Should Teachers Stick Around

At Bellwether, Chad Aldeman wants us to know that the classic teacher retirement plan "shortchanges teachers."

Aldeman's entire argument rests on a curious assumption--  but let's see what he's saying, first.

His point is a two-parter, and you can follow link one and link two to read his briefs at length if you like. But I think we can hit the drift of his gist pretty quickly.

Aldeman's argument is that it takes many years-- 25 (and he adds an exclamation point, like, good lord! can you even imagine someone staying in teaching for an entire twenty-five years!)-- for a teacher to have a pension that's worth as much or more than her contributions to the fund. When Aldeman says that the program shortchanges teachers, he actually means "teachers who aren't in teaching for an entire career."

It’s commonly accepted that public-sector workers such as teachers trade lower salaries for higher job security and more generous benefits. But that trade only works well for the small minority of teachers who actually stick around until retirement. 

I would argue that the pension set-up is long-term as an incentive for teachers to be teachers for the long haul, that like seniority protections and job security and the other features of employment, it helps foster what society has traditionally wanted-- teachers who become proficient and give the community the benefit of their well-developed skills for generations, and not just a year or two. Schools have traditionally been stabilizing institutions in their communities, and having a stable teaching force is central to that goal.

Aldeman's point rests on this charter, which shows that only 25% of the teaching force sticks around to get their pension.

This is as severe an attrition rate for teachers as I've ever seen, though it initially matches up with the old 50% of teachers leaving within the first five years figure (even though that figure has been questioned). So the math in this may be very arguable.

Aldeman is not arguing that's a bad thing, but seems to feel (!) that a lifelong career in teaching is neither normal nor desirable.

That's not an unusual reformy position, though Aldeman has not been one of the vocal proponents of the Short Career Model. In the Short Career Model, we pay some teachers big money for a few years, and then cycle them out, either because they never planned to stick around in the first place, or because school management has the regulatory freedom to fire any teacher at any time for any reason-- including, "Sorry, Mrs. McTeachwell, but we want to replace you with somebody cheaper." Certainly part of the appeal of that approach is the low cost of pensions for the state and the schools.

Aldeman also seems to be leaning toward the Do-It-Yourself pension model favored by Social Security reformers-- just take some pension payments and go invest them yourself. It's popular because it's cheap and it is one more way for the rich to tell poor people, "Grab your bootstraps and leave me alone. I've got mine, Jack." And playing the market to manage your own pension seems totally safe-- I can't think of anything that's happened to the markets in the last decade that would seem like a red flag.

Personally, I would argue that the steep drop at the beginning is partly a loss of teachers, and partly a loss of people who thought they would be teachers and turned out, well, not so much. But that's both a mystery data argument and probably a bit of a linguistic leap as well.

Eventually we arrive at the bigger question-- do we want teachers to stick around for long careers? Or do we want to transition to the Short Career Model and therefor shift all of the benefits of a teaching career (well, except job security) to the front end? Do we want to keep incentives to become seasoned and experienced and to give the school system the benefit of that age and wisdom, or do we want to staff schools with an ever-churning roster of enthusiastic(ish) unseasoned newbs?

But the reports do sound a useful alarm in noting that many pension "reforms" or "rewrites" or "tweaking in hopes of avoiding one more financial screw-ups" are making the inbalance more so, and that many young teachers are becoming "net contributors," paying more into the system that they take out upon early departure.

The reports, however, report these issues as some sort of lottery-- teachers in Utah have a 50-50 chance of breaking even, while teachers in New Hampshire have a one-in-ten chance of making their pension money back. But this is not a lottery, and there's no "chance" involved-- you stay in the profession long enough to reap the full benefits of retirement, not unlike the vesting that occurs in other jobs. If you don't stick around, you don't get the full benefits.

This isn't unfair or cheating Short Term Teachers-- it's one more way that the system was built to encourage teachers to make a lifetime commitment to the profession and reward them for the choice, because once upon a time, we all agreed that such a choice was a Good Thing.

Of course, if the death of tenure and seniority ever really kick in, having a long career will be a lottery, and this will be a huge rip-off. But when the day comes that the Short Career Model is the law of the land, we'll have many things in the profession to restructure, not just pensions.

The Public Education Dream

As much time as I spend writing about what I think people get wrong, it's important to keep some focus on what I want to see done right. So let's look at the major issues in education these days and consider what the positive outcome would be in a perfect world, and what would be a hopeful outcome in the real world.

SCHOOL CHOICE

Turning schools into a competitive marketplace is toxic for education. It does not drive improvement and, as currently practiced, it does not empower parents, but instead more commonly disempowers them.

In a Perfect World...

Choice pushers like to say that no child should be trapped in a failing school just because of her zip code. I say that no child should have to leave her neighborhood just to find a decent school. People don't want choice; they want good schools.

So in my perfect world, every child is able to attend a great school in his own neighborhood, with his neighbors, near where his family lives. Every school receives the funding and support it needs to be excellent.

In this world...

No more building a well-funded, well-supported school as an excuse to abandon the school already existing school. If we must have choice, let it be between excellent schools with, perhaps different focuses, or with the goal of improving a city and community through creating a diverse learning community.

But all schools must be fully funded and fully supported. No more "Well, a thousand students are trapped in this failing school, so we're going to invest millions of dollars in creating a great school for 100 of them."

CHARTERS

I have written a ton about this, so I'll be brief (ish).

In a perfect world...

If you want to set up a charter school, it must be fully funded, but not by stripping funds from public schools-- if you want to open a charter school, you'll either have to get private funding or a tax hike to cover costs. It must be fully transparent and account for every cent of public tax dollars that it accepts. It must be locked into a binding commitment to stay open for at least two decades, whether it is losing money or not. It may not in any way limit the students that can attend there, and it must backfill every seat that opens up. It will answer to an elected board from the community it serves. The feds will undo the laws that turned charter schools into an investment slam-dunk guaranteeing that you'll make your money back even if you suck. And if you think this is too restrictive and makes it unlikely that you would ever want to be in the charter business, then good. Get the hell out of the education "business" and let those of us who are serious about it get back to work.

In this world...

Yeah, pretty much the same thing. We need to get the hedge funders and educational tourists out of the education biz. If we could get back to the original conception of charters that would be great.

But at an absolute minimum, charters that accept public tax dollars must provide wholly transparent accounting for those dollars. They must be subject, in some way, to the control of an elected school board. And the zero-sum game that insures that every charter gain means a public school loss must stop.

BIG STANDARDIZED TESTING

In a perfect world...

It just stops. It's done. We don't do it, at all, ever. Period, full stop.

In this world...

The BS Tests are uncoupled from any stakes at all. They don't affect student standings or promotion. They aren't used to evaluate teachers or to rank schools or to affect anybody's professional future. "But how will we hold teachers and schools accountable?" someone cries out. Here's the truth that some folks just refuse to see-- the BS Tests do not hold anybody accountable for anything except test scores, and they do so at a cost to the real goals that most real humans expect from their teachers and their schools.

And once you do all of that, the market pressure is on test manufacturers to come up with tests that are actually useful, and not junk.

NATIONAL STANDARDS

In a perfect world...

There are none.

Yes, I know that on this point I am a bit further out there than even some of my fellow public ed advocates. But I see no value in or use for national standards of any kind. Trying to keep all teachers "on the same page" is a fool's game-- the teachers who don't need that kind of help will only be hindered by such requirements, while the teachers who supposedly do need that kind of help will not be improved by just following a handy standards list.

So, no. I don't see any use for national standards of any sort (though I recognize that many reasonable people do). So...

In this world...

Anybody who wants to can publish sets of standards, and those standards can battle it out in the marketplace of ideas. If actual working teachers and educators say, "Hey, these are pretty handy and definitely on point. Let's adopt them for our school or district," the congrats-- your standards win. If they languish on a shelf somewhere gathering dust because nobody anywhere is impressed, then too bad.

Note: It is totally cheating to try to do an end run around schools by going to, say, legislators and saying, "Hey, there, person who doesn't know jack about schools and teaching. You should totally force all the teachers in your state to use these standards."

In other words, all standards are optional and subject to local adoption. If somebody comes up with really good ones that spread like wildfire across the state or the nation, that's super. But no forcing the standards on schools.

ACCOUNTABILITY

With no national standards or BS Test, how will schools be held accountable? Well, we really need a long conversation about "accountable to whom" and "for what," because I do question the need to be accountable to legislators far away busy cutting in deals in back rooms we're not allowed to see while being financed by rich interests were not allowed to know about. Is there some reason for me to be accountable to those guys? I have my doubts.

But accountability to the taxpayers who pay my wages and finance my classroom. Absolutely, without a doubt. For me to say, "Just hand me a chunk of money and trust me blindly," is not okay.

In a perfect world...

I actually have a plan for this. You need to first figure out what the community wants to have measured, then you have to find the least intrusive way to measure it. There are two basic ways to approach the issue of accountability-- I can look for a way that I can find out how you're doing, or I can look for a way for you to prove to me how you're doing. The second way is worse, because it requires me to stop doing my actual job in order to convince you that I'm doing my actual job.

So in a perfect world, some assortment of trained professional educators visit my classroom as much and as often as they like, watch me work, talk to me about how I work, talk to my students about how I work, and develop some informed opinion about how I'm doing. The purpose of the evaluation is, of course, to help me do better.

In this world...

A system that is focused on improvement and the lifting up of classroom teachers, and which deals with far more than how well students score on a single standardized math and reading test. I like the idea of peer review, but I'm also aware that in some places it has become a twisted mess. But let's use something that helps teachers become the best teachers they can be.

TEACH JOB SECURITY

The destruction of tenure and seniority in teaching serves no purpose in the improvement of US schools. Removing teacher job protections is about creating a more cheap and servile workforce so that school a "CEO" has fewer obstacles to making money and doing what he wants to do.

In a perfect world...

There is tenure. There is FILO. Administrators have the competence and cajones to use the tools that they already have under current tenure systems to discipline and remove teachers who are incompetent. There are no long, convoluted processes, and school boards do not negotiate away their existing management powers.

In this world...

Yeah, there's no reason that we can't live in a perfect world on this one.

TEACHER EDUCATION

In a perfect world...

All pathways into the profession are controlled by teachers (just as in professions such as law and nursing). College programs must be accredited by teachers, and those programs have far more solid basis in child development and content area knowledge than in dopey methods courses by professors who haven't set foot in classrooms for umpteen years. And we would definitely get rid of the trend of teaching teachers how to just unpack standards, download lessons, and just generally act like Content Delivery Specialists.

These pathways would require time spent in real classrooms and a period of internship at the beginning of a career, to lead to a teacher certification process that included endorsement by a panel of master teachers.

Nobody anywhere can just put up a shingle and declare themselves a "teachers trainer," so no more TFA or Relay fake teacher training schools. All teacher education must be certified and accredited by a national board of master teachers, selected by their peers and not some government bureaucracy.

In this world...

The university and government agencies who certify teachers would solicit and follow significant input from actual teachers. States would not allow their desperation for filling teaching positions to lead to "alternative" paths that dilute the profession. Of course, if we fully funded and supported all schools, and we offered teachers working conditions that followed market requirements instead of a desire to be cheap, we'd have far less trouble recruiting teachers.

THERE'S MORE

But this is plenty for starters. What do you think? What is the picture of the education system we should be trying to achieve?

A Clock?! Seriously-- a Clock!!??

This is how a public school loses the support of rational humans with brains.

On the heels of a Slate piece last week reminding us about how the juvenile justice system "eats kids for breakfast," today we get the story to go with this photo that's rocketing around the interwebs.

Because I'm only a fake journalist, I can drop any pretensions of impartiality-- everybody involved in this was a dope.

The English teacher who freaked the hell out over a home-made clock was a dope.

The police who put this 98-pound ninth grader in cuffs was a dope.

The police who was quoted as saying that Ahmed Mohamed was "less than forthcoming" was a dope. Honestly, you've just been arrested for an engineering project-- you can't possibly predict how the words out of your mouth will be interpreted. You came to school and said, "I've got a clock" and the school screamed, "He's got a bomb!" At this point, as far as you know, "I'm thirsty" will be met with "He's taking hostages and making demands!!"

The school-- MacArthur High School of Irving, Texas-- responded quickly with a letter, and whoever actually wrote the letter was also a dope.

While we do not have any threats to our school community, we want you to be aware that the Irving Police Department responded to a suspicious-looking item on campus yesterday. We are pleased to report that after the police department’s assessment, the item discovered at school did not pose a threat to your child’s safety. 

Well, there is one threat to your child's safety-- there's always the possibility that school and law enforcement officials will absolutely lose their shit because some child brought an engineering project to school.

But the letter goes on to explain where the real burden lies-- on the parents and children. "I recommend using this opportunity to talk with your child about the Student Code of Conduct and specifically not bringing items to school that are prohibited." Because I'm sure that the list of prohibited items includes home made clocks!!

Seriously-- look at this kid and consider just how anybody could conclude he's a credible threat.



I hope that MacArthur High School and the local police experience a huge, burning, thorough national embarrassment. I hope they have an opportunity to look themselves in the eye and say, "Damn, we acted like a bunch of dopes."

In the meantime, MacArthur High might want to consider the high irony of touting its recognition for its use of cutting edge technology and amending its STEM initiatives to include the warning that while it's cool to invent things, you probably shouldn't show any body.

Would Ahmed have been better off with another name, heritage, and skin color. No doubt. But the whole school and community would be better off with less Just Plain Stupid behavior.

I know there will be people trying to be uber-reasonable and saying, "Well, you know. Maybe there's more to the story." I don't think so. I can't imagine any context in which the behavior of the teacher, the school, and the police is excusable. Okay, maybe if Ahmed had previously tried to blow up the school --or fake blow up the school (in some versions of the story they're now accusing him of a "hoax bomb" because handcuffs are always the best response to a prank, which this clearly wasn't and damn-- I can't even) which would clearly have been brought up by now if it were true. So, no. No, there's no circumstances that make this treatment by a school of a student in their charge okay, at all, even a little.

An English teacher. Right now I'm hugely embarrassed for my profession.

Mrs. Jobs Antes Up

Laurene Powell Jobs came out of the Wharton School of Business with an MBA and went to work for Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs. She started a health food business and went to Stanford's business grad school. And then she married Steve Jobs.

She's no lightweight. She's spent time working in various philanthropic undertakings, including College Track, a group that works to support "underserved" students in getting into, and through, college and they haven't done poorly. Her husband died after a long bout with pancreatic cancer at age 56, which is too young to die from such a crappy disease no matter how much money you do or don't have.

Jobs is now responsible for a huge pile of money, mostly as part of a trust that owns, in addition to a giant chunk of Apple, 7.3% of the Walt Disney Corporation.

Mrs. Jobs is rich, and powerful, and she would now like to fix schools.

The Good News

Jobs has said, “We want to make high schools back into the great equalizers they were meant to be."

Her new initiative is a huge grant competition called XQ: The Super School Project. 


The Super School Project is an open call to reimagine and design the next American high school. In towns and cities far and wide, teams will unite and take on this important work of our time: rethinking and building schools that deeply prepare our students for the rigorous challenges of college, jobs, and life.

The website is remarkably clear of even coded messages to implement a particular format or program. Teams are encouraged to self-assemble and then begin the work of figuring out what this super school would look like. "No one knows exactly how to build the next American high school."

Then the team is to start working out the details of how to manage and sustain their new concept.

The website encourages ideas like starting by looking at and talking to young people. What are their dreams and aspirations? Look, too, at the science of how children learn. Look at how to get them invested in their own learning. And nowhere did I see instructions to think about how you could scale your idea up for the whole country. Jobs was asked if she's talking about a charter school here, and she said that she doesn't know; I'm going to take that to mean she at least has an open mind on that point.

And at the end of the road, there's a fund of $50 million to help launch 5 schools. 

The Bad News

At the end of the day, is Jobs one more education tourist, dabbling with school-building, or is she one more Master of the Universe who thinks schools are just businesses?

Well, maybe.

The XQ site uses the language of business. You have to figure out how you'll manage your human capital and performance management. And part of Jobs previous experience in the education world is her membership on the board of NewSchools Venture Fund, a group specializing in helping hedge fundies make money off of the ed biz.

Her advisors in this adventure include Michelle Cahill, whose career in policy has included a stint working for Joel Klein in New York City, and Russlynn H. Ali, who was assistant secretary for civil rights at the USED and is currently head of the fiduciary board at Education Post. So, no actual teachers at the upper levels of this project. The tab for XQ has a fun rotating text feature that says alternately, "What if learning is a game?," "What if we take the desks outside," and "What if we knock down the walls," which are charmingly naive in a "Gosh, I bet nobody has ever thought of this before!" way. I wish Jobs would talk to actual teachers.

Jobs told the NYT, "The system was created for the work force we needed 100 years ago. Things are not working the way we want it to be working. We've seen a lot of incremental changes over the last several years, but we're saying, 'Start from scratch.'"

Start from scratch? Cool-- but the time frame on this puppy is not encouraging-- your initial concept proposal is due by November 15, with the first phases due by mid-February. I want to meet the working teachers involved in any of this, because if they're designing a school from scratch while actually teaching, I have much to learn from them about time management. But this certainly sounds like the sort of thing that a charter operation is better positioned to attempt.

There's that term "super school," as if the schools the rest of us ordinary plebes labor in are just ordinary schlubby schools. Which fits with the subtle suggestion by Jobs that no school, anywhere, is getting it right. Nowhere on the lists of things to consider do we find "Schools with successful programs." Given the requirements to put all this together, it seems certain that Jobs' super school will not be in a poor neighborhood serving poor children. That's fine. Rich kids need super schools, too.

And this is an entirely personal, subjective bias, but the whole thing smells of Palo Alto to me. I've had family living in the area, and the Silicon Valley is an odd place, filling up with newly rich tech millionaires who declare their support for social causes while simultaneously pushing their own local poor out of neighborhoods and housing and sight. I want to help the poor of the world, but if I see that raggedy poor guy on my street again, I'm calling the cops. But that's my own personal bias about the Jobs neighborhood.

So what have we got here

A very rich person with an interest in education, but no expertise or experience, who condemns the current system and turns to certified reformsters for advice on how to create a new system. Well, there's no way this can end badly.

On the other hand, I salute Jobs for using her own money and not simply coming up with a clever plan to use other people's tax dollars to fund her dream reform. I'm not optimistic, but there's no point in condemning the outcome of this competition before we see it. I'm definitely looking forward to the super school updates.

Brookings and CCSS Conservative Roots

Brookings Institute can always be counted on to come up with some confused coverage of education matters. But this time they have given David Whitman a platform from which to combat the conservative anti-Common Core hordes. Whitman was a reporter for US News who spent five years as Arne Duncan's speechwriter before jumping on Peter Cunningham's $12 million Core-boosting PR website.

Whitman is here to try to address what has to be one of the Obama administration's great frustration-- here they are implementing a set of education policies that are an extension of conservative GOP policies from years before, and suddenly conservative Republicans are lambasting it. It's like Nixon going to China and being called a Commie sympathizer by people on the left.

"The Surprising Roots of the Common Core:How Conservatives Gave Rise to ‘Obamacore’" is a challenging read, containing a pretty thorough look at the conservative pedigree of the Core that is wrapped in lots of heavily balonified conclusions.

Intro

Everybody keeps saying that conservatives hate the Core, and Whitman has the media quotes to prove it. But that's just not fair. In fact, Whitman says with the kind of shameless straight face that will exemplify his work, that the Obama-Duncan Department of Education "has substantially shrunk the federal role in advocating for anything resembling a model national curriculum, national standards, and national assessments." Which kind of ignores the whole "creating waivers that allow the Obama-Duncan department to effectively write law from the USED office" thing.

Whitman says that CCSS is out there still thriving in classrooms precisely because this administration didn't repeat the federal overreach mistakes of its predecessors, which is just... well, Not True seems like a gentle label. Let's say that this administration found more effective leverage and techniques for selling this policy, and a fortuitous time to make their move.

But Whitman is just setting the stage to say, in effect, it wasn't always this way. Once upon atime conservatives loved the whole national standards thing.

Honesty Gap 

Lordy, are these folks still trying to sell this piece of rhetorical fluffernuttery? Whitman wants to remind us that fifty different goalposts will not make our students ready to compete internationally, and that many states set their standards "pathetically" low, and that while high standards are no guarantee of awesome education, low standards insure that Kids These Days will continue to suck.


Poor Misunderstood Common Core

Before we can look at Core's history, we must understand what they are and aren't, says Whitman. He lists a whole bunch of Things They Aren't which I would make fun of as silly straw men except that I've seen all of these paranoid ravings decried in print, so I know he's not making them up. Not even "Common Core will turn your kids into gay commies."


Whitman counters with the usual inaccuracies. State standards. Written with input from teachers. "It bears repeating that the federal government had zero involvement in drafting the Common Core State Standards—it neither wrote, paid for, or participated in the development of the standards." It may bear repeating, but it doesn't bear scrutiny for factual accuracy.

Whitman correctly notes that the Common Core ball was already rolling when Obama took office, but he uses the adoption was strictly voluntary line, which is disingenuous at best-- states could refuse, but they couldn't easily afford to. And he slides past the waiver business entirely. He argues that standards and curriculum were confused by opponents, but I think Core supporters can carry plenty of the blame there. But he's correct to skewer guys like Ted Cruz with his "repeal every word of Common Core" pledge (after that, he will ban all Yeti from Florida). And I love Whitman just a little bit for this line:

And owing to the maelstrom of misinformation on the CCSS, the Common Core is fast approaching a Lord Voldemort-like status for conservatives as the insidious education reform with the name that must not be spoken-- even for conservative politicians who support, and who in fact (to paraphrase Ted Cruz), are implementing every word of the Common Core. 

Time for a History Lesson

Now Whitman enters into the useful and educational portion of his article. No, I'm not being sarcastic. Whitman is here to say, "Conservatives, you do not have to freak out about this stuff! It is totally your kind of thing!!"

To prove it, he goes back to Saint Ronald of Reagan and A Nation at Risk, with its call for "more rigorous and measurable standards." The desire for high standards, the interest in standards that were consistent and high from state to state-- that was a conservative thing. And Reagan's Secretary of Education William Bennett used language that Whitman finds coming out of Arne Duncan's mouth today.

Secretary Bennett in 1987 put together a book outlining " a sound secondary school core curriculum." The second year produced an elementary school counterpart. Bennett noted that the law barred him from implementing his grand blueprint, but he talked it up to conservatives and conservative governors in particular, and folks just loved it and did not freak out and scream "federal overreach."

Whitman sees the modern Core as a later draft of Bennett's work, and he is dumbfounded that conservatives have turned on it-- it has a strong element of the nation's founding documents, for crying out loud! And yet conservative critics still accuse it of being all manner of Commie loving brainscrubbery.

And now, G W Bush, who may lack Reagan's iconic conservative status, but still-- this is not some Commie simp, and Lamar Alexander was not some sort of bleeding heart liberal when he launched the America 2000 plan. Whitman dubs Alexander the Core's political godfather and Diane Ravitch their intellectual godmother; as he notes, her journey from conservative reformer to her current thorn-in-reform's side status has been well-documented in her own writing.

Whitman wants you to know that Bush's standards plan would have been wayyyyy more testy and inclusive of more fields than just English and math. Bush wanted voluntary standards, but couldn't get funding from Congress and finally did an end run around them to use grant money to get people to do the work.

The Bush-Alexander administration pushed hard for standards and for incentives for charter schools, sinking tons of money into promotion for a program intended to transform what happened in schools across the country. Alexander now says that Duncan overstepped his bounds in pushing the Core with the waivers, but Whitman wants to be clear that Alexander pushed pretty hard in his own day.

Whitman's research is relentless. Present-day GOP has renounced the Core, but 1992 GOP platform sounded a lot like Arne Duncan. Meanwhile, America 2000 finally collapsed, victim of a lack of center-based consensus and chipped away by Democrats, who didn't want to give Bush a "education President" win. By the early 90's, the standards were dead dead dead, Congress having driven a stake through their heart..

Whitman's observation is that CCSS succeeded where America 2000 failed because the leaders of the movement had learned some lessons the first time around.

Bottom Line? 

Whitman finishes up with a more-developed version of the usual call for conservatives to get behind the Core and how generally wonderful it is. That's same old, same old.

What's special about this piece is that it so thoroughly makes the case for a conservative pedigree for the Core. Ravitch, who knows the conservative roots of these policies better than anybody, has often marveled that the Obama administration has so thoroughly embraced conservative education policy. But I've never seen anyone address the point to conservatives themselves quite so thoroughly (it only adds to the layers of oddity that the person doing the addressing is a veteran of the Obama-Duncan administration).

The case for the Core is as weak as always, but this history lesson underlines how our current education policies really are just an extension of the work of previous administrations as well as highlighting how frustrated Core fans are to be fighting a tough battle against people they never thought they'd have to fight at all.

Forgetting History

So it's not 9/14, a date that carries no particular power. And after sitting in the cultural silence that follows any powerful observance, I'm reflecting again on 9/11.

Friday was a day not much different from many others. The social studies teacher whose classroom shares a door with mine was playing a documentary stitched together from footage of That Day. But teachers are already aware of what civilians are slowly realizing-- students in school, right now, have no memory of that day. My juniors were two years old. Some of my freshmen hadn't been born yet. To my students, who think of me as a thousand years old and their own elementary school years as eons ago, the September 11 attacks are as distant to most of them as the Vietnam War or World War II.

And I can't decide if that's a good thing or not.

I am seriously attached to the study of history. My student teaching kept me from minoring; the state of Pennsylvania's elevation of "social studies" over history kept me from adding it to my teaching certification. My class is shot full of it. I think human beings are absolutely hardwired to do history, to try to draw a consensus on what happened, why it happened, what it means. We do it for 9/11, for Vietnam, for the Great European War, and for the fight between Ethel and Mia last night at the restaurant.

My students deride history as the most worthless class they take, a class that has nothing to do with their present or their future. My students also like to drag out and rehearse their favorite stories of Things That Happened in Grade School.

We are hardwired to do history, and yet we also seem hardwired to forget it, if we even grasp it in the first place. I've watched my students for over three decades, certain that the world sprang into existence when they were born, unable to imagine what it will do when they die, and absolutely rocked to their core when someone does die.

We're a small place, but it happens. Accident. Disease. Suicide. The school is an entirely different place for a while, and then they spring back, stand back up and move on. Fourteen years ago, they did the same. I can't deny that the forgetting, the scabbing over, the pain's loss of immediacy and reality-- it all seems to be part of the healing.

And yet, the forgetting can seem callous. When I saw Titanic in the theater, I was braced, but it still hit me hard. Those people, crying helpless, floating in the water and slowly inevitably dying-- those were not a plot device or background color, but real people who really died that miserable, torturous death, and there we were, a theater full of people who had paid good money to eat popcorn and watch their deaths acted out for us. What the hell is that?

And the lack of historical memory, of ability to place themselves historically. We discuss works like William Bradford's account of Plymouth or Frederick Douglass's autobiography, and I inevitably have to explain, "This is a little less bland and boring if you can make yourself remember that this really happened to real people. It's not just a story."

My students have a hard time getting the horror of slavery. Many are pretty sure that racism is just when white people are really rude to black people, or call them names. They can see the pictures from the days of the Civil Rights Movement, and they can see that a lot of folks were really angry, but to get them to really see it and feel it is a challenge.

I'm reminded of all of this contemplating the slow tread of years in which we've watched 9/11 recede in the school, from something they view with somber concern, just as real as the time they fell down on the elementary school playground, to something they see just like one more movie about something that happened before the world was born.

How do I help them understand? How do I help them grasp their present reality when it's so hard to get them to really see, really feel, the foundation upon which it's built, foundation upon crumbled foundation, upon crumbled foundation, each new structure taking its unique tilt and twist and even broken instability from the ruins on which it was built? How do I get them to make sense of something like Ferguson or Dyett High or their own roots or whatever is going to erupt tomorrow?

Of all the teacher tricks I try to pull off during the year, this is the hardest, but probably also the most worthwhile, because how do you figure out how to be fully human in the world, how do you figure out how to live at the peculiar and unique intersection of roads on which you stand, unless you understand something about where those roads lead from?

Do No Excuses Affect Academics?

Last week at the Fordham blogsite, Kevin Mahnken touted some meta-research about "No Excuses" schools and their affect on the math and language scores on the Common Core Big Standardized Test. Well, actually they claimed to be researching “’No Excuses’ Charter Schools: A Meta-Analysis of the Experimental Evidence on Student Achievement,” but when we're looking at this kind of research, it's important to always remember that "student achievement" just means "test scores on that one high stakes test that narrowly covers a standardized test version of math and reading."

I took a swipe at the research paper itself, because you know I would do almost anything for you guys. But it is tough going for those of us not schooled in the subtle art of meta-research. But I did manage to pull out a few bits.

First, although the meta-researchers started with what I believe is technically known as "a whole buttload" of research papers, through a long and laborious process, they narrowed those down to ten papers. Of those ten, four were only about no excuses schools, two were about types of charters including no excuses, and four weren't about no excuses at all. So, six paper in the meta-analysis? I'm no meta-analyst, but that seems meta-thin.

What conclusions did they reach?

No excuse schools do better than other charters at raising math and reading test scores. They are better at improving math scores than reading scores, which stands to reason as standardized math tests are a little more prepable than reading tests which still, for instance, throw in random straight-up vocabulary questions. They also suggest that no excuses schools do better at raising scores in high schools than in elementary, though they admit that the research on no excuses elementary schools is pretty thin for even meta-slicing.

Some of the conclusions are transparently bizarre even to an untrained meta-observer:

According to Hill et al.’s (2007) standards, attending a No Excuses charter schools for one year closes approximately 25% of the Black-White math achievement gap and approximately 20% of the Black-white literacy achievement gap. A straightforward extrapolation of these results suggests that attending a No Excuses charter school for four to five years could eliminate the achievement gap.

I checked for any qualifier to this astonishing statement, but could not find anything remotely like "That is, any any student who wanted to go the school, was accepted by the school, and who was not shoved out of the school for being disobedient and non-compliant. And of course these results would not apply to any students with any sort of special needs." Surely this finding is not meant to suggest that any Black student could be plugged into a no excuses school and achieve startling success.

In fact the meta-researchers note that they believe they have insured that the sample is randomized by making sure to include research about schools that are oversubscribed and therefor had to use a lottery. But as I am not the first to observe, the process of choosing to respond to no excise charter marketing and navigating the application and lottery process has already insured that the school does not have anything like a randomly sampled student body. And that sampling gets even less random as the years go by and students flee or are pushed out the door of these highly regimented schools.

The writers meta-acknowledge that the research is narrow in its focus and that there's not much out there studying non-cognitive and other effects of charters, though they make sure to note the study that finds charter students are more likely to graduate (well, sure-- because charter students who aren't likely to graduate don't stay charter students for very long and are rarely replaced).

Mahnken is positively meta-giddy with excitement over this report:

We might have expected some optimism after witnessing the stupefying results at world-beating charter networks like KIPP and Success Academy. But it’s still nice that high-performing charters have both passed the eye test of policy commentators and are consistently feted by researchers as well. Now the only question is how the little guys grew up so fast.

But for anyone curious about no excuses education in action, you might consider tales of students going without lunch or bathroom breaks or high suspension rates or teaching young black students the importance of being submissive and compliant.

All of this continues to be justified in the name of student achievement-- except that all that means is higher scores on a single standardized math and reading test. Fans keep touting this result as proof that no excuses schools know the secret of raising students up out of poverty. As soon as I hear about the hundreds of poor students who have found well-paying middle class jobs because they are such good test-takers, I will start taking those claims seriously.