TNTP recently posted an article in HuffPost that I've addressed elsewhere. But one portion of Rachel Evans' piece deserves its own look, because it's a great min-capsule of what is wrong with much so-called Common Core so-called lesson so-called planning.
Learning to teach to the Common Core standards is sort of like learning
to cook a complicated dish, with a lot of ingredients that you can’t
just throw together. Teachers new to the standards need a recipe of
sorts—a series of steps to transform a blank planning template into the
type of quality instruction they see in the exemplar videos. In my ELA
seminar, we start with an anchor text (To Kill a Mockingbird, for
example) and brainstorm a list of supporting texts that could aid
students in better understanding the key concepts of the novel. Then we
analyze the standards and determine which ones are well-suited to be
taught in this unit. From there, we go back to the texts and ask, “What
must students know or be able to do in order to deeply understand what
they are reading?” Those answers guide how we create text-based
questions and tasks because, ultimately, the goal of the Common Core ELA
standards is to empower students to better understand their world by
understanding rich, complex texts.
Let's go ahead and stipulate that the complicated dish with ingredients "you can't just throw together" is an acceptable simile for this kind of lesson because it's a good simile for EVERY LESSON EVER. Why is it that Common Core cheerleaders so often talk as if they just now discovered teaching, a previously-unheard of activity that nobody else in the world has ever done successfully, ever?
Starting with a template.
Wrong. You are already in trouble because you are about to fit the material to your template instead of asking the question, "What are the goals I want to accomplish with this material, and how can I best achieve them?" Form follows function.
Do lots of practicing teachers do templates these days? Sure. A version of this is often part of alignment and other exercises in paperwork. And we do it the same way my fellow students and I used outlines for papers back in English class in the seventies-- we'd write the paper first, then retro-create an outline to go with it. The outlines didn't actually help us with the task; they were done after the task was completed.
Imitating the video.
Wrong. I've had a dozen or so student teachers over the years, and not once do I say, "Just imitate what I do." I'm a middle-aged man who has lived and taught in this community for decades. They are usually twenty-one year old females who just landed here. Often we have completely different personal styles, temperaments, vocabulary, areas of experience-- we're different persons, and teaching is personal.
There are certainly tricks and techniques we can pick up from other teachers, but to try to pattern an entire lesson on another teacher's practice is bad practice. And as with much of the bad reformsters advice we see, we already know this is wrong. Think of your five best teachers, ever. Would you say they all taught the same way, used the same approaches and techniques, and behaved the same in the classroom? Did they look like they were all imitating the same video of some Master Teacher? No, I didn't think so.
Supporting texts?
We're going to "brainstorm a list of supporting texts that could aid
students in better understanding the key concepts of the novel." Okay. Who decided what the "key concepts" of the novel we will be teaching? And will we really "brainstorm" that list? Because I'm betting that "brainstorming" looks a lot like "googling."
So, we're going to take the novel that's been selected to teach, and we're going to get on line and look for materials to use to teach it.
Analyze the standards
Yes, we all know this one, too. Go back to the list of standards and see which ones we can check off as "covered" by this unit. But from there we go to this:
From there, we go back to the texts and ask, “What
must students know or be able to do in order to deeply understand what
they are reading?”
Not sure what the standards have to do with this, at all, but again I'm going to ask-- who decides what "deeply understand" looks like. Are we looking for a deep understanding of race relations of that day? Are we looking for a deep understanding of legal proceedings? Are we looking for a deep understanding of the kind of quiet heroism displayed by Atticus, or of social isolation, or of daughter-father relationships, or what it was like to have servants, etc etc etc etc? Who is making this professional judgment call, because in this fairly detailed breakdown of the process, this kind of professional judgment doesn't seem to appear.
You know what else doesn't appear?
Students.
Heck, from a reformster I would at least expect a step that says, "Get out your data sets from the testing done with your students and perform some needs assessment and personal strengths number crunching so that you can aim this lesson straight at your students' needs." But no, at no point in this process do we worry about students' previous knowledge, needs, interests, anything.
Is this a high-functioning class or a low-functioning one? Are we in Georgia or Alaska? Are my students mostly white or mostly African-American or mostly neither? Do we have students with developmental or social disabilities (because, Boo Radley)? Are we in a small town or an urban setting? Are we in an area where guns are common or uncommon? Have racial issues been in the news locally lately?
And am I supposed to believe that none of that would matter, and that this lesson would turn out essentially the same no matter what group of students I was working with?
And something else that doesn't appear
That would be professional judgment and knowledge. I could successfully complete the process that Evans has described even if I had never actually read To Kill a Mockingbird. I just grab my template, do some googling for materials with which to fill in the blanks, and I'm good to go. My list of key concepts comes from... somewhere. My teaching techniques come from Master Teachers I'm imitating.
This is what planning a lesson looks like if you are trying to redesign teaching into a simple job that can be performed by anybody at all. This compares to actual teaching just as McDonald's burger assembler compares to Cordon Bleu chef.
In other words, this is what reformsters need teaching to look like if we're going to transform it from a high-skills, high-knowledge profession into a low-wage, low-skill, easily-filled job.
Friday, August 8, 2014
TNTP Bravely Drowning In Irony
A recent HuffPost piece by TNTP's Rachel Evans is a fine example of the kind of bad argument being put forth in the world of ed these days. This is how Core supporters often work-- a construction of misdirection about how to use techniques we already know to combat problems we don't have.
Evans opens with a picture of the poor, tired first year teachers of her Arizona Teaching Fellows seminar. Arizona Teaching Fellows program is one more end run around teacher certification and training (they awesomely promise "you will be trained like a pro athlete") operating on the assumption that learning education theory is for suckers.
While traditional teacher preparation programs stress educational theory, TNTP Academy is designed to transform you into a great teacher through practical, classroom-centered coursework, with a sharp focus on core skills.
It's an interesting stance philosophically, given the Common Corey insistence that students focus on more than simple "how." As Evans herself writes later in the same piece, "Students are no longer expected to merely “do math”—they have to be able to explain the concepts behind the math." This principle apparently does not apply to teachers themselves.
Anyway, as Evans and her seminar were watching a video of a teacher teaching, she performed a brief trick of mindreading.
I knew in the back of their minds, these new teachers were all thinking, “I’m never going to be able to pull off that in my classroom.”
So, nobody was thinking "I wonder how much longer till lunch" or "This is a bunch of baloney," two responses that fake researchers have shown are among the most common in PD sessions.
But no-- Evans, her colleagues, and her charges are concerned about how first year teachers (with no previous significant educational training) can be set up for success with the Common Core and its super-rigorry standards. Evans would like to share some techniques that are totally working.
Invest new teachers in a common vision of excellence.
Doesn't that sound awesome? Far better than "standardize teacher expectations," which sounds more Borgian. Only it turns out that it's a piece of cake, because "luckily, new teachers are easily invested in the Common Core standards because they match their intuitive vision for strong teaching." So, see? New teachers intuitively want to teach the Core! It's like magic!
Of course, it raises a question. If all new teachers intuitively want to teach the Core, why didn't all the current old teachers want to teach the Core when they were new teachers? If new teachers intuitively want to do these things, why aren't we all already doing these things?
"No one signs up to be a teacher because they are passionate about passing out worksheets." And here we go with the straw teachers. The implication is that old teachers (who somehow lost their intuitive teacher chops) are all about the worksheets.
New English teachers imagine their students reading and writing about great literature. Math teachers dream of watching small groups of students use calculators and protractors to solve complex, real-world engineering problems. That’s the Common Core standards in action.
Well, no. No it isn't. It's teachers in action. English teachers do not need the Core to either have or implement reading and writing about literature. And the math example is even worse, because there are plenty of folks in the field who think math is not just for engineering.
Make the process linear, even if the product isn’t.
Teachers new to the standards need a recipe of sorts—a series of steps to transform a blank planning template into the type of quality instruction they see in the exemplar videos. In my ELA seminar, we start with an anchor text (To Kill a Mockingbird, for example) and brainstorm a list of supporting texts that could aid students in better understanding the key concepts of the novel. Then we analyze the standards and determine which ones are well-suited to be taught in this unit. From there, we go back to the texts and ask, “What must students know or be able to do in order to deeply understand what they are reading?” Those answers guide how we create text-based questions and tasks because, ultimately, the goal of the Common Core ELA standards is to empower students to better understand their world by understanding rich, complex texts.
You know what? This is so bad, I'm going to finish this post, and then I'm going to come back and write a separate post just about this paragraph. Then I'll link it and you go wade through that if you're game.
Plan great units together.
"Gone are the days when a single objective could be taught and assessed in one class period." Well, yes. Also gone are the days when teachers had to worry about having enough starched collars to make it through the week, as are the days when women had to quit when they got married. Way to stay on top of those developments.
Evans actually references the three-day lesson on MLK's letter, and then offers the groundbreaking advice that if teachers know where they want to end up with a unit, they can work backwards to figure out their day-to-day planning. Good thinking, TNTP. You know who else knows about that technique? Everybody who studied in an actual teacher prep program in college.
Keep classroom culture front and center.
Even the most immaculately planned lessons will fail if students are disengaged or feel unsafe taking academic risks. The “what” of the Common Core standards matters little without the “how” of skilled instruction. That’s why we still spend most of our summer helping our Fellows internalize basic skills, like giving clear directions and addressing student behaviors.
Don't be thrown by the odd choice of "immaculately" (because, when planning lessons, I'm most concerned that the lessons be really clean). Instead be amazed that TNTP spends most of a summer learning the how of skilled instruction. Most of a whole summer.
Again, we arrive at a huge irony. Remember, in the Common Core, we're now going to spend three days on MLK's letter because to really learn, you need to spend lots of time. In the old days we might have covered it in just one period, but with Common Core, we now understand that more time and depth are required to really truly learn. However, in the old days, people who wanted to be teachers went to college for four whole years and took entire semester courses in teaching techniques. But nowadays we understand that a few weeks of training in the summer are sufficient to master teaching skills.
Some questions remain
No! Really? Because I thought that covered it all! But here are some of the questions. I'll save some time and answer them
How do you effectively remediate struggling students while still exposing them to grade-level content? (By first asking why grade-level content is more important than real remediation)
What if the curricula mandated by a district is not Common Core-aligned? (Use your new teacher intuition? Thank your lucky stars?)
How can teachers adapt pre-existing resources to meet the needs of their school and students? (Use professional judgment as you should all the freakin' time. If you are using ANY resources uncritically, you don't belong in a classroom)
Like the Common Core itself, these questions are complex and a little daunting. (Wrong again. The Common Core isn't particularly complex. It's just a half-baked slapped-together bunch of amateur hour bad standards.)
In many ways, I find TNTP one of the more frustrating of the reformster programs, because there could be some real value in helping grown adults with life experience and interest work their way into a classroom. But cockamamie advice and instruction like this is not the way.
Evans opens with a picture of the poor, tired first year teachers of her Arizona Teaching Fellows seminar. Arizona Teaching Fellows program is one more end run around teacher certification and training (they awesomely promise "you will be trained like a pro athlete") operating on the assumption that learning education theory is for suckers.
While traditional teacher preparation programs stress educational theory, TNTP Academy is designed to transform you into a great teacher through practical, classroom-centered coursework, with a sharp focus on core skills.
It's an interesting stance philosophically, given the Common Corey insistence that students focus on more than simple "how." As Evans herself writes later in the same piece, "Students are no longer expected to merely “do math”—they have to be able to explain the concepts behind the math." This principle apparently does not apply to teachers themselves.
Anyway, as Evans and her seminar were watching a video of a teacher teaching, she performed a brief trick of mindreading.
I knew in the back of their minds, these new teachers were all thinking, “I’m never going to be able to pull off that in my classroom.”
So, nobody was thinking "I wonder how much longer till lunch" or "This is a bunch of baloney," two responses that fake researchers have shown are among the most common in PD sessions.
But no-- Evans, her colleagues, and her charges are concerned about how first year teachers (with no previous significant educational training) can be set up for success with the Common Core and its super-rigorry standards. Evans would like to share some techniques that are totally working.
Invest new teachers in a common vision of excellence.
Doesn't that sound awesome? Far better than "standardize teacher expectations," which sounds more Borgian. Only it turns out that it's a piece of cake, because "luckily, new teachers are easily invested in the Common Core standards because they match their intuitive vision for strong teaching." So, see? New teachers intuitively want to teach the Core! It's like magic!
Of course, it raises a question. If all new teachers intuitively want to teach the Core, why didn't all the current old teachers want to teach the Core when they were new teachers? If new teachers intuitively want to do these things, why aren't we all already doing these things?
"No one signs up to be a teacher because they are passionate about passing out worksheets." And here we go with the straw teachers. The implication is that old teachers (who somehow lost their intuitive teacher chops) are all about the worksheets.
New English teachers imagine their students reading and writing about great literature. Math teachers dream of watching small groups of students use calculators and protractors to solve complex, real-world engineering problems. That’s the Common Core standards in action.
Well, no. No it isn't. It's teachers in action. English teachers do not need the Core to either have or implement reading and writing about literature. And the math example is even worse, because there are plenty of folks in the field who think math is not just for engineering.
Make the process linear, even if the product isn’t.
Teachers new to the standards need a recipe of sorts—a series of steps to transform a blank planning template into the type of quality instruction they see in the exemplar videos. In my ELA seminar, we start with an anchor text (To Kill a Mockingbird, for example) and brainstorm a list of supporting texts that could aid students in better understanding the key concepts of the novel. Then we analyze the standards and determine which ones are well-suited to be taught in this unit. From there, we go back to the texts and ask, “What must students know or be able to do in order to deeply understand what they are reading?” Those answers guide how we create text-based questions and tasks because, ultimately, the goal of the Common Core ELA standards is to empower students to better understand their world by understanding rich, complex texts.
You know what? This is so bad, I'm going to finish this post, and then I'm going to come back and write a separate post just about this paragraph. Then I'll link it and you go wade through that if you're game.
Plan great units together.
"Gone are the days when a single objective could be taught and assessed in one class period." Well, yes. Also gone are the days when teachers had to worry about having enough starched collars to make it through the week, as are the days when women had to quit when they got married. Way to stay on top of those developments.
Evans actually references the three-day lesson on MLK's letter, and then offers the groundbreaking advice that if teachers know where they want to end up with a unit, they can work backwards to figure out their day-to-day planning. Good thinking, TNTP. You know who else knows about that technique? Everybody who studied in an actual teacher prep program in college.
Keep classroom culture front and center.
Even the most immaculately planned lessons will fail if students are disengaged or feel unsafe taking academic risks. The “what” of the Common Core standards matters little without the “how” of skilled instruction. That’s why we still spend most of our summer helping our Fellows internalize basic skills, like giving clear directions and addressing student behaviors.
Don't be thrown by the odd choice of "immaculately" (because, when planning lessons, I'm most concerned that the lessons be really clean). Instead be amazed that TNTP spends most of a summer learning the how of skilled instruction. Most of a whole summer.
Again, we arrive at a huge irony. Remember, in the Common Core, we're now going to spend three days on MLK's letter because to really learn, you need to spend lots of time. In the old days we might have covered it in just one period, but with Common Core, we now understand that more time and depth are required to really truly learn. However, in the old days, people who wanted to be teachers went to college for four whole years and took entire semester courses in teaching techniques. But nowadays we understand that a few weeks of training in the summer are sufficient to master teaching skills.
Some questions remain
No! Really? Because I thought that covered it all! But here are some of the questions. I'll save some time and answer them
How do you effectively remediate struggling students while still exposing them to grade-level content? (By first asking why grade-level content is more important than real remediation)
What if the curricula mandated by a district is not Common Core-aligned? (Use your new teacher intuition? Thank your lucky stars?)
How can teachers adapt pre-existing resources to meet the needs of their school and students? (Use professional judgment as you should all the freakin' time. If you are using ANY resources uncritically, you don't belong in a classroom)
Like the Common Core itself, these questions are complex and a little daunting. (Wrong again. The Common Core isn't particularly complex. It's just a half-baked slapped-together bunch of amateur hour bad standards.)
In many ways, I find TNTP one of the more frustrating of the reformster programs, because there could be some real value in helping grown adults with life experience and interest work their way into a classroom. But cockamamie advice and instruction like this is not the way.
Thursday, August 7, 2014
Study Says Money and Family Cast Long Shadow
I'm just going to steal the lede from the article on John Hopkins HUB website in June:
In a groundbreaking study, Johns Hopkins University researchers followed nearly 800 Baltimore schoolchildren for a quarter of a century, and discovered that their fates were substantially determined by the family they were born into.
Karl Alexander and the late Doris Entwistle published the results of the study in April-- The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood. (h/t to former student George Kroner).
Researchers picked up their subjects' lives in First Grade, back in 1982, tracking them through age 28 or 29. They interviewed the children and their families extensively and repeatedly over time. This book is actually the fourth in a series of works based on the study data. Here's some of the data points from this work.
Of the 790 students, only 33 children born into the low-income bracket moved into the high-income bracket-- about half of what would have been predicted if family were not a factor.
Almost none of the low-income children made it through college.
Among non-college attenders, low-income white guys landed the best jobs.
White women benefited from marriage in terms of stability and income.
Most likely to abuse drugs and alcohol? Better-off white men. But they were also least likely to suffer bad consequences for that behavior. The arrest rates of abusers was similar regardless of race, but whites with records were still able to land jobs. African Americans, not so much. The study posits that the white men have a network that keeps them tied into employment opportunities even when they've made some bad choices.
I've scanned portions of the book (it is very much written by academic sociologists. The chapter about neighborhoods and schools yields a couple of observations worth noting.
The first is not exactly shocking. Poor students from poor neighborhoods get schools that have fewer resources. Neighborhoods with few economic resources get economically strapped schools. Or at least they did in West Baltimore a few decades ago. The authors also note that Africa American students are far more likely to attend a low-economic level school than whites.
The second s more subtle, involving forces the at affect social cohesion:
Two forces are at play in this account of urban disadvantage. The first, residential instability, is centripetal; it scatters families. The second, the retreat from public space into the protective cocoon of family life, is centrifugal; it isolates families from one another. Both forces weaken community cohesion.
That cohesion emerges as a major factor in the work. The advantage that money and family confer is a network of support that pulls folks back up when things go south. Community cohesion, a connection to family and friends who want to help and who have the economic resources to help-- that emerges from this study as one of life's big advantages.
There are huge implications here for the whole "Your school shouldn't be determined by your zip code crowd." If there is a definite advantage in life to coming from a cohesive connected community, breaking apart communities by scattering the students is exactly the wrong thing to do. Closing neighborhood schools and dispersing the students to the four corners of Newark or New Orleans becomes just one more force weakening community cohesion and denying students the advantage that such cohesion provides.
I see two implications in this study. One is that we should be using schools to increase community cohesion. To anyone who attended schools that had this quality, this seems as obvious as air, but many reformsters are convinced that a high quality charter is more important.
The second implication is also obvious. If the neighborhood school lacks economic resources, get it some. Fund the schools in the neighborhood just as well as you fund the schools in the rich ones.
Neither of these implications is news. But here's a study to back them up. There are other details to consider-- race is clearly a factor in much of what goes on here, but I'm not sure to what extent the study addresses racism. The whole set of four books are clearly not an easy read, but are valuable nonetheless.
In a groundbreaking study, Johns Hopkins University researchers followed nearly 800 Baltimore schoolchildren for a quarter of a century, and discovered that their fates were substantially determined by the family they were born into.
Karl Alexander and the late Doris Entwistle published the results of the study in April-- The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood. (h/t to former student George Kroner).
Researchers picked up their subjects' lives in First Grade, back in 1982, tracking them through age 28 or 29. They interviewed the children and their families extensively and repeatedly over time. This book is actually the fourth in a series of works based on the study data. Here's some of the data points from this work.
Of the 790 students, only 33 children born into the low-income bracket moved into the high-income bracket-- about half of what would have been predicted if family were not a factor.
Almost none of the low-income children made it through college.
Among non-college attenders, low-income white guys landed the best jobs.
White women benefited from marriage in terms of stability and income.
Most likely to abuse drugs and alcohol? Better-off white men. But they were also least likely to suffer bad consequences for that behavior. The arrest rates of abusers was similar regardless of race, but whites with records were still able to land jobs. African Americans, not so much. The study posits that the white men have a network that keeps them tied into employment opportunities even when they've made some bad choices.
I've scanned portions of the book (it is very much written by academic sociologists. The chapter about neighborhoods and schools yields a couple of observations worth noting.
The first is not exactly shocking. Poor students from poor neighborhoods get schools that have fewer resources. Neighborhoods with few economic resources get economically strapped schools. Or at least they did in West Baltimore a few decades ago. The authors also note that Africa American students are far more likely to attend a low-economic level school than whites.
The second s more subtle, involving forces the at affect social cohesion:
Two forces are at play in this account of urban disadvantage. The first, residential instability, is centripetal; it scatters families. The second, the retreat from public space into the protective cocoon of family life, is centrifugal; it isolates families from one another. Both forces weaken community cohesion.
That cohesion emerges as a major factor in the work. The advantage that money and family confer is a network of support that pulls folks back up when things go south. Community cohesion, a connection to family and friends who want to help and who have the economic resources to help-- that emerges from this study as one of life's big advantages.
There are huge implications here for the whole "Your school shouldn't be determined by your zip code crowd." If there is a definite advantage in life to coming from a cohesive connected community, breaking apart communities by scattering the students is exactly the wrong thing to do. Closing neighborhood schools and dispersing the students to the four corners of Newark or New Orleans becomes just one more force weakening community cohesion and denying students the advantage that such cohesion provides.
I see two implications in this study. One is that we should be using schools to increase community cohesion. To anyone who attended schools that had this quality, this seems as obvious as air, but many reformsters are convinced that a high quality charter is more important.
The second implication is also obvious. If the neighborhood school lacks economic resources, get it some. Fund the schools in the neighborhood just as well as you fund the schools in the rich ones.
Neither of these implications is news. But here's a study to back them up. There are other details to consider-- race is clearly a factor in much of what goes on here, but I'm not sure to what extent the study addresses racism. The whole set of four books are clearly not an easy read, but are valuable nonetheless.
Dolly Parton. Really.
So you say you'd like a cheerful story for a change. Fine. Let's talk about Dolly Parton. Really.
You may or may not be a fan of Dolly Parton, Country Icon and Oddly Constructed Barbie Doll, but if you're not paying attention, you might miss Dolly Parton, Philanthropist. And not Investment Philanthropist or Disruptive Innovation Philanthropist. Parton is pretty old school.
Parton came from real poverty, growing up with eleven siblings and a father who couldn't read or write in the middle of one of the poorest regions in the country. A tough time for her was not wondering if she dropped out of college, would her parents be willing to support her long enough to get her start-up off the ground.
Parton never forgot where she came from. You may think of Dollywood as a monument to kitsch, a big slice of Tennessee tacky, but it is also a sturdy economic engine and job factory in the middle of an otherwise poverty-stricken region. Parton's thought never seemed to be, "I'll build a big plastic monument to myself," but "I'll create a business that will bring money to my home region."
But Dollywood is only the most visible of Parton's work. Since the 1970s she's been awarding scholarships in Sevier County (her home). She's played at times with giving students a $500 bonus for finishing high school. Some of what she's done I can't tell you about because, apparently, much of her philanthropy is done anonymously.
But I can tell you about the Dollywood Foundation and the Imagination Library.
This program started with the simplest idea in the world-- putting books in the homes of small children. It began, once again, in her home county, and her proposal was simple-- sign your newborn child up, and once a month from birth through Kindergarten, the child will receive a book. On the program's website, Parton writes
When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true. I know there are children in your community with their own dreams. They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister. Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer. The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.
The program launched in 1995 in Sevier County, and it grew quickly. By 2006, when the Washington Post wrote about it, the program had spread to 471 communities in 41 states. In 2011 it launched in Scotland, and it can now be found in the UK, Australia, and Canada. The site says that 706,468 US kids are currently signed up. It's still fairly simple. Some combination of sponsors (some private, some government, depending on the locale) help with the financing (the cost is roughly $27 per child per year) and the Foundation delivers the books, each in its own poly bag with the child's name on it (consider the power of a child, even a small one, receiving a book that is theirs, addressed to them, by name).
Researching this was challenging, because press about the program is sparse. Apparently Parton is unaware that good philanthropists make sure to get plenty of press coverage for their work.
And one other noteworthy feature of this program-- she doesn't pay people to promote it or participate. It has spread across the world because people like the idea and want to do it. Imagine that-- a program that makes so much sense that it sells itself.
It makes me wonder-- what if Bill Gates had decided that rather than rewrite public education, he would spend a gabillion dollars putting books in the hands of every elementary school student in this country. What if a raft of corporate sponsors had worked with Scholastic Books to give every child a good-for-one-book voucher?
Ah, well. Parton may not be setting the education world on fire, but she's also not telling the children of Sevier County that they just need to find some grit to escape or insisting that Sevier County schools need to be more rigorous and testier. And if she has been, please wait a day or so to tell me. Let me have at least a day to enjoy the idea of a person who got rich and used the money to help folks out in a simple and direct way.
You may or may not be a fan of Dolly Parton, Country Icon and Oddly Constructed Barbie Doll, but if you're not paying attention, you might miss Dolly Parton, Philanthropist. And not Investment Philanthropist or Disruptive Innovation Philanthropist. Parton is pretty old school.
Parton came from real poverty, growing up with eleven siblings and a father who couldn't read or write in the middle of one of the poorest regions in the country. A tough time for her was not wondering if she dropped out of college, would her parents be willing to support her long enough to get her start-up off the ground.
Parton never forgot where she came from. You may think of Dollywood as a monument to kitsch, a big slice of Tennessee tacky, but it is also a sturdy economic engine and job factory in the middle of an otherwise poverty-stricken region. Parton's thought never seemed to be, "I'll build a big plastic monument to myself," but "I'll create a business that will bring money to my home region."
But Dollywood is only the most visible of Parton's work. Since the 1970s she's been awarding scholarships in Sevier County (her home). She's played at times with giving students a $500 bonus for finishing high school. Some of what she's done I can't tell you about because, apparently, much of her philanthropy is done anonymously.
But I can tell you about the Dollywood Foundation and the Imagination Library.
This program started with the simplest idea in the world-- putting books in the homes of small children. It began, once again, in her home county, and her proposal was simple-- sign your newborn child up, and once a month from birth through Kindergarten, the child will receive a book. On the program's website, Parton writes
When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true. I know there are children in your community with their own dreams. They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister. Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer. The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.
The program launched in 1995 in Sevier County, and it grew quickly. By 2006, when the Washington Post wrote about it, the program had spread to 471 communities in 41 states. In 2011 it launched in Scotland, and it can now be found in the UK, Australia, and Canada. The site says that 706,468 US kids are currently signed up. It's still fairly simple. Some combination of sponsors (some private, some government, depending on the locale) help with the financing (the cost is roughly $27 per child per year) and the Foundation delivers the books, each in its own poly bag with the child's name on it (consider the power of a child, even a small one, receiving a book that is theirs, addressed to them, by name).
Researching this was challenging, because press about the program is sparse. Apparently Parton is unaware that good philanthropists make sure to get plenty of press coverage for their work.
And one other noteworthy feature of this program-- she doesn't pay people to promote it or participate. It has spread across the world because people like the idea and want to do it. Imagine that-- a program that makes so much sense that it sells itself.
It makes me wonder-- what if Bill Gates had decided that rather than rewrite public education, he would spend a gabillion dollars putting books in the hands of every elementary school student in this country. What if a raft of corporate sponsors had worked with Scholastic Books to give every child a good-for-one-book voucher?
Ah, well. Parton may not be setting the education world on fire, but she's also not telling the children of Sevier County that they just need to find some grit to escape or insisting that Sevier County schools need to be more rigorous and testier. And if she has been, please wait a day or so to tell me. Let me have at least a day to enjoy the idea of a person who got rich and used the money to help folks out in a simple and direct way.
Wednesday, August 6, 2014
Conservatism vs. Ed Reform (Pt. II)
Andy Smarick continues his examination of the uneasy interface between conservatism and ed reform. I took a look at Part I of this series previously, but this time I'm going to skip over the bulk of his post to look at his conclusion, where he posits four issues that he is chewing over.
Defining dispositional conservatism is a challenge all by itself. I like this picture from Corey Robin (author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin):
Conservatives, at least by reputation, are supposed to be calm, reasonable, quiet, averse to the operatic, friendly to the familiar. They don’t go looking for trouble in far-off lands. They stay home, tending their gardens, patching the roof, taking care of their children. They want to be left alone. They’re not interested in history’s adventure. They want to leave things be, even if things aren’t so great, because they know that trying to change things, particularly through politics, will only make them worse.
This kind of conservatism was never going to embrace or be embraced by the ed reform movement. Any time you want to shift the flow of power or money in society (and the ed reform movement sought to do both), you have to dynamite some stream beds. Nobody ever gathered money or power by standing up and saying, "Okay, everyone. There's not really a big problem here, so just sit down and don't get excited." It's the same reason that government is always declaring war on some and that disaster capitalists like disruptive change.
Discussing what should be preserved was never going to be on the menu initially, because ed reform was looking to mine money and power out of New Things. There was probably also an element of reformsters believing that anything explicitly preserved from the old system would just become a toehold for resistance to hang onto.
Ironically, dispositional conservatism is now part of the ed reform landscape, because much of the ed reform agenda is now the status quo, so we get reformsters like John White in LA arguing that we must stay the course because changing now will create disorder and disruption.
Sometimes dispositional conservatism is just about whether things are going your way or not. If things aren't going your way, you're not disposed to be conservative.
In other (fewer) words, the lack of love for this type of conservatism and its concerns in ed reform is a clear signal that not all ed reformers were trying to answer the question, "How can we create the best education system?" Some, maybe many, were busy answering a different question, like "How can we open up education to more investment and profit opportunity" or "How can we wrest control of education away from the people who have it now."
If it will make Smarick feel better, I can assure him that many of his progressive friends are not fans of the technocrats. The fact that you have cool computer toys and a big brain and a stack of money does not mean that you have a remote clue about education and how best to do it.
I'd argue that technocrats are the progressive counterparts of rich conservatives. In both cases, we're dealing with someone whose stance is "I have more X than anybody, therefor I should be the person calling the shots." X may equal money, brains, or some manner of success, but the resulting problem is not one of politics, but of ego. You're not trying to run the show because you think you've tapped into some superior philosophy-- you're trying to run the show because you just believe that you are better than other people in a way that makes you qualified to Take Charge.
The fourth question is the hardest one. It's a version of the older question-- can dispositional conservatism solve problems are really extreme. How can "Let's just slow down and think this through carefully before we do anything rash or extreme" be a good position to take if you're in a burning building?
Smarick's question is further complicated by the question of whether or not urban school districts constitute a burning building, and if they are burning, does it matter that the same people who want to demolish the building are the same ones who set fire to it in the first place? Are there actual crises, and are they really educational crises, or crises of power, money and politics?
When considering the possibility of incremental responses to urban schools, it's worth noting that the radical approach to urban school district real or supposed failure has produced no successes, at all. From Philadelphia to New Orleans to Newark to Chicago to Los Angeles to DC, ed reformers have had ample opportunity to try every kind of radical reformy reboots they ever wanted to, and they've pursued these programs with an eye explicitly on scalability. According to the original ed reform narrative, we are by now all supposed to be sitting around learning how to follow the model from some highly successful re-imagined school district. We aren't. Instead, we just keep reading bulletins from Texas and DC and Atlanta, revealing that the miracles were actually illusory.
In other words, even though Smarick seems afraid that a measured dispositionally conservative response to urban school district problems, the evidence suggests that a measured thoughtful careful response to these crises is, to borrow a phrase, the worst possible solution, except for every other one.
These are tough and worthwhile questions to ask. It would be interesting to see if there were a common ground in education for discussion between conservatives and liberals who have concluded that their own leading figures in education have lost sight of the principles of both conservatism and liberalism.
- Why doesn’t ed reform seem to appreciate dispositional conservatism?
- Why doesn’t ed reform ever discuss what should be preserved?
- I wish my progressive friends appreciated the trouble with technocratic change.
- Is there a compelling dispositionally conservative response to tragic, longstanding K–12 injustices, like the ongoing failure of urban districts?
Defining dispositional conservatism is a challenge all by itself. I like this picture from Corey Robin (author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin):
Conservatives, at least by reputation, are supposed to be calm, reasonable, quiet, averse to the operatic, friendly to the familiar. They don’t go looking for trouble in far-off lands. They stay home, tending their gardens, patching the roof, taking care of their children. They want to be left alone. They’re not interested in history’s adventure. They want to leave things be, even if things aren’t so great, because they know that trying to change things, particularly through politics, will only make them worse.
This kind of conservatism was never going to embrace or be embraced by the ed reform movement. Any time you want to shift the flow of power or money in society (and the ed reform movement sought to do both), you have to dynamite some stream beds. Nobody ever gathered money or power by standing up and saying, "Okay, everyone. There's not really a big problem here, so just sit down and don't get excited." It's the same reason that government is always declaring war on some and that disaster capitalists like disruptive change.
Discussing what should be preserved was never going to be on the menu initially, because ed reform was looking to mine money and power out of New Things. There was probably also an element of reformsters believing that anything explicitly preserved from the old system would just become a toehold for resistance to hang onto.
Ironically, dispositional conservatism is now part of the ed reform landscape, because much of the ed reform agenda is now the status quo, so we get reformsters like John White in LA arguing that we must stay the course because changing now will create disorder and disruption.
Sometimes dispositional conservatism is just about whether things are going your way or not. If things aren't going your way, you're not disposed to be conservative.
In other (fewer) words, the lack of love for this type of conservatism and its concerns in ed reform is a clear signal that not all ed reformers were trying to answer the question, "How can we create the best education system?" Some, maybe many, were busy answering a different question, like "How can we open up education to more investment and profit opportunity" or "How can we wrest control of education away from the people who have it now."
If it will make Smarick feel better, I can assure him that many of his progressive friends are not fans of the technocrats. The fact that you have cool computer toys and a big brain and a stack of money does not mean that you have a remote clue about education and how best to do it.
I'd argue that technocrats are the progressive counterparts of rich conservatives. In both cases, we're dealing with someone whose stance is "I have more X than anybody, therefor I should be the person calling the shots." X may equal money, brains, or some manner of success, but the resulting problem is not one of politics, but of ego. You're not trying to run the show because you think you've tapped into some superior philosophy-- you're trying to run the show because you just believe that you are better than other people in a way that makes you qualified to Take Charge.
The fourth question is the hardest one. It's a version of the older question-- can dispositional conservatism solve problems are really extreme. How can "Let's just slow down and think this through carefully before we do anything rash or extreme" be a good position to take if you're in a burning building?
Smarick's question is further complicated by the question of whether or not urban school districts constitute a burning building, and if they are burning, does it matter that the same people who want to demolish the building are the same ones who set fire to it in the first place? Are there actual crises, and are they really educational crises, or crises of power, money and politics?
When considering the possibility of incremental responses to urban schools, it's worth noting that the radical approach to urban school district real or supposed failure has produced no successes, at all. From Philadelphia to New Orleans to Newark to Chicago to Los Angeles to DC, ed reformers have had ample opportunity to try every kind of radical reformy reboots they ever wanted to, and they've pursued these programs with an eye explicitly on scalability. According to the original ed reform narrative, we are by now all supposed to be sitting around learning how to follow the model from some highly successful re-imagined school district. We aren't. Instead, we just keep reading bulletins from Texas and DC and Atlanta, revealing that the miracles were actually illusory.
In other words, even though Smarick seems afraid that a measured dispositionally conservative response to urban school district problems, the evidence suggests that a measured thoughtful careful response to these crises is, to borrow a phrase, the worst possible solution, except for every other one.
These are tough and worthwhile questions to ask. It would be interesting to see if there were a common ground in education for discussion between conservatives and liberals who have concluded that their own leading figures in education have lost sight of the principles of both conservatism and liberalism.
NYC Looks For Teachers on Craigslist
The NYC Teaching Collective (formerly the NYC Teaching Residency) seems to be have hatched from a simple idea-- why pay TFA to provide us with underqualified, undertrained teacher bodies when we can just do it in house?
If nothing else, their mission statement is more direct:
The mission of the NYC Teaching Collaborative is to recruit and prepare talented, committed individuals to become effective teachers who dedicate themselves to raising student achievement and driving change in New York City's highest-need schools.
In other words, we need some people who will get test scores up. And "despite success in raising the overall quality of our teaching force, many schools in our highest need communities still struggle to attract and retain highly effective educators."
Now, some people might conclude that when you have trouble attracting and retaining people for a particular job, there might be a problem with the job-- how it's compensated, the working conditions, something. But NYC schools have apparently concluded that they simply aren't getting the right class of people for the job.
And where do you go when you need a better quality of job applicant? Why, Craigslist, of course.
Yes, the NYC school system, through the NYC Teaching Collaborative, is advertising for teachers on Craigslist. Well, not necessarily teachers, exactly.
Become a NYC Teacher - no experience required!
The program goes TFA one better in its quest to turn non-teachers into teaching gold. Candidates complete a six-month spring residency followed by a six-weeks summer program, followed by their own classroom. The program's goal is to provide "an accelerated path to the classroom that feels comprehensive rather than rushed."
The Craigslist ad says that each trainee is provided with an experienced teacher called a Collaborative Coach, however the City's own website says the trainee will work with either an experienced teacher OR a Collaborative Coach. That's a distinction I'd probably want to have cleared up.
Applicants are "meticulously" selected, though no specific requirements of any sort are listed; participants are described repeatedly as talented, dedicated, and hard-working. The program comes with a $13K stipend for the training period, and while there is no guarantee of a job, so far the program has 100% placement. Participants also commit to giving four years to a NYC high needs school.
NYC is a hotbed of alternative paths to teacherdom, and this program from the city school system does not challenge TFA for the criminal underpreparation crown. But kudos for looking for future professionals the 21st Century way. The ad does have one problem, however-- the inspiring photo at the header includes the slogan "Train for a year. Teach for a lifetime." They may want to wait until Campbell Brown's anti-tenure lawsuit is settled before they make those kind of crazy promises.
If nothing else, their mission statement is more direct:
The mission of the NYC Teaching Collaborative is to recruit and prepare talented, committed individuals to become effective teachers who dedicate themselves to raising student achievement and driving change in New York City's highest-need schools.
In other words, we need some people who will get test scores up. And "despite success in raising the overall quality of our teaching force, many schools in our highest need communities still struggle to attract and retain highly effective educators."
Now, some people might conclude that when you have trouble attracting and retaining people for a particular job, there might be a problem with the job-- how it's compensated, the working conditions, something. But NYC schools have apparently concluded that they simply aren't getting the right class of people for the job.
And where do you go when you need a better quality of job applicant? Why, Craigslist, of course.
Yes, the NYC school system, through the NYC Teaching Collaborative, is advertising for teachers on Craigslist. Well, not necessarily teachers, exactly.
Become a NYC Teacher - no experience required!
The program goes TFA one better in its quest to turn non-teachers into teaching gold. Candidates complete a six-month spring residency followed by a six-weeks summer program, followed by their own classroom. The program's goal is to provide "an accelerated path to the classroom that feels comprehensive rather than rushed."
The Craigslist ad says that each trainee is provided with an experienced teacher called a Collaborative Coach, however the City's own website says the trainee will work with either an experienced teacher OR a Collaborative Coach. That's a distinction I'd probably want to have cleared up.
Applicants are "meticulously" selected, though no specific requirements of any sort are listed; participants are described repeatedly as talented, dedicated, and hard-working. The program comes with a $13K stipend for the training period, and while there is no guarantee of a job, so far the program has 100% placement. Participants also commit to giving four years to a NYC high needs school.
NYC is a hotbed of alternative paths to teacherdom, and this program from the city school system does not challenge TFA for the criminal underpreparation crown. But kudos for looking for future professionals the 21st Century way. The ad does have one problem, however-- the inspiring photo at the header includes the slogan "Train for a year. Teach for a lifetime." They may want to wait until Campbell Brown's anti-tenure lawsuit is settled before they make those kind of crazy promises.
Power Social Marketing for Teachers
Patti Fletcher's credentials would not necessarily lead you to take her seriously. She is the global leader of the Cross-Portfolio Marketing and
Social Marketing Center of Excellence teams at IHS, and is the
Co-Founder and CEO of PSDNetwork, LLC, which sounds like a huge gobbledygook salad with jargonaisse dressing. Fletcher's work "centers on enablement and culture change with a particularly interesting focus on women in the boardroom."
In a recent post on Leader Networks entitled "Social Marketing and Gender Equality through Power Networking: 4 Common Trends Related to Transformation, Power and Influence," Fletcher lays out four ideas about institutional transformation that are directed at empowering women in the business world, but which have equally powerful implications for teachers and education. It's worth your time to read the whole piece, despite the heavy dose of business-speak that it promises, but here's the main points of the main points.
Trend #1. There is no separation between a professional and a personal life.
Women tend to integrate more than separate. We don’t have a work life and a personal life. We have a life! Taking that a step further, many successful female executives and millennial entrepreneurs I speak with all say they do not separate their relationships. “I don’t have work friends and personal friends, I have friends,” says Mark Johnson, former CEO of Zite (acquired by CNN in 2011, spun off to Flipboard in 2014).
This holds true for lots of teachers as well. Certainly, teaching in a small town, I am always a teacher no matter where I'm found. After all these years, some students are still shocked to see me in a grocery store, buying food. This is also why, in many communities, teachers really are held to a higher standard of conduct. When you're out in a bar drinking, people will still see you as their child's teacher.
Trend #2. It's not who you know that matters the most, it's who knows you.
Why does the media keep calling Randi Weingarten whenever they need a teacher's persepctive? Because she's the person they know. Why don't teachers appear on talk shows, news broadcasts, or any of the other places where education is discussed? Because the people in power, the people who decide these things, don't know any teachers.
How to break that barrier is a challenge. But it's part of the answer we're looking for.
We B2B social marketers want our brands to be first in mind within our target topics. We want to be in the hearts and minds of our customers, industry influencers, our partners. The people who know us are far more important that the people we know. The more people who know us and will advocate for our brands — whether we are present or not — the more our brands become the go-to source for thought leadership, engagement, and eventually business.
Why does Campbell Brown get to be the face of the latest reformy attack on teachers? Because people, both in the general public and the halls of power, know her. Reformsters have this part down. Teachers, not so much. In particular, unions could be creating whole speakers bureaus of teachers-- active classroom professionals available to everything from media to the local Rotary Club.
Trend #3. Power relationships are based on mutual interests and sharing information, not frequency of transactions.
In other words, networking. Fletcher says women are often reluctant to network because the interactions seem so force, unnatural, and self-serving. But connecting with people, being able to help them out, connecting them with other like-minded people-- those all build up power networks.
Teachers can be, of course, the ultimate anti-networkers. Let me just stay in my room and never talk to anybody over the age of ten. Often we overlook the most obvious of networking opportunities-- our own former students. But even connecting with our own colleagues would be a step forward for some of us.
Fletcher cites Judy Robinette, author of How To Be a Power Connector.
Robinett connects with people on what they care about and focuses on how she can help them. And, she works hard at her relationships. “I am not going to be a one-hit wonder. I am not going to do you a favor and never hear from me again,” says Robinett. She works hard at cultivating her relationships by being the source of information and of new connections.
Trend #4. Context and Strategy Are Critical
Whether we are talking about building a power network of key players in an industry you are targeting for your next business, or you are trying to engage potential customers online, first you have to find out where they are and then go to them.
Which sounds like about pretty much everything in teacherland.
In the ongoing debate about the future of public education, we need to remember that as alarmed as we may be, the charge is not to explain to civilians why we are upset, but to explain why they should be upset. We should not be telling them where they should go to get the information; we should be bringing it to them where they are.
In a recent post on Leader Networks entitled "Social Marketing and Gender Equality through Power Networking: 4 Common Trends Related to Transformation, Power and Influence," Fletcher lays out four ideas about institutional transformation that are directed at empowering women in the business world, but which have equally powerful implications for teachers and education. It's worth your time to read the whole piece, despite the heavy dose of business-speak that it promises, but here's the main points of the main points.
Trend #1. There is no separation between a professional and a personal life.
Women tend to integrate more than separate. We don’t have a work life and a personal life. We have a life! Taking that a step further, many successful female executives and millennial entrepreneurs I speak with all say they do not separate their relationships. “I don’t have work friends and personal friends, I have friends,” says Mark Johnson, former CEO of Zite (acquired by CNN in 2011, spun off to Flipboard in 2014).
This holds true for lots of teachers as well. Certainly, teaching in a small town, I am always a teacher no matter where I'm found. After all these years, some students are still shocked to see me in a grocery store, buying food. This is also why, in many communities, teachers really are held to a higher standard of conduct. When you're out in a bar drinking, people will still see you as their child's teacher.
Trend #2. It's not who you know that matters the most, it's who knows you.
Why does the media keep calling Randi Weingarten whenever they need a teacher's persepctive? Because she's the person they know. Why don't teachers appear on talk shows, news broadcasts, or any of the other places where education is discussed? Because the people in power, the people who decide these things, don't know any teachers.
How to break that barrier is a challenge. But it's part of the answer we're looking for.
We B2B social marketers want our brands to be first in mind within our target topics. We want to be in the hearts and minds of our customers, industry influencers, our partners. The people who know us are far more important that the people we know. The more people who know us and will advocate for our brands — whether we are present or not — the more our brands become the go-to source for thought leadership, engagement, and eventually business.
Why does Campbell Brown get to be the face of the latest reformy attack on teachers? Because people, both in the general public and the halls of power, know her. Reformsters have this part down. Teachers, not so much. In particular, unions could be creating whole speakers bureaus of teachers-- active classroom professionals available to everything from media to the local Rotary Club.
Trend #3. Power relationships are based on mutual interests and sharing information, not frequency of transactions.
In other words, networking. Fletcher says women are often reluctant to network because the interactions seem so force, unnatural, and self-serving. But connecting with people, being able to help them out, connecting them with other like-minded people-- those all build up power networks.
Teachers can be, of course, the ultimate anti-networkers. Let me just stay in my room and never talk to anybody over the age of ten. Often we overlook the most obvious of networking opportunities-- our own former students. But even connecting with our own colleagues would be a step forward for some of us.
Fletcher cites Judy Robinette, author of How To Be a Power Connector.
Robinett connects with people on what they care about and focuses on how she can help them. And, she works hard at her relationships. “I am not going to be a one-hit wonder. I am not going to do you a favor and never hear from me again,” says Robinett. She works hard at cultivating her relationships by being the source of information and of new connections.
Trend #4. Context and Strategy Are Critical
Whether we are talking about building a power network of key players in an industry you are targeting for your next business, or you are trying to engage potential customers online, first you have to find out where they are and then go to them.
Which sounds like about pretty much everything in teacherland.
In the ongoing debate about the future of public education, we need to remember that as alarmed as we may be, the charge is not to explain to civilians why we are upset, but to explain why they should be upset. We should not be telling them where they should go to get the information; we should be bringing it to them where they are.
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