Every Teacher Should Be Bad at Something

Like most teachers, I've worked at a variety of side jobs, from radio dj to musician to newspaper columnist. But I may have learned the most from my time at a catalog order call center.

This was not one of those cold call phone banks, but a call center where customers called us to place their orders. Our job was to get the ordered placed as quickly and pleasantly as possible, then provide them with a few opportunities for further purchases at the end of the call. Our job was to try to get them to pick up another item or two, and then "while their order was processing" (it was all on computer-- we were already looking right at it) try to sell them either a shop-with-us club membership kind of thing, or a kind of medical supplemental insurance. I worked at the job a full summer and through many months part-time thereafter.

I was not good at this job. I was bad at this job. I was punctual and never missed a shift, which they liked, but I was a terrible salesman.

Now, I'm not a master of any of the trades I've messed with. I'm an okay musician, a passable writer, a fair-to-middlin' radio guy-- the list of things that I can do well enough goes on and on (nor am I by any stretch of the imagination the best teacher in my building). But I had never done a job before at which I was just plain not good.

It wasn't long before I noticed how Being Bad was affecting me.

I came to dread being there, walking through the door, driving the car to work. While there, I wanted to be somewhere else. There can be big down time between calls; rather than just sit and soak in the place, I would throw myself into reading. Any distraction-- a chatty caller, an entertaining co-worker-- was consuming. I would negotiate deals between myself, my bladder and the clock (forty-five more minutes and I will go pee).

Part of my brain just wanted to somehow discount the whole experience, to come up with ways to dismiss what I was doing so that my failure was somehow proof that I was smarter or better or cooler or just generally above this. If I could treat it as a ridiculous joke of a job, the fact that I wasn't any good at it wouldn't matter. If I could find flaws in the people who were long-time successful employees, then I wouldn't have to feel bad about myself. A part of my brain dropped whatever it usually did and devoted itself full time to creating excuses, both macro and micro, and another portion started working full time on odd routines just to give me back some sense of control over y situation. A part of my brain was doing anything it could to avoid reaching an unwelcome conclusion about myself based on my apparent inability to succeed at a seemingly simple task. A part of my brain worked on telling me reasons it just didn't matter that I wasn't good at this-- after all, the real part of my real life was outside the company's four walls. I knew I was a perfectly capable, intelligent human being with a useful array of talents-- but none of them were doing me any good and it was hard to not frame my mismatch for the job as a deficit on my part.

After a while, I became used to failing. When the screen popped up that held my script for selling the club membership, I would flinch and just try to get through to the moment when the customer would reject my offer and we could move on. The more I failed, the more it was impossible to imagine anything but failure, and the more I envisioned failure, the more I wanted to avoid entering that wrestling match with the job that I just knew I would lose.

My employers were great. I was gently coached, pleasantly directed, and given encouragement. It did not help.

There is just a spiritually corrosive quality to having to go back, day after day after day, and throw yourself into something that you aren't very good at. Yes, I'm sure I could have grabbed my bootstraps or sucked up my testicular fortitude or put my head down and driven through--and I knew that, and the fact that I couldn't do any of that just became one more badge of failure in the job.

However, the whole experience did have one useful aspect, because I realized right off the bat who also dealt regularly with feelings like mine.

My students.

This is why I now say that all teachers should not only get a job outside of school, but also have the experience of being bad at something.

My lower functioning students have to get up every day and go to a place where all day long, they are required to do things that they are bad at. They have to carry the feelings that go with that, the steady toxic buildup that goes with constantly wrestling with what they can't do, the endless drip-drip-drip of that inadequacy-based acid on the soul.

It's up to us to remind them that they are good at things. It's up to us to make a commitment to get them to a place of success. It's up to us NOT to hammer home what they already know-- that there are tasks they aren't very good at completing.

I don't know how much longer the company would have tolerated my low bonus sale numbers, but my lack of scheduling availability was enough to end my phone career. That's okay. The extra money was nice, and I have no doubt that being a bad telemarketer made me a better teacher. And I have some great stories (you have not lived until you have helped a little old lady order a personal intimate massage device by phone), but I will save those for another day.

[More Update] Ohio Gunning for Specialists

My first teaching job was in Ohio (Lorain High School); I have some fondness for our nearby neighbors. So it has been alarming to watch Ohio transform fairly rapidly into a state that is openly hostile to public education and public school teachers.

This morning comes word that the Ohio State Board of Education will vote this Tuesday [ per this article on cleveland.com ], the vote will come in December] today on some revision to the school code. The most significant revision reportedly under consideration is one that would end state requirements for elementary specialists. [I've written a reaction to the new article over here]

Currently, school code states that for every thousand elementary students, schools must have in place five of the following eight specialists: art, music, counselor, school nurse, librarian/media specialist, visiting teacher, social worker, or phys ed.

The revision would eliminate the section that includes that language. What would be left is this definition of staff:

Educational service personnel are credentialed staff with the knowledge, skills and expertise to support the educational, instructional, health, mental health, and college/career readiness needs of students.

The appeal for districts is obvious. Let's have one music teacher for 10,000 students. Let's have no music teacher at all. Great. Let me mention that this article also came across my screen this morning: "Youngstown kids second poorest in nation" Do we really need to argue that the poorest, most vulnerable students are the ones who most need these sorts of services and enrichment? Is there somebody in Ohio prepared, seriously, to argue that nurses and music and art and phys ed are unnecessary luxuries, and kids should just pack up their grit and do without?

I would love to tell you more about this, like what the justification for the move might actually be (other than giving districts more leeway to slash personnel), but the whole business appears to be occurring with a double helping of speed and stealth. There's a slide presentation about the move available here and that comes with contact information. The issue is burning up twitter under the hashtag #ohio5of8.

So take some time to fire off emails, hit the twitter, do what you can to, at least, make some noise so that folks in Ohio see what's happening, because then maybe they'll make some noise and maybe the Ohio Board will think twice before making this stupid move.

Who does this? Who jumps up and says, "You know what our students need? Less! Our students need less! Let's take a stand and do what we can to make it easier to give them less!" Who the hell does that? Apparently the Ohio State Board of Education does that. Tell them it's not okay.

[Update:

I heard this evening from Greg at Plunderbund, an Ohio-focused site. Greg had a couple of observations to make that are perhaps good news for a portion of this issue, but still troubling for others. His reading of the code is that the arts and phys ed are not in danger, but the same may not be true for the other support services

If you look on page 108 of the Board Book, Volume 5 (ftp://ftp.ode.state.oh.us/ODEMediaWeb/State_Board_Board_Books/November_2014/Board%20Book%20Vol%205%20Nov%202014.pdf), you'll see that it still requires that all curriculum required by Ohio Revised Code shall still be provided by school districts.

As such, if you then look at ORC 3313.60 (http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/3313.60), you'll see that physical education and the arts are explicitly required.

In addition, earlier in the changes to OAC (page 99 of the Board Book), it does clearly define all of the "Educational Service Personnel".

Now, something to look into is the issue of nurses, counselors, social workers and the possible impact of these changes on those positions.  I haven't had time to research the other requirements for those roles in our schools.  Focusing research on these jobs might be more important than looking at the arts & phys ed. which are not going anywhere.

[More update: Per the cleveland.com article, the board's vice-chairman says that the board is not eliminating the positions. They're just saying that local schools don't have to have them.]

[Update: Here's a handy guide to names, regions, and emails for board members

Testing for Social Justice

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

The CCSSO-CGCS announcement heralding High Stakes Tests 2.0 (More Better Less Testing) included plenty of Not New Things. Cerberus, the three-headed reformsters spokesperson, delivered a backhanded acknowledgment that the glut of testing that is clogging our nation's schools has a serious PR problem. At the same time, they held tightly to the notion that high-stakes standardized tests are actually a fine and dandy foundation for every major decision made in the education world. So really, just a variation on that classic top 40 reformster hit, "It's Just the Implementation."

So the chiefs announced that testing needed some tweakage, but was still super-duper essential to education. Arne Duncan chimed in to say "Me, too!" and also "Wouldn't you all like to share responsibility for the policies that I waivered into sort-of-law?" Nothing new to see here.

Except for this.

In the midst of this golden oldie, there was a new note struck. It was a subtle note, a quiet note, a note that didn't even make it into some of the initial coverage. I found this in the Cleveland Plain Dealer's coverage:

"For far too long, too many kids were left out of the opportunity to have access to a high quality education," Minnich said. "These assessments shine a light on that situation."

John White, state superintendent of Louisiana, took that argument further, calling state testing "an absolutely essential element of assuring the civil rights of children in America."

White said broad testing is the only way to know which students are learning and which are not. Testing, he said, is the only way to know the truth of the "serious injustice" to low-income, minority or handicapped children that do not received a good education.

We can find this talking point shaded a few different ways. Here's Minnesota 2014 Teacher of the Year Tom Rademacher on the MinnCAN test cheerleading site: "However, the populations that most need more from our schools are often invisible or dismissible in the rooms of decision makers. Without the data we get, it would be too easy to keep ignoring the voices that demand better than the status quo. With better tests and better testing, we can continue to identify where we are struggling and where we are being successful."

And here's reformy cheerleader Chris Stewart, on the reformster rapid response PR site Education Post: "As a black parent, and a black community member who observes history and demands liberation, I need objective data about how my government and my people are doing to address the old struggle for racial justice and social parity. We have learned by experience what double standards can do to create social strife. We know that we have gaps in employment, wealth, law and health. We should be clear about the cause of those gaps. They are born out of the gaps in educational attainment. And, how do we know these gaps exist? We know because we have data that comes from audits, assessments and, yes, testing."

So we have a new addition to the list of Reasons We Must Have High Stakes Standardized Tests: because otherwise, we would never know that there are pockets of poverty and low achievement in this country's schools.


Ouroboros Rears His Head

If this argument seems a little wonky, that's because we've now come full circle.

When we were sold the Common Core Standards, part of the argument was that we needed to have high standards for the places of low achievement. We would fight the soft racism of low expectations. We knew where these places were, and by raising the bar for students trapped in zip codes filled with poverty and crumbling schools, we would create a world where every single person went to college and made big bucks.

The point is-- we knew where these places were. At what point did we become in danger of losing them? "Hey, these particular schools are terrible," was how we started down this reformy road. How can it be that we have to travel further down the road to find that spot again?

But there are bigger reasons that recasting high stakes standardized tests as instrunments of social justice is bogus.

Are We Still Not Asking Parents?

It's funny that we're so concerned about finding these schools that are failing these children, these pockets where it's such a struggle, because I will bet you dollars to dingleberries that in every afflicted school district, there has been a long-running river of parental information. I will bet you there have been parents calling, writing, complaining, begging, pleading for school leaders to Do Something about their childrens' school. And yet, somehow, their voices don't register (unless those voices fit the reformsters agenda). From Philly to Newark to Detroit, you can still find parents expressing loud and clear what they want and need from their schools.

And yet reformsters sit hunched over computers and spreadsheets saying, "Sorry, I won't know what your district needs until I read the test data."

If social justice is your aim, here is step one—go and listen to the people who are crying for it. Do not act as if you don't need to talk to them, as if you just need to look at the test results.

And after we find these pockets of need ... ?

We must have these tests so that the "invisible" students can be found. Let's pause a moment to register that our stated objective is to find the students who are failing the test and trumpet their failure to the world. Congratulations, small children—we will make your school famous for sucking.
So we've found them, and exposed them. Now we will ... what?

I'd like to believe that the answer is, "Get them the resources and funding and support that they need." But we already know where the underfunded under-resourced schools are, and we have been mighty slow to send those resources. I suspect the actual answer is, "We will dispatch some charter entrepreneurs to their neighborhood."

Are you pitching standardized tests as a form of needs assessment, or is it market research? If the test is a fire alarm, is it wired to a fire station or a contractor's office?

Let's Reverse Engineer

What would happen if we started with the problem we want to solve, instead of the solution we want to rationalize? Imagine we put a group of people—committed, interested, involved, invested people—in a room, and we said to them, "We are afraid that because of some factors of social injustice, there are children out there who are not getting the education they need and deserve. We need a plan to address that concern."

Do we imagine that the first, best plan that anyone would suggest would be—"Let's give every child in the country a high stakes standardized test!"

I mean, was it some sort of oversight that not one of the civil rights leaders of the sixties said, "What our children need are high stake standardized tests!"

We will put the resources of a nation at your disposal to root out and address social injustice. Will your best idea be a high stakes standardized test?

Let's Measure What We Need to Measure

Chris Stewart says we can't solve the achievement gap by erasing the evidence. But the achievement gap is a concept that is just shorthand for an education and opportunity gap, which we pretend to measure with high stakes standardized tests. The standardized tests don't measure the quality of a student's education or the quality of a school. Standardized tests just measure the student's ability to take a standardized test. And we already know that correlates pretty directly with poverty level.
So while in thery "achievement gap" may be intended to encompass a whole host of social ills, the actual achievement gap is simply the test score gap between students of different backgrounds. (It is in itself a nifty rhetorical construct. An "opportunity" gap would imply the cause was those who didn't provide an opportunity, but an "achievement" gap throws the blame back on those who have failed to achieve.)

Look. Let's notice that rich, successful people wear nicer shoes than poor, unsuccessful people. So we'll call it the Shoe Gap. We'll then try to wipe out the Shoe Gap with a National Shoe Intervention Program, and soon we'll put a pair of nice shoes on every person's feet. Do we have any reason to believe that everyone will then be rich and successful? (Hint: No)

We have poverty gaps, opportunity gaps, justice gaps, support gaps—many real gaps. The achievement gap is just a gap in the ability to score well on standardized tests.

Who Opposes Social Justice?

This rhetorical buttressing of high stakes testing is supposed to make people like me easily dismissable. Someone should be able to swoop into the comments and ask why, exactly, I'm opposed to social justice. Just so we're absoutely clear, I am not.

Too many people in our country are denied resources, quality education, decent jobs, non-crumbling schools and neighborhoods, and the right to live their lives without harrassment and brutality (just to list a few social injustices). This is wrong. We should end it.

But it is positively, bizarrely Kafkaesque to declare we can fix social injustice by giving all children standardized tests so that we can begin the process of raising those test scores. This is worse than deck chair shuffling, more callous than fiddling during the fire time.

Rademacher's quote hints at one possible non-baloney use of the test results—to create political pressure on the politicians and bureaucrats who have failed to act. But I doubt that the damage inflicted by a punishment-based testing regimen on young students is worth the possible political leverage.

If you do not know, right now, where at least a few centers of social injustice are in this country, you're an idiot. If you need standardized test results to find those places, I do not trust you to do anything useful once you find them.

CCSS & Charters: The Love Story Ends

The Ed Reform movement has always been a marriage of different groups whose interests and goals sometimes aligned, and sometimes did not. The Systems Guys, the Data Overlords, the Common Core Corporate Hustlers, the Charter Privateers, the Social Engineers-- they agree on some things (we need to replace variable costly teachers with low-cost uniform widgets), but there are cracks in the alliance, and one seems to be turning into a fissure.

The Common Core Hustlers are being dumped by the Charter Privateers. It's not an obvious break-up-- the privateers haven't texted the Core backers to say, "Hey, we need to talk." It's the slow, soft drop. The unreturned phone calls. The unwillingness to even say the name. Not even making eye contact when they show up at the same party. It's awkward. It's painful.

It wasn't always like this. Charters and the Core were a match made in heaven. To spur financing and enrollment, the Charter forces needed a way to "prove" that public schools suck, and that meant finding a yardstick with which public schools could be measured and found failing. That meant some sort of standardized test, and that meant something to test them on. So, Common Core. The Core and the Tests (from which it could not, must not, be separated) would be the smoking gun, the proof that public schools were failing and that only privatizing schools would save Our Nation's Youth.

The corporate folks liked it because it was another opportunity for market growth. The fake liberals liked it because it could be packaged as a way to bring equity to the poor. The fake conservatives liked it because it could be packaged as a way to use market forces to get those slacker poor folks into line.The Core and Charter really got each other. They wanted all the same things.

But soon, the love affair between charters and the Core started to show strain. The Core would show up late at night, smelling like Big Government. And while everybody's friends liked the Core when it first started coming around, as they got to know it, they started whispering behind its back that it was kind of an asshole. Pretty soon, old friends like Bobby Jindal were calling the Core out in public. And when election season came, they weren't invited to the same parties together any more. Jeb Bush had been the Core's oldest and best friend, and even he had a huge party where Charters were held up for praise and applause and the Core wasn't even mentioned.

There was no longer any denying it. When Charter walked into the cafeteria, instead of sitting down with the Core and telling friends, "You should come sit with the Core. It's cool" instead Charter would sit on the other side of the room and say, "You don't want to sit at that table with that thing."

Once the Core had been a marketing point. Public schools were bad news because they couldn't do Common Core well enough. Now public schools are bad news because they are trying to do Common Core well enough. We used to market charters as a way to run toward the Core; now we market them as a way to run away from it.

None of the reformsters who now disown Common Core are dropping any other part of the reformster agenda, especially not privatization.

And so in Connecticut, we have Dannel Malloy who started running away from the Core way back in April, follows up re-election by jumping right back on the charter train. Next stop-- Fully Privatized School Systemville. Andrew Cuomo's stated position on the public school system and the teachers who work there can now be summarized as "Burn them. Burn them all with fire." But he's expressed a desire to toss Common Core on there as well. From Memphis to Cleveland to Minneapolis, it's full speed ahead on privatizing school systems, but Common Core has vanished from the vocabulary, becoming the Chuck Cunningham of the reform movement.

In any divorce, it's a challenge to see who gets custody of which friends. This has proven awkward for fake liberals, who thought they had latched onto a pan-partisan initiative and now find themselves alone at Common Core parties. This is partly their own fault for trying to take credit for CCSS; now the fake conservatives have let them have it.It is only going to get worse. Ted Cruz is an opportunistic putz, but not since Joe McCarthy told the Wheeling Republican Women's Club that he had there in his pocket a paper with a list of prominent state department commies has a politician displayed such a keen sense of the direction of the wind. His intent to "repeal" Common Core is a joke, but it is also writing on the wall. The Core is no longer a bipartisan drive for high standards, but one of those Big Gummint programs.

Meanwhile, in the more rational corner of the GOP, newly minted Senator Lamar Alexander is ready to tackle the long-overdue reauthorization of ESEA (No Child Left Behind). That would be the simplest, most direct pin with which to pop the Race to the Top bubble, and while states can go ahead with charter privatization whether there's RttT or not, it's the Obama administrations waiver-based extortion that has propped up CCSS all along. In the meantime, when even Arne Duncan has shown the sense to let go at least the name of Common Core, national teachers unions still grapple that radioactive mess to heart with hoops of steel.

For people in the Resistance, working to preserve and protect the promise of public education in this country, what this divorce means is that if you like battle metaphors, this battle will henceforth be fought on multiple fronts. Cry out "Common Core is destroying public education" and you may find a charter privateer standing next to you hollering, "Yeah, it sure is!!" The Core and Charters may nod politely to each other when they pass on the street, but the love is gone.

Who Puts the "Merit" in "Meritocracy"?

We love to think of the US-- every last red, white and blue nook and cranny of it-- as a meritocracy. Want to get ahead in life? Just be excellent. Show merit. Or just, you know, possess merit. Or develop merit. Or be filled with merit? Soaked in merit? Steeped in merit? You can start to see our problem already-- we don't seem to know much about the nature of merit. Are you just born with it? Do you develop it, and if so, how? Is it a quality that one simply possesses? I mean, we say that an idea "has" merit, not that it grows it or acquires it. Is that also true for humans? Or, rather than a static quality, is merit only conveyed through action or expression, the same way that you can't just have loudness without actually creating noises that carry the quality of loudness with them? Does it come in increments-- can I be 100% meritty or 75%? Does it have volume, as in I have five gallons of merit but that guy only has a few meritalicios ounces? And is it static-- does a person with merit have merit 24/7, or can I get all through Monday filled with merit (and am I filled with merit like a lungful of air or do I carry merit like a backpack) and then wake up Tuesday morning suddenly meritless again (what about that-- what is the word for someone who doesn't have this highly reward-worthy quality) only to greet Wednesday only about half-meriticious?

Merit reminds me a little bit of ether. Not knock-you-out-while-someone-cuts-a-cannonball-out-of-your-gut ether. The other kind. Back when we figured that light was simply made of waves, somebody pointed out that water waves traveled through water, so what did light waves travel through? Couldn't be air, cause light traveled through space and other vacuums. "Um..." said physicists. "Must be something. We'll, uh, call it...er...ether." And they went looking for it, but could find it. So we could say that the idea of ether didn't have merit. Did the people who studied it for science have merit? Carry merit? Ooze merit?

So merit enters the hall of ideas everybody believes but nobody can explain other than something vaguely like Do Stuff Good (or maybe Do Good Stuff).

And yet we are certain that it is the basis of pour whole society, and absolutely must be instilled in our educational system for students and teachers alike. Because we live in a meritocracy.

If we operate by meritocracy, we must come up with a way to measure this critical quality that we can't explain. Cool. How hard could that be? I'm going to go with "practically impossible."

Because the one thing all the different views I've discussed so far share one thing in common-- the idea that merit is some sort of absolute purely objective quality. Except that's probably not true, either. Because another way to describe a meritocracy is to say it's a system that rewards the best.

No, not even in the commerce driven free market private sector. Do the rewards go to the highest quality product or the most canny marketing or the most profitable production methods? No, don't tell me those approaches all have merit! Or, if you must, tell me which approach has the most merit in some sort of verifiable manner. And not only should we discuss classics like VHS versus Betamax, but we could discuss products like Coca-Cola with no obvious merit at all.

But let's move on to education. Is the immutable, measurable, timeless, impervious-to-subjective-judgment quality of merit visible among teachers or students?

Think about every teacher you've heard described by some former students as "best"

* He was great because he was so demanding and strict that he forced us to do our best
* She was so incredibly smart that we learned just from being in the room with her
* I don't remember what I actually learned from her, but she made me feel like I was a great person, and that made all the difference in my life
* I wasn't any good in that subject, but he made me feel like that was okay
* She got me excited about that whole field
* He was really interested in me as a person, and that helped me learn, I guess
* She didn't worry about who I was at all and just helped me focus on learning things

I guarantee you that every teacher you will ever meet can list examples of all of the following student types

* Student who really liked me
* Student who really hated me
* Student who swears he learned a ton from me
* Student who swears he didn't learn a thing from me

Plus unusual variations. I used to teach downstream from a teacher whose students would swear they never did anything or learned anything in her class last year, and every time I would start a new unit I would check to see who knew something about the content, and they all did, and I would ask how and they would look surprised and answer, "Well, last year, I guess!"

And that's before we even get to the varied administrative definitions of teacher merit. Should students be seated, motionless and attentive, or active, energetic, and engaged? Is a teacher's merit related to the timeliness with which administrative tasks are completed? Is a teacher's merit related to willingness to serve on committees and other "extras."

Ask parents, future employers, community members, students, school leaders, and teachers themselves what qualities are needed for a good teacher, and the list would be huge. Huge! Kind, considerate, good communicator, knowledgeable, professionally up to date, good with tech, nice to students, reasonably professional dress, master of many (try to pick a number!) pedagogical techniques and on and on and on. And every single teacher would present a different constellation of those qualities, and if I asked you, "Which quality has the most merit?" you would say, "Well, they all have merit." But that's not good enough. We have to rank all the teachers, so we have to know which qualities have the most merit.

Students, too. Let's ask everybody-- oh, heck, let's just ask the parents. What qualities do you most want to see in your child? Good at math, good reader, likes to write, likes to run fast, happy, strong spirit, good problem solver, healthy friendships, excited about developing own special talents, passionate about something, knows some history, likes science, confident, strong-- I'll just stop because this list is even longer. Now quick-- which qualities have the most merit. In our meritocracy, we are going to give the greatest rewards to the students who display which quality? No, they can't all have equal merit-- this is a meritocracy, so we have to be able to pick the best!

I'm not going to try to sort out these answers now, because I only want to make one point.

Ranking, rating, and rewarding the merits of human beings in a meritocracy is really really really really really really REALLY complicated.

So somebody please explain to me how the hell we decided that the solution to this complex problem is that merit can be measured with a standardized math and reading test?

How did we decide that the best measure of student's merit is her score on a bubble test? I mean, damn-- was that even ON the list?

How did we decide that the only teacher quality we want to measure is his ability to get students to score well on the standardized test?

Who decided that the "merit" in "meritocracy" is a standardized test score? And does anybody have a clue what the justification, the basis for that definition of "merit" might be? Or did it because measuring merit is really hard, but scoring bubble tests is really easy? Because I think your definition of "merit" is without merit. This was the judgment, the subjective judgment, of some individuals. And don't try to slide off with your baloney about how you're totally calling for "multiple measures" because those are similarly one-size-fits-all meritless-- and in most cases they are a thin screen of smoke trying to hide that, yes, in fact, our major measure of merit is supposed to be a standardized test score.

Here's what I think about merit. I think most of us reach a personal definition of merit that reflects our experiences and our strengths and our weaknesses. I think our concept of merit, just like our concept of good and bad, comes from our values. And any time somebody comes along to tell to try to tell us what we should or should not value, what we should consider good or bad, that person is a problem. I am aware that I am, with a high level of irony, advocating here for my own values, my own idea of merit. But here's the difference-- I am not trying to use the force of law or pseudo-law to impose my values on you. You can read my argument, decide I'm full of it, or decide that my points have merit. I am not telling you that you must accept my values or I will find a way to punish you.

I am not arguing that meritocracy is bad. I am arguing that deciding what is good and bad, truly human and truly rotten-- that's a process that is ongoing and involves discussion and and a system that allows for the probability, or even certainty, that we will arrive at different answers. A meritocracy that insist we have but one measure, and that everybody should be made to use that one standard and measure-- that's not a meritocracy. It's something darker, something uglier, something that is offensive both to human and (if you so believe) divine sensibilities.

Meritocracy is about excellence, and human excellence comes in a gazzillion forms. If we have everybody make a list of the fifteen most excellent people in history. Those lists will not be identical, and no two examples of excellence from those lists will look the same. Because the road to excellence is an individual path, a personal path. You cannot standardize it. You cannot standardize a meritocracy, not even if you pretend to find a standardized measure of merit.

The "merit" in "meritocracy" is not an objective quality. It will always be something chosen by a particular human, and trying to make it the standard of merit for all humans always involves imposing one person's values on everybody else. That's wrong. That's immoral. And it's a very bad way to run a nation's educational system.

Product People and Bean Counters

I watched a short but powerful video this week. It comes from an interview that Steve Jobs sat for toward the end of his "vacation" from running Apple. The important clip is brief and well worth watching. Go ahead-- I'll be waiting for you on the other side

The basic complaint here is the classic argument against bean counters. The bonus insight for me is the idea of exactly how the bean counters end up in charge.

I've watched this process up close with a manufacturing firm right here in my small town. By the 1970's they had come to dominate their industry, and they did it by having the product guys run the company. Sales agents and even customers would sometimes make request for, say, a bifucated widget that could dispense cookies and ice cream, and the engineering department, backed up by the boss who came from the engineering department, would tell the customer "No. You can't have that. You don't even want that. Let us look at your problem and give you the best product design for the job."

They came to dominate their industry because customers who stayed inevitably said, "Yeah, they were right, and we'll never go to anyone else." Customers who walked away to do business with Brand X, who promised them the magic widgets, inevitably came back, saying, "Yeah, that didn't work. They were right about denying our request, and we'll never go to anyone else again."

As Jobs suggests, when you focus on your product and are passionate about your customer's needs, you succeed.

But the company topped out in market dominance, and it went from private ownership to public. Now they were worrying about the shareholders, not the customers, and anyway, there was no way that improving the product was going to get them more market share. And so the sales and finance guys rose to the front offices. When a customer ordered a magic cookie widget, the sales-and-finance bosses told the engineers, "You'll damn well make it." Bosses who had no knowledge of the machinery or the industry tried to demand the impossible, kind of like a yard work company boss telling his snow plow operators that they weren't bringing in enough plowing jobs in June and July.

The process that Jobs is describing has happened over and over and over and over and over in American business-- companies run by bean counters who care about neither the product nor the customer.

You recognize where we're going. The bean counters have, in the last decade, set their sights on the two huge service sectors of the US-- health care and education.

They were late getting to education because it was not immediately evident where money could be made. When the bean counters go to work on a company, they can lower the costs of the product, bump up the marketing, squeeze labor costs, and find ways to monkey with stock values as a way of generating more dollars.

But the education system was so entrenched. Revenue and labor costs were largely frozen, there was no stock to manipulate, and no marketing to be done because geographic boundaries ruled out somehow grabbing more customers.

Reformsters have now figured out how to fix all of those problems. Crush labor costs. Dissolve the geographic boundaries that keep customer locked in so that marketing can be used. Hand operation of schools over to private corporations that can proceed to juggle the books however they wish. We're working on the revenue stream, but that requires legislators to rewrite some rules and kick in funding, so that's last on the list.

The end result, we can already see, is just as Jobs predicts. Product guys-- the teachers and career educators who are concerned with creating the product-- a good education-- are pushed out, because doing a better job of educating students does not help the bean counters. Their passion for the product and for the students who are a big part of their customer base is inconvenient. The bean counters have no feeling for a quality product and no concern for the needs of the customers, but having redefined "success" as "handling the pile of beans really well," they stay in charge.

I wish Jobs had outlined a way for product people to take a company back from the bean counters, because that's the next thing American education will need to do.

Strong Words from Minneapolis

I don't have much to add to this post from Greta Callahan other than a virtual standing ovation. But so many people read my response to the Minneapolis newspaper assault on teachers (aided and abetted by their own superintendent) that I felt I should pass this along.

Greta Callahan teaches five-year-olds at Minneapolis's poorest school. Her response is strong, unapologetic, clear and free from whining.

Let’s start with what it means to be a “good teacher.” As the article says: “The district uses three different tools to evaluate teachers: classroom observations, a student survey and student achievement data.” Let’s put that into the perspective of a Bethune kindergarten teacher.

• Classroom observations: We have four per year. The teacher receives points based on standardized criteria; the feedback is generally helpful. But these observations also involve the observer walking up to students and asking what they are doing. Even my 5-year-olds, who may have just started school, get asked this question. The student is supposed to regurgitate the “I can” statement that correlates to “Focused Instruction.” The usual response, though, is something along the lines of “math” or “Jaden took my crayon!”

If you were in my room, observing an observation, you would laugh. I promise.

• Student surveys: I administer a student survey once a year. My 5-year-olds have to circle their responses (even though they can’t read) to questions about their teacher and school. Have you been around a 5-year-old? They are adorable, spacey, loud and unfocused — and under no circumstances does this student survey make sense for them or to them.

• Student achievement data: Two to three times a year, our students are pulled out of our classrooms and tested by a stranger from the district. When she asks our kids to go into a separate room with her and gives them a test, most of them shut down. It’s intimidating to them. Some are asked to take this test in the middle of breakfast; others are tested right after recess. The inconsistency of when our children are tested creates a test that isn’t being measured consistently or accurately, in my opinion.

And in response to superintendent Bernadeia Johnson's comment that the district would have to take another look at staffing and retention:

Really? None of this is rocket science. The retention rate of teachers at my school and others like it will not go up unless we have more incentive to stay — and more assistance to attempt to give our students an even chance.

If you're wondering if Callahan is as awesome as she seems here, the answer is apparently yes. Tom Rademacher, the 2014 Minnesota Teacher of the Year, profiled her on his blog.

So, why does she stay?  Because of those same kids who come in not knowing their letters. At some point in the year, she gets to watch them read.  There are struggles and frustrations, to be sure, but the successes of the teachers and students at her school are the result of good work for the kids who need it most.  The key, she says, is to love your students, and make sure they understand you love them.  Once she has that bond, she says,  “I can teach them, and when I get them to love school, I have them forever.”

Callahan's response is worthy of a standing ovation, and I hope that her fellow teachers take heart from it.

Do we want a pat on the back? No. Do we want your sympathy? No. Do we want our community to be aware of the challenges in our schools? Yes, we desperately do.

Please do not oversimplify a complex problem by blaming the teachers who are in the trenches every day.

Every line of this powerhouse essay is quoteworthy. I hope that it is clipped and placed on a bulletin board in teachers' lounges across the city.