gun unit, I was sure they'd be fascinated by shooting at my wacky targets and not each other's heads"). And what do all good teachers learn from that experience?

When you fail to anticipate how live human beings are going to react to your program, that is a failure of you and your program, not of those human beings.

Why do policy makers and big thinkers keep making this sort of mistake? Too little interaction with live human beings. Too little personal field testing of their ideas. Way way wayyyyyy too insulated in situations where other humans behave as expected because they are the boss (is there anything sadder than the former business exec-turned-guest teacher who thinks that since all his employees hang on his every word, so will a room full of fifteen year olds?)

But make this mistake they do. This is not how people were supposed to react to the standards. This is not how states are supposed to implement the testing. This is not how teachers are supposed to react to the evaluation systems. Reformsters can take heart in that this is not just an education policy problem ("US troops will be greeted as liberators").

But if your defense of your program is that people aren't reacting to it correctly, your program is indefensible. That great teacher of physics, Julius Sumner Miller, used to always say, "We must not say the experiment has failed. Rather, we have failed to meet the requirements of nature." If your policy and programs are great in every way-- except when being implemented by actual human beings-- your policy and programs have failed to meet the requirements of nature. They are no good, and they belong on the ash heap of history with communism and free love.

When people fail to behave as expected, the problem is not with their behavior. It's with your expectations.

Dancing into the Apocalypse

I'm writing this now so that I can read it to myself when the first day of school rolls around. Sometimes you have to be your own motivational speaker at the start of the new year.

Why the World of Public Education Has Never Been Worse, and Why I'm Excited To Be a Teacher Anyway

How Bad Is It?

It is almost breathtaking to step back and try to take in the wide array of forces lined up against the great traditions of American public education.

State legislatures and courts are re-writing the rules of employment to end the idea of lifetime teachers, and an entire organization has been set up to replace them with an endlessly cycle of barely-trained temps.

Data miners are rewriting the entire structure and purpose of schools to focus on gathering data from students rather than actually educating them, treating them as simply future marketing targets.

A far-reaching network of rich and powerful men is working to take the public education system as we know it and simply make it go away, to be replaced by a system that is focused on generating profit rather than educating children.

Teachers have been vilified and attacked. Our professional skills have been questioned, our dedication has been questioned, and we have been accused of dereliction and failure so often that now even our friends take it as a given that "American schools are failing."


One of the richest, most powerful men on the planet has focused his fortune and his clout on recreating the education system to suit his own personal ideas about how it should work and what it should do. He's been joined in this by other wealthy, powerful men who see the democratic process as an obstruction to be swept away.

We have been strong-armed into adopting new standards and the programs that come with them. These are one-size-fits-all standards that nobody really understands, that nobody can justify, and that are now the shoddy shaky foundation of the new status quo.

And in many regions, our "educational leaders" are also part of the reformster movement. The very people on the state and local level who are charged with preserving and supporting public education are, themselves, fighting against it.

All education is now slave to standardized testing. We live in a bizarro world where we pretend that test results tell us everything from whether a seven year old is college material to whether teachers (and the colleges at which they studied) are any good. The future of teachers, schools, and students themselves, ride on these tests that, when all is said and done, measure nothing except the students' ability to take these tests.

The President of the United States of America agrees with most of the forces lined up against public education. At his best, he has simply stood by while public education has come under attack; at his worst, he and his administration have actively implemented policies to break down our public education traditions.

It is true, as some folks like to say, that public education has been tossed about by the winds of one edu-fad or another. Anyone who has worked for more than ten years can rattle off a list of Next Big Things that have come and gone while teachers closed their doors and kept working.

But this is different. This is worse. This wind comes with more political power, more widespread support, and more power to do real damage than anything before. If these people achieve all their goals, what's left will be a system that looks nothing like the American public education system, and teaching as a career will be done.

So Why Am I Not Bailing Out?

First of all, none of what I'm saying here is meant as criticism of people who have left the profession. You can't do what you can't do, and when you reach your limit, you have to make the choice you have to make. Not all of us have the same kind of strength, and we do not all face the same level of challenge. I can't speak for anyone else, but I can say why I still think it's worth the fight.

There has never been a tougher time for public education, and that means there has never been a time when teachers have been needed more.

Education is can't run on autopilot any more. I don't mean it shouldn't (though that has always been true), but that anything resembling an autopilot or inertia or just a gravitation in the right direction has been busted, shattered. Public education will take its direction from the people who fight to get their hands on the steering wheel. Teachers need to be in that fight.

Someone has to look out for the students. Someone has to put the students' interests first, and despite the number of people who want to make that claim, only teachers are actually doing it. The number of ridiculous,  time-wasting, pointless, damaging, destructive policies that are actually making it down to the students themselves is greater than ever before. Somebody has to be there to help them deal with it, help them stand up to it, and most of all, help them get actual educations in spite of it.

I don't want to over-dramatize our role as teachers, but this is what professionals do. Police, lawyers, doctors, fire fighters-- they all go toward people in trouble. They run toward people who need help. That's what teachers do-- and teachers go toward the people who are too young and powerless to stand up for themselves. And for professionals, the greater the trouble, the greater the need.

The fact that public education is under attack just means that our students, our communities, need us more than ever.

Is There Hope?

Yes. Yes, there is.

The new high stakes test-driven corporate status quo runs on money, and money is not infinite. Particularly when resistance picks up and the ROI isn't looking so great. The big bold reformster programs all have one thing in common-- they have not produced any sort of success. Well, two things-- they also all required a big boost of money and "advocacy groups" to even happen in the first place.

The reformsters are not going to win, but neither are we going to simply set the clock back to twenty years ago. Our education system, our schools are going to be different, changed. And we will deal with that, too.

The reformsters are tourists, folks just passing through for a trip that will last no longer than their interest. They'll cash in their chips and move on to the next game. But we'll still be here, still meeting the challenges that students bring us. They've committed to education for as long as it holds their attention and rewards them; we've committed for as long as we can still do the work. They think they can sprint ahead to easy victory; we understand that this is a marathon.

I don't care if this is a passing storm or the apocalypse. I choose not to meet it huddled and hoping that I'll somehow be spared. And while we keep defaulting to battle metaphors, I'd rather not get into the habit of viewing every other human as an enemy that I have to combat with force of arms. I learned years ago that you don't wait for everything to be okay to do your dance and sing your song; you keep dancing and singing, and that's how everything gets closer to okay.

We can do this. We will do this. And our students will be better for it.

Whole Brain Teaching

I had put this out of my whole brain until Diane Ravitch posted a clip this morning from Nashville Prep. Here's the clip:

This looks to be an application of Whole Brain Teaching, sometimes called Power Teaching, a technique that seems to be the brain child of Chris Biffle. Biffle is no slacker; he's published an assortment of books with legit publishers, and his Whole Brain empire boasts a pretty well-developed website. And for the leader of a teaching movement that has been in action since 1999, Biffle keeps a remarkably low profile. It appears that he was a professor at Crafton Hills College, a community college in Yucaipa, CA, and it was there that he teamed up with an elementary and secondary teacher to create Whole Brain Teaching, which has grown pretty much on its own.

So there's not much that seems shady about WBT. Some sources suggest that Biffle has mis-stated his resume, but if the man's goal was to become rich and famous, he doesn't appear to be doing a very good job of achieving it.

The stated goal of WBT was to put some organized fun in the classroom. And I could try describing how Power Teaching is supposed to work, but it will be more effective to dip into the extensive youtube library of power teaching examples

As you can see, Biffle himself is kind of an avuncular and unthreatening, so the overall effect is kind of like a Hitler Youth meeting run by Fred Rogers. Some of the groupiness aspects are recognizable to anyone who was ever in band, choir, or the armed forces. And I have to tell you-- given the youtube and on-line testimonials, and WBT's persistence over fifteen years, there are people out there who love this. I can see the appeal if you are in a school mired in endless chaos, or if you've always struggled with classroom management, or if you're Dolores Umbridge.

All that aside, it is creepy as hell. Set your individuality aside, become part of the group, do as you're told, sit up, lie down, roll over , speak (but only as directed). Just imagine what this would look like with someone more stern, more authoritarian, more Hitlerish, in front of the classroom. If you can handle it, you can find sample lessons all the way down to Kindergartners.

But in a funny twist, per Ravitch's post this morning, it turns out that Biffle was a man ahead of his time, because what Nashville Prep and others have discovered is that WBT is great for test prep. It turns out that subsuming your individuality, spitting out dictated exact answers on demand, and generally being a good little all-fit-one-size widget is excellent training for taking standardized tests.

So if you find this little mini-re-enactment of the Cultural Revolution unappealing, the bad news is that this is exactly what high stake standardized testing call for.

John Thompson's Response to My Response to John Thompson's Post

I recently (oh, good lord, it was this morning-- am I still sitting here at the computer) wrote a piece in response to historian John Thompson's guest post on Living in Dialogue. That piece is here.  John attempted to post a very thoughtful response in the comments section, but apparently it was so thoughtful that it broke the internet. He asked for my help in posting it, and I asked if I could instead post it as a guest post here on the main stage.  So here it is-- John Thompson's response to my morning post.

 

Curmudgucation’s  response to my post, like Wag the Dog’s and Paul Thomas’s response to the Gates call for a moratorium and the comments on both posts, are indicative of a fundamental difference between the two sides in this education civil war. Corporate reformers refuse to submit their hypotheses to peer review by professionals or the give and take of democracy. We, the coalition of educators and families who do not even have a name, respect the clash of ideas.

Obviously, I knew my post would annoy friends. Honestly, the first drafts were more supportive of the moratorium, and less confrontational to Gates. I knew I had to listen and temper my call for offering an olive branch after thinking through the arguments it would provoke.

For instance, it makes an excellent point about Pearson and the profits that motivate them. Originally, I ducked that reason entirely, and I did so for a reason which many will reject. Especially in my first drafts, I tried to be as diplomatic as possible, hoping that Gates and other reformers would listen. Even in my final draft, I soft pedaled that issue, which of course is one of the dangers of trying to stress communication over confrontation.

Yes, I believe that Gates probably is taking the attitude of “Let's get our PR and politics lined up and relaunch more effectively in a year or two." Naively or not, my first drafts focused on explaining to reformers why that’s a bad idea. They won a lot of political victories for the first decade of two of reform, but they’ve wracked up one implementation failure after another. I don’t expect them to give up the political fight, but neither do I expect that they will find a bigger and better political gun to pull out. (We in schools and in the rest of society may lose to the worst of Big Data; we can’t deny the possibility of defeat or dwell on it.)

The last third of my posts stressed the political benefits that I see in working for a moratorium, as long as we are in stark contrast with reformers and don’t obscure our intentions. We’re in the fight against testing and other reward and punish schemes for the long run.

Yeah, the commenter, Eric Baldwin, is right, and I think it is great that Hanna Skandera, Kevin Huffman, and other Chiefs for Change have blown their gaskets and I bet the billionaires don’t like being called ridiculous by reformers an more than they do by teachers.

I agree with the great post below,   Data is the Fools Gold of Common Core

http://vigornotrigor.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/data-is-fools-gold-of-the-common-core/

Paul Thomas didn’t mention me, but I often ask myself what his response will be to some of my posts.  He responded to Gate’s call with a brilliant passage from Hemingway. Yes, the “Road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs.”

http://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2014/06/11/gates-moratorium-another-scam-beware-the-roadbuilders-pt-2/

His post prompted an equally good metaphor by Anthony Cody. Common Core is like a road through the Amazon forest. Stop the road and you can save the forest. (That explains why I said that I can’t see myself supporting a new set of NATIONAL standards, after Common Core is defeated.)  

I’d say that that metaphor is supportive of both sides on the point that separates Curmudguation and me. In the overall fight against the road, don’t we accept as many temporary delays as we can get while trying to kill it? Students who would be damaged next year by Common Core testing are like a village that is first in the road’s path. Saving that village is a first step. Saving the village of teachers who would have been punished in the next two years is a second step.

Whether we’re environmentalists fighting a road or educators fighting corporate reform, we must discuss and debate the best ways to win short term and long term political victories. By the time I finished the post, I knew I had toughened it up to the point where Gates people would dismiss it, but where it would still rile up allies. I went ahead with it because we need to converse about these issues.   

I see Anthony has also responded.

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2014/06/is_a_high_stakes_moratorium_wo.html

I need to now think through his post. On first reading, I would stress that we agree that the first priority is the “impact our students. Does it relieve them of a test-centered education? Does it alter the path we are on towards an education system monitored by tests, increasingly delivered by technological devices, all aligned to a master set of standards? Or does it simply slow the pace slightly, in order to placate and silence critics?”

Yes, as Anthony says, Common Core “will yield terrible results for our students, especially those facing the greatest challenges in life and in school.”

We and the increasing number of families who are rejecting tests must continue to fight those who “will continue to label these students, and the schools they attend, as failures.”

Talking about Tenure and Trust

Rick Hess (one of my favorite bloggers that I frequently disagree with) recently reflected on his conversation with Randi Weingarten about tenure.

He had several smart observations, but I think one of the most useful ones was an acknowledgement throughout that the reform battles in general and the tenure conversation in particular are hampered by distrust on both sides. In a companion post to this one, I look at the question of where such huge distrust was built. In this post, I want to answer a different question:

What would a conversation about tenure look like if we all trusted each other?

Tenure would be a great place to start, because of all the educational issues before us, it's the one on which we already have agreement on most of the major issues.

Teachers know full well that bad teachers exist, probably better than anyone; after all, your kid was in Mr. McNumbnutt's class for a year, but I've been working next door to him for ten. While there are teachers who are going through a patch, need some guidance or are struggling with a difficult assignment, some teachers, having had their chance to shape up, need to get out.

Likewise, many reformsters have acknowledged that teachers need to be protected from capricious firing, that they should have the job security necessary to actually do their job in without fear of retribution for following their best professional judgment.

If we can agree on those two points, everything else in the tenure conversation is detail.

So what would we need to sort out? What topics would have to be settled to create a workable system that protected the interests of teachers, students, and school systems?

A Real Evaluation System

We don't have one. The old system of administrator fly-bys followed by a mostly-subjective eval by the administrator was only as good as the administrator (and sometimes not even that good). The new systems based on some version of VAM are terrible and serve the interests of literally nobody. Administration would get better data out of reading tea leaves. A thorough Danielson-style observation like Pennsylvania's is better, but it is also onerous for principals, who are left with little or no time to perform any of their other duties.

This is a huge challenge, but it's essential. The most fundamental problem with every system ever is that we don't have any reliable way to sort the teachers. Teachers do not fear accountability because we are afraid of having to do our jobs; we fear accountability systems because we're afraid we'll get tagged as ineffective for no good reason.

 Likewise, a school leader nightmare (as they've presented it during tenure debates) is having to fire all their good teachers and make do with the bad ones that are left. We should all be trying to figure out how to fix that. And teachers are going to have to talk about taking a role in the process. (Note: I have a proposal for a system. Just waiting for my call.)

A Remediation System

A school does not want to start from scratch, particularly after they've already invested time and money in a new staff member, and particularly when starting from scratch doesn't necessarily guarantee a trade up.

It's fair to make the question, "How badly do you want to be a teacher?" part of the eval process. It's fair to the teacher and efficient for the district to try to shape up a marginal teacher.

Safeguards for Teachers

We need a system that provides some sort of safeguards for the teachers, some assurances that they if they are terminated, it will be for reasons related to their job performance and not for matters of internal politics or crossing the wrong parent or failing to pucker up for the right tuchus or for being old and getting too large a paycheck. This is a benefit for the school district as well, because it makes recruiting and retention easier and thereby improves the stability of the schools.

Safeguards for the Districts

Districts need to know that firing a clearly-unfit teacher will not turn into an unending legal nightmare. This is where trust would be a huge benefit. Unions fight termination to the bitter end, even when they know the person on the block should be drummed out of teaching, because they don't want the district to use it against them later. They do not want to be trying to defend Ms. McSwellteach from an unjust termination and hear, "Well, you let it go with that last guy."

Districts and unions need to find a point at which they can agree that it's time cut Mr. van Swine loose, and not drag the process out into infinity.

Training and Support for Administrators

One of the reasons the current tenure system is under fire is because it's not used properly. Administrators consider taking action against teachers, but decide it would be hard, or get hives thinking about starting job interviews again, or just hate filling out forms. So they mutter, "Well, I would do something, but, you know, tenure" and hide behind that excuse.

We can put the best new system in the world in place, but it won't survive a bad administrator. Whether he's lazy or clueless or unable to get along with uppity women who don't know their place, an administrator who doesn't know what he's doing will twist any system completely out of shape. Some sort of support and training for the administrators is a minimum requirement.

If we could agree to trust each other to be working to protect the interests of school systems and teachers (and thereby taking care of the interests of students), talking through these five points could begin, and we might end up with a new version of tenure/due process/what have you that would actually work.

Of course, first there's the trust thing.

What Happened To the Trust?

Rick Hess (one of my favorite bloggers that I frequently disagree with) recently reflected on his conversation with Randi Weingarten about tenure.

He had several smart observations, but I think one of the most useful ones was an acknowledgement throughout that the reform battles in general and the tenure conversation in particular are hampered by distrust on both sides. In a companion post to this one, I consider how we could move forward if we had the trust in place. In this post, I want to answer a different question:

Where did the trust go?

I'm asking not as an exercise in assigning blame. Knowing who got us here is not particularly useful knowledge in and of itself. But understanding how we got here is useful in figuring out if we can get out of here, and if so, how. So, what are some of the factors that led to a discussion deadlock on tenure (among other issues).

Bundling

Both sides of this ongoing battle are made of a wide variety of people who possess a wide variety of viewpoints, styles, and agendas. There is a tremendous tendency to bundle all the people on The Other Side into one large homogenous group. That is exacerbated by the tendency of people not to be critical of their allies.


When I was the president of a striking teachers' union, the school board president and I got together for breakfast regularly. One of the reasons we did it was, basically, to reassure each other that our wackiest constituents did not speak for everybody.

"You can't really pick your friends," one of us said.

"Yes," replied the other. "Or get them to shut up, either."

That leads to seeing ALL of your opponents believing ALL of the things that you hear SOME of them saying. If you're not careful, you will write people off who you actually share common ground with. Bundling makes everything seem worse and amplifies the effect of each of the following.

Anti-Teacher Rhetoric

There has been mile upon mile of anti-teacher rhetoric from reformsters across the spectrum. We have heard over and over again that A) schools are a disastrous failure and B) it's the fault of teachers. Some of the post-Vergara rhetoric has simmered down, but during the trial, plenty of people made it loud and clear what the trial was about-- getting rid of all those terrible teachers. When you keep telling us that one of your goals is to get rid of us, we suspect that getting rid of job protections is, well, about getting rid of us.

Anti-Non-Teacher Rhetoric

Yes, there are lots of people who think they know how to do our job and who are pretty much wrong about everything. But "you've never been a teacher" should not be a reason to ignore you. It can explain why what you just said was stupid, but to do that, I'll have to listen to you first. Refusing to you just because you were never a teacher does not build bridges.

We-Think-You're-Stupid Baloney

Reformsters far too often try to hide behind transparently fake rhetoric. So "we need to pay teachers more" ends up meaning that we're going to pay teachers less. "We're going to give you more freedom to teach" ends up meaning "follow the script and do exactly as you're told." Charters are either private or public depending on whether you want to scarf up public money or keep secret what you've done with it. Words have meaning. When you indicate you don't think that's true, it's very hard to trust you.

A Freakishly Extreme Resistance To All Change

I am sure that, some days, reformsters feel that if they walked up to a teacher who was smacking himself in the head with a hammer and said, "Maybe you shouldn't smack yourself in the head with that hammer," the teacher would reply, "You aren't the boss of me!" and smack himself harder. Many of us hate change badly enough to shut down even an attempt to talk about it. Yes, we have our reasons (if you are of a Certain Age, this all seems like Great New Thing #4,215,449), but imagine that a student runs up to you with a drawing he just finished. "Look! Look! I made you a flower!" he cries, and you just turn away saying, "Hell, kid, I've seen flowers before."

A Refusal To Discuss Bad Teachers So Entrenched That Reasonable People Might Conclude We Refuse To Acknowledge Their Existence

This has bugged me my whole career. It's in our interest to help weed out the bad ones, but we have made it a matter of policy not to even entertain the suggestion. While I believe it's wrong to think teachers don't believe in bad teachers, and counter-intuitive to think so, we have refused to address the issue for so long that critics could be forgiven for concluding that we had joined the Flat Earth Society.

It works for both teachers and reformsters-- when you seem to say things that reasonable people can plainly see are just not so, you should expect people to distrust you. They may distrust your judgment or your honesty, but distrust they will.

Privatizers

Reformsters have to face up to the self-evident truth that some of their number want to do away with public education. Profit-generating private and charter schools, staffed with unqualified temps, all used to replace public schools and public school teachers send a clear message, and the only thing missing is a reformster Kruschev banging his shoe and declaring "We will bury you."

When people show by word and deed that they are out to destroy the work and the institution that you have dedicated your life to, by any means handy, you tend not to trust them. Certainly when someone who wants to take your job away announces that they'd like to make that process a little easier, you are not filled with a warm fuzzy trusty feeling.

Hess, for instance, puzzles over why teachers aren't more excited about charters. I suspect that it's because here on the ground, a new charter almost always means fewer resources for the public schools. Cyber-charters are bledding PE public schools dry. And in nearby Cleveland, charters staffed with TFA temps are being launched to replace public schools and public school teachers. It's not nearly as perplexing as Hess thinks. 


Look, I don't know if the trust thing is fixable. And this is just talking about the tenure issue. It is entirely possible that, on the larger picture, the gulf between the two sides is unbridgeable, that it is a very deep distance created by two entirely different value systems. I'm not convinced that reformsters want public education to accomplish what teachers want it to accomplish (and I'm quite convinced that some reformsters don't want it at all). I don't think they're all (or even mostly) evil and nefarious. I think some are. I think some are well-meaning and clueless. I think some are so well-insulated by money and power that they really don't know how much about anything (including not knowing how much they don't know). And I think some just have different goals for the public education system. I trust some of them, and others I don't trust a bit, and some others, I suppose, fall somewhere in between.

And at the end of the day, I'm nobody. Just one classroom teacher among millions. But if I were someone important, I would certainly agree to meet for breakfast to talk. It never hurts to talk about stuff. But it is going to take a whole mountain of talk to fix these issues of trust.