Watch Public Education Nation Today

On Saturday, starting at noon, there will be a live event in the auditorium of the Brooklyn New School, featuring four panels:

Testing and the Common Core: New York Principal of the Year Carol Burris will lead a discussion  with educators Takeima Bunche-Smith, Rosa Rivera-McCutchen and Alan Aja.

Support Our Schools, Don’t Close Them: Chicago teacher Xian Barrett will moderate a panel featuring education professor Yohuru Williams, Hiram Rivera of the Philadelphia Student Union, and a representative of the Newark Student Union.

Charter Schools: North Carolina writer and activist Jeff Bryant will host a discussion that will include New Orleans parent activist Karran Harper Royal, New York teacher and blogger Gary Rubinstein, and Connecticut writer and activist Wendy Lecker.

Authentic Reform Success Stories: The fourth panel will be led by Network for Public Education executive director Robin Hiller and will include New York teacher and activist Brian Jones, and author of Beyond the Education Wars: Evidence That Collaboration Builds Effective Schools, Greg Anrig.

Diane Ravitch and Jitu Brown, In Conversation: The event will finish off with a conversation between leading community activist Jitu Brown and Diane Ravitch, who will talk about where we are in building a movement for real improvement in our schools.

There are some great names here, and subjects well worth discussing. There is clearly an agenda for solutions, not just complaining about reformster baloney.

Anybody connected to the internet can watch a live stream of the event. And if you would like to help with the costs, you can follow this link to the NPE website and contribute by way of paypal.

I cannot watch today-- it's Homecoming weekend and I'm the student council adviser, so I'm about to spend most of the next 36 hours in the gym. I am counting on all of you to watch, to blog and tweet about what you see and hear, to spread the word that there are non-corporate voices out there, smart, well-informed voices that support public education and see ways to move forward that aren't primarily focused on making somebody rich(er).

Planning vs. Creativity

Indeed, nothing stunts growth more powerfully than our attachment to the familiar, our blind adherence to predetermined plans, and our inability to, as Rilke famously put it, “live the questions.”

This comes from an article written by Maria Popova at her blog Brain Pickings (it'[s a great blog, despite her love for Duckworth's grittology) entitled "The Perils of Plans: Why Creativity Requires Leaping into the Unknown." Popova is looking at Dani Shapiro's memoir Still Writing which includes this great line:

The writing life isn’t just filled with predictable uncertainties but with the awareness that we are always starting over again.

And in reference to her own career

It might seem to you that all this has been the result of a methodically carried-out plan. Or any plan at all. But I planned none of it. Almost everything that has happened in my writing life has been the result of keeping my head down and doing the work. 

Shapiro's view matches what many writers have to say about writing-- that it is neither the result of waiting for some uncontrollable bolt of squishy lightning to strike, nor can it be harnessed by a careful and precise plan.

If you've taught writing, you've worked with young writers on both ends of the problem scale. On one end you find students who want to wait until they're in the mood, until they've had an inspiration, at which point they imagine the genius will just automatically pour out of them. On the other end, you find students who want a list of steps to follow, an exact hoop-by-hoop layout of where to jump in order to land on writing excellence.

The hoop jumpers want to be right. They want to know that there is One Right Way to get to the One Right Destination and they want you to tell them what it is. They want to know that every step they take will be Correct, and so not fraught with risk or uncertainty.

And while Popova and Shapiro are looking at writing, living your life is itself a creative venture. Our students need to learn to deal with the writerly creative uncertainty because they will meet it every day of their lives-- from deciding whether to marry someone to deciding what house to live in to picking a job to deciding what to have for lunch. To really live your life, you have to be willing to take the leap into the unknown.

The secret is not in the plan, but in the preparation. Build your muscles, marshal your strength, develop your focus so that you know the direction you want to go and have the strength and determination to deal with the obstacles and uncertainty. The best way to flub the leap into the unknown, to come up short, is to flinch and pull back at the very moment you should bear down and put all your strength and focus into launching yourself.

Putting faith in the Plan limits your possibilities, and it makes you inflexible. You make your choices based on what you think you're supposed to be able to achieve instead of your true goals. And when things don't go according to plan (as they will), you are stuck because your guide was the plan, not the goal. Planning is the straightjacket of creativity.

Again-- this is not just about writing. This is about living your life.

One of my most fundamental objections to the reformster ideals for education is that they seek to enforce a reality in schools that does not reflect the reality of the world. It is the tyranny of the hoop-jumpers. They seek to have students practice and model an approach to life that is stunted, small, low on possibilities, devoid of true creativity, sad, grey. They believe in planning, not just for themselves, but for everyone. Not even a range and variety of plans, but one plan for everyone. It is not just a bleak view of education. It is a bleak view of life.

They will say, "Oh, but within the standards and tests there is freedom to achieve the goals any way you wish." Yes, and Henry Ford offered the Model T in any color the customer wanted, as long as it was black.

It's good for us as teachers to think about pedagogical method, instructional strategies, best ways to organize content, all that good teachery stuff. But we also need to step back and ask larger questions. I prefer to ask, "Does my classroom model approaches for living a full, rich, creative life with bravery and strength? Are we learning an openness to the uncertainty of that leap?" I can't say I always know exactly how to get there, but that's the leap, and I try to take it anyway.

Is the Paperless Classroom Coming?

In the new Time, Michael Scherer breathlessly announces the imminent arrival of the paperless classroom. Yeah, sure. And soon my students will arrive to class on their hoverboards and get lunch from the food replicators.

The piece opens with an anecdote of grumpy parents pushing back during an orientation session. The teacher, Matthew Gudenius, says that they don't really care about handwriting. A mother quickly replies, "Yeah, we do." But despite the resistance to a paperless, e-book classroom, Scherer is sure that the paperless classroom is just around the corner.

Last year, President Obama announced a federal effort to get a laptop, tablet or smartphone into the hands of every student in every school in the U.S. and to pipe in enough bandwidth to get all 49.8 million American kids online simultaneously by 2017. 

True enough. The federal government could also announce a federal effort to have every citizen driving a Lexus. But since "federal effort" doesn't mean "make money grow on trees," it doesn't really mean a thing. The saga of computing in the LA school district is a cautionary tale about how  every single step in the cyber-conversion process can be botched-- and botched very expensively.

The transition to an e-classroom is hugely expensive, not only because of the initial investment, but because of the repeated upkeep. Promoters like to say that e-textbooks are great because they can be updated every year without the school's spending a cent; what they neglect to say is that the devices on which e-texts are viewed have a dependable life of only a few years. I have textbook sets in my cupboard that are twenty years old and still perfectly usable. Nobody is working on twenty year old computers.

The rapid and expensive obsolescence of computer tech is a huge issue for schools, but it makes schools hugely attractive to tech companies. Where else but in education can a vendor find a single customer who will buy thousands or tens of thousands of units, to be handed over to rough users who are sure to hasten the tech's inevitable demise? We're not just talking millions of dollars-- we're talking millions and millions of dollars every year, year after year after year.

Gudenius started as a computer lab instructor, but he saw computers as a tool, not a subject. Now he estimates that he saves 46,800 sheets of paper a year, "or about four trees." That's laudable, maybe, though if you want to save trees, stop eating fast food hamburgers. The trees that go into paper generally come from managed tree farms; the actual processing is more concerning than the trees themselves. I realize that's a picky side note, but as an English teacher, I long ago tired of the Paper Kills Trees discussion.

There is research that suggests serious pitfalls in education-by-screen, including some that suggests book reading results in greater comprehension. And Scherer does cite the ergonomic concerns-- eyestrain, neck strain, etc. But computers are so cool!

“The problem we have in K-12 is we are not engaging the kids because we are not using the things they use outside the classroom inside the classroom,” says Lenny Schad, who is overseeing the purchase of 65,000 devices for Houston-area high school students. 

Maybe. But the things my students use outside the classroom are smart phones, and I'm not about to suggest that they can effectively read Huck Finn or write a paper on an iPhone screen. For many of my students, a tablet or laptop screen is almost as quaint as a paper book.

My school went one-to-one several years ago. We put a device in every students' hands, and there has been some interesting learning since then.

First has been the technology itself. We went with what seemed like a good choice at the time-- netbooks. At the moment we are at a crossroads because nobody actually manufactures netbooks any more; we've been limping along on new old stock, but it's time to move on. Again-- expensive, inevitable, speedy obsolescence.

The tech is not reliable. I mean, it's pretty reliable, and I argue that it's unreliable the same way a pencil or a pen is unreliable. But students get frustrated really quickly when tech won't do what they want it to. Maybe this is a good life lesson, but after many years of computers in classrooms, most of my colleagues would still say you're a fool to plan a tech dependent lesson without a Plan B in place.

Second, the tech has limits. We have some e-textbooks in use in the school. Mostly the students seem to hate them. I often assign e-copies of works of literature. It's frankly great-- as a teacher of American literature I could almost do away with the textbook entirely. But the first thing that many, if not most, of my students do when they surf on over to the online copy of the reading is print it out so they can use a paper copy. When they've written something they want to keep forever, they print it out.

E-reading has had ample opportunity to win over entire generations of readers; it's not happening. There's a reason that books have evolved and survived over centuries. They are a tested, tried and true technology, reliable and adaptable. I can interact with paper at almost any time in almost any setting. Just as pencil and paper are not the right solution for every situation, neither is a computer screen.

Finally, the new frontier of privacy. We spend a lot of time trying to teach students to be good digital citizens and to be mindful and careful about what data they give away about themselves. Then in many schools we turn around and plug them into platforms and online ecosystems that strip mine their data as effectively as Facebook. Yes, they readily give that stuff away in their online lives, but that doesn't mean schools should be complicit in hooking students up for data-hoovering. We can plug every aspect of students' lives into the internet. But that doesn't mean we should.

Almost two decades ago, yearbook publishers started offering digital books and digital supplements. If you purchased one of those, all you would need today is a computer that runs Windows 95 with a cd-rom drive and some software from a company that no longer exists. If you bought a paper yearbook, however, all you will need are your fingers and eyeballs.

The obstacles to a paperless classroom remain the same-- expense, utility, safety, and longevity. There are clear and definite benefits to computer tech in schools, but achieving the paperless classroom is  not easy, definitely not cheap, and certainly not inevitable.

The Five Percent Rule

I call it the Five Percent Rule, and it goes like this:

Ninety-five percent of everything is unimportant baloney, crap that we humans use to torture ourselves and each other. Neckties. Eye shadow. Funny hats. Hair length. Only five percent of what we deal with is true and important and lasting. Only five percent of what we deal with is really important. Only five percent of what we deal with really, truly matters. It's what Thoreau was saying- simplify your life by getting rid of the ninety-five percent junk.

I'll bet you that many people agree, that many people would also say that folks waste way too much time and concern and effort and worry and energy on stuff that just doesn't matter.

But here's the catch. We can agree that a huge slice of life is wasted on inconsequential stupid stuff, and that only that small sliver, that five percent, really deserves our heart and soul and attention.

But we can't agree on what falls within the five percent.

We all subscribe to "Don't sweat the small stuff." But we can't agree on which stuff is small.

You may think that having a neat and orderly house is essential to a good life, but I think comfort and personality is what really matters. I may think that an unexamined life is not worth living, while you feel all that navel gazing is a waste of time. You may think ready access to fresh, compelling music is an unnecessary luxury, while I believe that life requires it.

Oh, there are some things we all mostly subscribe to, like "Nobody ever lay on his death bed wishing he had spent more time at the office." But so many of our fights with other humans are about what constitutes that essential, true five percent. (And of course, some people will argue that the five percent is really twenty or thirty or fifty. The Five Percent Rule also applies to the Five Percent Rule.)

Sometimes we make accommodations by association. There are things I have never really believed are part of that five percent, but my wife is part of my five percent, so what she values, I value, because I value her.

Disagreements about the five percent don't have to be a big deal. Particularly if we value other people and hold them in our five percent, it's not that hard to accept that we all have our own five percent's, and that doesn't make people wrong necessarily-- just different. Though, of course, if your five percent includes a moral absolutism that you hold more important than other people...

The problem comes when we start trying to enforce our five percent on everyone. I think this value is real an true, so you will value it also or else.

Educational reformsterism, the GERM, the new status quo-- it's all about enforcing and inflicting one particular idea about the five percent.

Traditional schools in the post-war period allowed for a certain looseness, a certain freedom for students to pursue whatever five percent they felt connected to. If they clashed with one teacher who held a conflicting view of the five percent, they might also find a teacher who valued a similar sliver.; They were free to sues out that deepest of adolescent mysteries-- what do I really value? What falls within my five percent?

What Common Core based, high-stakes test driven, data-hovering, no excuses, college and career ready schooling does is tell students (much as schools did 100 years ago) that the only correct view of the five percent is the one dictated by the People In Charge. There is no need for a young person to search or probe or question. The five percent is already there, on the test, in the standards, in the insistence that education is only job training, and that only scores and dollars are the measure of a person's life. Listen to what reformsters like David Coleman say-- it's not so much about education as it's about what they believe constitutes the five percent. Coleman's whole educational philosophy has been about saying, "We are spending school time on things like feelings and literature that are not important in life, are not part of the five percent."

My dispute is really two-fold. First, I disagree with their view of the five percent. I think it's stunted, sad, and wrong. But second, even if the reformsters embraced most of the values that I do, I would still object to enforcing them as the only values pushed by public education. One size does not fit all-- not even if it's the size that fits me.

It is a hard thing to learn in life, that letting go of the ninety-five percent, that learning to stop bothering with the sweaty small stuff. But it's essential to living a full and focused life in which one does not waste time on things one does not care about. Education must leave people free to figure out their five percent, not force them to adopt somebody else's.

Iowa Teacher of Year Offers Dopey Common Core Quote

“If you go to any college basketball game anywhere in the nation, the court is going to be the same width, the same length and the hoop is going to be same height – and that’s all the Iowa Core outlines for us."

2014 Iowa State Teacher of the Year Jane Schmidt in an interview in the Daily Nonpariel (Stewart). (And picked up by me from the US Dept of Ed "Teachers Edition" newsletter.)

Let's just count the ways in which this metaphor fails.

If I go to any college basketball game, I am stuck watching basketball. I cannot watch football or curling or gymnastics or a performance of a Beethoven Symphony or an art exhibit. But basketball isn't the only game in town. Does Schmidt think only basketball should be standardized, or does she think every public sports and performance venue in the nation should be built to the standardized measurements of a basketball court?

If I go to any college basketball game, I will see a group of carefully screened and selected players. I will not see people who are lousy at basketball. That standardized court does not fit all possible players-- the players are screened to find the small, select group of people who can play well on that court.

Schmidt also needs to declare whether we're watching men or women's ball, because the standards actually are not the same. And if we traced the feeder programs for that team, we would not eventually trace our way back to five year olds playing basketball on that college-ball-standardized court. Even if we ignore that one sport does not fit all athletes, surely we can't ignore that one size court does not fit every person of every age to play that sport.

If I go to any college basketball game, I will see a standardized court built to measurements that are the carefully considered judgment of people who knew and worked in the game for years and years, testing and considering the best dimensions based on expert knowledge. I am not looking at dimensions selected by a bunch of rich amateurs who walked in one day and said, "We've decided what size court you guys should play on."

I went back to the original article to see if it provided a better context for this quote. All I found was this:

We all across Iowa are playing on the same court with the same dimensions, but it’s how you put the team out there and how you coach it that is the local control.

It didn't help. Look-- sports metaphors make terrible ways to describe public education. Sports have winners and losers and people who are cut from the team and people whose talents are in other sports entirely, or even (gasp) no sports at all. 

I am sure that you don't get to be Iowa State Teacher of the Year by being bad at your job or a terrible person. Elsewhere in the article, Schmidt notes that she feels the Common Core and Iowa State Standards (which are as different as night and later that same night) are just misunderstood. If she wants them to be better or more favorably understood, she's going to need a better metaphor.

Outsourcing, Teaching, and Not Understanding the Free Market

The destruction of teaching as a US profession continues to move forward.

Takepart yesterday reported on the increasing use of teachers from the Philippines to fill empty spots in the US. The article focuses on this move as a response to teacher shortages in Arizona, but it alludes to teacher shortages around the country.

This is a tricky subject. On the one hand, teacher shortages are a fairly predictable outcome of the continued assault on the profession. By stripping teachers of autonomy, dropping the pay level, reducing teaching to clerical script-reading work, removing all job security, gutting the parts of teaching that traditionally attract people, and denigrating the profession on a regular basis, the Folks In Charge have assured that teaching today is far less attractive as a profession than it has ever been. For example, given the current conditions there, what person in her right mind would pursue teaching as a lifelong career in North Carolina?

On the other hand, teacher "shortages" are being used as an excuse for any number of misbehaviors. The article mentions a group of Filipino teachers recruited to teach in Baton Rouge, and if gulf coast Louisiana, where 7500 teachers were wrongfully fired from the New Orleans school district-- if that part of the country has a teacher shortage, I'll eat my hat.

The importing of Filipino teachers is already revealing itself to be borderline human trafficking. Those Baton Rouge teachers won a $4.5 million suit against the "recruiters" who charged them $7K for their "applications" and demanded a cut of their wages. Turns out these kinds of shenanigans are not that uncommon.

Nor is the article very forthcoming on the wage issue. The income that the Filipinos make is described as ten times what they could make back home, but it doesn't address whether they are paid the same that a home-grown teacher would have made. Are they being hired at US bargain prices? It's hard not to suspect as much.

In US labor issues, management often develops a sudden lack of understanding of how the free market works. So let me refresh their sad memories.

The free market sets prices by a very simple mechanism. If you want to buy gold for a penny a pound, you offer that amount. If nobody will sell you gold at that price, you have to offer more. You have to keep offering more until somebody will sell.

It is no different for labor. If you want to pay a dollar a day to hire someone for a job, and nobody will take the job, you have to offer more, and keep offering more until someone says, "Yes."

If you have a labor "shortage," then unless you are on a desert island with just two other people, you don't really have a labor shortage at all. What you have is a Willing To Meet the Minimum Conditions Under Which People Will Work For You shortage. Even minimum wage employers, who in lean times will advertise that they're hiring for more than minimum wage, get that.

In a very real sense, there is no teacher shortage in this country at all. What there is is an unwillingness to make teaching an appealing profession that people will actively pursue and stay with for a lifetime. Depending on your location,it may be about money, or autonomy, or job security, or basic teaching conditions (if you're in some place like North Carolina, sorry, but it's all of the above). Another question the article doesn't ask is this-- why isn't Arizons headhunting in other states? Even Virginia (not exactly a teachers' paradise) recognized that North Carolina teachers were ripe for poaching. Why would you recruit teachers from the Philipines, unless you were specifically looking to recruit people who would work for less than the professionals here on the mainland?

Of course, if no one will sell you gold for a penny a pound, another alternative is to find somebody who will sell you really shiny metal that's sort of gold colored. And if your business model is actually about selling fake gold at huge profit to suckers who mistake it for the real thing, this arrangement is perfect. Since many of our reformsters don't really want lifetime career teachers anyway (too expensive, too uppity), refusing to meet the conditions for employment is a great way to shut out the "overqualified" labor they don't want.

That this brings human trafficking into the world of education is no surprise. Much of modern school reform is based on a disregard for the humanity of students and teachers, and one huge thrust of reform has been to define teaching down from a skilled profession to unskilled labor. Trying to profit from trafficking in that labor just seems like a logical extension of the ethics already in play. It's appalling and inexcusable, but it's not unexpected.

Schools and Social Capital

Andy Smarick has continued his series of meditations on how modern education reform and classic conservatism have fallen out of alignment. It's a thoughtful series and worth exploring, but I found his latest particularly striking.

In "Ed reform's blind spot: Catholic schools and social capital" Smarick considers once more the question of what conservatives should want to preserve, and he focuses particularly on social capital.

Social capital describes the “benefits that flow from the trust, reciprocity, information, and cooperation associated with social networks.” When people are connected, they (and even those outside the network) gain, thanks to sharing, interdependence, joint learning, collective action, solidarity, and more.

In case you're not a link-follower, I'll note that the first link leads to Bowling Alone, one of the more indispensable examinations of social connections in our world. Kudos for that reference.

Smarick uses the concept of social capital mostly to talk about Catholic schools, and how they exert a positive influence on neighborhoods stricken by poverty. That reminds me of John Hopkins' longitudinal study in Baltimore; the headline on that study was that family and money are destiny, but it also suggests that neighborhood (not entirely disconnected form the other two) is destiny as well.

But it also resonates for me in the context of my own corner of the world. In fact, I think that in small town and rural areas like mine, the social capital aspect of the schools may be the aspect that folks value most.

I live in an area where High School of Origin is still considered important information about grown adults. It's an area where school sports are a Big Deal, a source of identity and community pride. I live in a county where four separate school districts serve a shrinking student population. My own district and the closest neighbor system now serve fewer students together than my own district held by itself just twenty years ago. We now share sports teams, marching bands, and school play programs. But nobody thinks a merger is going to happen any time soon, and I could explain that by saying that the residents, particularly in the smaller district, do not want to sacrifice the generations of social capital they have invested in their schools.

Districts also find, over and over, that a simple appeal to economic reality, however harsh, rarely moves residents and taxpayers to shut down a school. My district, like many others, has had to essentially confront the question: "How much is this social capital worth to you in cold, hard tax dollars?" The answer repeatedly turns out to be, "A great deal."

Smarick is correct to note that many reformsters have completely disregarded social capital invested in local schools, as well as the real world benefits that come from it. Reformsters and privatizers might do well to consider the issue of how little social capital (which takes considerable time to gather) is invested in shiny new charters, particularly those charters which are not tied to any particular neighborhood.

I've noted before that I find it strange for conservatives to chime in with the idea that students should not be "trapped" by their zip codes or neighborhoods. There is a strength and value and wealth of social capital that comes from having a school rooted in a particular place. It should not be lightly discarded. Heritage, history, community, connection-- these sorts of things have value. "Social capital" and the research that measures its effect just put a scientific face on a human value that many people already recognized.

Social capital doesn't just have implications for Cathoilic schools, but for public schools. It has implications for staffing as well-- longevity matters, and builds more capital.

Smarick wraps up with a striking and apt image:

Those who cleared old, messy “swamps” to make room for modern development severely damaged ecosystems. Those who cleared old, eyesore “slums” to make room for shiny, new public housing high-rises severely damaged communities. 

This is education reform as nature conservation, focusing not on what they want to plow under, but on what should be preserved and saved. I think plenty of folks understand that urge to conserve instinctively, and I think social capital represents a huge investment that people have been loathe to sacrifice just for a few untested and allegedly magic beans. Reformsters often come across as the guys with the big bulldozers who want to pave the swamp, get rid of the noisy birds, kill off the annoying animals, and replace the plants with longlasting perfect plastic flowers. Reformsters seem to think of themselves as men of vision, but there is a whole world of value that they seem to be blind to.