If I Had Been in Atlanta

Much has been written about the conviction of the Atlanta teachers from the standpoint of society-- how should we react, should they have been convicted, how should they be punished, what this tells us about the system, etc. Here's a great article comparing their fates to the fates of our economy-crushing housing crisis creators. Here's what one of my favorite political writers, Jason Linkins, had to say. And here, tied more closely to testing policy, is what blogger Stephen Singer had to say. And if you'd like the background of how this happened, last year's New Yorker article is thorough.

But as I've watched this unfold and read through many reactions to the prosecution and conviction, I find myself coming back to the more personal question--

What would I have done if I had been in Atlanta?

Most teachers have a visceral reaction to cheating-- bad, wrong, don't, don't ever, ever, ever, ever do it. I'm no different. Cheating is wrong. Dishonesty is wrong. And, frankly, I've made enough mistakes in my own life to know that sick-at-gut feeling of living dishonestly, to know it personally and to live with a pretty strong commitment to never feeling it again.

But I'm not in Atlanta.

I teach in a small town high school in a rural area that is mostly free of the high-pressure troubles of poor urban schools. We're pretty unwealthy ourselves, but here in the hinterlands, there aren't a lot of charters and privateers trying to crack open the market. We're also the only high school in the district, so we don't have people breathing down our necks with score sheets in one hand and demolition plans in the other.

I also teach for bosses who are not score-obsessed or threatening to end my career if I don't make my numbers. The state may slowly be losing its mind with teacher evaluations, but my bosses still judge me on how well I teach.

So I'm not in Atlanta. I'm not working under the constant threat of punishment for crazy factors beyond my control. So if I stand up and nobly proclaim that I am 100% certain I would never do what those teachers in Atlanta were convicted of doing (and what so many other teachers across the country have not been convicted of doing), I would be talking out of some orifice other than my mouth.

I know some of the factors I would consider.

I think one of the worst results of the cheating in Atlanta (and in DC and Philly and Houston) is that cheating on tests has bolstered the illusion that reform is working.

Teachers are often terrible institutional enablers. Somebody up the line makes a bad policy choice, and rather than let our students suffer for that choice, we "fix" it on the classroom level. This solves the problem for the current students, but it also gives the administration the impression that the policy works just great.

Sometimes it's necessary to step back and allow a single small mess in the present to avoid huge systemic ongoing disasters in the future. It is one of the things I wonder-- how much longer did No Child Left Behind keep chewing up education because all of us in the classroom were doing our best to make it look as if NCLB were actually working?

But thinking about that would also remind me that we lie and cheat on the small scale all the time. We put our name on all manner of paperwork, from fictitious lesson plans to dust-collecting standards alignment documents, with no intention of pledging ourselves to pay attention. In teaching, nodding your head and signing your name to baloney is part of the normal price of admission. Raise your hand if you've never fudged a student's grade for your own class. Yeah, that's what I thought.

We accept it because we think of it as paperwork that doesn't matter, that has no bearing on the real work we do. I don't consider the Pennsylvania's Big Standardized Test anything more than a time-wasting big pile of useless baloney; linking it to threats against my professional future won't make me respect it any more, but my lack of respect for it would probably make it easier to cross that line.

Bob Schaeffer of Fairtest says, given the overuse and abuse of standardized testing, "It is hardly surprising that more school professionals cross the ethical line."

But here's the thing-- all teachers were pushed across an ethical line years ago. No Child Left Behind codified a whole raft of educational malpractice. It required, among other things, that teachers treat the big Standardized Test as the gold standard of what education is about. It required that we tell our students, "Nothing is more important to your future than getting a good score on the BS Test." And as most of us recognize, that is a lie. It is especially a lie for poor students who lack both the skills to excel at test taking and who also lack much of what they need beyond test-taking ability. It's like taking poor kids to the store, handing them ten dollars, and saying, "Now, the only thing you need to plan a great menu for the week is this fifteen-dollar case of Twinkies."

The Atlanta teachers were over the ethical line from the moment NCLB was made law. They could either follow the letter of the law, stop doing the things that were turning their school around and focus on a bogus test for a system that would inevitably chew them up, or they could try to trick the system into sparing them in hopes that some students could eventually be saved. Both choices are unethical, but one choice was far more likely to serve the interests of the students-- at least in the short term.

NCLB and much education reform nonsense makes me angry precisely because it gives me a lose-lose choice. I can break the rules and commit educational malpractice, or I can do what I know professionally is correct and break some rules while doing it. Or I can, as most teachers do, try to create some sort of clever parquet out of the two and tap dance my way through the teaching day.
Teaching has, in one short generation, turned from a profession with extraordinary ethical clarity into one of shadows and greyness and compromises that we make with the system, our students, and ourselves.

If I had been in Atlanta, what would I have done?

The honest answer is that I don't know. I might have refused to cheat at all and instead tried to wave my hands and draw attention to the crash and burn that followed, but the modern ed reform approach has been crashing and burning, with virtually no successes to speak of, for over a decade-- and nobody in power seems to care.

So I might have decided to try to save my kids and my school, and I might have stepped into it by increments, until I was confronted by the horror of people trying to laud my "success" publicly.
I might have looked for other work, if I could, but I am a nester and when I put down roots in a community, I'm unlikely to pick up. I might have left the profession, but it would have been bitter to abandon my students to someone else willing to live on the wrong side of the ethically line. I might have become obnoxious and angry, that guy who makes everyone's eyes roll in staff meetings, and blogged angrily as well, until I managed to get myself reprimanded and fired for insubordination. Except in all those cases, a decade ago I would have had to face the prosepct of being a divorced dad with kids to look out for.

One of my fundamental beliefs about life is that, no matter how dark the place you find yourself, no matter how many wrong choices you have made, there is always a right choice open to you. So it is a hard thing for me to imagine that there were no good choices available for the Atlanta teachers (or all the other cheating teachers who haven't been arrested or ruined). But I wasn't there, and I have no way of knowing exactly what choices they faced.

And yet there is something baldfaced and ugly about taking out an eraser and changing the answers on a test. It seems like a bigger jump. But is it?

Making ethical choices in unethical circumstances is damned hard. It would be great if the Powers That Be recognized the conviction of the Atlanta teachers as what it is-- a sign that the system is horribly out of whack. It would be great if the Powers That Be recognized that a teacher who changes answers on a test is not the equivalent of a dangerous organized crime figure who needs to be locked up for the safety of society. I'm not holding my breath.

Instead, I'm just remembering to hoping that my big Atlanta moment never comes, but if it does, that I recognize it and that I find a choice that I can live with.

Originally posted in View from the Cheap Seats

Duncan's Regrets

Arne Duncan put in an appearance at the Education Writers' Association conference and allowed himself to be interviewed by Motoko Rich of the New York Times. Alyson Klein of EdWeek was there (because she's a real education writer and not some lousy blogger), and she reported some of the highlights of that interview. I'm going to look at some highlights of the highlights because, as usual, Duncan has some moments that make one question who, exactly, is this man who has been put in charge of a nation's education system.

Duncan regrets waiting so long to implement waivers. In hindsight, he thinks they wasted time waiting for Congress to get to rewriting the ESEA, and you know, I can almost sympathize with him on this-- until I remember that Congress is composed of people democratically elected to handle the writing of laws in this country, and Arne Duncan is neither 1) elected or 2) charged with writing the laws of this country.

But it is interesting that, contrary to the usual lines about ed reform being rolled out too fast, Duncan thinks it wasn't rolled out fast enough.

He underlines this when asked if maybe the simultaneous rollout of new testing and systems linking teacher evaluation to that same new testing-- well, maybe that was all a bit much. Klein quotes Arne:

It's been a lot of change, it's been a lot of change fast, it's absolutely been rocky and bumpy in some places. ... But for me the question is, how do you get better, faster?

I think I know the answer to that last question and, in brief, the answer is "Not like this." And maybe I'd also suggest that faster is not always better. But then I'd probably illustrate it with some sophomoric example, so I'll just not make that point.

A question brings up that whole testing and opt-out and people hating the testing thing. Duncan tries to once again suggest that he totally gets it and totally called for folks to back off on excess and unnecessary testing, by which he means state and local testing, which is another way of asserting that the Big Standardized Tests are the most important tests being given in schools, which I'd say is exactly backwards, and the BS Tests are the least necessary and useful and if we are going to throw a test over the side of the lifeboat for being fat and useless and repeatedly eating the supply of biscuits when it doesn't think anyone is looking, well, that test that had better start swimming is the Big Fat Standardized PARCC/SBA/WTF test.

He also makes his equity point, that folks in the civil rights and disability community want their kids tested, and I've heard this from enough places that I believe it, but I still believe those folks are being hoodwinked, because 1) we don't need a test to tell us that poor urban schools need help and 2) in ten years of this testing regimen, we haven't lifted a dollar to actually help the schools that have been identified as being in trouble.

Asked why he likes the Congress ESEA rewrite and not the House one, Arne says that seeing Congressional bipartisanship gives him goosebumps, and the Title I portability idea sucks. On this particular point, I think he's actually correct. Portability is one more way to take money away from poor schools (and help charter operators get rich). That is not good for anybody (except charter operators).

Asked about his plan to rate colleges, Duncan said, "Necessary colleges expensive argle bargle blerg."

Someone asked Arne when he would take funding away from a college that failed to satisfy Title IX. Duncan replied, "We'll take away federal funding when we need to." Klein called this non-specific, but I would call it awesomely non-responsive. It's rare when Arne just goes ahead and says, "Screw you. I'll do it the way I wanna" and I find those moments bracing in their honesty.

Asked about the digital divide, Arne fell back on a more standard Duncanswer, which is a wordy version of "That is a true thing that you have said, and I certainly heard you say it." It mimics reflexive listening and agreement, even if he has no idea what to answer. In fact, the Duncanswer format is exactly like the proper response to a writing prompt on a Big Standardized Test-- even if you don't understand the question, you can still recycle enough words from it to create a topic sentence and maybe even the first few paragraphs. You can see it in his dyslexia grilling, too. The Duncanswer. Remember, you heard it here first.

Asked about his biggest regret, Duncan models the non-apology apology. He doesn't regret anything he did including the white suburban moms crack (gosh, he's just a straight-shooter who speaks from his heart), but he does regret that Congress sucks and can't get its job done.

He also regrets that all of America sucks in its inability to think that education is really important, proof once again that Arne needs to get out and speak to regular non-government non-screened carbon-based life forms. It's a question that begs a follow-up-- who exactly is it that does not consider education a national priority? Your boss the CIC? Congress? All the parents? All the teachers? All the Americans pre-occupied with keeping their families fed and sheltered? Boy, I would really like to hear the rest of the explanation behind that idea, if he didn't try to dodge it completely. Which would be the Duncancover. You're welcome.

The Culture of Compliance

Last night I attended a school board meeting at a nearby district where they are struggling, like all Pennsylvania school districts, with financial problems.

Culprit #1 is the pension system. For a variety of reasons, school districts must contribute an amount equal to roughly 21% of their payroll this year to the pension fund. Next year it will be 25%. In a few years it will finally top out at 32%.

Culprit #2 is the cyber charter system, which sucks enormous amounts of blood from local districts. At the meeting, the treasurer listed off the monthly payment as well as the year-end total. It would be enough to keep their soon-to-be-closed elementary school open.

As the expense was explained, one board member said, "That's just nuts." Another board member said, "Well, let's just not pay it." And there was a sort of awkward silence.

Now, practically speaking, it would be a fruitless gesture. Presumably the state would simply garnish the district's subsidy payments, perhaps levy a fine. And it can be dicey to go head to head with the state-- a few decades back Philadelphia schools decided to play financial chicken with Harrisburg and lost local control. So withholding charter payments may or may not be a wise idea.

But the moment reminded me once again of how thoroughly the education system is saturated in the culture of compliance.

It is, frankly, one of the worst things about how we sometimes run schools and classrooms. When I was first starting out, it suddenly hit me like a bathtub full of icy water that when some of my colleagues talked about excellent and outstanding students, they were not talking about students who were whip smart or highly curious or uniquely driven or bold thinkers-- they were talking about students who behaved themselves, who did as they were told, who were cheerfully and fully compliant.

In my career, I have occasionally butted heads experienced philosophical differences with colleagues who don't just want their students to learn the material, but to be happy and grateful about it, to have the Right Attitude. I once worked for a man who equated letting students get away with dress code violations with letting students walk around shooting people.

We love rules. I would argue we love them way too much, and our love of the rules permeates the institution from top to bottom.

This is a lesson we could actually learn from the business world. My brother, who comes from the world of manufacturing, served on the school board for years. He would tell versions of the following story: "In the meeting administration would talk about some stupid rule from the state and we would all agree that it was a stupid rule. Then I would say, 'Well, let's just ignore it' and everyone would look at me like I had two heads one of which spoke Greek." But in parts of the business world, rules are not king. If a rule is stupid, you ignore it. And if you're supposed to pay somebody, but they are doing a crappy job or hurting your business, you withhold payment to get their attention and start a conversation.

Sure, too much of that gets you companies violating important rule and doing real damage. But so does doing as you're told without thinking about whether that's a good idea or not. The world is filled with folks who live somewhere between the Land of Anarchy and the Culture of Compliance.

Compliance is so hard-wired into schools that most educational regulations do not have any substantial oversight-- they just assume that schools and teachers will do as they're told.

True story. Pennsylvania has a law that says your school year must be done by a particular date, which means a teacher strike can't extend beyond a number of days. When we were on strike over a decade ago, we needed to figure out what that date was, so both the union and the district tried to find somebody in Harrisburg who could tell us for sure when the end date for the strike would have to be and, just for fun, what the penalty would be if we went over. Not only could we not find anybody in Harrisburg who could answer the question, we couldn't even find someone who would admit that their office was supposed to know the answer. We finally picked a final date to agree on-- it was one of the first points of agreement in the whole negotiation. There was no enforcement mechanism to go with the law-- apparently they had just assumed that if there was a law about school stuff, everyone involved would be sure to follow it.

In this one respect, the creators of Common Core actually read the room pretty well. "Once we put this out there as the Official Approved Standards," they must have thought, "teachers will pretty much fall in line, because they always follow the rules no matter what."

Meanwhile, we've been taking these crappy high stakes tests for years because that's what we were told we were supposed to do. In the face of the opt out movement, we still have education folks sputtering that of course you have to take the test because that's just what you're supposed to do because if you don't, Bad Things Will Happen (and go on your Permanent Record).

If there is any remotely good thing to come out of the last decade-plus of reformster nonsense, it's a growing awareness among teachers and parents and even administrators that we cannot simply comply with whatever comes down the pike, no matter what official seals of officially officialness are pasted all over it.

My dream world is not filled with anarchy and chaos, but I'm not deeply attached to order and rules and compliance, either. Our best students should be our most challenging ones, and sometimes being challenged is uncomfortable and hard and pushes us out of the EZ lane. But it's the best way to grow and rise and become fully human, fully ourselves. So that means challenges for the students, challenges for us, and challenges for edu-leaders of all stripes who were hoping we would just shut up and sit down and behave because that's what we're supposed to do. I am always open to new ideas, new techniques, new insights, new understands, but none of those come into town riding on the back of Because I Said So or This Is The New Required Policy.

Compliance never leads to excellence. Never. Don't make trouble just to make trouble, but don't put up with wasteful, toxic, destructive nonsense just to avoid trouble, either. Compliance is not a virtue-- not in us, not in our students, not in our leaders.

EdPost and VIVA Serve Reheated CCSS Leftovers

In the ongoing search for a Common Core PR bump, Education Post with the use of VIVA Idea Exchange has issued a report, trotted out for the convention of the Education Writers Association (a group that has steadfastly expunged bloggers and other ne'er-do-wells from its consideration, but I'm not bitter).

The report "Common Core State Standards: the Key To Student Success" has a weird retro vibe, like someone stashed it in a drawer in early 2013 and only just now dug it out. But Education Post is a group that has been bankrolled to promote and push the Core (which, among other things, creates the spectacle of a raft of Democratic operatives working hard to smooth Jeb Bush's path to the White House). Peter Cunningham, former mouthpiece for Arne Duncan's USED, reportedly got a cool $12 million to launch the rapid response PR machine, but I am going to go ahead and take a look at their nifty everything-old-is-new-again report for free.

Note: Education Post's name has been carefully omitted from the report itself, but still proudly sits atop the press release for it.

The use of VIVA represents an attempt to involve authentic teacher voices in this report. There are ten authentic teachers listed on the Writing Collective for this, plus one moderator. If you want a picture of how well that flies, scoot on over to Living in Dialogue and Anthony Cody's recent series about how that very thing turned out (spoiler alert: not all that great for authentic teacher voices). The report features four recommendations, all of which will strike you as vaguely familiar.

Recommendation 1: Clearly Acknowledge that the Common Core and Curricula are Two Different Things.

Yes, it's that golden oldie, "The standards aren't curriculum at all." Like many writers in the field, I've addressed this question many times. But the report wants teachers to get out there and convince people that the standards aren't curricula, while sharing all of their CCSS-aligned curricula. But in the meantime, the phrase "common core curriculum" turns up in marketing materials all over the place. Core supporters lost this one over a year ago.

The report shoots itself in the foot by offering an analogy-- all lasagna has the same basic ingredients, but no two chefs make it exactly the same. So.... what? The Core is not restrictive and one size fits all? In Core land, you can eat anything you like and select anything from the vast and exciting array of foods known to humans-- as long as it's lasagna. You can make lasagna with a little more ricotta cheese, or a bit more basil, and you can make it in a rectangular pan or square pan, so you totally have all sorts of freedom. If I had looked for an analogy to show that, when it comes to Common Core, standards vs. curriculum is a distinction without a difference, I could not have done any better myself.

What exactly do they recommend? Get out there and sell the Core, because according to that bogus Edutopia poll, folks love it. Also, make a culture in which teachers are involved "in every part of educational policy-making implementation," which will be hard since the very existence of CCSS means that ship has sailed (and no teachers were allowed). Basically, we really need to get teachers on the team here.

Recommendation 2: Restructure the Way Schools Engage Parents, Families, and Community Members with the Common Core in the Academic, Emotional, and Social Education of Their Children. 

In other words, do some community outreach PR for the core. Proposed solutions include "Share Evidence that the Common Core State Standards Provide Opportunities for All Students Regardless of Background or Economic Privilege." Which is tricky since no such evidence exists. And in fact the breakdown for specific actions under this item includes-- well, sharing the PARCC timeline and keeping a blog.

Or how about some five-minute videos of happy children talking about their Common Core success stories. We could show them at "family universities" designed to alleviate frustration. There's a lot of recognition of the need to work with diverse cultural backgrounds and to help overcome the issues of poverty. At times you can almost see where the authentic teacher voices have been grafted right onto the authentic client message that VIVA was hired to articulate.

Recommendation 3: Change the Concept of “School” from Just a Building Where Our Children Sit All Day, to a Place of Community Identity and Opportunity.

"The Core is starting to make children and their families hate school. Try to fix that." They don't get into many concrete recommendations here, but off the top of my head I'm thinking that putting back all the things schools had before CCSS and testing drained resources and forced schools to focus on test prep-- that might be a good start.

But basically we're looking for ways to help parents with their kids' homework, because the Common Core is making parents feel frustrated and dumb. So let's pass on some of the CCSS training that we haven't finished giving to teachers yet. That should do it.

By gifting families with new tools for success, teachers increase school-home communication. In return, teachers get partners who can monitor homework and ensure that students are physically, emotionally, and mentally prepared for active learning throughout the day. 

Oh, Core-o-philes! You just never tire of re-inventing the wheel. Communicating with parents! What an idea! But I'm taking a point deduction for the use of "gift" as a verb,

Recommendation 4: Create Opportunities for Sustained CCSS-Based Professional Development that Allows Teachers to Collaborate Regularly and Provide the Resources Necessary to Achieve Success.

Ah, another old fave-- the Core rollout was rocky because we didn't train teachers enough. That was barely credible two years ago. Now that teachers have had a chance to really get to know the Core, pretending that we're victims of our ignorance just doesn't fly. The results are in, and they are that the better teachers know the Core, the less they like it. More PD from Core cheerleaders isn't going to fix that. Also, when you hand a surgeon a rusty can opener, his problems with operating is not because you didn't give the accessories necessary for success-- it's because the main tool you handed him is a lousy tool.

But hey-- let's identify master teachers and have them teach the rest. Let's have PD sessions to surf the resource sites on line. Let's work with the union! Let's do lots of PD so the teachers can teach each other and get on the same page. If we pass the rusty can opener around many times, maybe we'll figure how to better use it!

Recommendation 5: Ensure CCSS-Based Assessments are as Useful as Possible to Students, Educators, the Community, and Policy Leaders.

You will perhaps be surprised to learn the two purposes of assessment: Instructional change, and accountability. Also, here's the goal of Common Core:

The goal of the Common Core is to make children think critically while teaching them how to absorb, process, and use those skills on an everyday basis. The assessments we develop and administer to students should align with that goal.

So add that to your list of explanations for what this is all supposed to be accomplishing.

The report recommends fewer and fairer assessments, so less time spent taking, less test prep, and less pressure and emphasis on them. The detail portion also says we should be clear about the test purpose, but hey-- that's simplified above, so no sweat. Also, only one CCSS test per year, and let's use portfolio assessment too.

Then some editor just let the authentic teacher voices run wild-- let teachers have input on what's on the test, and let us know what texts will be on the test ahead of time, and deliver the results within thirty days, plus creating rubrics. Also, let's scrap grades and move toward competency based education. Also, every child should ride to school on a unicorn. Okay, I made that one up, but what a crazy page. Were the ATV's just carried away with irrational exuberance, or did the VIVA folks miss a page in the edit. Anyway, fun list of things that are never going to happen.


Recommendation 6: Reconsider the CCSS-Based Assessment Schedule

States that haven't rolled out CCSS tests yet should do it in stages, and all I'm thinking is who hasn't rolled out their CCSS tests yet? Anyway, if you've already done it, we've got nothing for you.


So what have we here?

We appear to have a blunt PR object that took some ATV input, wrapped it up in a nice sauce of the client's making, with the hopes that some enterprising education writers (real writers, not those damn bloggers) will write it up and creatively disrupt the already fully-congealed narrative that Common Core is just Dead Program Walking. Cunningham is being paid good money to make sure that people hear that Common Core builds strong bodies twelve ways and is totally grrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeaaattt and will cure your bad breath and hair, and since most politicians will no longer even say the Core's name out loud, it needs all the press it an get. In which case I guess they can thank me later-- and I did it for free.

Managing Across the Moat

Several of my friends in the business world have told me that modern management is taught to keep its distance. "You are supposed to live at least fifty miles away from the facility," one told me. The idea is to not be influenced in decision making by any personal attachments to the people who work for you.

That gulf, that moat between management and the people and facilities which they manage is a common feature of corporate life, and it explains a lot about how large companies work (or don't). Managers never have to face the people whose lives they disrupt, and they are fine with that because human beings are a distraction-- it's profits and gains and stock prices that are the true measure of good management choices. They can make the Right Choices unhampered by empathy.

The management technique reminds me of Louis C K's Conan appearance in which he explains the dynamics of bullying. Kids will try out being mean, but if they have to do it to someone's face, they see the hurt, their empathy kicks in, and they decide that being mean to someone doesn't feel good. But bullying-by-text has no such feedback loop.

When you can't see the hurt, you don't feel the hurt.

When the Let's Run Schools Like a Business crowd (like Reed Hastings) complains about school boards, that is the essence of their complaint-- these elected board members live in the community and must face the people who are affected by their decisions, leading board members to make decisions for all sorts of terrible reasons when their eyes should stay focused on Return on Investment and Bottom Line and all the markers of success that too many business types value.

And so one way of understanding the modern wave of reformsterism is a slow steady process of trying dig a moat between the people who make the decisions about schools and the people who must are there in the schools.

Let's make sure that tests are devised by people who never meet the students and administered by teachers who must, by edict, behave as if the students are strangers to them, as if they aren't even in the same room. 

Let's dismantle school boards and replace them with appointed managers who can operate by spreadsheets and "data" and never have to actually face the teachers, students, parents and community members who have to live with the decisions.

Let's put school districts under the control of people who have never been in a classroom-- that way they will make the Right Choices without being swayed by too much empathy for teachers of students.

The application of this management technique in places like Newark, where "Superintendent" Cami Anderson's concerted effort to never mix with the stakeholders of the school district would be comical, were the costs not so high to the people the district is supposed to serve. Other super-managers like John King and John White and Merryl Tisch do their best to avoid ever looking school stakeholders in the eyes.

The modern charter has a similar management approach in which the people who run the school never have to actually deal with the people whose lives are wrapped up in the school. Someone like Eva Moskowitz, who appears to spend plenty of time in the Success Academy charters that she runs, is no exception to this technique. But where someone like Cami Anderson simply hides from the public, the Moskowitz approach is to send away everyone who doesn't see things her way. If SA fits you and your child, she's happy to see you-- if not, then you are the one who needs to get out and move on and join the rest of the invisible multitudes outside the school's walls.

This management by moat is also evident on the national level. Secretary of Education rarely mixes with ordinary parents or teachers, and any teachers that do come into his orbit are carefully vetted and screened so that they will be The Right Type. Finding Duncan in an ordinary public school without advance screening and a carefully prepared program would be more exceptional than finding a family of yetis on the beach at a Disney Caribbean resort.

Distance and separation builds callousness and short-circuits empathy.

Leaders and policymakers see lobbyists every day. They regularly hang out with thinky tank experts and corporate bigwigs. I have to wonder what it would be like if Duncan or some of the other policy bigwigs spent one or two days a week in an actual school-- an ordinary school, not hand picked or carefully chosen, but just a random ordinary school.

They don't know what it's like out here in the trenches, and some of them work very hard to make sure they don't learn. That disconnect, that difficult reach across the moat, hampers much of our policy choices and is one of the worst principles that we've tried to carry over from the world of business. But it's faulty. It's dysfunctional. It's wrong.

Imagine if I tried to teach my classes without ever appearing in the room-- just check some spreadsheets from my office in another city, sent instructions to an aide via text, never met my students or their parents face to face. I would be a terrible teacher (though uncomfortably close to vision of Master Teacher touted by some reformsters).

Education is a human service, and the means its foundation is relationships, and the first rule of relationships is that you have to show up (take it from a guy on his second marriage). To try to conjure up a management system that not only doesn't require you to show up, but actually requires that you don't-- that is a recipe for failure and toxicity. It's bad management and terrible education.

Fill in the moat and show up. Anything else is a waste.

Dear Burbank School Board

Dear Burbank School Board:

I have no dog in your particular superintendent hunt, but as a blogger, unsolicited advice is my (non-paying) bread and butter. You've taken a lot of heat for your hiring choice. I just watched the video short form of your very contentious meeting for the approval of Matt Hill as your new superintendent. Clearly many people on all sides of the table were extremely agitated and emotional. (If you haven't seen the edit yet, I've included it below so you can see what I saw.)

What I saw was brutal. And frankly, though I am a teacher and former union president, some of the attacks on Mr. Hill were unnecessary and not helpful. I keep trying to imagine his wife going home later to try to explain to their children why all the angry people hate Daddy so much. Add to that the emotional, angry resignation of a board member, and the apparent twenty minutes of angry interlude, and there's no question that many people came together to create an ugly mess.

However, at the risk of being one more person who seems to be piling on you, I have to tell you-- that ugly mess was entirely your fault.

I'm in Pennsylvania. I have no idea what the historic relationship between board and teachers in Burbank has been, but I presume, given Burbank's reported excellence, that it has been pretty good. That makes it all the sadder that you messed it up.

I have no idea if Matt Hill was the best man for the job (I rather doubt it, but I wasn't the one looking at those eighteen candidates, so there's no way I can know). But if he was, you did him a huge disservice by botching the hiring process.

There's a basic principle involved in running any organization-- people want to be heard. If they don't think they're being heard when they speak, they will keep raising their voices until they believe they are being heard. If I'm in a leadership role and someone is screaming at me, I first check the possibility that they don't believe I've heard them. And really, you already know this-- why were you so angry with the teachers at the meeting? Because you felt they were not hearing what you had to say.

You had to know that the selection of Hill as superintendent would be contentious, that many people would have legitimate and heartfelt concerns about the choice. As Mr. Hill's future employers, you owed it to him to make sure those concerns were heard so that he could enter the office without having to face employees who were pre-disposed not to want him there.

That means that your obligation as his future bosses and the leaders of Burbank schools was to make sure those concerns were heard and addressed, even if it lengthened your timeline. But when you you announced a meeting to allow teacher discussion and questioning of the candidate with barely twenty-four hours notice, you sent a clear signal that you were interested in looking as if you'd listened to people, not in actually listening. Of course that meeting was contentious-- by your actions, you told them before they even showed up that you weren't really going to listen. And so they showed up ready to scream. Your ranty ex-member complained that everybody was just assuming how he'd vote, but of course the actual vote showed that what everybody assumed was correct-- the hiring was a done deal on a fast tracked railroad. This type of behavior does not build trust.

I could see the hurt and disappointment in board members, and I recognize it because I've seen it in leadership amateurs before-- we went through so much, thought so hard, went through so many steps to make this decision, and it hurts that people are reacting as if we pulled it all casually out of our butt, as if we don't really care.

So you went through a long, hard process. Ask yourself one question-- how much of that process occurred out in plain sight for any and all to see? So many school boards seem to have trouble grasping a simple idea-- what you do in secret and private is effectively invisible. If you want people to see what you've been through, you have to show them every step of the way.

Matt Hill comes with huge, huge issues attached. You say that you were satisfied that he had addressed those properly. How many of those answers did you share? How many did he provide to your teachers?

Matt Hill comes with no classroom background at all. That is not a hopeless obstacle, but it is an obstacle. How will he evaluate the performance of a job that he knows nothing about? How will he decide what resources teachers do or do not need if he does not understand what they need the resources for? These are not un-answerable questions, but if you are the only people who have heard the answers, do not be surprised that other folks are doubtful.

Matt Hill comes attached to John Deasy, whose tenure at LAUSD was a disaster, rife with massive screw-ups that were in turn connected to what could at best be called shady behavior. And Hill was attached directly to two of the largest disasters. It's fine to say, "Well, he assured us that he learned some important lessons," but that's not really an answer.

Matt Hill comes attached to the Broad empire, which is a giant red flag for anybody working in education. It's like handing management of your steak house over to a life long vegetarian. It's like putting a Democrat in charge of the Republican primary. It's like hiring a fox to watch your henhouse. It might very well work out, but not if there's no real plan, and you certainly can't expect people to just shrug and say, "Sounds legit."

Matt Hill comes believing that schools can be run by a business guy (which is expected from a good Broadie), but not only has he not ever run a classroom, but he has also never successfully run a business. The biggest business decisions he has ever been associated with would be the oft-mentioned disasters at LAUSD.

Hill has never run a classroom, a school district, or a business. His most recent relevant experience was a highly public failure. His whole adult life has been spent working for and with people who are devoted to shutting down public schools and replacing them with charters.

There may very well be reasons to believe that none of this matters going forward and that he will be a great superintendent-- but if you guys didn't know there would be enormous pushback then you must be partially brain dead. As a business guy, he should have been able to tell you-- if his installation in the job was going to run smoothly at all, the massive baggage that comes with him would have to be addressed, publicly, openly, honestly, and with an understanding that people's first reaction was going to be negative.

I don't know how you imagined it would work. People would just take your words for it? You would just run this through quickly before any kind of bad stink could be raised? The other seventeen were so bad and you had lived with this for so long that you just couldn't see anything else to do?

Like I said. I'm in Pennsylvania and for all I know you didn't botch the selection process at all. All the evidence I can see says, frankly, you did-- but all the evidence I can see isn't very much. But whether or not you botched the selection process, you completely botched the hiring process.

Is there a way forward? Sure. If I were your school board management consultant, here's what I would advise you to do.

Have the meetings now that you should have had in the runup to this decision. Put on your big boy and girl pants, because the first hours of meetings will consist of people yelling at you. Suck it up and take it, because you earned every bit of it. Listen honestly and reflectively. Show that you hear what they're saying. Show that you understand their concerns. Earn back some trust.

Be honest. Don't be defensive, don't try to save face, and don't try to make up reasons for anything. Don't try to manage the situation. Be honest. Be open.

Assume good intent. Teachers and public folks are not being a pain your ass because they're big meanies-- they're doing because they think a terrible scary thing has happened that they have had absolutely no say in. If they did not give a rat's rear about Burbank schools, they would laugh, shrug, call you names in the faculty lounge and get a comfy seat for the expected disaster. They are upset because they care what happens to your schools. Remember that.

Do not say things like "We'll talk to you when you grow up." Say things like "We know this decision looks like a terrible mistake, but we really do want the best for these schools, and we will tell you everything we know that helped us feel good about this choice." They will yell some more, because right now they don't trust you, and that's not going to fix itself overnight. Some of them will keep yelling forever and will never be okay with this; if your choice was good and your motives pure, then slowly but surely the angry voices will become a minority.

Finally, and perhaps most painfully, consider the possibility that you have screwed the pooch on this one. The absolute worst next chapter for Burbank would be if Hill does turn out to be awful but the board backs him because you'll be damned if you admit that you were wrong.

As much as I think you've made a bad choice, one bad choice doesn't have to turn into the kind of management dysfunction fiasco portrayed by the video. Your mishandling of the hiring has multiplied your problems a thousand-fold. You need to get your act together. If you want people to act like grownups, start by modeling the behavior yourselves.

Arne Bumbles Dyslexia Grilling

Oh, it just hurts.

Here's a link to a clip from 2016 Budget grilling of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. In it, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) asks a simple question: What specific programs do we have in place for helping students with dyslexia?

And it just goes south from there.

The answer, pretty clearly, is "none." But Duncan is bound determined not to go there, so he tries, "Well, students with dyslexia have special needs, and we have a special needs fund, so they fall under that--"

Cassidy bores in, citing studies and facts and figures to elaborate on his point which is that students with dyslexia make up 80% of the students with special needs and as much as 20% of the general student population, so wouldn't it make sense to have programs directed at that particular issue?

Let the flailing begin. I would put together my usual summary-deconstruction of a Duncan word salad, but this is the mouth noise equivalent of a large-mouthed bass thrown up on the creek bank and trying to flop his way back to some water.

Cassidy tries again. Does Duncan have any sense of the quality of dyslexia programs out there? The answer, again, is "no," but Arne can't form that word, so instead he starts making up some sentences that boil down to, "I suppose there are some good ones and some bad ones and some in between ones" which is not exactly an insight that required the United States Secretary of Education to deliver it.

Here's Arne's problem-- he absolutely has an idea about what the approach to dyslexia should be. He's been very clear about it in the past. Let's go back to his conference call about new USED special needs policies

We know that when students with disabilities are held to high expectations and have access to a robust curriculum, they excel. 

Or the explanation from Kevin Huffman in that same call. These words didn't come out of Duncan's mouth, but he didn't say, "Well, that's not quite what we mean" either.

Huffman challenged the prevailing view that most special education students lag behind because of their disabilities. He said most lag behind because they're not expected to succeed if they're given more demanding schoolwork and because they're seldom tested.

So, Senator Cassidy, that's the USED plan-- we will expect those students with dyslexia to do better, and then if they don't we'll get rid of their teachers and replace them with teachers who are better at expecting things. That's it. That's the plan.

But Duncan was smart enough not to say that out loud to a man who 1) has clearly done his homework about dyslexia 2) cares about dyslexia and 3) is a US senator.

Cassiday found a few more ways to make his point, comparing the USED stance on for-profit colleges (we're going to be all over that) to their stance on dyslexia (someone will either do something about it or not). He even offered some concrete solutions, noting that research indicated you need the entire teaching staff to have some understanding of dyslexia to address it, and maybe we could direct some money toward programs that would provide that broad level of training.

Cassidy starts a great question--In your dream of dreams, what would be done for the screening and intervention of students with dyslexia?-- but then it turns into a bit of a rant-- we're worried about the 1% of gifted students who will probably succeed no matter what, but what about the 20% that won't succeed unless we do something-- and he loses the thread, so that by the time Arne gets to talk, he can dodge the real question.

Well, I think our office that looks at this is doing really good work there [which office would that be, exactly?] Again, it's a fair critique. Do we have enough resources put behind children whether they have special needs or whether they're extraordinarily gifted that we're not investing enough in either population, and for us to invest more we clearly need your help and support.

I skipped all the "ums" and grimaces. Arne is just trying so hard to find his way back to his standard talking points and you can just hear all the tension go out of his voice when he finally makes it back to "we clearly need your help and support."


It's a pretty excruciating six minutes-- Sen. Cassidy is closing his eyes and massaging his own forehead by the time it's done-- and just one more example of where Duncan is in way over his head. Show it to all your friends who care about dyslexia.