PA: Charter Vampires on the Loose

In Pennsylvania, opening a charter school, particularly a  cyber-charter, has long been just like printing money in your garage (only you won't get in any trouble for it).

The current plight of the Chester Upland School District highlights just how screwed up the whole mess is, and how charters are set up to suck the public system dry. Yesterday's news roundup at Keystone State Education Coalition has most of the best coverage of the story, but let me pull up some highlights for you.

I'll remind you that before CUSD ever started to get in trouble, the state of Pennsylvania has been distinguishing itself by some of the most inequitable funding in the country. This is a bi-partisan screwing of public ed. Democratic Governor "Smilin' Ed" Rendell used stimulus funds exactly as he wasn't supposed to, as a replacement for regular state funding of education, and his successor Republican Tom "One Term" Corbett slashed education on top of the auto-slashing that occurred when those stimulus funds went away. Bottom line-- funding of our poorest schools is in free-fall, because they get very little from the state.

As it turns out, CUSD gets negative support from the state. That's because the hugely generous payment formula for charters has resulted in CUSD losing more money to charters than they get from the state of Pennsylvania.

Each school district pays charters based on their own per capita costs per student. That's right-- what the charter collects has absolutely nothing to do with what it actually costs to educate the student. Perhaps that's how it's possible to pay the six top executives at cyber monster K12 a grand total of $16.4 million. Perhaps that's how Vahan Gureghian, King of the Keystone Edupreneurs, can end up building (and now selling) an $84.5 mansion in Palm Beach (not to be confused with the 30,000 square foot manse he built in upscale suburban Philly).

Gureghian operates one of the largest charters in PA, located right in Chester County. So it's only a mild stretch to say that Chester Upland Schools are in danger of being shut down so that Gureghian can live large. But like many charter operators in PA, Gureghian has friends in high places. Here's a fun story-- one of Gureghian's schools was in trouble for test cheating, but the school was allowed to investigate itself.

Chester Uplands is a perfect example of how students with special needs have become the cash cows of the charter biz in PA. This is a special kind of creaming. Francis Barnes is the receiver for Chester Upland schools, and he's a pretty frustrated man these days as witnessed by this open letter he sent to many media outlets. He outlines how the profitable selection process works.

The key is that while all CUSD students with special needs come with a hefty $40K for a charter school, they are not all created equal. Students on the autism spectrum are expensive to teach; they make up 8.4% of CUSD special ed student population, but only 2.1% at Chester Community Charter School, and a whopping 0% at Widener and Chester Community School of the Arts. Emotionally disturbed students are also costly; they make up 13.6 % of special ed at CUSD, 5.3% at Chester Community, and zero at the other two. Intellectual disabilities make up 11.6% for CUSD, 2.8% for CCCS, and zero for the others.

Speech and language impaired, however, are pretty inexpensive to educate. CUSD carries 2.4% of the special ed population in this category, but the three charters carry 27.4%, 20.3% and 29.8%.

That is the charter trick. Get the students for which your paid the most, but which cost the least to educate, and ka-ching! you are off to your gigantoc mansion.

New Governor Tom Wolf is trying to fix the system, but due to PA's super-duper budgeting process (the budget is due at the beginning of the summer, but our elected leaders don't generally get it passed till Halloween) that is stalled. The state tried to get special relief for Chester Uplands, but the judge said no.

You cannot swing a cat in Pennsylvania without hitting a school district that has had to close a school building because of financial problems caused by bloodsucking charter schools (combined with our seriously messed-up pension situation, but that's another day). But Chester Uplands is poised to become the first entire district in Pennsylvania to be shut down entirely by charters, leaving a few thousand students to go... well, who knows what happens to them when the public school system has to close its doors. The charters certainly don't want all those unprofitable poor kids with special needs.

This is what it means to say that charters save only some kids, only the kids they choose, only the kids they deem worthy (aka profitable), while abandoning the rest of the students to a public system that has been stripped of resources. This is why I don't support charters as currently practiced-- because they violate the spirit, history, and purpose of public education which is to serve all students, not just the ones that help you finance a big mansion. And there is no laying this at CUSD's door-- no amount of responsible financial management would have saved them as long as the system is twisted and tilted to favor the vampires that drain public schools dry.

Why a Teacher "Shortage"?

This originally ran two weeks ago, and yet we're still talking about the issue. It's almost as if there's some sort of real problem.

August is apparently our month to contemplate a teacher shortage. Or reports of a teacher shortage. Or a completely fabricated teacher shortage. The issue has had play all the way from the blogoverse to the New York Times to the Ed Week blog department.

What nobody seems to be able to answer is why, exactly, we're having this conversation? What is causing the shortage-- or at least the repeated reporting of one. What is the actual problem?


It's Teachers Bailing Out

One repeated argument is that the shortage isn't anything special, but teachers and reform-resistors are exaggerating in order to argue that bad policies are driving teachers out of the field. Every anguished "Why I Am Leaving Teaching" column is just a crowbar with which to whack away at the reformster machinery.

This is an odd argument, like saying to someone you're beating up, "Oh, you're just crying because you want me to stop punching you in the face." Well, yeah.

But it's not just teachers making the point. The state of Arizona ran a study on recruitment and retention and came up with suggestions like "treat teachers with respect."

It's the Economy, Stupid

There's a teacher shortage because the economy is better. Because there are so many great jobs out there, this argument goes, college students are saying no to teaching.

There are three problems with this theory.

First, the recovery has added a disproportionate number of crappy jobs. "Why become a teacher when I can go work at McDonalds," said no college student ever.

Second, this theory could be best supported by a historical argument. Simply show the figures indicating that every time the economy gets good, we have a teacher shortage. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Third, what this theory describes is not a teacher shortage, but a teacher pay gap. When National Widget Works can't hire all the widget engineers it needs, it takes steps to make the job more attractive by improving pay, benefits and work conditions. Is it possible that the only real shortage is a shortage of willingness to do what it takes to recruit?

Well, It's Complicated

Once again, nuance and detail are trampled by a herd of rhetorical bulls. Many states report shortages in STEM area, in special ed, and in ELL. Some states have trouble recruiting to rural areas. On the other hand, nobody is reporting a pressing shortage of elementary teachers. And I don't think anybody on any side of this issue is claiming that we have more than adequate numbers of non-white teachers in the field.

It's Manufactured

Just as it's argued that teachers are over-selling the shortage to score points against reformster policies, we can argue that reformsters are using shortage rhetoric to promote their own policies.
The most obvious example is New Orleans, where officials fired over 7,000 teachers and then said, "Dang! We have a teacher shortage. We'd better ship in lots of low-cost Teach for America temps to help us with this dreadful shortage!" Nevada has embraced its teacher shortage as a way to speed former cocktail waitresses into classrooms, and West Virginia boasts a guy who feels qualified to teach biology because his wife's a nurse.

If your state is run by folks with little love for the teaching profession, then reports of a shortage are good leverage for alternate certification plans to put people in classrooms who don't even have a college degree. That leads us to--

It's a New Definition of "Teacher"

Some places "solve" their problem of a teacher shortage by simply redefining "teacher" as "a sentient human able to occupy a classroom." By this definition, there are hundreds of millions of teachers in this country. See? No shortage at all.

It's the Busted Pipeline

I've talked to the president of a college that was founded as a teacher's college and is now radically slashing its education department. She echoed many national reports-- students are not going to college for teaching.

Nobody knows why for certain, though there are certainly popular theories. Teachers have been badmouthed and the profession denigrated. Today's college students have had nothing but teachers who had little autonomy, were tasked with test prep and spent time in clerically-intense data collection, and it just doesn't look like fun.

Teaching was once a stable job, paying decent-if-not-awesome wages, offering job security and promising a good prospect of finding work. All of that has changed. Ironically, the opening of alternate certification means that a teacher shortage and a tight job market can exist side by side (again, think New Orleans with 7,000 out of work teachers and a teacher shortage all at the same time).

So, Is There Really a Shortage?

It's true that rhetoric about teacher shortages serve the interests of both reformsters (We need more alt cert and TFA) and the resistance (Look what they're doing to our profession). But just a look at the numbers shows us that some regions are looking at empty jobs they are having trouble filling.

But does that mean a shortage? Nope. It's one more version of the widespread corporate refusal to deal with demands of the invisible hand. We didn't send jobs to China because we couldn't find the workers in the US, but because we couldn't find them for what corporations wanted to pay. Tech companies have yelled "shortage" in order to import cheaper labor.

The invisible hand is very clear. When you can't get what you want for X dollars, you need to offer more. The world is filled with human beings who have the ability to morph into any kind of worker you want-- if you offer them motivation. Good lord, even Frank Bruni, not exactly a whiz on the topic of education, gets it at least a little (even if he doesn't understand why he's part of the problem).
If you're having trouble filling a teaching position, make a better offer. It really doesn't get any more complicated than that.

Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats

TN: We've Found the Unicorn Farm

Tennessee officials are cheerfully announcing the advent of awesome new assessments that will be "not a test you can game." The tests will be delivered at the end of the year by winged unicorns pooping rainbows while playing a Brahms lullabye on the spoons.

“We’re moving into a better test that will provide us better information about how well our students are prepared for post-secondary,” Tennessee Education Commissioner Candice McQueen told reporters recently during sneak peek at some of the questions.

Fans of the new standardized tests continue to be impressed at how these tests solve the problems of education in the 1970's. Assistant state commissioner of data and research Nokia Townes says that the tests will require "more than rote memorization," which puts them on a par with the tests I started giving my students thirty-five years ago. But that statement also indicates that officials still don't understand what "gaming the test" means.

Standardized tests are, by their nature, games. Where you have multiple choice questions, you have one correct answer and several other answers designed to trick and trap students who might make a particular mistake, so by their nature, they are not simply trying to capture a particular correct behavior, but are also testing for several incorrect ones.

But Tennessee officials are distracted themselves, focusing on unimportant test features. The questions have drop and drag! Which is, of course, simply a bubble test question with dragging instead of clicking or bubbling. The questions require multiple correct answers! Which is just a bubble test with more options and two bubbles to hit.

Because standardized tests are a game, gaming them will always be possible. The tests involve plenty of tricks and traps, and so we teach students how to identify those and spot when testers are trying to sucker them in a particular way. We learn specialized testing vocabulary (this is what "mood" means to test manufacturers). We learn what sorts of things to scan for in response to certain types of questions. In short, we teach students a variety of skills that have no application other than taking the Big Standardized Test.

Nothing has changed, really. The advantage of a standardized multiple choice test is that it can be scored quickly and cheaply. The problem is that it can't measure much of any depth. At its worst in the bad old days when Hector and I were pups, it measured recall. In the new and improved days since, it measures whether or not the student will fall for particular tricks and traps-- which may or may not have anything to do with how well the student understands and applies the understanding. And since our focus under the Core is almost entirely on performing certain operations and not at all on content, we're not really testing a student on what she knows, but on whether she can perform the required trick (of course, we're also testing whether or not she's willing to perform the trick, but we never, ever have that discussion).

The article says that the "oldest and most potent criticism of tests" is that "they force teachers to 'teach to the test' and focus unduly on memorizing facts and testing tricks that students promptly forget after completing the test."

Memorizing facts? Maybe. Testing tricks? Those will always and forever be part of test prep for standardized tests because those tests must be speedy and cheap, and the only way to do testing speedy and cheap is by building it out of testing tricks. And any testing tricks that manufacturers can use to create a test, students can learn to take it. 

Content-Free Curriculum

Coming back to school (first student day yesterday, thanks) reminds me once again of the huge hole in the heart of current Core curriculum. The lack of content. The sad fact that there is no there there.

Yes, someone is going to pop up to say that the Core (both in its original incarnation and all the old wine in new skins versions that have promulgated throughout states where "OMGZ NOES! We has no Common Core!" versions of the Core still roam free) is NOT a curriculum, which is part of the trick. Because the Core really isn't a curriculum in a classic sense; the ELA standards are a sort of anti-curriculum in which teachers are forbidden to care about the content, and must only worry about teaching students to perform certain actions, certain tricks, on a test.

Content exists, and teachers a free to select what they will. Teach Romeo and Juliet or  Heart of Darkness or Green Eggs and Ham-- we don't care because it doesn't matter because the literature, the content, has no purpose beyond a playing field on which to practice certain plays. I've accused the Core of treating literature like a bucket in which we carry the important part, the "skills" that the Core demands, but it's more accurate to call literature the paper cup-- disposable and replaceable. We just want you to be able to "find support" or "draw conclusions." About what just doesn't matter.

Back in the early days, we had folks arguing that CCSS called for rich content instruction, that it absolutely demanded a classroom filled with the classic canon. At the time I thought those folks were simply hallucinating, since CCSS  makes no content demands at all (the closest it comes is the infamous appendix suggested readings list). But I've come to believe that those folks were reacting to the gap that they saw-- "Without rich content, this set of standards is crap, so apparently, by implication and necessity, this must call for rich content. Because otherwise it's crap."

I think the absence of content is also the origin of the "new kind of non-bubble non-memorizing test" talking point. The old school test their thinking of is the kind that asks you to pick the year the Magna Carta was signed, or identify the main characters of Hamlet. But the Big Standardized Tests cover absolutely no content at all. I could throw out all my literature basal texts and never teach a single item from the canon, a single work of literature all year, and still have my students prepared for the BS Test by studying test-taking techniques while reading an article from the newspaper and answering questions about it every single day.

This is also the secret of Depth of Knowledge instruction. It doesn't matter what you teach, as long as you use it to develop certain mental tricks.

Look at it this way:

A student could graduate from high school with top scores on the BS Test and have read nothing in high school except the daily newspaper. The student's teachers would be rated "proficient," the student's school would be high-achieving, and the student could proudly carry the Common Core BS Test "advanced" seal of approval, without that student ever having read a single classic work of literature or every having learned anything except how to perform certain tricks for answering certain questions when confronted with a text.

This is not a high standard. This is neither college nor career ready. Core supporters are going to say, "Well, the local school is free to-- and should-- fill in the blanks with classic literature and great reading." But the test-and-punish reformster system that we live on does not care a whit for content. If students cannot perform the proper tricks on the BS test, students, teachers and schools will be punished. If students cannot identify Huck Finn, MacBeth, James Baldwin, or Toni Morrison, it won't make a bit of difference to the system.

This tilting of the playing field does not just make the Core content neutral; it makes the Core content hostile. It dismisses the value of literature without so much as a conversation. If you are talking to a Core fan who insists otherwise, ask them this question-- Can I prepare my students to be proficient on the BS Test without reading a single important work of literature? The answer is "yes." If they say otherwise, they are lying.

Tribune Discovers Dyett Hunger Strike

It only took eight days for Chicago's leading "news" outlet to discover that Dyett High twelve community members were staging a hunger strike. But yesterday afternoon, the Chicago Tribune finally covered the story.

Mind you, they didn't cover it all that well. They reported the 13-student enrollment class without any context, as if it were the result of "plunging enrollment" and not a phased closure (with CPS encouraging students to get out of Dodge).

They reported the two other proposals uncritically. They didn't explain Little Black Pearl's non-past operating schools, and I am becoming really curious about who is behind the athletic school proposal which is always only linked to Charles Campbell, the Dyett interim principal. They did not mention that CPS entertains his proposal even though it was late.

The Trib reported the community proposal, but put "leadership and green technology school" in quotation marks as if this were some sort of crazy idea that community members just pulled out of thin air, as if it were like a school for chinchilla ranchers or underwater basket weavers. And Trib-- you left off "global."

And the Tribune made sure to note that the group on hunger strike has always been tied to the Chicago teachers' union (you know-- Those People).

Still, they did report on many of the group's major concerns-- and they acknowledged that the hunger strike is going on.

Now-- here's what you need to do.

1) Click on over to the article. Remember, every click on an article is a vote saying "I want to read more coverage of this."

2) Comment. I'm not sure if any comments are actually getting through, but make sure the comment section includes the rest of the story.

An action like a hunger strike is only as effective as the public reaction to it, and that depends on the public hearing about it, so the Tribune's end of their news blackout of the event means that progress is being made. Keep the pressure on. Spread the word. And remind the Tribune that the worlds needs to know about what's going on.

Robert Putnam and Cage Busting

It was probably because I was reading Robert Putnam's Our Kids and Rick Hess's Cage Busting Teachers, but in Putnam's book, this section leapt out at me. Putnam is describing social capital, the "informal ties to family, friends, neighbors and acquaintances involved in civic associations, religious institutions, athletic teams, volunteer activities, and so on."

Social capital has repeatedly been shown to be a strong predictor of well-being both for individuals and for communities. Community bonds and social networks have powerful effects on health, happiness, educational success, economic success, public safety and (especially) child welfare. However, like financial capital, social capital is distributed unevenly...

Contrary to romanticized images of close-knit communal life among the poor, lower-class Americans today, especially if they are nonwhite, tend to be socially isolated, even form their neighbors.

Perhaps more important, more educated Americans also have many more "weak ties," that is, connections to wider, more diverse networks. The reach and diversity of these social ties are especially valuable for social mobility and educational and economic advancement, because such ties allow educated, affluent parents and their children to tap a wealth of expertise and support that is simply inaccessible to parents and children who are less well off. 

Now, that speaks to me as a teacher learning about students-- but it also speaks to me just plain as a teacher. Putnam is talking about how the lack of social capital gives poor students a disadvantage, but it got me to thinking about teachers' social capital.

Hess's book talks about authority and power-- but what if the issue Hess is talking about is really social capital?

After all-- one of the side effects of working almost exclusively with children is that teachers don't develop the kind of network of soft ties that other professionals do. In fact, teachers early in their careers are often so busy doing the work that they don't get out, don't join community groups, don't volunteer, don't become part of a "more diverse network." Even things as simple as meeting someone for lunch are not do-able in teacherville.

We've talked a lot about how reformsters have access to a great deal of money, but it's social capital as well. When David Coleman and his buds decided that they had the blueprint for re-inventing American education, they cashed in some social capital and got a meeting with Bill Gates. When I have new ideas about how to revolutionize education, I can...um... tell other faculty in the lounge. Guys like Rick Hess and Mike Petrilli and Arne Duncan have powerful and important people in their phone directory. Guys like me do not.

Weak ties get things done for people with social capital. My child or I have an interest or concern? I know a guy. For the poor, informal weak ties are supplemented with formal government agencies. If a socially capitalized parent is worried that his kid is sick, he cashes in some capital to get an unofficial medical opinion. For the poor, the only solution is a trip to a clinic; they don't have access to a doctor's home number. Likewise, the union often substitutes for teacher weak ties. I may not know how to get connected with a political figure, but my union does.

So when Hess spends time talking about earning moral authority by doing the right thing, when he talks about how to effectively approach the People In Charge to get their permission and support, isn't he perhaps talking about building (or substituting for) social capital?

What is mentoring except offering to share a wealth of social capital with someone who hasn't had a chance to build any yet?

Imagine a world in which every rich and powerful player adopted not schools, but teachers. Imagine if every rich and powerful person decided to become socially connected to four or five classroom teachers, connected well enough that they felt comfy calling him any time.

Of course, it's hard to imagine because what would the teachers offer the rich and powerful player? Because they don't have any social capital to offer him in return. But if such ties became the norm, eventually teachers would become an integral part of a larger network. Heck. Imagine a world where rich and powerful folks connected to each other through their teachers.

But teachers-- because we are isolated in our classrooms, interacting mostly with children, don't build the kind of powerful social capital accounts that other professionals do. Our biggest source of social capital is our students and their families, which means in poor communities the teachers end up with less social capital to "spend" on behalf of their students. In upscale schools, teachers get to grow capital through parent connections, and through former students who go on to be Big Deals.

Seen through this lens, perhaps part of Hess's message is that teachers have more social capital than they think they do, and they should start using it and building it. I think of my colleague Jennifer Berkshire, who's not a teacher, but who gets to interview all sorts of people through the revolutionary technique of calling them up and asking. Sometimes we grossly underestimate the amount of social capital that we have at our disposal.

Maybe the big secret of cage busting is finding ways to build social capital, to create connections, to accumulate the kind of weak ties that make life run better for those who have them. Maybe the cage is not actually a cage, but a kind of null space created by the lack of connections to anything, and we don't need so much to bust the cage as we need to bridge the gap and build connections across that empty zone.

I'm still thinking this stuff through. Maybe when Putnam and Hess give me a call and invite me to sit down with them over lunch to talk about it, I'll flesh it out some more. If they can meet with me for thirty minutes during fifth period.

Cage Busting Teachers?

One of my summer reads was Rick Hess's book The Cage-Busting Teacher. Hess comes to us from the American Enterprise Institute, a right-tilted free-market-loving thinky tank, but Hess is no dummy and has shown at times his willingness to think things through, whether that thinking leads him into disagreement with reformster orthodoxy or not.

This new book of his deals the question of the cages that teachers inhabit, what makes the cages, what keeps the teachers in the cages, and how they can get out. It's a challenging book, because parts of it are dead on and parts of it are dead wrong. But I've read it, so you don't have to (or so that you can decide if you want to).

First, the Very Short Version

Teachers complain of being thwarted, boxed in, bottled up, and just plain caged. Hess spent some time talking to lots of folks, and concluded that while teachers lack the organizational authority to bust a cage (we don't control budgets, staffing, scheduling, etc), teachers can make use of the authority of expertise and moral authority. Using those, teachers can shift the culture of their buildings and create concrete solutions to institutional problems.


The more teachers do that, the more trust they'll win, the more policy makers will back off, and the more room they will have to put their expertise and passion to work. That has the promise to flip today's vicious cycle, where micromanagement leads to resistance, which lead to more micromanagement, which leads to more resistance. Cage-busters can create a virtuous cycle in which problem-solving educators earn the trust of lawmakers and administrators, yielding more autonomy and more opportunity to make smart decisions for kids.

Remember that paragraph, because it contains most of what is right and wrong about Hess's idea.

So What Is the Cage? 

The cage consists of the routines, rule4s and habits that exhaust teachers' time, passion, and energy. The cage is why educators close their classroom doors and keep their heads down.

Hess gets more specific. An avalanche of well-intentioned directives. The casual and thoughtless wasting of teachers' time with everything from potty duty to pointless assemblies to --well, just stuff. Every teacher knows the drill. No systemic rewards for excellence. And being "blindsided by accountability," where Hess admits that testing culture is a bit out of control.

And it is so pervasive that teachers have come to accept feeling alienated, disempowered and frustrated. Hess notes the disconnect between surveys showing that teachers think their boss is doing a good job, but feel their work environment is not open and trusting and that they are not treated with respect. Hess's conclusion is that teachers not only work in the cage, but accept that the cage is an inescapable part of the job.

Hess goes on to point out some of the mindsets that keep teachers in the cage. The MacGyver trap, where some teachers just make miracles out of stretching what they have-- but wearing themselves out and keeping others from finding actual real non-gum-and-paper-clip solutions. Hiding in the classroom, disconnected from the full school system. Getting too angry about the big picture to accomplish things locally. Simply waiting for the flavor of the month to pass, rather than dealing with it. And fear-- fear of rocking the boat, causing trouble, being That Guy, making a mistake.

This part of Hess's construct is his strongest, the part where, mostly, he has a point.

Who Are the Busters?

Hess is clear that CBT are not about specific classroom techniques, but simply seeing their world a little differently. Here are some of the things that Hess's cagebuster believes.

* actions, not words, change culture
* teachers can have influence, but have to earn it
* management's job is to root out mediocrity, but teachers should pressure them to do so
* "teacher leadership" is chirpy nonsense unless it comes with real power
* precision and clarity are important
* problem-solving and responsibility are the teachers' tools for creating change
* the lucky get luckier
* that "this stuff is hard" and that mistakes will be made

Cage Busting Teachers wield their authority of expertise by being experts in their field and knowing what the heck they're doing. They get and use their moral authority by being guardians of the public good. Moral authority is earned.

Hess spends a lot of time throughout the book trying to describe this complex of stuff. What I see him saying is, basically, a teacher who is self-directed and intrinsically motivated, who knows what the right thing to do is and does it.

So, How Does One Bust

I'm going to really oversimplify this part, but contained in it is the best part of Hess's book.

Teachers in the cage tend to be compliant, well-behaved, institutional team players who stay in place. As Hess says, there are many reasons for that, but he's onto something when he observes that one way to get out of the cage is... just to walk out of the cage. I was reminded of C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, describing how there are no actual barriers keeping the damned in Hell. They could walk right out at any time, but for a variety of reasons, they have convinced themselves that they can't, and so they stay there, suffering.

It starts with cage-busting teachers. It starts with teachers earning, employing and leveraging the authority that will make them masters of their fate. It's about a new deal, where teachers embrace responsibility for what schools do and how students fare.

Instead of seeing themselves as other-directed cogs, a CBT would act on the belief that this is our house. A CBT steps up and solves problems. And as the CBT establishes herself as a strong agent of responsibility, administrators invest more trust and responsibility in her, giving her more power to influence the system.

And that's actually pretty much it. The rest is a matter of working out the details.

Contentious Issues 

Hess spends an entire chapter on "The Union Question." Hess knows his history-- he knows that teachers have suffered a variety of historical abuses such as being fired for stupid reasons, and that the union did not just spring up because a bunch of teachers wanted more beer money.

Ultimately, his position here vis-a-vis the CBT is that a CBT does not necessarily take a particular side on the question. Hess is never a fan of over-simplifying some issues: "Cage-busting teachers eschew sweeping generalizations..." So unions can be good or bad, depending on members and leadership.

But Hess's handling of difficult issues gets in the way of his cage-busting vision. He suggests, for instance, that while teachers should be vocal and intolerant when it comes to crappy colleagues, the business of how exactly to identify bad teachers is an issue that the CBT doesn't need to get all wrapped up in-- even though I would argue that it's hugely important and all his talk about getting rid of the chaff and rewarding excellence is meaningless if we have no way to identify either.

And in fact, Hess's CBT is bold and courageous and outspoken and willing to exercise her authority-- but always in a proper non-controversial way. For a while I thought that Hess was advocating his version of "It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission," until he specifically wrote that he wasn't.

And There's Hess's Big Problem

The book is filled with dozen of examples of CBTs who identified a problem, figured out a way to address it, and worked the problem until they managed a solution. They are all great stories. And yet every single solitary CBT story ultimately rested on a cooperative administrator. Some had to be convinced at first, but not one of them actively attempted to thwart the CBT.

In Hess's universe, many teachers are not making great enough use of the power that they have at their disposal-- and on this I agree with him 100%. But in Hess's universe, the power structure, the entire system surrounding schools and government oversight thereof-- that is all just as it should be. The right people are in charge, right where they belong.

Teachers "earn" trust. The people in power "yield" some authority to teachers. And all of that earning of trust and power is done on the terms set by those in authority. He even includes big chunks of information about how to get those in authority to say yes to your cage-busting ideas (and he's not entirely wrong-- some teachers are very bad at that sort of thing). But in Hess's world, teachers never have more authority than is given to them by the people in charge. Hess looks at the public education system and sees the Catholic Church, with all power flowing down from above. He sees a feudal society where things run smoothly as long as everyone stays in their place. Teachers who behave themselves and please their rightful bosses can earn a longer leash.

Hess's universe is an inverted version of mine. In my universe, I'm the professional who knows what the hell he's doing (mostly, on most days-- I ain't Superman). If you want to come into my world and tell me what I'm supposed to do, you're going to earn the right to have me take you seriously and consider following your "suggestions" about my classroom and my school. I mean-- I'll listen to almost anything, because I'm always ready to steal be influenced by a new idea. But just because, say, you had some success selling computers or winning an election or running a thinky tank or selling a textbook, I'm not automatically going to recognize your authority in my workplace. Not until you earn it. Sure, you can get control of all or some of the government and pass laws and create some rules, and you may be able to force my compliance-- but that's not authority. It's just blunt force.

It may be that Hess is just offering practical realpolitik. And I absolutely agree that many teachers sit in cages that have lockless doors and bars made of tin foil, cages that don't even need to be busted-- just walked right out of.

But there are administrators, officials, bureaucrats, meddlers, policymakers, and other cage builders out there who are resistant problems, massive obstacles to educational progress, and a polite and proper approach to them isn't going to budge a thing. Hess's whole model depends on cooperation from the people who have positional authority, and the educational landscape is filled with people who aren't letting go of an ounce of their control, no matter how deserving and earning a CBT acts.

In fact, if we just think back, we can recall that during every wave of reformsterism, including NCLB, RTTT, Common Core and everything else that has dropped on us in the last fifteen years, there have been plenty of teachers around with plenty of professional and moral authority, and they were resoundingly ignored. Well, that's not true-- when some tried to speak up, they were belittled and dismissed.

I think Hess's book is worth reading-- there's a lot to think about, even when you're disagreeing with it. But at the end of the day, Cage-busting Teaching is about being a little bit of a rebel, just enough of a self-starter, and not-inappropriately independent. I think some of his ideas are actually useful-- but more so when taken further than he wants to take them, because ultimately, in Hess's world, outside of the cage is another, bigger cage. That is, perhaps, reality, but Hess still ends up with an oddly limited message of, "Stand up for education, as long as you, you know, get permission and don;t get too unruly."

I actually have one other big thought about the book, but I'm going to deal with that separately. In the meantime, maybe Hess will return my favor and give my book a plug.