Florida recently took another step in trying to hold onto the position of the state with the most bat-guano crazy education policy in the country. Seems Rep. Eric Fresen read himself a book and-- voila!-- a bold new policy was born. Giving teachers bonuses for their old SAT or ACT scores.
This bold choice has prompted considerable discussion about the wisdom of this plan, but I think commentators are barking upward along the wrong arboreal highway.
Instead of talking about how crazy this is, Floridians ought to be asking if it is crazy enough.
After all, other competitors in Education's Wacky Races have come up with innovations like sticking people in the classroom without actual teaching degrees or college degrees. If Fresen wants to make sure that his state has Really Awesome Teachers as evidenced by Really Random Metrics, he can do better.
Let's start with the obvious-- Florida's already using a Big Standardized Test to determine whether eight year olds are on the path to college or not. Let's just piggy-back on that-- if you were a proficient Third Grader, you get a bonus when you become a teacher. If we want something more reliable, we could give a bonus based on your high school GPA. Since Florida really loves its standardized tests, maybe we could use an eye test, or the driver's test.
Or hey-- maybe you were a boy scout. We could give you a $500 bonus for every merit badge you earned. Or if you were a girl scout, a bonus for every box of cookies you sold ($400 for every box of Trefoil, but only $75 for each box of Thin Mints. My dog could sell Thin Mints). For country kids, we can give a bonus for every 4-H blue ribbon won.
Perhaps Florida can reach back further. A bonus for how soon you were walking. A $1000 bonus for every month before your second birthday that you were potty trained.
Or dig deeper. A bonus if your mother birthed you naturally rather than by C-section. How about a bonus based on your apgar score? Perhaps a bonus for speedy fetal development.
In fact, let's get down to it-- offer Florida teachers a bonus based on their parents' SAT or ACT scores. Or on how well trained their dogs are. Or the feng shui in their homes. Or their astrological sign. Or flip a coin. Or just come right out and say, "Hey, TFA temps-- we'll give you a big bunch of money to come here because it will still be cheaper in the long run to hire folks who won't stick around long enough to earn raises or require pensions."
Come on, Florida. If you're going to bring the crazy, really bring it.
Friday, August 7, 2015
Merit Pay Fallacies
Cynthia Tucker Haynes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist who has hooked up with Campbell Brown's reformster-pushing website. She has done much distinguished work throughout her career, but last week she demonstrated that she doesn't understand teaching and especially not teacher merit pay.
The title of the piece pretty well gives us the whole picture: "Excellent Teachers, Like My Mom, Deserve Better Pay. No Matter What Their Unions Say." Yes, grammar police, the title is a punctuation abomination (suggesting, among other things, that her mother is not actually a teacher), but we're going to skip past that.
Haynes follows the standard template for this sort of piece, opening with an anecdote about a Really Awesome Teacher (who is, in this case, the writer's mom). In her opinion, her mom should have gotten bonus pay for being more awesome than other teachers, but the school district didn't offer it. And now Haynes lays out a mistaken and self-destroying argument.
Indeed, few public school districts do because the concept remains so controversial among teachers’ organizations.
Not the whole truth. In fact, lots of school districts like the traditional teacher pay ladder because it makes budgeting for personnel costs so much easier. With a merit pay system, school districts have only two approaches available to budgeting (a process that begins over a year ahead of time in my neck of the woods).
#1) We don't know how much merit pay we'll be giving out next year yet, so we'll just leave the budget unfinished. The state should love that.
#2) We will budget a finite merit pay pool, which the teachers will then have to fight over in a zero sum teacher thunderdome. That should be great for school morale.
Haynes notes that merit-based pay systems require a means of linking teacher pay to student performance, which counts as an unexamined assumption, but let's slide on by for now. She asserts that finding such a linking system is contentious, but doesn't need to be. I think she thinks she goes on to explain why not-- but she doesn't. She says that Race to the Top required states to whip something up; she fails to examine whether or not the states whipped up anything that actually works.
She offers an NEA quote cautioning against a system that makes students a mechanism for earning pay instead of young human beings deserving of an education, and she says it's bunk, that of course the only purpose of schooling is to make an educated human being and so the only measure of a teacher is the product that pops out the end of that teacher's assembly line.
Since student learning should be the end product of teaching, why shouldn’t it be measured?
Ma'm, you asked, so I'll answer. Because it can't be. Because there's more to learning than answers on a single standardized test.
She makes the "everybody does it" argument, claiming that the corporate world is rife with performance evaluation and this particular argument is getting old. Does she want performance evaluations like the ones that earned banksters big fat bonuses for tanking the US economy, or does she mean that we should keep using stack ranking for teachers even as corporations like Microsoft are dropping it for being counterproductive?
She admits that her mother resisted the idea of merit pay, and at the very end of that paragraph drops this nugget:
Having spent several years teaching in segregated schools where Jim Crow ruled, she wasn’t sure her white superiors would assess black teachers fairly.
She notes that her mother might have been right, that in fact the old state-led idea of merit pay was that black teachers merited less pay than their white counterparts. This elevates her piece to the level of crazy talk, because she shows that she knows the answer-- that a teacher pay system based on "merit" has, can, and will be twisted and tilted based on biases that have nothing to do with merit at all. I don't have to tell Haynes why her argument is bunk because she has the answer right there in what she wrote!
Oh, but no worries. Haynes says that "times have changed." It is not clear what she thinks has changed-- there's no more racism, or there's no more biases in schools, or there's now a magical method for evaluating teachers that is totally fair and impervious to any sort of tilting? All she references is that her mother now believes that teachers should be trained and selected more carefully, which she takes to mean that her mother now supports a merit pay system, but I'm not so sure.
I agree that teachers should have more control over preparation for and entrance to our profession, and that point seems to be lurking around the edges of this piece.
But Haynes never really proved anything that she set out to prove. Are unions single-handedly obstructing merit pay systems (and doing so in defiance of their own members)? The answer's way more complicated than that. Do we have a system for evaluating teachers accurately and fairly? Everything we've learned over the last decade says, "No, we don't" (look at this recent study from Houston for one example). Is there a way to finance such a system that would not be toxic for school districts? Nobody has proposed one yet.
Look-- there is huge support everywhere for the idea that good teachers should be rewarded more than poor teachers. But we don't have the first idea how to do it. It's like saying that everybody agrees that cancer should be wiped out or only good-tasting asparagus should be sold in stores or people should only marry partners that would be their perfect match. It's a great idea, but until anyone gets a clue about how to do it, it's just a fun discussion for 3 AM in your freshman dorm.
Haynes is a good writer, and I have no doubt that Brown is paying her well. She can do better than this.
The title of the piece pretty well gives us the whole picture: "Excellent Teachers, Like My Mom, Deserve Better Pay. No Matter What Their Unions Say." Yes, grammar police, the title is a punctuation abomination (suggesting, among other things, that her mother is not actually a teacher), but we're going to skip past that.
Haynes follows the standard template for this sort of piece, opening with an anecdote about a Really Awesome Teacher (who is, in this case, the writer's mom). In her opinion, her mom should have gotten bonus pay for being more awesome than other teachers, but the school district didn't offer it. And now Haynes lays out a mistaken and self-destroying argument.
Indeed, few public school districts do because the concept remains so controversial among teachers’ organizations.
Not the whole truth. In fact, lots of school districts like the traditional teacher pay ladder because it makes budgeting for personnel costs so much easier. With a merit pay system, school districts have only two approaches available to budgeting (a process that begins over a year ahead of time in my neck of the woods).
#1) We don't know how much merit pay we'll be giving out next year yet, so we'll just leave the budget unfinished. The state should love that.
#2) We will budget a finite merit pay pool, which the teachers will then have to fight over in a zero sum teacher thunderdome. That should be great for school morale.
Haynes notes that merit-based pay systems require a means of linking teacher pay to student performance, which counts as an unexamined assumption, but let's slide on by for now. She asserts that finding such a linking system is contentious, but doesn't need to be. I think she thinks she goes on to explain why not-- but she doesn't. She says that Race to the Top required states to whip something up; she fails to examine whether or not the states whipped up anything that actually works.
She offers an NEA quote cautioning against a system that makes students a mechanism for earning pay instead of young human beings deserving of an education, and she says it's bunk, that of course the only purpose of schooling is to make an educated human being and so the only measure of a teacher is the product that pops out the end of that teacher's assembly line.
Since student learning should be the end product of teaching, why shouldn’t it be measured?
Ma'm, you asked, so I'll answer. Because it can't be. Because there's more to learning than answers on a single standardized test.
She makes the "everybody does it" argument, claiming that the corporate world is rife with performance evaluation and this particular argument is getting old. Does she want performance evaluations like the ones that earned banksters big fat bonuses for tanking the US economy, or does she mean that we should keep using stack ranking for teachers even as corporations like Microsoft are dropping it for being counterproductive?
She admits that her mother resisted the idea of merit pay, and at the very end of that paragraph drops this nugget:
Having spent several years teaching in segregated schools where Jim Crow ruled, she wasn’t sure her white superiors would assess black teachers fairly.
She notes that her mother might have been right, that in fact the old state-led idea of merit pay was that black teachers merited less pay than their white counterparts. This elevates her piece to the level of crazy talk, because she shows that she knows the answer-- that a teacher pay system based on "merit" has, can, and will be twisted and tilted based on biases that have nothing to do with merit at all. I don't have to tell Haynes why her argument is bunk because she has the answer right there in what she wrote!
Oh, but no worries. Haynes says that "times have changed." It is not clear what she thinks has changed-- there's no more racism, or there's no more biases in schools, or there's now a magical method for evaluating teachers that is totally fair and impervious to any sort of tilting? All she references is that her mother now believes that teachers should be trained and selected more carefully, which she takes to mean that her mother now supports a merit pay system, but I'm not so sure.
I agree that teachers should have more control over preparation for and entrance to our profession, and that point seems to be lurking around the edges of this piece.
But Haynes never really proved anything that she set out to prove. Are unions single-handedly obstructing merit pay systems (and doing so in defiance of their own members)? The answer's way more complicated than that. Do we have a system for evaluating teachers accurately and fairly? Everything we've learned over the last decade says, "No, we don't" (look at this recent study from Houston for one example). Is there a way to finance such a system that would not be toxic for school districts? Nobody has proposed one yet.
Look-- there is huge support everywhere for the idea that good teachers should be rewarded more than poor teachers. But we don't have the first idea how to do it. It's like saying that everybody agrees that cancer should be wiped out or only good-tasting asparagus should be sold in stores or people should only marry partners that would be their perfect match. It's a great idea, but until anyone gets a clue about how to do it, it's just a fun discussion for 3 AM in your freshman dorm.
Haynes is a good writer, and I have no doubt that Brown is paying her well. She can do better than this.
Thursday, August 6, 2015
TNTP: Why Does Professional Development Suck?
TNTP has released a new report-ish papery thing addressing the state of teacher professional development in the US. Their conclusion? It sucks.
To their credit, they're apparently unhappy with those results. I'm not sure they need to be quite so discouraged; as with most TNTP researchy products, this one has some problems. Still, if you think I'm going to stick up for the awesomeness of professional development, I do hope you have another think coming. But let's go ahead and take a quick look at The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth about Our Quest for Teacher Development.
Do we know how to help teachers get better?
I confess that I find this particular reporty thing oddly fascinating, because at its root it is a slow-motion collision between a fundamental reformster flaw and reality. So what we're looking at is TNTP trying to jump their unicorns over an existential chasm while trying not to look directly into the abyss.
The intro is almost plaintive-- we were so sure that if we could just figure out what teachers should be doing and then train them to do it, students would start racking up the big test scores (I'm paraphrasing, but only a little). I want to feel bad for these guys, because right out of the box they are designing a whole study based on fundamental misunderstandings of how teaching works, what teachers do, and what student success looks like. Really, we've driven right past the unicorn farm to a special lab where scientists are trying to make kumquats produce better pork chops by developing techniques for making the number nine smell more like lilacs.
I'm not entirely sure how to address the issues here, but let's start by looking at what they think they've learned.
Districts are spending big bucks
Well, they can't screw this up-- it's just running the numbers, right? TNTP found that districts are spending astronomical funds on teacher development, including the district that spends more on PD than on transportation. Okay, then.
Despite the buck spendage, most teachers do not appear to improve from year to year
How would you even measure something like that? TNTP went with just looking at the districts' own ratings of teachers, and discovered that "the difference in performance between an average first-year teacher and an average fifth-year teacher was more than nine times the difference between an average fifth-year teacher and an average twentieth-year teacher." So, beginning teachers improve at a greater rate than veteran teachers. Is this news to anybody, anywhere, at all?
But TNTP is concerned, particularly because the veteran teachers "still have ample room to improve." They know this because they find that many teachers were less than "effective" in critical thinking. This is probably a good time to mention two things-- the reporty thing is based primarily on three unnamed districts, and the "effective" rating is one computed by TNTP, not the district's rating. It's all in the big fat appendix.
Those teacher ratings go back to 2011, and include plenty of special VAM sauce. So they are, as always, questionable. Nor does TNTP mention if Districts A, B and C use one of the many teacher evaluation systems that require the school to keep everyone on a bell curve, therefor insuring that few teachers ever make it into the top levels.
Nor does TNTP offer any justification that its measure of teacher improvement can in any way, shape or form be tied to the professional development inflicted on that particular staff. This is like saying, "Well, we planted these begonias out in the swamp and watered them every day, but they grew poorly, so clearly water does not help begonias grow."
TNTP kind of acknowledges that
We couldn't find any improvey link to PD
They looked at teachers who had improved and tried to pin down any one aspect of PD that was linked to improviness. There's a full page chart showing that when it comes to many traits, attitudes and experiences, improvers are are pretty much just like non-improvers. Yup-- incredibly, there doesn't appear to be a single one-size-fits-all approach to professional development that works for every single human teacher. Not even the ones that TNTP folks "believed to be most promising." Do these guys get out much? Have they met humans?
School systems are not helping teachers understand how to improve-- or even that they have room to improve.
TNTP's position here is not unexpected. In the reformster world, remember, parents and students and teachers have no idea how students are doing unless they have datafied test results to look at. So if course, in that same universe, teachers would not know anything about their own strengths and weaknesses unless the system told them. TNTP believes the system is not doing that.
As evidence they offer that old standard, beloved by education experts like Andrew Cuomo and Campbell Brown-- if 40% of the students got low test scores, then 40% of the teachers must be ineffective. This is reasoning that stuns with its dumbosity. Since my favorite baseball team lost 40% of their games last year, 40% of the players must be terrible. Since 40% of my flowers died in the garden last year, we must conclude that 40% of the days had bad growing conditions.
Further proof of teachers' universal lack of self-knowledge? 60% of teachers who were low-rated didn't think they were terrible teachers. Which is foolish, because we all know that teacher evaluation systems are perfect. But we're not done. Come with me now as TNTP takes a flying leap over Logic Gulch. Two-thirds of teachers surveyed didn't think their PD was useful, and only 40% thought the PD was a good use of their time. Can you guess why? No, no, you can't-- this low appreciation of the PD sessions is a product of "a pervasive culture of low expectations for teacher development and performance."
Sigh. You know what causes a culture of low expectations about professional development? A long history of crappy professional development. You know what that has to do with expectations about teacher performance? Absolutely nothing at all.
Conclusion?
"We bombard teachers with help, but most of it is not helpful--"
Like much of the report, this sits right on the cusp of actual understanding. Who are "we" exactly, anyway, and why is PD bombarded, a word that perfectly elicits the image of things being dropped from above on helpless folks below. And why is the help not helpful? These would all be useful questions, and TNTP is not going to answer them.
Here's a whole paragraph's worth of climbing right up to the edge of the pond and refusing to drink:
In spite of this, the notion persists that we know how to help teachers improve and could achieve our goal of great teaching in far more classrooms if we just applied that knowledge more widely. It’s a hopeful and alluring vision, but our findings force us to conclude that it is a mirage. Like a mirage, it is not a hallucination but a refraction of reality: Growth is possible, but our goal of widespread teaching excellence is further out of reach than it seems.
On the other hand, there are moments when it appears that TNTP really has learned something:
Teacher development appears to be a highly individualized process, one that has been dramatically oversimplified. The absence of common threads challenges us to confront the true nature of the problem—that as much as we wish we knew how to help all teachers improve, we do not.
Well, they're proposing some solutions here, so let's see how many clues they bring to that process.
So what do we do?
Redefine what it means to help a teacher improve
The new definition includes "measurable defined progress toward an ambitious standard," so we're back to the over-reliance on what can be measured. It's not that I think teacher development should live in a fuzzy land of fluffy clouds, but if you insist on concrete deliverables, you will end up with the kind of crap chosen because it's easily measurable, not because it's useful.
The new definition is also supposed to be about increasing teacher self-knowledge which, okay, maybe. But then we follow that with rewards and punishments-- I mean, "consequences." Which takes us back to the old idea that doing a good job in a classroom somehow has no intrinsic reward or feedback, which is just a meagre view of human beings.
Reevaluate current stuff that's out there
Sort through what's on the market and distinguish crap from gold. Because once you've labeled the crap as crap, the company that's making a living pushing it will certainly fold up and go away. Surely TNTP understands what most teachers who have ever sat through a PD session understand-- much if not most of this stuff is not being put out by people who think they can make teaching better, but by people who think they can make a living selling their particular program.
Reinvent how we support effective teaching at scale
Wow. That's all wrong. All wrong. Because "we" (again-- who is the we here) don't know how to identify effective teaching, let alone support it. And "at scale"? Why? Why why why WHY? The only reason to care about doing this "at scale" is so that it can be more effectively widely marketed, so we're right back to the wrong question-- the question of how to operate the PD business as a more efficient money-making business.
These guys actually got it right a few paragraphs ago-- teacher development is highly individual. Such individuality suggests that trying to operate at scale is a fools game, and likely to work directly against the goal of effective development.
But TNTP is thinking big. Under this item they would like to reconstruct the job of teaching, redesign schools, and reimagine how teachers are trained and certified. So, just redo everything.
My advice for free
If I were to address the issue of teacher development stuff, there are a few other things that might help.
Start with teachers
One striking chart in the papery thing shows that the highest-rated "I find this helpful" activity listed by teachers is informal collaboration.
The worst professional development (and probably the most common) is done to teachers, not for them or with them. You're lucky if you teach in a district where your preferences count, and even then, that may not count for much because your state government may have helpfully created rules about what things may be done for professional development.
The most useful professional development for me is that which addresses needs that I've identified for myself. Period. Some presenter who is a glorified salesperson (or in the case of PD provided by textbook companies, an actual salesperson) does not have my attention. Somebody sent by the state to tell me what the state has decided I need to do does not have my attention (Common Core test prep sessions, anybody).
Most professional development is like a restaurant where you don't get to see a menu, you don't get to pick your order, and the waitpersons don't even ask if you have food allergies.
Never mind measuring what you can't measure
TNTP's reporty thing acknowledges this, but sloughs it off because, gosh, if we did give teachers what they wanted, would they improve? This avoids the big question once again-- if I improve as a teacher, how will you know? Answer-- particularly if I'm teaching high school history or some other completely untested subject-- is probably not. If I have a good principal and an evaluation system that doesn't depend on VAMmy foolishness, we may have a shot. But hey-- the feds have mandated that everybody suffers through VAMmy foolishness, so probably not.
Evaluate the PD directly
TNTP used a long convoluted chain of possible cause and improbable effect to evaluate development. We could do better just by handing every teacher in the session a single question: was the session useful, middling, or a waste of time? Granted, some of my colleagues will frustrate me by "being nice" on an instrument that blunt, but still-- is there anything you need to know about the development that the answer to that question won't tell you?
To their credit, they're apparently unhappy with those results. I'm not sure they need to be quite so discouraged; as with most TNTP researchy products, this one has some problems. Still, if you think I'm going to stick up for the awesomeness of professional development, I do hope you have another think coming. But let's go ahead and take a quick look at The Mirage: Confronting the Hard Truth about Our Quest for Teacher Development.
Do we know how to help teachers get better?
I confess that I find this particular reporty thing oddly fascinating, because at its root it is a slow-motion collision between a fundamental reformster flaw and reality. So what we're looking at is TNTP trying to jump their unicorns over an existential chasm while trying not to look directly into the abyss.
The intro is almost plaintive-- we were so sure that if we could just figure out what teachers should be doing and then train them to do it, students would start racking up the big test scores (I'm paraphrasing, but only a little). I want to feel bad for these guys, because right out of the box they are designing a whole study based on fundamental misunderstandings of how teaching works, what teachers do, and what student success looks like. Really, we've driven right past the unicorn farm to a special lab where scientists are trying to make kumquats produce better pork chops by developing techniques for making the number nine smell more like lilacs.
I'm not entirely sure how to address the issues here, but let's start by looking at what they think they've learned.
Districts are spending big bucks
Well, they can't screw this up-- it's just running the numbers, right? TNTP found that districts are spending astronomical funds on teacher development, including the district that spends more on PD than on transportation. Okay, then.
Despite the buck spendage, most teachers do not appear to improve from year to year
How would you even measure something like that? TNTP went with just looking at the districts' own ratings of teachers, and discovered that "the difference in performance between an average first-year teacher and an average fifth-year teacher was more than nine times the difference between an average fifth-year teacher and an average twentieth-year teacher." So, beginning teachers improve at a greater rate than veteran teachers. Is this news to anybody, anywhere, at all?
But TNTP is concerned, particularly because the veteran teachers "still have ample room to improve." They know this because they find that many teachers were less than "effective" in critical thinking. This is probably a good time to mention two things-- the reporty thing is based primarily on three unnamed districts, and the "effective" rating is one computed by TNTP, not the district's rating. It's all in the big fat appendix.
Those teacher ratings go back to 2011, and include plenty of special VAM sauce. So they are, as always, questionable. Nor does TNTP mention if Districts A, B and C use one of the many teacher evaluation systems that require the school to keep everyone on a bell curve, therefor insuring that few teachers ever make it into the top levels.
Nor does TNTP offer any justification that its measure of teacher improvement can in any way, shape or form be tied to the professional development inflicted on that particular staff. This is like saying, "Well, we planted these begonias out in the swamp and watered them every day, but they grew poorly, so clearly water does not help begonias grow."
TNTP kind of acknowledges that
We couldn't find any improvey link to PD
They looked at teachers who had improved and tried to pin down any one aspect of PD that was linked to improviness. There's a full page chart showing that when it comes to many traits, attitudes and experiences, improvers are are pretty much just like non-improvers. Yup-- incredibly, there doesn't appear to be a single one-size-fits-all approach to professional development that works for every single human teacher. Not even the ones that TNTP folks "believed to be most promising." Do these guys get out much? Have they met humans?
School systems are not helping teachers understand how to improve-- or even that they have room to improve.
TNTP's position here is not unexpected. In the reformster world, remember, parents and students and teachers have no idea how students are doing unless they have datafied test results to look at. So if course, in that same universe, teachers would not know anything about their own strengths and weaknesses unless the system told them. TNTP believes the system is not doing that.
As evidence they offer that old standard, beloved by education experts like Andrew Cuomo and Campbell Brown-- if 40% of the students got low test scores, then 40% of the teachers must be ineffective. This is reasoning that stuns with its dumbosity. Since my favorite baseball team lost 40% of their games last year, 40% of the players must be terrible. Since 40% of my flowers died in the garden last year, we must conclude that 40% of the days had bad growing conditions.
Further proof of teachers' universal lack of self-knowledge? 60% of teachers who were low-rated didn't think they were terrible teachers. Which is foolish, because we all know that teacher evaluation systems are perfect. But we're not done. Come with me now as TNTP takes a flying leap over Logic Gulch. Two-thirds of teachers surveyed didn't think their PD was useful, and only 40% thought the PD was a good use of their time. Can you guess why? No, no, you can't-- this low appreciation of the PD sessions is a product of "a pervasive culture of low expectations for teacher development and performance."
Sigh. You know what causes a culture of low expectations about professional development? A long history of crappy professional development. You know what that has to do with expectations about teacher performance? Absolutely nothing at all.
Conclusion?
"We bombard teachers with help, but most of it is not helpful--"
Like much of the report, this sits right on the cusp of actual understanding. Who are "we" exactly, anyway, and why is PD bombarded, a word that perfectly elicits the image of things being dropped from above on helpless folks below. And why is the help not helpful? These would all be useful questions, and TNTP is not going to answer them.
Here's a whole paragraph's worth of climbing right up to the edge of the pond and refusing to drink:
In spite of this, the notion persists that we know how to help teachers improve and could achieve our goal of great teaching in far more classrooms if we just applied that knowledge more widely. It’s a hopeful and alluring vision, but our findings force us to conclude that it is a mirage. Like a mirage, it is not a hallucination but a refraction of reality: Growth is possible, but our goal of widespread teaching excellence is further out of reach than it seems.
On the other hand, there are moments when it appears that TNTP really has learned something:
Teacher development appears to be a highly individualized process, one that has been dramatically oversimplified. The absence of common threads challenges us to confront the true nature of the problem—that as much as we wish we knew how to help all teachers improve, we do not.
Well, they're proposing some solutions here, so let's see how many clues they bring to that process.
So what do we do?
Redefine what it means to help a teacher improve
The new definition includes "measurable defined progress toward an ambitious standard," so we're back to the over-reliance on what can be measured. It's not that I think teacher development should live in a fuzzy land of fluffy clouds, but if you insist on concrete deliverables, you will end up with the kind of crap chosen because it's easily measurable, not because it's useful.
The new definition is also supposed to be about increasing teacher self-knowledge which, okay, maybe. But then we follow that with rewards and punishments-- I mean, "consequences." Which takes us back to the old idea that doing a good job in a classroom somehow has no intrinsic reward or feedback, which is just a meagre view of human beings.
Reevaluate current stuff that's out there
Sort through what's on the market and distinguish crap from gold. Because once you've labeled the crap as crap, the company that's making a living pushing it will certainly fold up and go away. Surely TNTP understands what most teachers who have ever sat through a PD session understand-- much if not most of this stuff is not being put out by people who think they can make teaching better, but by people who think they can make a living selling their particular program.
Reinvent how we support effective teaching at scale
Wow. That's all wrong. All wrong. Because "we" (again-- who is the we here) don't know how to identify effective teaching, let alone support it. And "at scale"? Why? Why why why WHY? The only reason to care about doing this "at scale" is so that it can be more effectively widely marketed, so we're right back to the wrong question-- the question of how to operate the PD business as a more efficient money-making business.
These guys actually got it right a few paragraphs ago-- teacher development is highly individual. Such individuality suggests that trying to operate at scale is a fools game, and likely to work directly against the goal of effective development.
But TNTP is thinking big. Under this item they would like to reconstruct the job of teaching, redesign schools, and reimagine how teachers are trained and certified. So, just redo everything.
My advice for free
If I were to address the issue of teacher development stuff, there are a few other things that might help.
Start with teachers
One striking chart in the papery thing shows that the highest-rated "I find this helpful" activity listed by teachers is informal collaboration.
The worst professional development (and probably the most common) is done to teachers, not for them or with them. You're lucky if you teach in a district where your preferences count, and even then, that may not count for much because your state government may have helpfully created rules about what things may be done for professional development.
The most useful professional development for me is that which addresses needs that I've identified for myself. Period. Some presenter who is a glorified salesperson (or in the case of PD provided by textbook companies, an actual salesperson) does not have my attention. Somebody sent by the state to tell me what the state has decided I need to do does not have my attention (Common Core test prep sessions, anybody).
Most professional development is like a restaurant where you don't get to see a menu, you don't get to pick your order, and the waitpersons don't even ask if you have food allergies.
Never mind measuring what you can't measure
TNTP's reporty thing acknowledges this, but sloughs it off because, gosh, if we did give teachers what they wanted, would they improve? This avoids the big question once again-- if I improve as a teacher, how will you know? Answer-- particularly if I'm teaching high school history or some other completely untested subject-- is probably not. If I have a good principal and an evaluation system that doesn't depend on VAMmy foolishness, we may have a shot. But hey-- the feds have mandated that everybody suffers through VAMmy foolishness, so probably not.
Evaluate the PD directly
TNTP used a long convoluted chain of possible cause and improbable effect to evaluate development. We could do better just by handing every teacher in the session a single question: was the session useful, middling, or a waste of time? Granted, some of my colleagues will frustrate me by "being nice" on an instrument that blunt, but still-- is there anything you need to know about the development that the answer to that question won't tell you?
Putnam: Social Capital and Children
If Robert Putnam had never done a thing in his life except write Bowling Alone, he would have done more than enough to justify his taking up space on Earth. The work looks at the collapse and rebuilding of the American community, pairing sharp insight with exhaustive and clever collected data. It is required reading. But Putnam has just released another work entitled Our Kids, and in its own way it is just as important as his earlier work.
The book sets out to answer a particular question:
Do youth today coming from different social and economic backgrounds in fact have roughly equal life chances, and has that changed in recent decades?
Well, spoiler alert: the answers are “no” and “yes,” respectively. It’s the details and the explanations that make Putnam’s book worth reading. You should read the whole thing, because I am not going to cover everything. But let me give you some tidbits while I hit the broad strokes.
TIDBIT #1
Income inequality has risen within each major racial/ethnic group between 1967 and 2011. In other words, rich blacks have pulled away from poor blacks. The Great Recession stymied the growing gap briefly, but recovery has brought more of the same.
TIDBIT #2
When considering the debate about social mobility, it’s useful to remember that “conventional indicators” are generally three or four decades out of date.
TIDBIT #3
For those who believe that the fabled welfare mother is behind the growth in single-mom parenting, Putnam points out that there is no correlation between growing unmarried birth rates and “the ebb and flow of mothers on welfare.”
INFANCY MATTERS
Healthy infant brain development requires connecting with caring, consistent adults.
Putnam underlines this in a number of ways. The studies make quite a pile—stress affects brain development, contingent reciprocity interactions (an informal interaction) builds brain power, stable or unstable environment shapes the child’s view of how the world works, etc etc etc etc etc.
Good parenting takes time and can take money. Stress trickles down from stressed parents worried about life to children. In a fairly stunning chart, Putnam shows that higher-education parents favor parenting focused on building self-reliance, while low-education parents focus on obedience. Professional parents give far more encouragements, while welfare parents offer more discouragements.
This has to change how the child interacts with the world. But Putnam’s researchers have collected hundreds and hundreds of stories, and these stories show repeatedly the “linkage from economic hardship to stressed parenting to bad outcomes for kids.”
But let’s go to the central concept of the book.
THE WEB
We could look at Putnam’s main concept as a web of support or an account filled with social capital. Either way, it is the vast networks of connections, the deep pockets of social networking, that give the children on the high side of the great divide their advantage (and it is a divide-- time after time Putnam shows a scissor-shaped gap between the upper and lower groups, with no middle in the gulf between).
Both in data and anecdote, Putnam hammers home the same concept. Troubles happen to the rich and the poor. But when the children of the rich find trouble, the rich have access to resources, from formal programs that require money to access to have enough contacts to know a guy who knows a guy who handles that sort of thing.
The poor have no such network. In fact, Putnam cites studies that suggest that the poor have a much smaller, more redundant network-- their friends and their family and the people they hang out with are all the same people.
For a while, the American solution was essentially to provide the poor with a government created network. The wealthy have their own network-- from dance lessons to math tutoring to treatment for that little cough that may or may not Be Something, they know someone to call. The poor have no such network. Putnam talks about "weak ties," connections to wider, more diverse networks. As a wealthier person, you may not be friends with a doctor, but you undoubtedly know somebody who does have access to that world. The poor have few "weak ties" to help with jobs or college entrance or health issues.
This has huge practical implications for children. It has implications for what interests and skills they can pursue; does a parent know who to call if Chris is interested in hockey or dance or helping in a veterinarian office? Sure, there are programs to pluck students with outstanding promise from poverty, but that is kind of the point-- wealthy children don't have to show outstanding promise to pursue any of those things.
But it also has huge implications for world view. Putnam repeatedly talks about interview subjects whose socio-economic background has shaped their view of the world. For the wealthy, it's a big wide wonderful world where you can trust others and things generally work out well no matter what. For the poor, it's a hard world where you can trust very few people. Putnam reminded me of the Rochester Baby Lab do-over of the famed marshmallow experiment, a study that suggested that grit and patience have a lot more to do with environmental factors than any innate character possessed (or not) by the humans in question.
SCHOOLS
Putnam devotes a whole chapter of the book to schooling, but out of the detail and anecdote that fills the chapter, one basic point emerges-- schools don't create the gap between the poor and the wealthy, but they certainly do reinforce it.
Putnam sees that class gap as stronger than any racial gap, and says it's already well-established before students enter school.
In part he argues that the gaps we find in the education system are a function of residential sorting, that Americans have spent the last several decades sorting themselves into neighborhoods based on class and income-- well, let's be honest-- wealthier folks have spent the past few decades moving away from poor folks and leaving them alone in their poor neighborhoods. It dovetails with Warren Buffet's observation that if the rich couldn't opt out of public schools, we'd have better public schools. But Americans have opted out of living next door to Those People, and so that sorting and segregation is reflected in geographically-based public schools. "There's no denying that rich and poor kids in this country attend vastly different schools nowadays, which seems hard to square with the notion that schools are innocent bystanders in the growing youth class gap."
School finance and parent involvement are two of the major factors that Putnam cites. And while Putnam kind of sort of likes some of the idea of charter schools, I would point him back at those two factors. Charters don't fix finance, and they make parent involvement more difficult except for those parents who would have been involved even if their kid was attending school in a van down by the river. When you create a New Orleans style system, you end up with poor parents who somehow have to coordinate with parents who live in other neighborhoods and who must find a way to get cross town to their non-neighborhood school.
Putnam sees extracurricular activities as a way to build social capital and essential life skills. But of course, schools for lower class students, with budgets slashed and resources at a minimum, are least likely to have any such activities.
BOTTOM LINE
Putnam opens the book with a question he wants to answer it. Toward the end, he makes his main point (which he subtly signals by writing "this is the point of this book." Talking about parents who were themselves upwardly mobilized...
Though it might seem natural to label them "self-made," in many unnoticed ways they benefited from family and community supports that are nowadays less readily available to kids from modest backgrounds. They grew up in an era when public education and community supports for kids from all backgrounds managed to boost a significant number of people up the ladder-- in Bend, Beverly Hills, New York, Port Clinton, and even South Central LA. Those supportive institutions, public and private, no longer serve poorer kids so well.
Emphasis mine.
It's a grim picture that Putnam paints. Wealthier Americans have withdrawn physically from poorer Americans, moving out of the neighborhoods (or moving back to them once Those People have been pushed out). But more recently, we've also withdraw financially, insisting that our tax dollars not go to provide services for Those People as well. We don't want to pay for their health care or their education. Even the charter school bargain says essentially, "Okay, we'll pay to educate a few of them. You know, the good ones." (That's my interpretation, not Putnam's).
Putnam suggests the solution for schools is to move either money, kids or teachers. But moving kids does not strengthen the community or the people who live in it. He acknowledges that charters don't really seem to help. And he also notes that if you want better teachers to work in poorer schools "the most obvious way to attract more and better teachers to such demanding work is to improve the conditions of their employment."
But I have to say that, for the most part, the "what can we do about it" portion of the book is pretty weak (example: go tell your local school district to do away with "pay for play" policies).
That's okay. Putnam brings a lot of clarity to these issues, and that's no small thing. The title points the way-- at the root of much of this is that we tend to have a narrow definition of who "our children" are, and we need to broaden that vision. At the very least, this book can serve as a valuable addition to the conversation, and I recommend you give it a read.
The book sets out to answer a particular question:
Do youth today coming from different social and economic backgrounds in fact have roughly equal life chances, and has that changed in recent decades?
Well, spoiler alert: the answers are “no” and “yes,” respectively. It’s the details and the explanations that make Putnam’s book worth reading. You should read the whole thing, because I am not going to cover everything. But let me give you some tidbits while I hit the broad strokes.
TIDBIT #1
Income inequality has risen within each major racial/ethnic group between 1967 and 2011. In other words, rich blacks have pulled away from poor blacks. The Great Recession stymied the growing gap briefly, but recovery has brought more of the same.
TIDBIT #2
When considering the debate about social mobility, it’s useful to remember that “conventional indicators” are generally three or four decades out of date.
TIDBIT #3
For those who believe that the fabled welfare mother is behind the growth in single-mom parenting, Putnam points out that there is no correlation between growing unmarried birth rates and “the ebb and flow of mothers on welfare.”
INFANCY MATTERS
Healthy infant brain development requires connecting with caring, consistent adults.
Putnam underlines this in a number of ways. The studies make quite a pile—stress affects brain development, contingent reciprocity interactions (an informal interaction) builds brain power, stable or unstable environment shapes the child’s view of how the world works, etc etc etc etc etc.
Good parenting takes time and can take money. Stress trickles down from stressed parents worried about life to children. In a fairly stunning chart, Putnam shows that higher-education parents favor parenting focused on building self-reliance, while low-education parents focus on obedience. Professional parents give far more encouragements, while welfare parents offer more discouragements.
This has to change how the child interacts with the world. But Putnam’s researchers have collected hundreds and hundreds of stories, and these stories show repeatedly the “linkage from economic hardship to stressed parenting to bad outcomes for kids.”
But let’s go to the central concept of the book.
THE WEB
We could look at Putnam’s main concept as a web of support or an account filled with social capital. Either way, it is the vast networks of connections, the deep pockets of social networking, that give the children on the high side of the great divide their advantage (and it is a divide-- time after time Putnam shows a scissor-shaped gap between the upper and lower groups, with no middle in the gulf between).
Both in data and anecdote, Putnam hammers home the same concept. Troubles happen to the rich and the poor. But when the children of the rich find trouble, the rich have access to resources, from formal programs that require money to access to have enough contacts to know a guy who knows a guy who handles that sort of thing.
The poor have no such network. In fact, Putnam cites studies that suggest that the poor have a much smaller, more redundant network-- their friends and their family and the people they hang out with are all the same people.
For a while, the American solution was essentially to provide the poor with a government created network. The wealthy have their own network-- from dance lessons to math tutoring to treatment for that little cough that may or may not Be Something, they know someone to call. The poor have no such network. Putnam talks about "weak ties," connections to wider, more diverse networks. As a wealthier person, you may not be friends with a doctor, but you undoubtedly know somebody who does have access to that world. The poor have few "weak ties" to help with jobs or college entrance or health issues.
This has huge practical implications for children. It has implications for what interests and skills they can pursue; does a parent know who to call if Chris is interested in hockey or dance or helping in a veterinarian office? Sure, there are programs to pluck students with outstanding promise from poverty, but that is kind of the point-- wealthy children don't have to show outstanding promise to pursue any of those things.
But it also has huge implications for world view. Putnam repeatedly talks about interview subjects whose socio-economic background has shaped their view of the world. For the wealthy, it's a big wide wonderful world where you can trust others and things generally work out well no matter what. For the poor, it's a hard world where you can trust very few people. Putnam reminded me of the Rochester Baby Lab do-over of the famed marshmallow experiment, a study that suggested that grit and patience have a lot more to do with environmental factors than any innate character possessed (or not) by the humans in question.
SCHOOLS
Putnam devotes a whole chapter of the book to schooling, but out of the detail and anecdote that fills the chapter, one basic point emerges-- schools don't create the gap between the poor and the wealthy, but they certainly do reinforce it.
Putnam sees that class gap as stronger than any racial gap, and says it's already well-established before students enter school.
In part he argues that the gaps we find in the education system are a function of residential sorting, that Americans have spent the last several decades sorting themselves into neighborhoods based on class and income-- well, let's be honest-- wealthier folks have spent the past few decades moving away from poor folks and leaving them alone in their poor neighborhoods. It dovetails with Warren Buffet's observation that if the rich couldn't opt out of public schools, we'd have better public schools. But Americans have opted out of living next door to Those People, and so that sorting and segregation is reflected in geographically-based public schools. "There's no denying that rich and poor kids in this country attend vastly different schools nowadays, which seems hard to square with the notion that schools are innocent bystanders in the growing youth class gap."
School finance and parent involvement are two of the major factors that Putnam cites. And while Putnam kind of sort of likes some of the idea of charter schools, I would point him back at those two factors. Charters don't fix finance, and they make parent involvement more difficult except for those parents who would have been involved even if their kid was attending school in a van down by the river. When you create a New Orleans style system, you end up with poor parents who somehow have to coordinate with parents who live in other neighborhoods and who must find a way to get cross town to their non-neighborhood school.
Putnam sees extracurricular activities as a way to build social capital and essential life skills. But of course, schools for lower class students, with budgets slashed and resources at a minimum, are least likely to have any such activities.
BOTTOM LINE
Putnam opens the book with a question he wants to answer it. Toward the end, he makes his main point (which he subtly signals by writing "this is the point of this book." Talking about parents who were themselves upwardly mobilized...
Though it might seem natural to label them "self-made," in many unnoticed ways they benefited from family and community supports that are nowadays less readily available to kids from modest backgrounds. They grew up in an era when public education and community supports for kids from all backgrounds managed to boost a significant number of people up the ladder-- in Bend, Beverly Hills, New York, Port Clinton, and even South Central LA. Those supportive institutions, public and private, no longer serve poorer kids so well.
Emphasis mine.
It's a grim picture that Putnam paints. Wealthier Americans have withdrawn physically from poorer Americans, moving out of the neighborhoods (or moving back to them once Those People have been pushed out). But more recently, we've also withdraw financially, insisting that our tax dollars not go to provide services for Those People as well. We don't want to pay for their health care or their education. Even the charter school bargain says essentially, "Okay, we'll pay to educate a few of them. You know, the good ones." (That's my interpretation, not Putnam's).
Putnam suggests the solution for schools is to move either money, kids or teachers. But moving kids does not strengthen the community or the people who live in it. He acknowledges that charters don't really seem to help. And he also notes that if you want better teachers to work in poorer schools "the most obvious way to attract more and better teachers to such demanding work is to improve the conditions of their employment."
But I have to say that, for the most part, the "what can we do about it" portion of the book is pretty weak (example: go tell your local school district to do away with "pay for play" policies).
That's okay. Putnam brings a lot of clarity to these issues, and that's no small thing. The title points the way-- at the root of much of this is that we tend to have a narrow definition of who "our children" are, and we need to broaden that vision. At the very least, this book can serve as a valuable addition to the conversation, and I recommend you give it a read.
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
The Human-Proof Classroom
I am a big believer in having a teacher toolbox chock
full of many and varied tools. I also believe that just because a tool
doesn't work well for me, that doesn't mean it can't work for someone else.
Nevertheless, there are some approaches that simply don't belong in a classroom ever.
Take scripting. Scripted lessons have been with us for a while, even before the folks at EngageNY decided that having teachers travel in lockstep through units was somehow a good idea.
Scripting has always had apologists. Way back in 2007, Georgia teacher educator Michelle Commeyras took to the pages of the Phi Delta Kappa magazine to make a half-hearted case for scripting. Commeyras traces the modern scripted lesson back to Siegfried Engelmann and Carl Bereiter, "who in the 1960s developed the direct instruction method of teaching reading to raise the academic success of inner-city children." This is unsurprising; rich school districts will be looking for teachers who know what they're talking about, not those who need a script.
Commeyras shared my attitude--at first. But she insisted that the more she watched teachers work from scripts, the more she saw good teachers who made individual choices. In other words, they worked over and above the script. Beyond the script. Off the script. Which is kind of my point. If you need a script to work in a classroom, you don't belong in a classroom.
Commeyras was writing in 2007, before the newest, biggest wave of reformsterism hit the beach like a tanker full of whale carcasses, each one of those carcasses stamped "teacher-proof." Publishers promised programs that could not be bollixed up by a teacher. Just open the box, hand out the materials, read the script, and deliver the content.
Commeyras offered an analogy that has been oft-repeated--it's just like having an actor read a script, bringing the character to life through the actor's choices, movement, reading, and action. Different actors can still make different choices; Ryan Gosling and Mel Brooks would make very different Hamlets.
But the actor analogy doesn't hold up. Actors and playwrights collaborate to bring a character to life, to put a living breathing human in front of the audience. Manufacturers of teaching scripts are doing the opposite--doing their best to erase every tiny piece of real, live human from the teacher's performance. Shakespeare wrote lines and it makes all the difference who reads them. But it's supposed to make no difference at all which "actor" delivers a Success for All lesson.
But reading Edushyster today made me realize just how much worse things have gotten. Amy Berard's account of being coached in the No Nonsense Nurturing school of schooling is profoundly horrifying, with Berard forced to work with an earpiece so that her edu-coaches can admonish her to stop using inflection and personality in her speaking while being sure to "narrate" the class aloud, a technique so ludicrously mockable that, in fact, her students started mocking it.
I had no choice but to go look up the masters of No Nonsense Nurturing, and it's a dark, sad picture. I found plenty of thick websitery to wade through, but some kind soul has distilled a presentation down to the high points, which is less depressing than reading a full syllabus.
There is literally nothing here you haven't seen before. Don't be an enabler. No excuses. Give precise instructions. Keep your vocal affect flat. Lee Canter. A color-coded behavior system. Attention-commanding signals (like a hand clap and response). Ignore negative behavior, but visit "consequences" upon it (unless you reach level Red, in which case send the kid to the office). Oh, and "be authentic" (which they must have been skipping over the day they told Berard that her voice was pitched too high).
There are two striking features of this program.
The first reminds me of the knd of management training we used to mock at my old summer job, the kind of training where folks are taught to mimic the behavior of carbon-based life forms (always use the other person's name to address them). It's not that some of this is not correct. It's that if you need to be told to do it, you probably will not do it well, at all. If you are focusing on positive behaviors according to a system instead of according to sense, you're probably doing it in a highly artificial and ineffective way.
But the other feature I'm struck by is how this goes scripted lessons one better. Our old goal was to teacher proof the classroom, but NNN also minimizes the importance of the individual student as well. Like the no excuses schools that it fits so well with (one of the endorsements comes from a KIPP school boass), it demands that students take their places as cogs in a machine.
The reformster dream is not teacher-centered learning or student-centered learning or even curriculum-based learning. This is a classroom centered around a content delivery system, and every one-- teachers, students, parents, strangers on the street-- is to submit themselves to the system.
On the NNN summary I found these two statements of belief parked unironically side by side:
I have to earn the respect of my students.
I expect 100% compliance from all of my students, 100% of the time.
Compliance and respect have nothing do with each other, but systems demand compliance. Teachers must comply with the system. Students must comply with the teachers. The content and testing will be designed for easiest compliance. Our content delivery module will be teacher-proof, student-proof, and just generally proof against all of the relationships, feelings, humanity and individuality that humans cart around like a pile of messy, unwelcome baggage. All will serve their rightful master-- the system.
Originally posted in View from the Cheap Seats
Nevertheless, there are some approaches that simply don't belong in a classroom ever.
Take scripting. Scripted lessons have been with us for a while, even before the folks at EngageNY decided that having teachers travel in lockstep through units was somehow a good idea.
Scripting has always had apologists. Way back in 2007, Georgia teacher educator Michelle Commeyras took to the pages of the Phi Delta Kappa magazine to make a half-hearted case for scripting. Commeyras traces the modern scripted lesson back to Siegfried Engelmann and Carl Bereiter, "who in the 1960s developed the direct instruction method of teaching reading to raise the academic success of inner-city children." This is unsurprising; rich school districts will be looking for teachers who know what they're talking about, not those who need a script.
Commeyras shared my attitude--at first. But she insisted that the more she watched teachers work from scripts, the more she saw good teachers who made individual choices. In other words, they worked over and above the script. Beyond the script. Off the script. Which is kind of my point. If you need a script to work in a classroom, you don't belong in a classroom.
Commeyras was writing in 2007, before the newest, biggest wave of reformsterism hit the beach like a tanker full of whale carcasses, each one of those carcasses stamped "teacher-proof." Publishers promised programs that could not be bollixed up by a teacher. Just open the box, hand out the materials, read the script, and deliver the content.
Commeyras offered an analogy that has been oft-repeated--it's just like having an actor read a script, bringing the character to life through the actor's choices, movement, reading, and action. Different actors can still make different choices; Ryan Gosling and Mel Brooks would make very different Hamlets.
But the actor analogy doesn't hold up. Actors and playwrights collaborate to bring a character to life, to put a living breathing human in front of the audience. Manufacturers of teaching scripts are doing the opposite--doing their best to erase every tiny piece of real, live human from the teacher's performance. Shakespeare wrote lines and it makes all the difference who reads them. But it's supposed to make no difference at all which "actor" delivers a Success for All lesson.
But reading Edushyster today made me realize just how much worse things have gotten. Amy Berard's account of being coached in the No Nonsense Nurturing school of schooling is profoundly horrifying, with Berard forced to work with an earpiece so that her edu-coaches can admonish her to stop using inflection and personality in her speaking while being sure to "narrate" the class aloud, a technique so ludicrously mockable that, in fact, her students started mocking it.
I had no choice but to go look up the masters of No Nonsense Nurturing, and it's a dark, sad picture. I found plenty of thick websitery to wade through, but some kind soul has distilled a presentation down to the high points, which is less depressing than reading a full syllabus.
There is literally nothing here you haven't seen before. Don't be an enabler. No excuses. Give precise instructions. Keep your vocal affect flat. Lee Canter. A color-coded behavior system. Attention-commanding signals (like a hand clap and response). Ignore negative behavior, but visit "consequences" upon it (unless you reach level Red, in which case send the kid to the office). Oh, and "be authentic" (which they must have been skipping over the day they told Berard that her voice was pitched too high).
There are two striking features of this program.
The first reminds me of the knd of management training we used to mock at my old summer job, the kind of training where folks are taught to mimic the behavior of carbon-based life forms (always use the other person's name to address them). It's not that some of this is not correct. It's that if you need to be told to do it, you probably will not do it well, at all. If you are focusing on positive behaviors according to a system instead of according to sense, you're probably doing it in a highly artificial and ineffective way.
But the other feature I'm struck by is how this goes scripted lessons one better. Our old goal was to teacher proof the classroom, but NNN also minimizes the importance of the individual student as well. Like the no excuses schools that it fits so well with (one of the endorsements comes from a KIPP school boass), it demands that students take their places as cogs in a machine.
The reformster dream is not teacher-centered learning or student-centered learning or even curriculum-based learning. This is a classroom centered around a content delivery system, and every one-- teachers, students, parents, strangers on the street-- is to submit themselves to the system.
On the NNN summary I found these two statements of belief parked unironically side by side:
I have to earn the respect of my students.
I expect 100% compliance from all of my students, 100% of the time.
Compliance and respect have nothing do with each other, but systems demand compliance. Teachers must comply with the system. Students must comply with the teachers. The content and testing will be designed for easiest compliance. Our content delivery module will be teacher-proof, student-proof, and just generally proof against all of the relationships, feelings, humanity and individuality that humans cart around like a pile of messy, unwelcome baggage. All will serve their rightful master-- the system.
Originally posted in View from the Cheap Seats
Winning International Competition
Hey, look! According to reporting in the New York Times and the Washington Post, some jobs are coming back from China. I wonder why that is.
The NYT piece by Hiroko Tabuchi focuses on the textile industry. Currently some Chinese companies are opening plants in the American South; the piece is anchored by a look at a worker from the Chinese plant training American workers to do her job in a highly automated plant that may use as few as 500 workers.
Why is this happening? Are the heads of these corporations saying, "Wow! Now that a generation of workers have grown up with the Common Core and had their educational achievement certified by high stakes standardized tests, we totally want to come employ these workers who are clearly bastions of international competitiveness." Or perhaps the bosses are saying, "These Chinese workers just don't have the deep level of educational achievement that
Well, no. They're not. From Ana Swenson's piece in the Washington Post:
Even when adjusted for productivity, Chinese manufacturing wages have risen by 187 percent over the decade. Industrial electricity costs have grown 66 percent, while natural gas costs are up 138 percent.
In the same time frame, U.S. wages have risen only 27 percent, while natural gas costs have fallen 25 percent, according to Boston Consulting.
Yes, shockingly, the international competition is about what it's always been about-- money. Having textiles manufactured in China by workers who work for peanuts in the cheapest of manufacturing conditions used to be the winning formula. Now Chinese want more pay, and demand has pushed up the cost of running manufacturing facilities.
Competing for those jobs is not about having the best public school educational standards. It has never been about that. It's about mustering a competent work force that will work cheap in cheap conditions. As both stories note, the textile plants opening do not represent a sudden change and surge. But they do represent examples of how the international competition for jobs will be won-- and it won't be by jamming our students through a one-size-fits-all, test-driven system based on "college and career ready" standards.
The NYT piece by Hiroko Tabuchi focuses on the textile industry. Currently some Chinese companies are opening plants in the American South; the piece is anchored by a look at a worker from the Chinese plant training American workers to do her job in a highly automated plant that may use as few as 500 workers.
Why is this happening? Are the heads of these corporations saying, "Wow! Now that a generation of workers have grown up with the Common Core and had their educational achievement certified by high stakes standardized tests, we totally want to come employ these workers who are clearly bastions of international competitiveness." Or perhaps the bosses are saying, "These Chinese workers just don't have the deep level of educational achievement that
Well, no. They're not. From Ana Swenson's piece in the Washington Post:
Even when adjusted for productivity, Chinese manufacturing wages have risen by 187 percent over the decade. Industrial electricity costs have grown 66 percent, while natural gas costs are up 138 percent.
In the same time frame, U.S. wages have risen only 27 percent, while natural gas costs have fallen 25 percent, according to Boston Consulting.
Yes, shockingly, the international competition is about what it's always been about-- money. Having textiles manufactured in China by workers who work for peanuts in the cheapest of manufacturing conditions used to be the winning formula. Now Chinese want more pay, and demand has pushed up the cost of running manufacturing facilities.
Competing for those jobs is not about having the best public school educational standards. It has never been about that. It's about mustering a competent work force that will work cheap in cheap conditions. As both stories note, the textile plants opening do not represent a sudden change and surge. But they do represent examples of how the international competition for jobs will be won-- and it won't be by jamming our students through a one-size-fits-all, test-driven system based on "college and career ready" standards.
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Couple Days Off
I have just returned from a few days on a lake in Maine with my lovely wife. We had a window of opportunity and cause to celebrate (my wife will be back where she belongs—in a classroom—come the fall), so we hopped in the car and headed north for some r & r.
We stayed in a cabin that my grandfather (a general contractor) built back in the fifties. It’s quiet, and this weekend it was clear and perfect
It is also completely without wi-fi, so I’ve been unplugged for several days (our phones are not smart, not even a little bit wise). But with the time to sit and read and reflect cut off from the torrent of information, I’ve found some renewed focus about a few things. I learned some stuff on my summer vacation.
Well, in some cases I've simply confirmed old knowledge. Devil Dogs are awful, but I love them anyway. They seem to made of chocolate tinged cardboard and fluff, but they taste like summer and home and outdoors to me. Also, with all due respect to my friends in the pilgrim state, all residents of Massachusetts should have their cars confiscated and they should never be allowed to drive ever again.
What I’ve learned is that while I can go a while without being able to check the blogs and the news and e-mail (I worry about the Nigerian prince), I have a powerful need to be able to look stuff up. It reminds me that we live in such a miraculous time, a time in which we have access to mountains of information—it’s almost like being smart. At the very least, the internet has changed what it means to be smart—but the inequity of access means the internet is also one more amplifier of the gap between the haves and have-nots. I need to find ways to address all of that in my classroom.
We read a bunch while we were up north. I read a bio of Edwin Drake, Our Children, The Cage-Busting Teacher, and The Warmth of Other Suns (and re-read Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire). Each read alone has a lot of interesting things to say; read together, they struck a few extra sparks in my brain. I’ll get back to you with some of it in this space. I’m glad to learn that I can still read entire books.
I've relearned something I learned earlier this summer-- when you are in the ongoing stream of news and reaction and dissection and re-reaction, you lose sight of just how quickly it moves (Chris Christie wants to punch who??). Earlier this summer I absolutely depended on Mercedes Schneider to report on the ESEA rewrite amendments, because I had a new round of rehearsals, a dying refrigerator, and some family business to attend to. In other words, I was having trouble keeping up because I was dealing with the exact sort of everyday stuff that ordinary people deal with. Sometimes it takes all of peoples' time and attention just to live their lives-- we can't be shocked, surprised, or upset that people busy with life didn't take a few hours to read up on the latest eruption in the education policy world (or dozens of hours over the last month to understand the context). This is one of the advantages that the thinky tank guys and the lobbyists and the policy wonks have-- their everyday life IS keeping up with this stuff. For people who have actual lives, it's more of a challenge. Having a network-- and being part of a network-- is critical to the mission of defending public education.
Likewise, I've learned that it can be worth it to take your head out of the unending high-speed swirly that is the education debate to stop and clear your brain a bit and remember what we care about, why we care about it, and what we want to do about it. It's easy to get caught up in the one-damn-thing-after-another of it all.
It's a marathon, not a sprint. Never give up and never surrender. But run too fast, too hard, too much of the time, and you not only run the risk of not finishing, but you lose track of where the finish line even is.
We stayed in a cabin that my grandfather (a general contractor) built back in the fifties. It’s quiet, and this weekend it was clear and perfect
It is also completely without wi-fi, so I’ve been unplugged for several days (our phones are not smart, not even a little bit wise). But with the time to sit and read and reflect cut off from the torrent of information, I’ve found some renewed focus about a few things. I learned some stuff on my summer vacation.
Well, in some cases I've simply confirmed old knowledge. Devil Dogs are awful, but I love them anyway. They seem to made of chocolate tinged cardboard and fluff, but they taste like summer and home and outdoors to me. Also, with all due respect to my friends in the pilgrim state, all residents of Massachusetts should have their cars confiscated and they should never be allowed to drive ever again.
What I’ve learned is that while I can go a while without being able to check the blogs and the news and e-mail (I worry about the Nigerian prince), I have a powerful need to be able to look stuff up. It reminds me that we live in such a miraculous time, a time in which we have access to mountains of information—it’s almost like being smart. At the very least, the internet has changed what it means to be smart—but the inequity of access means the internet is also one more amplifier of the gap between the haves and have-nots. I need to find ways to address all of that in my classroom.
We read a bunch while we were up north. I read a bio of Edwin Drake, Our Children, The Cage-Busting Teacher, and The Warmth of Other Suns (and re-read Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire). Each read alone has a lot of interesting things to say; read together, they struck a few extra sparks in my brain. I’ll get back to you with some of it in this space. I’m glad to learn that I can still read entire books.
I've relearned something I learned earlier this summer-- when you are in the ongoing stream of news and reaction and dissection and re-reaction, you lose sight of just how quickly it moves (Chris Christie wants to punch who??). Earlier this summer I absolutely depended on Mercedes Schneider to report on the ESEA rewrite amendments, because I had a new round of rehearsals, a dying refrigerator, and some family business to attend to. In other words, I was having trouble keeping up because I was dealing with the exact sort of everyday stuff that ordinary people deal with. Sometimes it takes all of peoples' time and attention just to live their lives-- we can't be shocked, surprised, or upset that people busy with life didn't take a few hours to read up on the latest eruption in the education policy world (or dozens of hours over the last month to understand the context). This is one of the advantages that the thinky tank guys and the lobbyists and the policy wonks have-- their everyday life IS keeping up with this stuff. For people who have actual lives, it's more of a challenge. Having a network-- and being part of a network-- is critical to the mission of defending public education.
Likewise, I've learned that it can be worth it to take your head out of the unending high-speed swirly that is the education debate to stop and clear your brain a bit and remember what we care about, why we care about it, and what we want to do about it. It's easy to get caught up in the one-damn-thing-after-another of it all.
It's a marathon, not a sprint. Never give up and never surrender. But run too fast, too hard, too much of the time, and you not only run the risk of not finishing, but you lose track of where the finish line even is.
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