We've marched steadily toward accountability for over a decade now. Teachers must be held accountable. Schools must be held accountable.
And not just in some fuzzy, non-specific manner. This accountability must come with real, hard consequences, say reformsters. Accountability means real consequences, financial consequences. If teachers aren't doing a great job, they should not get paid more. If they do a lousy job, they should be subject to losing their jobs. If schools fail to provide excellence, we should be able to close them, replace them with new schools that will promise to do better.
Because, you know, that's how things work in the business world.
Unless, of course, you're a educational testing corporation.
News has broken of the latest Pearson testing mistake, and this one in particular gives us a picture of corporate accountability in this new age. The mistake itself is the result of an actually-understandable screw-up. A civics and economics test in Virginia included a question for which the answer changed between the writing and the scoring (can VA residents register to vote online). The answer key was incorrect, and many students who should have passed were marked as failing.
Virginia and Pearson were both quick to explain the problem. Pearson is just a contractor, and they just do what they're told.
This is an interesting position to take in our new accountariffic education world of today. I am wondering if it would work for low-rated teachers in NY. Can they say, "Hey, I delivered the engageNY lessons exactly as they are laid out on the website. I followed the instructions to the letter-- if the students scored poorly on The Test, that is not on me."
We're just the contractor. We were just following orders. These do not sound like slogans for the Age of Accountability to me.
This event in VA is of course not just a one-off. Tales of Pearson's screw-ups are legion (here's one list). In one case they offered $600K of "scholarship money," which is an amount I imagine they have rattling around a receptionist's desk in loose change. Sometimes they have to pay a fine, though you generally have to take them to court to get that to work. Mostly life just goes on.
Look, Pearson is a huge corporation. I expect they're going to make mistakes, and I personally accept mistakes as part of the cost of being in the world. But if our new philosophy is that failure is not an option, and that teachers and schools need to be beaten into shape with the big stick of accountability, then let's wave that stick at everybody.
If accountability is not for 800 pound gorilla corporations (or certain select charters, but that's another essay), then what we're living in is not a new Age of Accountability at all, but just the same old Age of Money Talks.
Monday, August 18, 2014
Sunday, August 17, 2014
The Opposite of Excellence
It's not really news, and it has certainly been commented on a million times, but I don't think we can be reminded too many times. We've heard it, but it's a slippery well-greased pig of a fact, a detail so unbelievably stupid that it literally numbs the mind and slips away like a half-remembered dream. Unconsciously, our brain's filter says, "Well, that can't be right," and we go back to arguing about bigger picture details.
But at the root of everything-- the attempts to measure teacher effectiveness, the programs to regulate student advancement between grades, the declarations of college readiness, the shutting down of public schools because they aren't good enough-- is a simple definition.
Excellence is high scores on standardized tests of reading and math.
That's it. That is how the current corporation-serving high-stakes test-driven reformster status quo defines excellence for every single child in America (well, almost every child-- as always, children of the rich are exempt).
Think about that. Think. About. That.
If you are a teacher, think about every student you've ever taught that you would have called excellent. The outstanding musician who went on to a creative career entertaining and uplifting thousands. The gifted welder who was in such demand that he had his pick of cities to travel to. The student with such exceptional people skills you knew she would be an awesome doctor. The student who could jump higher and run faster than anybody, or the student who competed athletically on the state level. The student who was a genius at coding.
None of them can be called excellent-- unless they also score well on a standardized math and reading test.
If you are a person living in this world on this planet, think of everybody you know who you would call excellent. The single parent who manages to raise several healthy, happy, capable children while working hard to provide them with a stable life. The married parents who make an awesome team while creating a home for their children. The community volunteer whose donation of hours and time and sweat makes your corner of the world a better place. The local politicians or business leaders who set aside their own lives to work at making everybody's lives better. The doctor. The lawyer. The garage mechanic. The chef. The artist. The ambulance driver. The plumber. Hell, even the teacher.
A vast tapestry of people bringing varied, rich, awesome talents and accomplishments to make the world a better place to be. A great gallumphing mass of individuals who let us understand what it means to be fully human, to fully realize what we can best do with the precious moments given to us. to show the myriad ways in which we grasp our lives and create bright beautiful displays of who we are, what we are, what we can be, what we can settle on for our own purpose, even as we help other people realize their own unique vision for their own unique future.
And the best we can come up with for measuring everything great and excellent in human beings is some scores on a standardized reading and math test (and not even good tests, at that).
Reformsters like to talk about raising the bar and really creating high standards for our young people, because, you know, young people, you may have all sorts of dreams and aspirations and talents and hopes and strengths that you want to realize and express but, really, you know-- what you need to be thinking about is your standardized test scores.
Raising the bar, my ass.
What CCSS and its attendant clamoring kudzu of reforms really offers is a tiny, cramped vision of humanity. We should be taking our young people to the edge of the Grand Canyon and saying, "Your life is out there somewhere. Let's go explore." Instead, reformers hold out a suitcase and say, "Okay, get in here. Just curl up and make yourself as small as possible."
Human beings are huge. We contain multitudes. CCSS and its various slices of baloney are devoted to making students small, to measuring them with the tiniest of rulers.
Remember. When they talk about highly effective teachers and excellent schools and proficient students, all they are talking about is the scores on a standardized math and reading test. That's it. It would be a joke if it weren't twisting American public education out of shape. Because if life really is a multiple choice test, it's one with a gazillion answers, and every one of them could be correct. But reformsters want us to bubble in just one. And that is the opposite of excellence.
But at the root of everything-- the attempts to measure teacher effectiveness, the programs to regulate student advancement between grades, the declarations of college readiness, the shutting down of public schools because they aren't good enough-- is a simple definition.
Excellence is high scores on standardized tests of reading and math.
That's it. That is how the current corporation-serving high-stakes test-driven reformster status quo defines excellence for every single child in America (well, almost every child-- as always, children of the rich are exempt).
Think about that. Think. About. That.
If you are a teacher, think about every student you've ever taught that you would have called excellent. The outstanding musician who went on to a creative career entertaining and uplifting thousands. The gifted welder who was in such demand that he had his pick of cities to travel to. The student with such exceptional people skills you knew she would be an awesome doctor. The student who could jump higher and run faster than anybody, or the student who competed athletically on the state level. The student who was a genius at coding.
None of them can be called excellent-- unless they also score well on a standardized math and reading test.
If you are a person living in this world on this planet, think of everybody you know who you would call excellent. The single parent who manages to raise several healthy, happy, capable children while working hard to provide them with a stable life. The married parents who make an awesome team while creating a home for their children. The community volunteer whose donation of hours and time and sweat makes your corner of the world a better place. The local politicians or business leaders who set aside their own lives to work at making everybody's lives better. The doctor. The lawyer. The garage mechanic. The chef. The artist. The ambulance driver. The plumber. Hell, even the teacher.
A vast tapestry of people bringing varied, rich, awesome talents and accomplishments to make the world a better place to be. A great gallumphing mass of individuals who let us understand what it means to be fully human, to fully realize what we can best do with the precious moments given to us. to show the myriad ways in which we grasp our lives and create bright beautiful displays of who we are, what we are, what we can be, what we can settle on for our own purpose, even as we help other people realize their own unique vision for their own unique future.
And the best we can come up with for measuring everything great and excellent in human beings is some scores on a standardized reading and math test (and not even good tests, at that).
Reformsters like to talk about raising the bar and really creating high standards for our young people, because, you know, young people, you may have all sorts of dreams and aspirations and talents and hopes and strengths that you want to realize and express but, really, you know-- what you need to be thinking about is your standardized test scores.
Raising the bar, my ass.
What CCSS and its attendant clamoring kudzu of reforms really offers is a tiny, cramped vision of humanity. We should be taking our young people to the edge of the Grand Canyon and saying, "Your life is out there somewhere. Let's go explore." Instead, reformers hold out a suitcase and say, "Okay, get in here. Just curl up and make yourself as small as possible."
Human beings are huge. We contain multitudes. CCSS and its various slices of baloney are devoted to making students small, to measuring them with the tiniest of rulers.
Remember. When they talk about highly effective teachers and excellent schools and proficient students, all they are talking about is the scores on a standardized math and reading test. That's it. It would be a joke if it weren't twisting American public education out of shape. Because if life really is a multiple choice test, it's one with a gazillion answers, and every one of them could be correct. But reformsters want us to bubble in just one. And that is the opposite of excellence.
Local vs. Global
One of the advantages that the reformsters have in the ongoing debate is that their POV is one-size-fits-all large scale national by its very nature, while those of us in the resistance are fighting largely local battles. And each one of those is different. It's a single ocean on one side and a million Dutch boys and girls on the other, each with a finger in a different hole in a different part of the dike.
This plays out in many ways. My home state of Pennsylvania is always a study is divisive politics-- on every issue you find Philly-Pittsburgh-Harrisburg on one side and every other place in the state elsewhere. Where we are not urban, we are exceptionally rural. The district covered by my House Representative is huge-- to drive along either the east-west or north-south axis would take a good three hours.
So while I would love to say that the rural teachers of PA totally have the backs of the teachers in Philly, I'm not sure that's true. Because PA's divisions run through everything on the state level, including PSEA. But here in the northwestern corner of the state, we don't know much about what it's like to be in Philly's setting. We're also kind of prickly about how we tend to be ignored. Retailers, media outlets, just plain people from Pittsburgh either ignore us completely or talk about us as if we are a suburb of the Burgh, as if, of course, we want to be part of the city, even though we are a 90 minute drive away.
There are whole different issues between city and country. In rural areas, homelessness is far less of a problem than a lack of transportation. Racial issues look different. Employment issues look different. And education issues look different.
Community works differently. In small towns, every relationship is several relationships. In other words, your boss is also your sister's neighbor and your nephew's godparent and your co-chair on that church committee and the person you play in town band with. Strong-arm tactics that work well in big cities are overkill with far too much collateral damage in a small town, while small town quiet leveraging of relationships would accomplish nothing in a big city.
Rural voices are often shut out of conversations, and rural voices often contribute to the problem by enjoying our quiet isolation a little too much . On top of that we can throw in the mid-size cities like Erie and Altoona, and you get a very broad range of issues in schools overlaid with a difficult struggle for voice, resources and attention. And that's just one state.
And the reformsters, by the very nature of what they're pushing, can come into the state and treat all of those many and varied communities as identical widgets in a machine. "Does your district face unique challenges? Don't care. Everybody drink this snake oil down. It fixes all problems."
Meanwhile, all the different local communities struggle to pull together. We argue over priorities and perspective (this issue that matters hugely to us should matter to everybody). Identifying the concerns that should unite all of us is an ongoing conversation. Meanwhile, the reformsters have no such stumbling block in their paths.
Still, their strength can easily become their weakness. They are not well tooled for dealing with a hundred different little problems in a hundred different places, and they are not well-equipped to put out a hundred little fires. Fordham can only send its response team so many places.
So I don't have a dream that everyone in the resistance will join hands, sing Kum Bay Yah and unite behind one universally accepted vision or set of tactics. Personally, I have always thought part of the beauty of American public education is that is NOT one monolithic vision, but a big messy conglomeration of visions and goals and strengths and weaknesses reflecting people and places and hopes and dreams. I know that there will always be people who want to neaten it all up and get it organized, and God bless them, their inevitable failure is an interesting thing to watch.
Point is, it's natural and normal and a point of strength that we can't all agree on the same exact priorities or methods. It's natural and normal that we all have to fight our own local battles, but it is powerful when we can share what we know, what we understand, what we see. That kind of power is only unleashed when we listen without dismissing people for seeing different things or being in a different place.
This plays out in many ways. My home state of Pennsylvania is always a study is divisive politics-- on every issue you find Philly-Pittsburgh-Harrisburg on one side and every other place in the state elsewhere. Where we are not urban, we are exceptionally rural. The district covered by my House Representative is huge-- to drive along either the east-west or north-south axis would take a good three hours.
So while I would love to say that the rural teachers of PA totally have the backs of the teachers in Philly, I'm not sure that's true. Because PA's divisions run through everything on the state level, including PSEA. But here in the northwestern corner of the state, we don't know much about what it's like to be in Philly's setting. We're also kind of prickly about how we tend to be ignored. Retailers, media outlets, just plain people from Pittsburgh either ignore us completely or talk about us as if we are a suburb of the Burgh, as if, of course, we want to be part of the city, even though we are a 90 minute drive away.
There are whole different issues between city and country. In rural areas, homelessness is far less of a problem than a lack of transportation. Racial issues look different. Employment issues look different. And education issues look different.
Community works differently. In small towns, every relationship is several relationships. In other words, your boss is also your sister's neighbor and your nephew's godparent and your co-chair on that church committee and the person you play in town band with. Strong-arm tactics that work well in big cities are overkill with far too much collateral damage in a small town, while small town quiet leveraging of relationships would accomplish nothing in a big city.
Rural voices are often shut out of conversations, and rural voices often contribute to the problem by enjoying our quiet isolation a little too much . On top of that we can throw in the mid-size cities like Erie and Altoona, and you get a very broad range of issues in schools overlaid with a difficult struggle for voice, resources and attention. And that's just one state.
And the reformsters, by the very nature of what they're pushing, can come into the state and treat all of those many and varied communities as identical widgets in a machine. "Does your district face unique challenges? Don't care. Everybody drink this snake oil down. It fixes all problems."
Meanwhile, all the different local communities struggle to pull together. We argue over priorities and perspective (this issue that matters hugely to us should matter to everybody). Identifying the concerns that should unite all of us is an ongoing conversation. Meanwhile, the reformsters have no such stumbling block in their paths.
Still, their strength can easily become their weakness. They are not well tooled for dealing with a hundred different little problems in a hundred different places, and they are not well-equipped to put out a hundred little fires. Fordham can only send its response team so many places.
So I don't have a dream that everyone in the resistance will join hands, sing Kum Bay Yah and unite behind one universally accepted vision or set of tactics. Personally, I have always thought part of the beauty of American public education is that is NOT one monolithic vision, but a big messy conglomeration of visions and goals and strengths and weaknesses reflecting people and places and hopes and dreams. I know that there will always be people who want to neaten it all up and get it organized, and God bless them, their inevitable failure is an interesting thing to watch.
Point is, it's natural and normal and a point of strength that we can't all agree on the same exact priorities or methods. It's natural and normal that we all have to fight our own local battles, but it is powerful when we can share what we know, what we understand, what we see. That kind of power is only unleashed when we listen without dismissing people for seeing different things or being in a different place.
The Non-fiction vs. Fiction Issue
Since Common Core first shambled onto the education stage, teachers (particularly language teachers) have sounded the alarm about the infamous 70/30 split between fiction and non-fiction. "We'll have to drop studying Shakespeare to make room for reading instructions for IKEA shelving assembly," goes the complaint.
As a high school English teacher, I'm not very concerned about this requirement of the Core. If it's something that troubles you, I have a suggestion for how to deal with it.
Ignore it.
Seriously. First, the 70/30 split is supposed to represent the student's entire program, so you can legitimately count on every other class in the student's schedule to provide the non-fiction content. Second, this split is part of what I call the unenforced content of the Core.
The 70/30 split is like collaboration-- sure, it's in the CCSS, but if you don't do it, then.... what? Someone from the US/Pearson Dept of Ed will stop by the room to look at you sternly? [Edit-- yeah, I know. In some places, teachers have already lost control of their own teaching and are required to stick to the script. That does raise this issue to a whole new level, and I'm sorry if you are stuck in such a place, because that sucks hugely. I was writing this post for the people who are still arguing about the issue, and I jumped to the assumption that where there is an argument, there are still options.]
I mean, if the 70/30 split were coming from a group of educational experts who had done extensive research and determined that there will be real education benefits for students from a 70/30 split, then I would look at it long and hard and think about ways to incorporate it into my practice. But the 70/30 split, like the rest of the ELA standards came from a bunch of civilians-- most particularly one guy who has fewer educational credentials than my last student teacher and no research to back up his personal choices. The 70/30 split recommendation carries no more weight than the guy who stops me in the grocery store to suggest that I need to have my students read more books about hunting, cause he likes hunting. I'm going to go ahead and use my best professional judgment to select readings (both fiction and non) based on what will best serve the educational needs of my students, thanks.
If your administration is really sold on the 70/30 split, just keep asking why. Other than David Coleman put it in the CCSS because he thinks it's a good idea, what sound educational basis can your admins point to as support for the split?
Of course, you'll likely find yourself back at the Ultimate Justification for all educational choices these days-- we need to get ready for The Test.
And that brings us to the real problem with CCSS reading.
I am not nearly as worried about the emphasis on non-fiction as I am in terrible, short, context-free, boring-as-hell excerpt reading, which is what is actually on the test and consequently what is being fobbed off a "close reading" when in fact it is some sort of twisted hybrid-- Close Reading 2.0.
The continued emphasis on short short selections or excerpts, with a special focus on items that students are unlikely to have previous knowledge of (or interest in), presented by teachers who deliberately don't give any sort of background material, as well as an insistence on staying within the four corners of the text-- all of these add up to soul-crushing experiences designed to kill any love of reading.
And that's not even getting the mandate, most damaging at the elementary level, to force students to read grade-level materials, even if those are also frustration-level materials. It doesn't matter to Pat whether it's fiction or non-fiction if it's all Greek.
Again, none of this is designed on a bedrock of research and expertise. Well, reading or teaching expertise. The expertise on display here is test-design expertise, because what we've done with CCSS is define good reading skills as "those reading related skills that can be measured on a standardized test."
This is like declaring that good runners can run a 50 yard dash in six seconds; distance runners are by definition bad runners. Or by decreeing that the only good pets are scaly ones that fit in a showbox.
So don't expect me to get excited about the whole fiction vs. non-fiction thing. I am far more concerned about the need to, say, do away with reading entire books because we need more time to do our daily one-page-plus-multiple-choice-questions drill for reading test prep, or to just generally teach reading in a manner guaranteed to make students hate it.
As a high school English teacher, I'm not very concerned about this requirement of the Core. If it's something that troubles you, I have a suggestion for how to deal with it.
Ignore it.
Seriously. First, the 70/30 split is supposed to represent the student's entire program, so you can legitimately count on every other class in the student's schedule to provide the non-fiction content. Second, this split is part of what I call the unenforced content of the Core.
The 70/30 split is like collaboration-- sure, it's in the CCSS, but if you don't do it, then.... what? Someone from the US/Pearson Dept of Ed will stop by the room to look at you sternly? [Edit-- yeah, I know. In some places, teachers have already lost control of their own teaching and are required to stick to the script. That does raise this issue to a whole new level, and I'm sorry if you are stuck in such a place, because that sucks hugely. I was writing this post for the people who are still arguing about the issue, and I jumped to the assumption that where there is an argument, there are still options.]
I mean, if the 70/30 split were coming from a group of educational experts who had done extensive research and determined that there will be real education benefits for students from a 70/30 split, then I would look at it long and hard and think about ways to incorporate it into my practice. But the 70/30 split, like the rest of the ELA standards came from a bunch of civilians-- most particularly one guy who has fewer educational credentials than my last student teacher and no research to back up his personal choices. The 70/30 split recommendation carries no more weight than the guy who stops me in the grocery store to suggest that I need to have my students read more books about hunting, cause he likes hunting. I'm going to go ahead and use my best professional judgment to select readings (both fiction and non) based on what will best serve the educational needs of my students, thanks.
If your administration is really sold on the 70/30 split, just keep asking why. Other than David Coleman put it in the CCSS because he thinks it's a good idea, what sound educational basis can your admins point to as support for the split?
Of course, you'll likely find yourself back at the Ultimate Justification for all educational choices these days-- we need to get ready for The Test.
And that brings us to the real problem with CCSS reading.
I am not nearly as worried about the emphasis on non-fiction as I am in terrible, short, context-free, boring-as-hell excerpt reading, which is what is actually on the test and consequently what is being fobbed off a "close reading" when in fact it is some sort of twisted hybrid-- Close Reading 2.0.
The continued emphasis on short short selections or excerpts, with a special focus on items that students are unlikely to have previous knowledge of (or interest in), presented by teachers who deliberately don't give any sort of background material, as well as an insistence on staying within the four corners of the text-- all of these add up to soul-crushing experiences designed to kill any love of reading.
And that's not even getting the mandate, most damaging at the elementary level, to force students to read grade-level materials, even if those are also frustration-level materials. It doesn't matter to Pat whether it's fiction or non-fiction if it's all Greek.
Again, none of this is designed on a bedrock of research and expertise. Well, reading or teaching expertise. The expertise on display here is test-design expertise, because what we've done with CCSS is define good reading skills as "those reading related skills that can be measured on a standardized test."
This is like declaring that good runners can run a 50 yard dash in six seconds; distance runners are by definition bad runners. Or by decreeing that the only good pets are scaly ones that fit in a showbox.
So don't expect me to get excited about the whole fiction vs. non-fiction thing. I am far more concerned about the need to, say, do away with reading entire books because we need more time to do our daily one-page-plus-multiple-choice-questions drill for reading test prep, or to just generally teach reading in a manner guaranteed to make students hate it.
Saturday, August 16, 2014
A Curmudgucation Birthday
I made my first post here one year ago today (this is post #485). Several, in fact. Do us both a favor and don't go read them; it was a month or so before I started to figure out what the hell I was doing. Still working on it.
I was fortunate to find some audience fairly quickly. I joined BATs back when there were around 1600 members, and the responses I garnered there were encouraging. I was fortunate to be welcomed into that group. Anthony Cody was the first A-lister to ask to reprint me. Then Diane Ravitch saw something worthwhile in my work and has connected me with a much larger audience. I have been fortunate to have her backing and support. More recently, Bryan Maygers accepted me into the stable of Huffington Post bloggers, which has also let me reach even more folks. Here on the mother ship, this post has pulled about 5,300 views. On the HuffPo, it's been translated into three other languages and pulled about 450,000 likes. That would be my personal best. Soon, I'll be starting work to reach yet another audience by blogging at Education Week.
I have fans, bizarre as that seems to me, many of whom make up the small army of proofreaders who help me avoid looking too wrong for too long. I'm fast, but not always precise. I appreciate all of them as well, and that they care enough to help me do better.
I would be lying if I said it wasn't personally gratifying to have an audience. The only thing I ever wanted to be as much as I wanted to be a teacher was a writer (what tipped the scale was that I also wanted to be a Person Who Eats).
But I've been writing for a variety of audiences for decades. I've never had the material pouring with the volume it does here, nor felt so fired up when I work. That's not because I'm cranked up with dreams of fame and fortune (which is just as well)-- it's because I'm saying things that I believe are important directly to the people who want or need to hear them. The two most gratifying pieces of feedback I get are "You made me think about this differently" and "You put into words what I wanted to say but had trouble expressing."
I've never met any of the people in person that I have "met" on line. As an English teacher, I find it absolutely gutbustingly awesome that we live in an age where so much can be done just through the written word. I haven't found an audience because of my sparkling charm or a multi-million dollar PR campaign. I have a small gift for stringing words together, and I was fortunate enough to connect with people who connect with it. I never cease to find it unutterably cool that we live in a world in which such things can happen.
I'm proud to have connected with so many people, to have written words that help inform some people's opinions and understanding of their work. I'm also a little flabbergasted; I'm at about 550,000 hits on the blog-- how the heck did that happen.
But I'm not what's important here. What's important is the cause, the resistance, the continuing marathon that is the work of making American public education live up to everything it can be. What's important is to find our way as teachers, as parents, as students, in a world that has somehow twisted itself into an attack on its own best hopes and aspirations.What's important is education and teaching and doing it the best way we know how, and doing it every day better than we did it the day before. That's what's important. The attention that my posts get is not because I'm anybody-- it's because people care deeply, passionately about the issues that I write about.
I'm using the blog birthday to spend some time thinking about where I really want to focus, and what I issues I have failed to highlight effectively and see if I can't do better moving forward. I owe a huge debt to public education; I want to keep trying to pay it back.
I'm also resolved to do a better job of promoting other voices. When I was starting out, I felt awkward about hooking onto other people's stuff-- it felt like trying to grab coattails to draw an audience. But I am increasingly aware of the enormous value in amplifying all the voices of the resistance. There are a lot of good, thoughtful writers, each with his or her own strengths to bring to the table. At this point, I have an audience of my own, and I want to direct them to some of the other great stuff that's out there. If I am showing them people they already know, that's okay, too. Linkage and referrals raise a writer's profile on line, and as we've seen, it is good for public education when its advocates cannot be dismissed as a small splinter cell, but must be seen for what we are-- a large and diverse crowd of many and varied voices. Just as my students are better served if I don't close the door and ignore my colleagues, the cause of public education is better served if I don't just sit in my own corner and post nothing but my own thoughts from my own head. Dialogue, discussion, sharing, sass-- those are the building blocks of good edublogging.
This post, like pretty much everything I post, is about getting my thoughts organized and out of my head, to give me a place I can go read a note to myself to refocus and renew (without getting ridiculous). Every year I try to do everything a little better-- better teacher, better father, better trombone player, better husband, better non-jackass. This year I'll also try to be a better blogger.
I was fortunate to find some audience fairly quickly. I joined BATs back when there were around 1600 members, and the responses I garnered there were encouraging. I was fortunate to be welcomed into that group. Anthony Cody was the first A-lister to ask to reprint me. Then Diane Ravitch saw something worthwhile in my work and has connected me with a much larger audience. I have been fortunate to have her backing and support. More recently, Bryan Maygers accepted me into the stable of Huffington Post bloggers, which has also let me reach even more folks. Here on the mother ship, this post has pulled about 5,300 views. On the HuffPo, it's been translated into three other languages and pulled about 450,000 likes. That would be my personal best. Soon, I'll be starting work to reach yet another audience by blogging at Education Week.
I have fans, bizarre as that seems to me, many of whom make up the small army of proofreaders who help me avoid looking too wrong for too long. I'm fast, but not always precise. I appreciate all of them as well, and that they care enough to help me do better.
I would be lying if I said it wasn't personally gratifying to have an audience. The only thing I ever wanted to be as much as I wanted to be a teacher was a writer (what tipped the scale was that I also wanted to be a Person Who Eats).
But I've been writing for a variety of audiences for decades. I've never had the material pouring with the volume it does here, nor felt so fired up when I work. That's not because I'm cranked up with dreams of fame and fortune (which is just as well)-- it's because I'm saying things that I believe are important directly to the people who want or need to hear them. The two most gratifying pieces of feedback I get are "You made me think about this differently" and "You put into words what I wanted to say but had trouble expressing."
I've never met any of the people in person that I have "met" on line. As an English teacher, I find it absolutely gutbustingly awesome that we live in an age where so much can be done just through the written word. I haven't found an audience because of my sparkling charm or a multi-million dollar PR campaign. I have a small gift for stringing words together, and I was fortunate enough to connect with people who connect with it. I never cease to find it unutterably cool that we live in a world in which such things can happen.
I'm proud to have connected with so many people, to have written words that help inform some people's opinions and understanding of their work. I'm also a little flabbergasted; I'm at about 550,000 hits on the blog-- how the heck did that happen.
But I'm not what's important here. What's important is the cause, the resistance, the continuing marathon that is the work of making American public education live up to everything it can be. What's important is to find our way as teachers, as parents, as students, in a world that has somehow twisted itself into an attack on its own best hopes and aspirations.What's important is education and teaching and doing it the best way we know how, and doing it every day better than we did it the day before. That's what's important. The attention that my posts get is not because I'm anybody-- it's because people care deeply, passionately about the issues that I write about.
I'm using the blog birthday to spend some time thinking about where I really want to focus, and what I issues I have failed to highlight effectively and see if I can't do better moving forward. I owe a huge debt to public education; I want to keep trying to pay it back.
I'm also resolved to do a better job of promoting other voices. When I was starting out, I felt awkward about hooking onto other people's stuff-- it felt like trying to grab coattails to draw an audience. But I am increasingly aware of the enormous value in amplifying all the voices of the resistance. There are a lot of good, thoughtful writers, each with his or her own strengths to bring to the table. At this point, I have an audience of my own, and I want to direct them to some of the other great stuff that's out there. If I am showing them people they already know, that's okay, too. Linkage and referrals raise a writer's profile on line, and as we've seen, it is good for public education when its advocates cannot be dismissed as a small splinter cell, but must be seen for what we are-- a large and diverse crowd of many and varied voices. Just as my students are better served if I don't close the door and ignore my colleagues, the cause of public education is better served if I don't just sit in my own corner and post nothing but my own thoughts from my own head. Dialogue, discussion, sharing, sass-- those are the building blocks of good edublogging.
This post, like pretty much everything I post, is about getting my thoughts organized and out of my head, to give me a place I can go read a note to myself to refocus and renew (without getting ridiculous). Every year I try to do everything a little better-- better teacher, better father, better trombone player, better husband, better non-jackass. This year I'll also try to be a better blogger.
Can We Enter Phase Three?
Reading Paul Thomas always makes me feel smarter (and yet we have also shared some great cyber-conversation about comics). A recent post on his blog is both smart and challenging. In it, he addresses the phases of the current education debates.
Phase I goes back to the accountability fever of the 1980s and takes us right up through NCLB and its steroidified sibling, Race to the Top (and waiver-driven Race to the Top Lite).
Most of those accountability years, I would classify as Phase 1, a period characterized by a political monopoly on both public discourse and policy addressing primarily public K-12 education.
We are now in Phase 2, a time in which (in many ways aided by the rise in social media—Twitter, blogging, Facebook—and the alternative press—AlterNet and Truthout) teachers, professors, and educational scholars have begun to create a resistance to the political, media, and public commitments to recycling false charges of educational failure in order to continue the same failed approaches to education reform again and again.
Thomas argues that while we are still in Phase 2, it's time to start on Phase 3, moving (as he puts it) from adolescence to adulthood. And he proposes some changes in strategy.
First, we need to consider our tone. As we expand our audience, we need adopt a tone that does not undermine our mission (Thomas allows that tone-based attacks from reformsters are still not legit-- I'm foreshortening his arguments considerably).
Believe it or not, I do think about tone when I write. Earlier in my blogging career, I was a lot more passed off, and that clearly copies through. Still, I have generally avoided personal attacks (I kn ow the difference between "Chris is stupid" and "Chris just said a stupid thing" or "Chris is promoting a stupid policy." But my goal has always been to speak plainly, and sometimes that creates a bluntness in tone that some people find off-putting.
There's a real challenge in engaging someone who is being condescending and dismissive, and an even larger challenge when engaging someone who is actually attacking you. This is further complicated when the person sincerely fails to grasp that they are attacking. I think there are many reformsters who really don't understand just how seriously they are attacking public school teachers and are genuinely surprised at some of the pushback they get.
The other problem is the problem of being "uppity." As Thomas (and many others) note, teachers are traditionally good team players. We keep quiet, stay in place, follow orders, and never rock the boat. With that background, even a simple, "Excuse me, sir, but I'd rather not" is perceived, by both listener and speaker, as pretty feisty and uppity.
That said, I've always argued that screaming at people and venting the rage-fueled assumption that all who disagree with us must be either stupid or evil is just plain ineffective. Leading reformsters actually corrected themselves on that score.
Also, when considering tone, context matters. I don't just mean the context of content, but the location of the conversation. The same tactics that may be appropriate in Chicago or New York will do no good at all in my quiet small town of 7,000. And vice versa.
Second, we Ned to stop putting out fires. Thomas says we need to stop simply responding to the Ridiculous Celebrity Comment Du Jour. This is tricky as hell, for a couple of reasons.
One is the audience. One reason I call She Who Will Not Be Named (and refuse to name her) the Kim Kardashian of education is because she is reliable clickbait. I'm under no obligation to write about her, but I know that the crowd will be running off to some other place that did. Getting the audience to ignore someone is a real challenge.
The other is focus, and Thomas is right on point here. The best way attack a person's credibility is to attack their argument. We do not need, and it is not useful, to try to prove that reformsters are terrible people. We need to be talking about their terrible ideas.
They have made this difficult because they rarely present their terrible ideas with evidence or support. Most often, they simply assert linkages that don't exist. We still haven't seen a shred of specific evidence to support, say, the idea that the Core will make a student ready for college, or that the standards are "tougher" or "higher." Evidence and soundness of reformster ideas have never been part of the conversation.
It's a tough stance to counter. When people are hearing about happy puppies and fluffy bunnies and unicorns that poop rainbows, they don't want to be brought down by boring bummer facts.
We will always be at a marketing disadvantage, because ed reform since the dawn of time is always about a Really Cool Thing that will Change Everything and bring Instant Fixes, whereas actual education and schooling is about long hard unglamorous day-by-day work. Guess which is easier to market. But we can't get to where we want to by trying to sell a better brand of snake oil.
I think one answer is to come up with a batch of questions and to keep asking them, again and again and again, just as many times as reformsters repeat unsubstantiated claims. "How do you explain [foundationless baloney], exactly?" Or, "How do you explain [actual fact]?"
The other answer, at least for me, has been to follow the arguments, not the people. It does get to be like playing whack-a-mole, but I want to point out that in many cases we've been successful. For instance, reformsters have stopped floating the claim that teachers wrote the Common Core. It's true that we need to stop simply reacting, but it's also true that by reacting relentlessly, we have made the conversation drift a little closer to reality.
That's our big advantage-- we have actual facts on our side. Reformsters just have to keep making shit up. Time is on our side. But (as we all know from managing our own classrooms) it's far more productive to focus on what we want to see happen and not on what we want to NOT see happen.
Third, we need more faces and voices.
The mainstream media have reduced the resistance to Ravitch in much the same way that the media have reduced climate change to Bill Nye. The resistance is and must be promoted as a rich and varied body of professionals, both unified and driven by the tensions of our field. Race, gender, sexuality, ideology—the rainbow of our resistance must be prominent and we cannot allow it to be reduced, oversimplified, or marginalized.
Amen. Now, to some degree, this is out of our control. Unless you've got a zillion dollars to spend, it's hard to manufacture media attention.
But all of us can help by amplifying all of our voices. Diane Ravitch had a huge platform essentially fall in her lap-- she was the perfect media-ready person to represent a point of view. And once she had a spotlight, she started aiming it at other people. None of us have that kind of platform, but all of us have a platform of some sort. We can use it to pass on what resonates. Tweet links. Share on Facebook. Email. If you feel as if you don't have the words, share someone else's.
As you read and share, look for two sets of people. People who are just like you and who are saying just what you want to say, and people who are different from you from whose work you learned something about another point of view. Both sets are important to developing a rich and varied chorus that both reflects your concerns and connects you to the larger community of people working to strengthen all that is best and valuable in American public education.
I think Thomas has written a piece well worth thinking about. It's possible that he's simply describing what is about to happen naturally and organically, which would suit me-- I'm not a fan of super-organization. But I do believe the time has come to be just a hair more mindful of what we're saying and doing.
Phase I goes back to the accountability fever of the 1980s and takes us right up through NCLB and its steroidified sibling, Race to the Top (and waiver-driven Race to the Top Lite).
Most of those accountability years, I would classify as Phase 1, a period characterized by a political monopoly on both public discourse and policy addressing primarily public K-12 education.
We are now in Phase 2, a time in which (in many ways aided by the rise in social media—Twitter, blogging, Facebook—and the alternative press—AlterNet and Truthout) teachers, professors, and educational scholars have begun to create a resistance to the political, media, and public commitments to recycling false charges of educational failure in order to continue the same failed approaches to education reform again and again.
Thomas argues that while we are still in Phase 2, it's time to start on Phase 3, moving (as he puts it) from adolescence to adulthood. And he proposes some changes in strategy.
First, we need to consider our tone. As we expand our audience, we need adopt a tone that does not undermine our mission (Thomas allows that tone-based attacks from reformsters are still not legit-- I'm foreshortening his arguments considerably).
Believe it or not, I do think about tone when I write. Earlier in my blogging career, I was a lot more passed off, and that clearly copies through. Still, I have generally avoided personal attacks (I kn ow the difference between "Chris is stupid" and "Chris just said a stupid thing" or "Chris is promoting a stupid policy." But my goal has always been to speak plainly, and sometimes that creates a bluntness in tone that some people find off-putting.
There's a real challenge in engaging someone who is being condescending and dismissive, and an even larger challenge when engaging someone who is actually attacking you. This is further complicated when the person sincerely fails to grasp that they are attacking. I think there are many reformsters who really don't understand just how seriously they are attacking public school teachers and are genuinely surprised at some of the pushback they get.
The other problem is the problem of being "uppity." As Thomas (and many others) note, teachers are traditionally good team players. We keep quiet, stay in place, follow orders, and never rock the boat. With that background, even a simple, "Excuse me, sir, but I'd rather not" is perceived, by both listener and speaker, as pretty feisty and uppity.
That said, I've always argued that screaming at people and venting the rage-fueled assumption that all who disagree with us must be either stupid or evil is just plain ineffective. Leading reformsters actually corrected themselves on that score.
Also, when considering tone, context matters. I don't just mean the context of content, but the location of the conversation. The same tactics that may be appropriate in Chicago or New York will do no good at all in my quiet small town of 7,000. And vice versa.
Second, we Ned to stop putting out fires. Thomas says we need to stop simply responding to the Ridiculous Celebrity Comment Du Jour. This is tricky as hell, for a couple of reasons.
One is the audience. One reason I call She Who Will Not Be Named (and refuse to name her) the Kim Kardashian of education is because she is reliable clickbait. I'm under no obligation to write about her, but I know that the crowd will be running off to some other place that did. Getting the audience to ignore someone is a real challenge.
The other is focus, and Thomas is right on point here. The best way attack a person's credibility is to attack their argument. We do not need, and it is not useful, to try to prove that reformsters are terrible people. We need to be talking about their terrible ideas.
They have made this difficult because they rarely present their terrible ideas with evidence or support. Most often, they simply assert linkages that don't exist. We still haven't seen a shred of specific evidence to support, say, the idea that the Core will make a student ready for college, or that the standards are "tougher" or "higher." Evidence and soundness of reformster ideas have never been part of the conversation.
It's a tough stance to counter. When people are hearing about happy puppies and fluffy bunnies and unicorns that poop rainbows, they don't want to be brought down by boring bummer facts.
We will always be at a marketing disadvantage, because ed reform since the dawn of time is always about a Really Cool Thing that will Change Everything and bring Instant Fixes, whereas actual education and schooling is about long hard unglamorous day-by-day work. Guess which is easier to market. But we can't get to where we want to by trying to sell a better brand of snake oil.
I think one answer is to come up with a batch of questions and to keep asking them, again and again and again, just as many times as reformsters repeat unsubstantiated claims. "How do you explain [foundationless baloney], exactly?" Or, "How do you explain [actual fact]?"
The other answer, at least for me, has been to follow the arguments, not the people. It does get to be like playing whack-a-mole, but I want to point out that in many cases we've been successful. For instance, reformsters have stopped floating the claim that teachers wrote the Common Core. It's true that we need to stop simply reacting, but it's also true that by reacting relentlessly, we have made the conversation drift a little closer to reality.
That's our big advantage-- we have actual facts on our side. Reformsters just have to keep making shit up. Time is on our side. But (as we all know from managing our own classrooms) it's far more productive to focus on what we want to see happen and not on what we want to NOT see happen.
Third, we need more faces and voices.
The mainstream media have reduced the resistance to Ravitch in much the same way that the media have reduced climate change to Bill Nye. The resistance is and must be promoted as a rich and varied body of professionals, both unified and driven by the tensions of our field. Race, gender, sexuality, ideology—the rainbow of our resistance must be prominent and we cannot allow it to be reduced, oversimplified, or marginalized.
Amen. Now, to some degree, this is out of our control. Unless you've got a zillion dollars to spend, it's hard to manufacture media attention.
But all of us can help by amplifying all of our voices. Diane Ravitch had a huge platform essentially fall in her lap-- she was the perfect media-ready person to represent a point of view. And once she had a spotlight, she started aiming it at other people. None of us have that kind of platform, but all of us have a platform of some sort. We can use it to pass on what resonates. Tweet links. Share on Facebook. Email. If you feel as if you don't have the words, share someone else's.
As you read and share, look for two sets of people. People who are just like you and who are saying just what you want to say, and people who are different from you from whose work you learned something about another point of view. Both sets are important to developing a rich and varied chorus that both reflects your concerns and connects you to the larger community of people working to strengthen all that is best and valuable in American public education.
I think Thomas has written a piece well worth thinking about. It's possible that he's simply describing what is about to happen naturally and organically, which would suit me-- I'm not a fan of super-organization. But I do believe the time has come to be just a hair more mindful of what we're saying and doing.
Teachers in Thunderdome
One of the dreams of reformsters is a school system in which teacher employment is shaped by neither tenure nor seniority. When the time comes for cutting staff, administrators will just grab their Big Spreadsheet of Teacher Effectiveness Data, look down at the bottom of list, point at the name next to the lowest rating number and declare, "Okay-- that's who's getting laid off."
We've talked about the huge problems with the data generation methods that would go into such a list. But let's talk about the effect that such a system would have on teaching staffs.
The system would turn shrinking school districts into education Thunderdomes (only "two teachers enter, one teacher leaves" will have a slightly different meaning).
Some of the best educational ideas out there are pushing teamwork and collaboration, built on the idea that all of our students belong to all of us teachers. Not my kids in my room, and your kids in your room. Unfortunately, most VAM-based systems don't see it that way. My kids determine my fate, and your kids determine yours.
So do I really want to help you with your kids when that means making my own job less secure?
Look, I think the overwhelming majority of teachers are good people who went into teaching for the right reason, and I think they would have a hard time saying, "No, I won't give you any help in figuring out how to teach that skill to your class." But how does anyone overlook the fact that she has a family to help support, kids to feed and put through college, a mortgage to pay off-- how does anyone look at that and say, "Yes, I am going to actively work to make my employment less secure."
Our current system depends on both official and unofficial mentoring of new teachers. How many pieces of advice, handy lesson tricks, moments of moral and educational support can you bring yourself to share when every bit of help you give to someone else is a bit of hurt for yourself?
Who really, truly imagines that a teacher beaten and carried out of Thunderdome will go home and cheerily announce, "Sorry, kids, but no new clothes and no new vacation for you. But i'm sure you'll be glad to know that I lost my job to someone with better numbers."
How will Thunderdome affect hiring? After all, some districts include classroom teachers in the interview process. Will teachers sit in interviews and think, "Yes, I want to find someone good enough to take my job!" Or will it become a tricky business of finding someone who's good enough not to be a big chunk of dead wood, but not so good that they're a threat? And will administrations figure this out and shut teachers out of the hiring process entirely?
In Thunderdome, teaching assignments will be critical. In a shrinking district, student and class distribution will become a matter of professional life and death. With so much riding on it, what do you suppose the odds are that the process will become twisted, driven by concerns other than what's best for the children? How hugely important will it be to smooch your principal's tuchus? How ugly will it be when certain students are turned into human hot potatoes?
How will Thunderdome affect the collegiality, the collaboration, the success of all students? Will it promote the learning of all students, or will it exacerbate the problem of teachers huddling in their own classrooms, keeping for just twenty-five students the educational assistance that could have helped 100?
Yes, teachers are professionals, and caring people, and usually naturally inclined to help and support each other. But Thunderdome raises the stakes. Helping a teacher become as good as, or better than, you would not just be a blow to your ego or trigger some sort of existential crisis-- it would mean your job. We already have evidence (as if we needed any), via multiple test cheating scandals, that when you pit people's devotion to philosophical purity against their desire to feed their children, purity often loses.
Teacher Thunderdome is a dumb idea that would do huge, irreparable harm to schools and create obstacles to student success. There's an old saying about how, when you're in a pack of people trying to escape a bear, you only have to be faster than the slowest person in the pack. That is not a scenario conducive to teamwork. There may be fields where the road to excellence is a one-lane footpath that must is best traveled alone, but in teaching, excellence always depends on the support and assistance of a larger team. To create a system that cuts that team apart, that makes teachers compete with the people they should be sharing with, is just dumb.
We've talked about the huge problems with the data generation methods that would go into such a list. But let's talk about the effect that such a system would have on teaching staffs.
The system would turn shrinking school districts into education Thunderdomes (only "two teachers enter, one teacher leaves" will have a slightly different meaning).
Some of the best educational ideas out there are pushing teamwork and collaboration, built on the idea that all of our students belong to all of us teachers. Not my kids in my room, and your kids in your room. Unfortunately, most VAM-based systems don't see it that way. My kids determine my fate, and your kids determine yours.
So do I really want to help you with your kids when that means making my own job less secure?
Look, I think the overwhelming majority of teachers are good people who went into teaching for the right reason, and I think they would have a hard time saying, "No, I won't give you any help in figuring out how to teach that skill to your class." But how does anyone overlook the fact that she has a family to help support, kids to feed and put through college, a mortgage to pay off-- how does anyone look at that and say, "Yes, I am going to actively work to make my employment less secure."
Our current system depends on both official and unofficial mentoring of new teachers. How many pieces of advice, handy lesson tricks, moments of moral and educational support can you bring yourself to share when every bit of help you give to someone else is a bit of hurt for yourself?
Who really, truly imagines that a teacher beaten and carried out of Thunderdome will go home and cheerily announce, "Sorry, kids, but no new clothes and no new vacation for you. But i'm sure you'll be glad to know that I lost my job to someone with better numbers."
How will Thunderdome affect hiring? After all, some districts include classroom teachers in the interview process. Will teachers sit in interviews and think, "Yes, I want to find someone good enough to take my job!" Or will it become a tricky business of finding someone who's good enough not to be a big chunk of dead wood, but not so good that they're a threat? And will administrations figure this out and shut teachers out of the hiring process entirely?
In Thunderdome, teaching assignments will be critical. In a shrinking district, student and class distribution will become a matter of professional life and death. With so much riding on it, what do you suppose the odds are that the process will become twisted, driven by concerns other than what's best for the children? How hugely important will it be to smooch your principal's tuchus? How ugly will it be when certain students are turned into human hot potatoes?
How will Thunderdome affect the collegiality, the collaboration, the success of all students? Will it promote the learning of all students, or will it exacerbate the problem of teachers huddling in their own classrooms, keeping for just twenty-five students the educational assistance that could have helped 100?
Yes, teachers are professionals, and caring people, and usually naturally inclined to help and support each other. But Thunderdome raises the stakes. Helping a teacher become as good as, or better than, you would not just be a blow to your ego or trigger some sort of existential crisis-- it would mean your job. We already have evidence (as if we needed any), via multiple test cheating scandals, that when you pit people's devotion to philosophical purity against their desire to feed their children, purity often loses.
Teacher Thunderdome is a dumb idea that would do huge, irreparable harm to schools and create obstacles to student success. There's an old saying about how, when you're in a pack of people trying to escape a bear, you only have to be faster than the slowest person in the pack. That is not a scenario conducive to teamwork. There may be fields where the road to excellence is a one-lane footpath that must is best traveled alone, but in teaching, excellence always depends on the support and assistance of a larger team. To create a system that cuts that team apart, that makes teachers compete with the people they should be sharing with, is just dumb.
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