The irreplaceable Mercedes Schneider has a sharp, tough piece this morning about profiteer Steve Barr, founder of Green Dot Schools, that is one more reminder of why schools are not businesses.
Steve Barr has a good story (you can read the approved version on a Wikipedia page that is waiting to be edited by someone who doesn't already love Steve Barr). Single mom, working class background, former teamster, career as political operative, dabbling in TV production. Barr's younger brother did not rise up, but instead struggled with getting his act together before dying in a motorcycle accident. Barr asked himself why his brother followed a different trajectory than he did, and concluded "schools," and so took the insurance money from his brother's death to help launch Green Dot.
Bottom line: Barr is not a typical riches to riches success story, but he is typical of the business-politics approach to life-building, and therefor a good example of why that approach is ill-suited to education.
Schneider takes Barr to task for his dalliance with and abandonment of John McDonogh High School is New Orleans. Barr thought he'd give a long-distance takeover of that school a try in 2012, and he thought he'd just dump the whole project in 2014. Not his kids, not his community, and, not his problem. As Schneider puts it, "Just a long-distance business deal that did not pan out."
And that's the thing. If this were an entrepreneur trying a tentative launch of a new left-handed widget production facility, that would be fine. Taking chances, experimenting, trying something even when you know going in that it might not pan out-- that's a perfectly legitimate way to do business. If entrepreneurs never took a flier on new ventures, we would be far poorer for it.
That is what business people, investors, entrepreneurs do-- they take risks. If they win, then society is often better off and the investors reap the rewards of shouldering the risk. If they lose, then they're out some money and life goes on. They have risked investor money, maybe reputation, and the lives of those who worked on the enterprise.
None of this is wrong or bad. It's how business ventures work. But it should not, can not be how schools work.
For one thing, the reformster movement is another part of a larger trend-- shifting risk to the public while privatizing rewards. Too often reformsters get to finance their ideas while they get to keep the rewards. We've spent a lot of time looking at the many, many ways in which charter operators can get rich (yes, even the non-profit ones). But at the other end, we'll find that when charters collapse, nobody has lost money except the taxpayers. When Barr's Future Is Now group bowed out of operating John McDonogh, there were no wails about how much of their own money they had sunk into the place. This is one other thing that is appealing about charter operation-- the state gives you money and, if you have the right connections, even buildings. Start-up costs and investment expense is minimal, and personal financial risk is negligible-to-non-existent.
But there's another reason that schools cannot be businesses.
Students are not lab rats.
Barr's little experiment with John McDonogh High School lasted about two years, or about the half of the high school years of students at that school. Those years were taken from them, and nothing will ever get that time back.
Schools are not businesses for the same reason that so much education research is bunk-- because students are not lab rats, and it's not okay for adults to sacrifice students' education, well-being and lives on the altar of Let's Find Out If This Works.
Steve Barr's story is a recognizable American success story, and it involves plenty of experimentation, trial and error, and failure followed by rebounding. And those are all great qualities to apply to your own story. Gambling with your own life, your own future is both admirable and, occasionally, necessary. But gambling with other peoples' futures is foolhardy and irresponsible. Gambling with the futures of children is unconscionable.
Reformsters make a lot of noise about how the education sector is inertia-filled, conservative, extra-careful about change. Well, of course we are-- these are the lives of children we're talking about.
An edupreneur may think, "Hey, we could totally upend kindergarten with this new approach. Let's give it a try for a year or two and if that doesn't work out, no biggie. We'll move on to another idea." A year in business experimenting doesn't seem like so much. But we're talking about taking away a year from five year olds, tiny humans who will never be five again, and for whom that experiment will forever be part of their lives and history.
When we futz with the system, we can spot problems and change the system. But we can't change what we did to the students in the system while we were futzing.
So, yes-- we're conservative and we change carefully and slowly. It's fine to take big risks with private money. It's less fine to use public money to finance private risk. It's not remotely fine to take big risks with the education of young humans.
If there's one thing that marks the worst of the reformsters, it's a complete disregard for the tiny humans whose lives are shaped in schools. Reformsters are great at invoking children and using the well-worn talking points about putting the interests of children ahead of the interests of adults. But in practice, reformsters treat children like widgets or sweat-shop employees. When businessmen determine the fate of a factory or business enterprise, they don't worry about the stock, the soon-to-be-unemployed, or their former customers.
When we talk about the close of a business, the end of a venture, there is no analogy in which children come out looking like valued human beings whose concerns are central to how the end is handled. Schools are not businesses, because businesses fail and vanish like vaporware, but children never do. Schools are not businesses, because businesses must sometimes be experiments, and students are not lab rats.
Monday, April 6, 2015
Sunday, April 5, 2015
Easter and the Free Market
I grew up Methodist (United Methodist, actually), went through a long Between Churches spell, and eventually settled back into a sort of relationship with the local Episcopalian church. My religious faith has stayed fairly steady (though, as a good born New Englander, I am not going to talk to you about it), but if the Christian Church were on Facebook, I would mark our relationship "it's complicated."
But I still love Easter. I have always loved Easter far more than Christmas, and the years have only strengthened those feelings.
It is the tritest of cliches to point out that Christmas is overly commercialized, but that commercialization is instructive, because in it we can see the Invisible Hand of the Free Market on a crazed, drunken rampage. In the three months of the season, there is absolutely nothing that can happen in stores, malls, back alleys or any other temple of commerce that could shock or surprise me.
This is the untethered free market in action, the rudderless, anchor-deficient free market that has long since stopped asking "What is the real point and purpose of this activity" and instead asks "How can this activity be leveraged to create a revenue stream?" With most free marketified activities, we can at least take comfort in the notion that injection of free market profit-driven innovation will bring us to a higher better pursuit of our main goal.
But Christmas can't even try to pretend that the proliferation of holiday tchotchkes and corporate advertising somehow aids in the worship and honoring of the Great I Am. The Creator of All That Is and Will Be is not honored by special beer steins. No, the vast majority seasonal tie-ins have lost the plot, descending into some sad Godless money-grubbing romp.
Easter, however, stays relatively impervious to the seduction of the Invisible Hand. Perhaps it's that Christmas reduces to simple charming ideas-- babies are sweet and people should be nice to others-- but Easter is harsh and dark an then, for many folks, metaphysically improbable.
It may be a matter of how easy it is to keep up appearances. In other words, I can sell you Christmas stuff and still pretend that it has something to do with the central message of Christmas. But the crucifixion does not play well on t-shirts and halftime advertising.
A unmoored free market doesn't just subvert the virtue and purpose of an activity-- it twists and distorts everything into a fun-house shadow if its true self. Folks who have a childlike faith in the free market and believe that an unleashed market will automatically breathe virtue into whatever it comes near-- those folks need only look at Christmas, a holiday that has literally had the virtue beaten out of it by the club-wielding invisible hand.
Compare and contrast with Easter. Easter is not broadly celebrated; it is not culturally required for every single person of whatever faith to observe it, and so there was no need to water it down for mass marketing. Nor has it bee infused with the Great Money Chase, and so other aspects can stay in place.
Easter is about renewal, rebirth, and resurrection; it's about finding a path forward in even the darkest of moments. It's about finding direction and guidance from a higher power. It's about somehow seeing beyond the limited boundaries of our lives into something so infinite and beautiful that we can barely grasp it.
It does not cry out to be fixed. It does not need corporate interests to come in and say, "This holiday is a national disgrace, a sad failure. We must not let people condemned to this lame holiday because their prospects are controlled by their calendar." Easter does not need somebody to come up with National Holiday Standards so that it can be measured against them (to prove it's failing). Easter does not need a shot of Holiday Reform. There may indeed be great potential depths of untapped riches in the holiday, but there is no value to the holiday in trying to tap those riches.
There are some things the Free Market should just leave alone, because the Free Market too easily loses track of the Actual Point of the things it tries to "fix."
I had a good Easter morning. I get up and go out to eat with all my family in the area, and I play a brass instrument in church. This year as a bonus my grandson was baptised. I can't think of anything that would lead me to think, "If only corporate interests could get their hands on this and turn it into the same great holiday that they made Christmas."
But I still love Easter. I have always loved Easter far more than Christmas, and the years have only strengthened those feelings.
It is the tritest of cliches to point out that Christmas is overly commercialized, but that commercialization is instructive, because in it we can see the Invisible Hand of the Free Market on a crazed, drunken rampage. In the three months of the season, there is absolutely nothing that can happen in stores, malls, back alleys or any other temple of commerce that could shock or surprise me.
This is the untethered free market in action, the rudderless, anchor-deficient free market that has long since stopped asking "What is the real point and purpose of this activity" and instead asks "How can this activity be leveraged to create a revenue stream?" With most free marketified activities, we can at least take comfort in the notion that injection of free market profit-driven innovation will bring us to a higher better pursuit of our main goal.
But Christmas can't even try to pretend that the proliferation of holiday tchotchkes and corporate advertising somehow aids in the worship and honoring of the Great I Am. The Creator of All That Is and Will Be is not honored by special beer steins. No, the vast majority seasonal tie-ins have lost the plot, descending into some sad Godless money-grubbing romp.
Easter, however, stays relatively impervious to the seduction of the Invisible Hand. Perhaps it's that Christmas reduces to simple charming ideas-- babies are sweet and people should be nice to others-- but Easter is harsh and dark an then, for many folks, metaphysically improbable.
It may be a matter of how easy it is to keep up appearances. In other words, I can sell you Christmas stuff and still pretend that it has something to do with the central message of Christmas. But the crucifixion does not play well on t-shirts and halftime advertising.
A unmoored free market doesn't just subvert the virtue and purpose of an activity-- it twists and distorts everything into a fun-house shadow if its true self. Folks who have a childlike faith in the free market and believe that an unleashed market will automatically breathe virtue into whatever it comes near-- those folks need only look at Christmas, a holiday that has literally had the virtue beaten out of it by the club-wielding invisible hand.
Compare and contrast with Easter. Easter is not broadly celebrated; it is not culturally required for every single person of whatever faith to observe it, and so there was no need to water it down for mass marketing. Nor has it bee infused with the Great Money Chase, and so other aspects can stay in place.
Easter is about renewal, rebirth, and resurrection; it's about finding a path forward in even the darkest of moments. It's about finding direction and guidance from a higher power. It's about somehow seeing beyond the limited boundaries of our lives into something so infinite and beautiful that we can barely grasp it.
It does not cry out to be fixed. It does not need corporate interests to come in and say, "This holiday is a national disgrace, a sad failure. We must not let people condemned to this lame holiday because their prospects are controlled by their calendar." Easter does not need somebody to come up with National Holiday Standards so that it can be measured against them (to prove it's failing). Easter does not need a shot of Holiday Reform. There may indeed be great potential depths of untapped riches in the holiday, but there is no value to the holiday in trying to tap those riches.
There are some things the Free Market should just leave alone, because the Free Market too easily loses track of the Actual Point of the things it tries to "fix."
I had a good Easter morning. I get up and go out to eat with all my family in the area, and I play a brass instrument in church. This year as a bonus my grandson was baptised. I can't think of anything that would lead me to think, "If only corporate interests could get their hands on this and turn it into the same great holiday that they made Christmas."
Saturday, April 4, 2015
The Rewards of Teaching
Many reformsters have built their confused, misguided and just plain bad ideas on one very big misconception, a gap in their belief system that informs a hundred other flawed ideas.
Many reformsters do not believe that teaching is intrinsically rewarding.
This has always been there in the worst denigrations of teacher-haters. Teachers are just in it for the paycheck, for the summer vacation, for the cushy ease of the job. You can only believe this if you also believe that there is nothing rewarding about the job itself, if there is nothing to enjoy about working with students and helping them grow and understand and become more fully themselves, more fully human.
It's also there in so-called teacher supporters. We need raise pay. We need to offer financial incentives, merit pay, just higher pay levels across the board. Those are all lovely things, but don't think those have to be there because there's no other reason we'd be in the classroom.
Even Teach for America, a group that more than any other has mastered the rhetoric of teacher idealism about changing the world and touching children-- TFA may laud teaching in its ad copy, but their actions belie their pretty words. "Come be a teacher. Touch the future. Change a life. But for God's sake get the hell out of there and on to a real job." It's nice to touch lives for a year or two, but that couldn't possibly sustain you for an entire career.
Virtually every reformy program now comes with one form of incentivization or another, seemingly borrowed from the world of business cogs, grey flannel suits passing through a series of offices chasing ever-increasing stacks of cash.
If we want teachers to follow one program or another, we must incentivize it with money. Why else would teachers teach?
Mind you, I don't want to roll back to the more traditional argument for keeping teachers poor-- "If you were really doing it for the kids and the good warm feeling you get, then we shouldn't need to pay you more than minimum wage."
But the constant waving about of money is a sign that many reformsters have a fundamental misunderstanding of the work and the people who do it.
For example, lots of reformsters like the idea of setting up a system, because the way you get people to do work is you line them up in various coggy functions, allowing them to work their way up to higher levels of cogsmanship, which they'll do because each cog level offers new incentives (with lots of structure and direction). This is what you do with work that has no intrinsic motivation. Incentives, because why else would people pursue doing it right, and structure, because we don't believe that there's any natural feedback that tells the cog whether it's doing well or not.
This is dumb. It's like assuming that kissing does not have any natural feedback loop, so we need a system to let people know if they're kissing correctly or not. That same thinking says that a teacher can't tell whether a class is going well or poorly because there's no intrinsically rewarding feedback loop. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how a classroom works.
For another example, we return frequently to the problem of getting super-duper teachers to go work in America's most hard-to-staff schools, and we always return with a discussion of how we could create some financial incentives for teachers to go work there. But teachers do not go to work at Shiny New High School because the pay is great (often the cost of living in SNHS's neighborhood eats up the higher pay). Teachers go to work at SNHS because it's a great place to work.
I could try to lay out all the specifics of what makes a school or district a great place to work, but I think I can simplify it--
A great school to work in is one where there are the fewest possible obstacles between the teachers and the intrinsic rewards of teaching.And the intrinsic rewards of teaching are, most simply stated, using your skills, knowledge, judgment and efforts to help your students learn and grow, and getting to see the real life results of that growth.
The more obstacles stand between a teacher and the use of those personal skills, knowledge, judgment and effort, the less rewarding it is to work there.
So a plan like, say, "We'll give you a scripted program, and you are never to use your own judgment. We have no interest in what skills and knowledge you bring to the table as an individual-- just do as your told when you're told. But we'll give you a few thousand more dollars to do it"-- well, that's not a plan. And while you may find takers for it, they are not the teachers that you want.
Likewise a plan like, "Yes, take all your passion and care and dedication into that classroom, but we're not going to give you any tools such a books or paper, and we won't give you any support to help maintain discipline, and we'll never fix that broken window. but we will give you some extra pay"-- also not a plan.
Yes, teachers need money (we have families and we like to eat food and wear clothes), but if you don't understand that there is something exciting and joyful and rewarding for us in the work we do, you will never come up with a plan or program or system that motivates us. In fact, if you don't get that we're still in the classroom because we're already motivated, then you don't understand the work situation well enough to have a positive effect on it.
Teaching is intrinsically rewarding. You know when things are going well, and it feels good. You know when things are going poorly, and that feels lousy. You also know when people are trying to help you become your best teachery self so that you can have more good days, great moments. And you know when people are not trying to help, but are just trying to take away all the tools that allow you to create the good days.
Many reformsters do not believe that teaching is intrinsically rewarding.
This has always been there in the worst denigrations of teacher-haters. Teachers are just in it for the paycheck, for the summer vacation, for the cushy ease of the job. You can only believe this if you also believe that there is nothing rewarding about the job itself, if there is nothing to enjoy about working with students and helping them grow and understand and become more fully themselves, more fully human.
It's also there in so-called teacher supporters. We need raise pay. We need to offer financial incentives, merit pay, just higher pay levels across the board. Those are all lovely things, but don't think those have to be there because there's no other reason we'd be in the classroom.
Even Teach for America, a group that more than any other has mastered the rhetoric of teacher idealism about changing the world and touching children-- TFA may laud teaching in its ad copy, but their actions belie their pretty words. "Come be a teacher. Touch the future. Change a life. But for God's sake get the hell out of there and on to a real job." It's nice to touch lives for a year or two, but that couldn't possibly sustain you for an entire career.
Virtually every reformy program now comes with one form of incentivization or another, seemingly borrowed from the world of business cogs, grey flannel suits passing through a series of offices chasing ever-increasing stacks of cash.
If we want teachers to follow one program or another, we must incentivize it with money. Why else would teachers teach?
Mind you, I don't want to roll back to the more traditional argument for keeping teachers poor-- "If you were really doing it for the kids and the good warm feeling you get, then we shouldn't need to pay you more than minimum wage."
But the constant waving about of money is a sign that many reformsters have a fundamental misunderstanding of the work and the people who do it.
For example, lots of reformsters like the idea of setting up a system, because the way you get people to do work is you line them up in various coggy functions, allowing them to work their way up to higher levels of cogsmanship, which they'll do because each cog level offers new incentives (with lots of structure and direction). This is what you do with work that has no intrinsic motivation. Incentives, because why else would people pursue doing it right, and structure, because we don't believe that there's any natural feedback that tells the cog whether it's doing well or not.
This is dumb. It's like assuming that kissing does not have any natural feedback loop, so we need a system to let people know if they're kissing correctly or not. That same thinking says that a teacher can't tell whether a class is going well or poorly because there's no intrinsically rewarding feedback loop. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how a classroom works.
For another example, we return frequently to the problem of getting super-duper teachers to go work in America's most hard-to-staff schools, and we always return with a discussion of how we could create some financial incentives for teachers to go work there. But teachers do not go to work at Shiny New High School because the pay is great (often the cost of living in SNHS's neighborhood eats up the higher pay). Teachers go to work at SNHS because it's a great place to work.
I could try to lay out all the specifics of what makes a school or district a great place to work, but I think I can simplify it--
A great school to work in is one where there are the fewest possible obstacles between the teachers and the intrinsic rewards of teaching.And the intrinsic rewards of teaching are, most simply stated, using your skills, knowledge, judgment and efforts to help your students learn and grow, and getting to see the real life results of that growth.
The more obstacles stand between a teacher and the use of those personal skills, knowledge, judgment and effort, the less rewarding it is to work there.
So a plan like, say, "We'll give you a scripted program, and you are never to use your own judgment. We have no interest in what skills and knowledge you bring to the table as an individual-- just do as your told when you're told. But we'll give you a few thousand more dollars to do it"-- well, that's not a plan. And while you may find takers for it, they are not the teachers that you want.
Likewise a plan like, "Yes, take all your passion and care and dedication into that classroom, but we're not going to give you any tools such a books or paper, and we won't give you any support to help maintain discipline, and we'll never fix that broken window. but we will give you some extra pay"-- also not a plan.
Yes, teachers need money (we have families and we like to eat food and wear clothes), but if you don't understand that there is something exciting and joyful and rewarding for us in the work we do, you will never come up with a plan or program or system that motivates us. In fact, if you don't get that we're still in the classroom because we're already motivated, then you don't understand the work situation well enough to have a positive effect on it.
Teaching is intrinsically rewarding. You know when things are going well, and it feels good. You know when things are going poorly, and that feels lousy. You also know when people are trying to help you become your best teachery self so that you can have more good days, great moments. And you know when people are not trying to help, but are just trying to take away all the tools that allow you to create the good days.
Fixing Title II and PD
While we're all busy worrying about the big sexy parts ESEA rewrite, like testing, teacher evaluation, and just generally squeezing blood from the public ed turnip so that Educorporations can get their daily dose of Vitamin $$, the folks at American Institutes for Research have been taking a look at less glamorous sections of the law.
You may recognize AIR as the folks who brought us the SBA test, as well as some knockoff testing products for states with CCSS-averse electorates. But they have many, many researchy segments, and one of those has made some recommendations regarding Title II of ESEA.
Those of you who know all about Title II can skip to the end of this paragraph, but you're probably lying. Title II has two stated purposes-- 1) raise student test scores aka "student achievement" by getting more awesome teachers and principals in schools and 2) holding local districts accountable for student test scores aka "student achievement." AIR notes that there are many fed-approved uses of Title II money, but mostly districts just spend it all on professional development. Notes AIR drily:
Sound educator learning activities and resources are critical to effective teaching and leading as well as to continuous improvement in our schools. Yet, 13 years and some $30 billion later, Title IIA has not had the effect on teacher and principal quality or student achievement its creators hoped.
So what do districts actually spend the money on. Turns out its mostly PD and class reduction.
You may recognize AIR as the folks who brought us the SBA test, as well as some knockoff testing products for states with CCSS-averse electorates. But they have many, many researchy segments, and one of those has made some recommendations regarding Title II of ESEA.
Those of you who know all about Title II can skip to the end of this paragraph, but you're probably lying. Title II has two stated purposes-- 1) raise student test scores aka "student achievement" by getting more awesome teachers and principals in schools and 2) holding local districts accountable for student test scores aka "student achievement." AIR notes that there are many fed-approved uses of Title II money, but mostly districts just spend it all on professional development. Notes AIR drily:
Sound educator learning activities and resources are critical to effective teaching and leading as well as to continuous improvement in our schools. Yet, 13 years and some $30 billion later, Title IIA has not had the effect on teacher and principal quality or student achievement its creators hoped.
So what do districts actually spend the money on. Turns out its mostly PD and class reduction.
AIR notes that after 13 years and $30 billion, problems persist. Inexperienced teachers are still in high-needs schools, hard-to-staff schools are still hard to staff, principals still burn and churn, the test score gap aka "the achievement gap" is still wide between poor and minority students and everyone else, and we still are getting beaten by Estonia on international tests. Also, instructional quality varies between classrooms and the sun continues to rise in the East.
AIR only rattles off that list to set up their next point-- of course Title II funds can't fix all that, but at the very least it could fund worthwhile professional development. Some research suggests that some local PD is okay, but mostly some AIR research from 2009 finds that "by and large, U.S. teachers have been receiving professional development that is superficial, short-lived, and incoherent."
Now, that 2009 research looked mostly at PD from 2005-2006, so I'm not so sure that-- oh, who am I kidding. "Another professional development session! Oh boy! I'll bet this will be very useful," said no teacher ever. But decade-old research is going to miss the giant increase in a gazillion sessions that could all be loosely titled, "How to do a better job of teaching to the test and getting scores up."
Fun factoid. AIR notes that neither the USED or Congress has ever commissioned post-NCLB research on how effectively the Title II money has been spent. But in 2014, the Gates funded the Boston Group, an organization that's a huge fan of privatization, to find that "although more teachers report engaging in research-based, collaborative forms of job-embedded professional development, even these richer formats leave most teachers cold." According to that report, only 30% of teachers called themselves "highly satisfied" with their PD and only 34% thought PD was getting better.
So, short answer-- Title II as an engine of professional development is a failure.
If you're teacher who has ever sat through professional development, you may have some thoughts about why PD sucks, but AIR is way ahead of all of us. Here are their Three Reasons That Title II Is Failing Miserably (I will paraphrase, translating from the heavy bureaucratese of the report):
1) PD tries to hard to work on individuals when it should be fixing the "organizational capacity for sustained and continuous performance improvement." They explain this later as emphasizing "teacher" quality instead of "teaching" quality. While AIR doesn't really Go There-- this can only have one implication-- that PD should be about making individuals function better as cogs in the machine.
2) "It contains no incentives or supports for enhancing the strategic management of educator and organizational learning" because, as always, the reformster assumption is that there is no incentive intrinsic to working with students or managing teachers who work with students.
3) It uses a bad definition of "professional development" that doesn't link directly to better test scores.
Now, not everything that AIR has to say is bone-stupid, even if it is in ivory tower gobbeldeeshmear.
Educators do not simply perform better by acquiring more knowledge or skills. They perform better when they acquire the right knowledge and the right skills and have a chance to practice these new learnings, study the effects, and adjust accordingly. They perform better when they work in an organization that takes non-mission-critical tasks off of their plates, deploys them according to their strengths, and supplies them with vetted tools and instruments that they can use to be more effective every day.
That's not wrong (I particularly like the notion of relieving teachers of "non-mission-critical" tasks. But the whole thing rests on somebody, somewhere knowing what the "right" knowledge and the "right" skills are. This is one of the precise moments where reformsters and teachers part ways. The teachers can raise their hands and say, "OOh! Pick me! I know! I can tell you what's needed," but reformsters are ignoring them and making noise about calling in lobbyists/experts and using bad standardized tests as systemic tools.
AIR has four recommendations for fixing Title II.
1) Put money into funding and fixing systems, not people. More corporate argle-bargle follows about building capacity and creating smart systems with monitoring and data analysis.
2) Fund hiring Really Good Teachers in either teaching or teacher-leader jobs in high needs districts.
3) Stop allowing Title II funds to be transferred, swapped or generally used for other things.
4) Finally spend some money studying what Title II is or isn't accomplishing.
AIR has identified a real problem. An awful lot of professional development sucks. But AIR doesn't seem to have a clue of what to do about it, including asking the teachers who actually suffer through it. For instance, AIR seems unaware of Inverse Delivery Law of PD-- the further someone has traveled and the more they have been paid to deliver the PD, the more likely it is to be deeply, terribly awful.
In particular, AIR's idea that PD should not actually address concerns of teachers, but should focus on getting them to be part of a better-functioning piece of machinery seems terribly ill-advised and unlikely to help a bit.
So, could Title II be fixed? Sure. Does AIR have a clue about how to do it? Not so much.
Friday, April 3, 2015
Brown Wants More NY Teacher Blood
When reflecting on the new laws gutting the teaching profession in NY, I mused that Campbell Brown must be bummed that Andrew Cuomo had done an end run around her. But apparently teaching has not been sufficiently eviscerated to suit the Browninator.
Per Politico's morning education grab-bag, Brown is rolling on ahead with her lawsuit to strip tenure protections from all teachers in New York.
It's an interesting stance. After all, the new NY rules subordinate tenure to testing-- Carol Burris has the clearest breakdown on the new rules at Washington Post today, and it's clear that NY now will give teachers a couple of strikes, and then they're out. Two bad years of test results (which trump any observations by human life forms) seem like enough to end the career of any NY teachers, or keep those careers from ever starting in the first place. So why would Brown still want to tie tenure to the legal whipping post?
Here's the quote from Politico
While the budget reforms have promise, Brown said it’s still way too hard for districts to lay off bad teachers, especially those with seniority. “We are glad that Albany appears to have finally woken up to the crisis in our public schools. But make no mistake, they have a long way to go and there is much work ahead,” Brown told Morning Education. “This will have no bearing on the legal case moving forward.”
This can only mean one of two things:
1) Brown agrees that Cuomo's proposed evaluation method (one part test scores, one part evaluations mostly by strangers) is a lousy way of identifying whether teachers are any good or not. If this is the case, I look forward to hearing her articulate what she thinks needs to be tweaked. If this is not "far enough," what does she think an evaluation should look like? 100% test driven? 100% drive-by evaluation by strangers? Please, Ms. Brown-- spill!
2) Brown wants to be able to fire teachers for reasons other than poor job performance. If the state is going to measure how well teachers do their job (not measure it well, I know, but stay with me here) and fire them if they do their job poorly, and that's not good enough for Brown, then she must want to be able to fire them (especially the senior ones) for other reasons. Could we be on the cusp of hearing a reformsters finally say out loud and in public, "We want to be able to save money by firing the teachers who get paid the most!" Will Brown articulate why being able to fire a tenured teacher for being a bad teacher is somehow not enough for her?
Of course, there's a third possibility, which is that Brown's lawsuit is not about making changes in NY tenure law, but about having a platform from which to reduce the political clout of teachers and their union (although, again, moot point--why bother trying to reduce the clout of the ineffectual NY teachers union at this point). When Brown hired Incite and former Dem political operatives, it was not to build the case, but to mount a PR offensive against teachers. And she made damn sure that hers was the only such lawsuit being filed.
So what more does Campbell Brown want? Does she want teachers to be fireable for any reason at all, from bad hairs to wrong politics to costing too much money? Does she want them to be discredited in the public eye? Does she just want them to be sadder? I guess we'll see in the months ahead. I hope somebody in the court or press has the balls to ask her exactly why her lawsuit needs to go forward.
Per Politico's morning education grab-bag, Brown is rolling on ahead with her lawsuit to strip tenure protections from all teachers in New York.
It's an interesting stance. After all, the new NY rules subordinate tenure to testing-- Carol Burris has the clearest breakdown on the new rules at Washington Post today, and it's clear that NY now will give teachers a couple of strikes, and then they're out. Two bad years of test results (which trump any observations by human life forms) seem like enough to end the career of any NY teachers, or keep those careers from ever starting in the first place. So why would Brown still want to tie tenure to the legal whipping post?
Here's the quote from Politico
While the budget reforms have promise, Brown said it’s still way too hard for districts to lay off bad teachers, especially those with seniority. “We are glad that Albany appears to have finally woken up to the crisis in our public schools. But make no mistake, they have a long way to go and there is much work ahead,” Brown told Morning Education. “This will have no bearing on the legal case moving forward.”
This can only mean one of two things:
1) Brown agrees that Cuomo's proposed evaluation method (one part test scores, one part evaluations mostly by strangers) is a lousy way of identifying whether teachers are any good or not. If this is the case, I look forward to hearing her articulate what she thinks needs to be tweaked. If this is not "far enough," what does she think an evaluation should look like? 100% test driven? 100% drive-by evaluation by strangers? Please, Ms. Brown-- spill!
2) Brown wants to be able to fire teachers for reasons other than poor job performance. If the state is going to measure how well teachers do their job (not measure it well, I know, but stay with me here) and fire them if they do their job poorly, and that's not good enough for Brown, then she must want to be able to fire them (especially the senior ones) for other reasons. Could we be on the cusp of hearing a reformsters finally say out loud and in public, "We want to be able to save money by firing the teachers who get paid the most!" Will Brown articulate why being able to fire a tenured teacher for being a bad teacher is somehow not enough for her?
Of course, there's a third possibility, which is that Brown's lawsuit is not about making changes in NY tenure law, but about having a platform from which to reduce the political clout of teachers and their union (although, again, moot point--why bother trying to reduce the clout of the ineffectual NY teachers union at this point). When Brown hired Incite and former Dem political operatives, it was not to build the case, but to mount a PR offensive against teachers. And she made damn sure that hers was the only such lawsuit being filed.
So what more does Campbell Brown want? Does she want teachers to be fireable for any reason at all, from bad hairs to wrong politics to costing too much money? Does she want them to be discredited in the public eye? Does she just want them to be sadder? I guess we'll see in the months ahead. I hope somebody in the court or press has the balls to ask her exactly why her lawsuit needs to go forward.
The Atlanta Cheaters
As most know by now, the verdict was handed down in the Atlanta cheating trial and eleven former educators (it seems safe to say that they'll never work in education again) were hauled off instantly and none-too-gently to a bizarrely extreme sentence of jail.
You can get a pretty full picture of the story from these two articles-- the New Yorker in depth piece from 2014 and the Atlantic article that accompanied the verdict.
Much of the ground has been covered. The teachers did a Very Bad Thing and their punishment is earned. The teachers' crime is also an indictment of the system we're currently operating under. There are just a few more thoughts that occur to me.
First, I'm stuck by how hard the teachers at Parks Middle School were trying. This was not teachers trying to game the test scores so that they could back to napping in the lounge and showing videos all day. This was a school where, by all accounts, they were trying everything they could think of in the face of serious challenges, and they were moving forward and creating success-- just not enough of the right kind of success.
In a world without No Child Left Behind, Parks Middle School would have been called a success, a school that was slowly turning around not just its students, but its neighborhood. The cheaters were not trying to save their cushy paychecks or no-stress sinecures-- they were trying to defend the little success that they had managed to create.
Nothing I've read really addresses this, but I would bet that nobody at Parks thought they would have to manage the charade for years. Remember-- from 2007 on we all lived in hope that Congress would rewrite ESEA any day now and the ridiculous imperatives for unattainable test scores would go away. When a new administration was chosen in 2008, that hope became even stronger. In my school, as in many schools, the mantra became, "Let's just figure out how to get through this year, and maybe by next year things will be different." I get a sinking hollow in my gut just imagining the growing horror at Parks as each passing year dug them deeper into the growing pit of lies they were digging for themselves.
I can't condone a thing they did. But it would be cheap of me to condemn them for failing a test I've never had to take. That's why I particularly value the insights of someone like Adell Cothorne, a whistleblower who used to work in DC in the heart of the big Cheating Scandal That Never Happened and who wrote a full response to the convictions for Mercedes Schneider in which she said this:
Do I condone what they did in reference to manipulating students’ tests? No I do not – in any way, shape, or form.
Do I understand why they participated in these egregious acts? I do!
By 2010, it was clear to anybody who was paying attention that there were increasingly only two types of schools in America-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating.
The fate of the Atlanta cheaters stands in stark contrast to the fate of teachers and administrators cheating across the US. Can I pull up a list and name them? No, nor would I. But I don't doubt for a fraction of a second that hundreds upon hundreds of schools in this country survived the insanely unattainable politically-set requirements of federal reform by cheating in ways big and small. This can't be a surprise-- school reform's first big exemplar was the Texas Miracle, which turned out to be nothing more than creative accounting and magic tracking. The federal government literally paraded a big fat lie in front of schools as if it were a model and then said, "Okay, now YOU do that, too!"
We've heard whisperings of cheating from across the country since then, with reports of questionable test erasures to results that just raise your eyebrows right off your face. The biggest marquee Cheating Scandal That Never Was didn't occur in DC under the watchful eye of She Who Will Not Be Named, but as with the Texas miracle of Rod Paige, too many important people had bet too heavily on the success of She to allow any such scandal to gain traction.
But somehow, in a whole nation of cheats, the folks in Atlanta were the ones who were caught and slapped, an entire library thrown at them.
There's a whole conversation to be had about the ethics of following bad, damaging destructive laws. If you are in Nazi Germany, is it okay to lie about the Jewish family hiding in your attic? If a gunman asks if there are a bunch of five year olds in the classroom behind you, is it okay to lie? If somebody wants to destroy a school that you have built into a haven of peace and positive growth for the community, is it okay to lie to hold them off?
These can be hard questions, but here's one other thing I know-- when a system pressures people to lie in order to survive, bad things happen when they don't lie, and worse things happen when they do.
If you want a stunning example of a lie-fueled reporting system in action, take a look at the Great Chinese Famine of the fifties and sixties, a story all the more remarkable because it's still not widely known outside of China or widely acknowledged within it.
The simple outline is this. Mao decided that he would remake the Chinese economy in the Great Leap Forward (1958) by simply dragging farmers off the farm, taking every scrap of metal that could be rounded up, and building an industrial economy in the cities. He would do this without hurting the food supply by setting quotas for the districts, requiring farmers to make their numbers, or else. The district's farms, stripped of resources and manpower, could not make their numbers, but in Mao's China, nobody wanted to face the "or else." Some tried to broach the subject, but were told that was defeatist thinking-- did they not believe in the mighty power of China's farms? And so everyone made their numbers by lying.
On paper, China in the sixties was doing just fine. In reality, the country was in the grip of man-made famine. The Chinese government now admits to a death toll of 20 million; some writers estimate as many as 36 million. Officials commandeered more grain in some district than existed. Peoples' deaths went unreported so that survivors could keep collecting food rations.
So much weight was put on the measure of food production that to this day, there's no accurate measure of the reality in existence.
When you create a machine that is so badly engineered that it can only work when heavily lubricated by lies, that machine will never do any of the work it was supposedly built for. It will just chew things up and make a destructive mess. What is the moral response to an immoral system?
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if nobody anywhere had lied about test results, if the feds had been forced to confront a nationwide epidemic of "failing" schools, more than could have been milked for profits by charter profiteers and corporate raiders. Would someone have said, "Well, that can't be right" or would we be looking at millions of unemployed educators and a public ed system completely gutted.
The Atlanta cheaters were wrong. What they did was wrong. So were the people who created the system that put those educators in a no-win situation. The Atlanta teachers were in trouble from the moment they were given numbers to make that could not be made; they were doomed to be either failures or cheats. There are no heroes in the Atlanta story, but when counting up the wrong-doers, it would be a grievous error to stop with the eleven people who just went to jail.
You can get a pretty full picture of the story from these two articles-- the New Yorker in depth piece from 2014 and the Atlantic article that accompanied the verdict.
Much of the ground has been covered. The teachers did a Very Bad Thing and their punishment is earned. The teachers' crime is also an indictment of the system we're currently operating under. There are just a few more thoughts that occur to me.
First, I'm stuck by how hard the teachers at Parks Middle School were trying. This was not teachers trying to game the test scores so that they could back to napping in the lounge and showing videos all day. This was a school where, by all accounts, they were trying everything they could think of in the face of serious challenges, and they were moving forward and creating success-- just not enough of the right kind of success.
In a world without No Child Left Behind, Parks Middle School would have been called a success, a school that was slowly turning around not just its students, but its neighborhood. The cheaters were not trying to save their cushy paychecks or no-stress sinecures-- they were trying to defend the little success that they had managed to create.
Nothing I've read really addresses this, but I would bet that nobody at Parks thought they would have to manage the charade for years. Remember-- from 2007 on we all lived in hope that Congress would rewrite ESEA any day now and the ridiculous imperatives for unattainable test scores would go away. When a new administration was chosen in 2008, that hope became even stronger. In my school, as in many schools, the mantra became, "Let's just figure out how to get through this year, and maybe by next year things will be different." I get a sinking hollow in my gut just imagining the growing horror at Parks as each passing year dug them deeper into the growing pit of lies they were digging for themselves.
I can't condone a thing they did. But it would be cheap of me to condemn them for failing a test I've never had to take. That's why I particularly value the insights of someone like Adell Cothorne, a whistleblower who used to work in DC in the heart of the big Cheating Scandal That Never Happened and who wrote a full response to the convictions for Mercedes Schneider in which she said this:
Do I condone what they did in reference to manipulating students’ tests? No I do not – in any way, shape, or form.
Do I understand why they participated in these egregious acts? I do!
By 2010, it was clear to anybody who was paying attention that there were increasingly only two types of schools in America-- schools that were failing and schools that were cheating.
The fate of the Atlanta cheaters stands in stark contrast to the fate of teachers and administrators cheating across the US. Can I pull up a list and name them? No, nor would I. But I don't doubt for a fraction of a second that hundreds upon hundreds of schools in this country survived the insanely unattainable politically-set requirements of federal reform by cheating in ways big and small. This can't be a surprise-- school reform's first big exemplar was the Texas Miracle, which turned out to be nothing more than creative accounting and magic tracking. The federal government literally paraded a big fat lie in front of schools as if it were a model and then said, "Okay, now YOU do that, too!"
We've heard whisperings of cheating from across the country since then, with reports of questionable test erasures to results that just raise your eyebrows right off your face. The biggest marquee Cheating Scandal That Never Was didn't occur in DC under the watchful eye of She Who Will Not Be Named, but as with the Texas miracle of Rod Paige, too many important people had bet too heavily on the success of She to allow any such scandal to gain traction.
But somehow, in a whole nation of cheats, the folks in Atlanta were the ones who were caught and slapped, an entire library thrown at them.
There's a whole conversation to be had about the ethics of following bad, damaging destructive laws. If you are in Nazi Germany, is it okay to lie about the Jewish family hiding in your attic? If a gunman asks if there are a bunch of five year olds in the classroom behind you, is it okay to lie? If somebody wants to destroy a school that you have built into a haven of peace and positive growth for the community, is it okay to lie to hold them off?
These can be hard questions, but here's one other thing I know-- when a system pressures people to lie in order to survive, bad things happen when they don't lie, and worse things happen when they do.
If you want a stunning example of a lie-fueled reporting system in action, take a look at the Great Chinese Famine of the fifties and sixties, a story all the more remarkable because it's still not widely known outside of China or widely acknowledged within it.
The simple outline is this. Mao decided that he would remake the Chinese economy in the Great Leap Forward (1958) by simply dragging farmers off the farm, taking every scrap of metal that could be rounded up, and building an industrial economy in the cities. He would do this without hurting the food supply by setting quotas for the districts, requiring farmers to make their numbers, or else. The district's farms, stripped of resources and manpower, could not make their numbers, but in Mao's China, nobody wanted to face the "or else." Some tried to broach the subject, but were told that was defeatist thinking-- did they not believe in the mighty power of China's farms? And so everyone made their numbers by lying.
On paper, China in the sixties was doing just fine. In reality, the country was in the grip of man-made famine. The Chinese government now admits to a death toll of 20 million; some writers estimate as many as 36 million. Officials commandeered more grain in some district than existed. Peoples' deaths went unreported so that survivors could keep collecting food rations.
So much weight was put on the measure of food production that to this day, there's no accurate measure of the reality in existence.
When you create a machine that is so badly engineered that it can only work when heavily lubricated by lies, that machine will never do any of the work it was supposedly built for. It will just chew things up and make a destructive mess. What is the moral response to an immoral system?
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if nobody anywhere had lied about test results, if the feds had been forced to confront a nationwide epidemic of "failing" schools, more than could have been milked for profits by charter profiteers and corporate raiders. Would someone have said, "Well, that can't be right" or would we be looking at millions of unemployed educators and a public ed system completely gutted.
The Atlanta cheaters were wrong. What they did was wrong. So were the people who created the system that put those educators in a no-win situation. The Atlanta teachers were in trouble from the moment they were given numbers to make that could not be made; they were doomed to be either failures or cheats. There are no heroes in the Atlanta story, but when counting up the wrong-doers, it would be a grievous error to stop with the eleven people who just went to jail.
Hess: Helping Policymakers Make Policy
As part of the ongoing online conversation tied to the upcoming (or already-ongoing) launch of his Cage Busting Teachers, Rick Hess yesterday offered four pieces of advice for "how public employees can thrive in public bureaucracies." That is not a bad way to look at the problem, but I believe some of his specific advice needs tweaking. Here are his four tips.
First, believe it or not, teachers have a sympathetic audience.
I think that's true. I've said before that one of the lessons real teachers can learn from Teach for America is that there are a whole bunch of folks out there who think that supporting teachers is a Noble and Good. There is still plenty of public support for teachers and the teaching profession.
But Hess is being disingenuous when he quotes a Teaching Ambassador who says, "What fascinated me was this perception that folks at [the U.S. Department of Education] would look at us and think, 'They're just teachers.'" This is on par with Arne Duncan saying, "I just don't understand why states are putting so much emphasis on standardized testing."
There are sympathetic folks among policymakers, but there are also policymakers like Andrew Cuomo who have been quite explicit in explaining that teachers are what's wrong with the education system and they have to be rooted out and brought to heel. And the USED does in fact enlist teacher ambassadors, who are carefully screened and vetted and allowed to visit the table from time to time. But a teacher would have to have lived under a rock not to have noticed that our last decade of school reform has been implemented without any attempt to include teachers in the design of policy, and also implemented with the foundational assumption (sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit) that teachers are a problem to be fixed and not experts and collaborators to be included.
So teachers do have some sympathetic folks in the policymaker audience, but we also have some folks who have already declared us public education enemy number one. Hess's advice is useful up to a point-- teachers should not assume that just because someone is a bureaucrat or reformster that he must also hate or disrespect teachers-- but it's pretty clear at this stage of the game that many policymakers are not at all interested in what teachers have to say.
Second, keep in mind that policymakers can make people do things, but they can't make them do them well.
This is one of Hess's more useful insights, and he has offered it more than a few times as an explanation of why some aspects of education reform are such a clusterfinagle. And his explanation of the idea here is illuminating.
Worse, policymakers know that their good ideas often go south once they're implemented, which makes them hesitant to trust those on the ground. That's why they're eager to find sympathetic professionals who can help figure out how to ensure that policies actually do what they're supposed to do. Policymakers aren't writing laws for people they know and trust; they're writing them for strangers who they're entrusting with the public's kids.
He quotes Randy Dorn, who has worked on every side of the ed-and-legislation biz. Dorn points out that politics are about relationships. This points to what I've always considered the huge disadvantage of teachers (and many other professionals)-- we have jobs, and we work all day. The power of a lobbyist is not just that he can promise money and toys and assistance-- it's that he doesn't have to be anywhere else during the day. The lobbyist is free to hang around capitals and create personal relationships with legislators all day every day, while working Americans are busy doing their actual jobs, thereby remaining strangers to the policymakers.
Hess's point is that since policy is a blunt instrument, legislators are looking for partners to help them make the policy work. I frankly don't have an answer for this. I have a job. I work for a living. I can't hop in the car and make the four hour drive to Harrisburg to let legislators get to know my face and understand where I'm coming from, and while I'd like to put the burden of connecting with constituents on them, they've got a job to do, too. And often that reach comes too late. If, as Hess writes, they're looking for professionals to help make the policy work as it should, they've already skipped the part where they should have asked the professionals advice about creating the policy in the first place.
Third, keep in mind that rules are written heavy-handedly . . . on purpose, with an eye to stopping obvious stupidity.
Nope. Don't buy this one. This is, in fact, why many rules don't work. When you try to strap everyone into the same constricting straightjacket, two things happen. First, your good actors, the people who were doing a good job and were a positive force-- those folks are diminished and made less effective because you've got them all wrapped up in this regulatory straightjacket. Second, the obvious stupidity that you set out to stop goes on anyway, or reappears in a different form.
Oh, and a third thing-- your rule is so obviously dumb and heavy-handed that you reduce everyone's respect for and adherence with your rules, so that over time you think you have to be even more heavy-handed which hampers your good people even more and creates brand new forms of bad stupidity and makes it hard to get anybody to pay attention to you even when you do have a good rule to implement.
How do I know this? Because it's Basic Classroom Management 101. It is bad policy for running my classroom, and it is bad policy for running a state or country. If this is how rules are written, then we've located one of policymakers basic huge mistakes.
Fourth, when educators do get the chance to speak to policymakers or in public hearings, they often do so in ways that don't help their cause.
Yeah, I'd like to deny this one, but I can't. Too many folks have this mental image of standing up before Power and speaking out in Righteous Indignation a Truth of such blinding, burning strength that their opponents cower and say, sadly, "Yes, I see now that I am a terrible person who has been terribly wrong, and now I will do what you ask and beg forgiveness for being such an ass." The internet has not helped. And yet, this scenario plays out in real life exactly none times.
That is not to say that the old objection of, "Well, we just can't listen to you when you're so rude and strident" holds up. People keep raising their voices till they the believe they've been heard. , and a lot of people in education have been feeling ignored for a while now. The rule here is simple: if you don't want people to scream at you, listen to them when they talk to you. But Hess is correct-- when you get the chance to be heard, you have to consider your audience.
Now, I don't agree with all of Hess's specific examples of this. For instance, his number one is "Don't ask for money." This must not apply to everyone, because the charter school lobby keeps asking for money, and they keep getting it. For that matter, public education is not always asking for more money so much as it's asking to at least keep them money that it has previously received. One of the mottos of ed reform continues to be, "Throwing money at public schools is wasteful, but throwing money at charters and ed-related corporations is awesome."
But he is absolutely correct that in dealing with policymakers, or any other carbon-based life forms, it is most effective to frame your own requests in terms of how they will address your audience's concerns. Any presentation to anybody must, at some point, address the question of Why You Should Care. The blunt force answer in politics is "You should care because if you don't at least act like you agree with me, I will make your re-election very hard," and that has its place. But policymakers do have concerns of their own, and they are worth factoring into any attempt to influence them.
Of course, what Hess doesn't address is that in the current ed reform landscape, there are some influential figures whose interests have no overlap at all with the interests of teachers. More importantly, the basic requisite for these kinds of conversations is for all parties to be honest about their concerns, and the reformster landscape is littered with people who show no signs of being remotely honest about what they want and what their goals are. To have these kinds of conversation, we have to have trust, and to have trust, we have to have honesty, and many policymakers and the influential figures who are trying to call shots haven't brought that quality to the table yet.
First, believe it or not, teachers have a sympathetic audience.
I think that's true. I've said before that one of the lessons real teachers can learn from Teach for America is that there are a whole bunch of folks out there who think that supporting teachers is a Noble and Good. There is still plenty of public support for teachers and the teaching profession.
But Hess is being disingenuous when he quotes a Teaching Ambassador who says, "What fascinated me was this perception that folks at [the U.S. Department of Education] would look at us and think, 'They're just teachers.'" This is on par with Arne Duncan saying, "I just don't understand why states are putting so much emphasis on standardized testing."
There are sympathetic folks among policymakers, but there are also policymakers like Andrew Cuomo who have been quite explicit in explaining that teachers are what's wrong with the education system and they have to be rooted out and brought to heel. And the USED does in fact enlist teacher ambassadors, who are carefully screened and vetted and allowed to visit the table from time to time. But a teacher would have to have lived under a rock not to have noticed that our last decade of school reform has been implemented without any attempt to include teachers in the design of policy, and also implemented with the foundational assumption (sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit) that teachers are a problem to be fixed and not experts and collaborators to be included.
So teachers do have some sympathetic folks in the policymaker audience, but we also have some folks who have already declared us public education enemy number one. Hess's advice is useful up to a point-- teachers should not assume that just because someone is a bureaucrat or reformster that he must also hate or disrespect teachers-- but it's pretty clear at this stage of the game that many policymakers are not at all interested in what teachers have to say.
Second, keep in mind that policymakers can make people do things, but they can't make them do them well.
This is one of Hess's more useful insights, and he has offered it more than a few times as an explanation of why some aspects of education reform are such a clusterfinagle. And his explanation of the idea here is illuminating.
Worse, policymakers know that their good ideas often go south once they're implemented, which makes them hesitant to trust those on the ground. That's why they're eager to find sympathetic professionals who can help figure out how to ensure that policies actually do what they're supposed to do. Policymakers aren't writing laws for people they know and trust; they're writing them for strangers who they're entrusting with the public's kids.
He quotes Randy Dorn, who has worked on every side of the ed-and-legislation biz. Dorn points out that politics are about relationships. This points to what I've always considered the huge disadvantage of teachers (and many other professionals)-- we have jobs, and we work all day. The power of a lobbyist is not just that he can promise money and toys and assistance-- it's that he doesn't have to be anywhere else during the day. The lobbyist is free to hang around capitals and create personal relationships with legislators all day every day, while working Americans are busy doing their actual jobs, thereby remaining strangers to the policymakers.
Hess's point is that since policy is a blunt instrument, legislators are looking for partners to help them make the policy work. I frankly don't have an answer for this. I have a job. I work for a living. I can't hop in the car and make the four hour drive to Harrisburg to let legislators get to know my face and understand where I'm coming from, and while I'd like to put the burden of connecting with constituents on them, they've got a job to do, too. And often that reach comes too late. If, as Hess writes, they're looking for professionals to help make the policy work as it should, they've already skipped the part where they should have asked the professionals advice about creating the policy in the first place.
Third, keep in mind that rules are written heavy-handedly . . . on purpose, with an eye to stopping obvious stupidity.
Nope. Don't buy this one. This is, in fact, why many rules don't work. When you try to strap everyone into the same constricting straightjacket, two things happen. First, your good actors, the people who were doing a good job and were a positive force-- those folks are diminished and made less effective because you've got them all wrapped up in this regulatory straightjacket. Second, the obvious stupidity that you set out to stop goes on anyway, or reappears in a different form.
Oh, and a third thing-- your rule is so obviously dumb and heavy-handed that you reduce everyone's respect for and adherence with your rules, so that over time you think you have to be even more heavy-handed which hampers your good people even more and creates brand new forms of bad stupidity and makes it hard to get anybody to pay attention to you even when you do have a good rule to implement.
How do I know this? Because it's Basic Classroom Management 101. It is bad policy for running my classroom, and it is bad policy for running a state or country. If this is how rules are written, then we've located one of policymakers basic huge mistakes.
Fourth, when educators do get the chance to speak to policymakers or in public hearings, they often do so in ways that don't help their cause.
Yeah, I'd like to deny this one, but I can't. Too many folks have this mental image of standing up before Power and speaking out in Righteous Indignation a Truth of such blinding, burning strength that their opponents cower and say, sadly, "Yes, I see now that I am a terrible person who has been terribly wrong, and now I will do what you ask and beg forgiveness for being such an ass." The internet has not helped. And yet, this scenario plays out in real life exactly none times.
That is not to say that the old objection of, "Well, we just can't listen to you when you're so rude and strident" holds up. People keep raising their voices till they the believe they've been heard. , and a lot of people in education have been feeling ignored for a while now. The rule here is simple: if you don't want people to scream at you, listen to them when they talk to you. But Hess is correct-- when you get the chance to be heard, you have to consider your audience.
Now, I don't agree with all of Hess's specific examples of this. For instance, his number one is "Don't ask for money." This must not apply to everyone, because the charter school lobby keeps asking for money, and they keep getting it. For that matter, public education is not always asking for more money so much as it's asking to at least keep them money that it has previously received. One of the mottos of ed reform continues to be, "Throwing money at public schools is wasteful, but throwing money at charters and ed-related corporations is awesome."
But he is absolutely correct that in dealing with policymakers, or any other carbon-based life forms, it is most effective to frame your own requests in terms of how they will address your audience's concerns. Any presentation to anybody must, at some point, address the question of Why You Should Care. The blunt force answer in politics is "You should care because if you don't at least act like you agree with me, I will make your re-election very hard," and that has its place. But policymakers do have concerns of their own, and they are worth factoring into any attempt to influence them.
Of course, what Hess doesn't address is that in the current ed reform landscape, there are some influential figures whose interests have no overlap at all with the interests of teachers. More importantly, the basic requisite for these kinds of conversations is for all parties to be honest about their concerns, and the reformster landscape is littered with people who show no signs of being remotely honest about what they want and what their goals are. To have these kinds of conversation, we have to have trust, and to have trust, we have to have honesty, and many policymakers and the influential figures who are trying to call shots haven't brought that quality to the table yet.
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