Competency Based Ed for Teachers

Competency Based Ed (or Proficiency Based Learning or Outcome Based Education) is increasingly and alarmingly all the rage, but so far we've been talking about it mainly as a content delivery system for K-12 students. Well, says Patrick Riccards at Real Clear Education, why not use it as an approach to training teachers as well?

Riccards is the chief communications and strategy officer for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and he lays a foundation here of reformy building blocks. Here's the Bellwether Partners report on how we don't know how to unpack "the black box of good teaching." Here's a charmingly trusting assertion that Charlotte Danielson " has clearly identified the knowledge and skills that beginning teachers need to both succeed in those formative years and remain in the classroom for many years to come." Has she? Has she really? Why, bless her heart, and yours too, if you believe in her so hard.

But Riccards is here to argue against inputs, against the traditional teacher prep program that measures hours and lists the courses one must take.

There is nothing magical about 36 credit hours of graduate education that ensures one will be an effective teacher. Instead, it is about understanding content and pedagogy, as well as being able to put that understanding to use in a classroom of your own.

Well, no. There's nothing "magical" about 36 credit hours, just like there's nothing "magical" about studying human skeletal structure on your way to mastering physiology for your physical therapy degree. But Riccards want us to see as necessary and inevitable a shift from lecture halls to actual practice in a classroom.

Let me step aside for a moment to note that I am not the person you want to defend traditional teacher prep programs. I was trained in a non-traditional program with far fewer hours of education courses before student teaching and far more support and coursework while I was getting my classroom practice on. I happily await the day that some college education department calls me up and invites me to re-configure their system, because I have more than a few ideas.

I should also note that debating study versus practice in teacher prep strikes me as just as useful as endlessly arguing about whether there should be more hugging or kissing with your romantic partner. If you are arguing violently for mostly one at the exclusion of the other, you've lost sight of the point.

But Riccards has his eye on his own point, and his point is Use CBE To Train Teachers! He does a good job of anticipating some objections:

Yes, some are resistant to the idea of competency-based education. It is too often misconstrued as a checklist approach: anyone who is wearing a blue shirt on Tuesday meets competency 183. Such application is CBE at its very worst, and doesn’t reflect what it can and should look like in teacher education.

I'm still dubious that his Tuesday checklist is not so much CBE at its very worst as it is CBE at its very usual. But Riccards says there are several things that CBE done right will do for 21st century teacher awesomeness--

- Establishes a set of outcomes one  must attain in order to graduate, rooted in what excellent beginning teachers must know and be able to do;

- Constructs meaningful assessment tools designed to determine candidate competencies at the outset, to gauge candidate progress, and to shape each candidate’s course of study; and

- Provides a problem-based, individualized, adaptive curriculum tied to these competencies.

No, I don't think so. The "set of outcomes" that every beginning teacher must perform is a very tall order, but the "meaningful assessment tools" requirement is unicorn farming. It simply isn't going to happen, because every single candidate (at least as long as we are talking about human candidates) is a completely different set of strengths and weaknesses, which themselves play out differently depending on the young humans who are in the classroom. Those students, live and in the classroom, are the "problem-based, individualized, adaptive curriculum."

There are too many variables, too many possibilities to ever be covered by a canned program. Either the "set of outcomes" will have to be so vague as to be useless ("Teacher will keep classroom orderly and focused") or so specific as to require the equivalent of a six zillion page manual ("If a male student tends to make sarcastic fart jokes, the teacher will use one of the following responses depending on their own skill set: A) If teacher is a petite, quiet female, she will approach the student with direct eye contact and a stern tone of voice and say.... on through ZZ) If teacher is a physically imposing woman with a loud voice and an infectuous sense of humor, she will keep her distance while making the following joke..." and on and on and on). In other words, this system demands that checklist-- either a checklist too short to provide useful feedback and direction, or a checklist so long it takes long minutes to load it from a zillion terrabyte cloud where it lives.

I'm a little nervous that Riccards is dreaming of an EdTPA type of program, with videos and a set of standard behaviors that can be evaluated at a distance. That idea is a snare and a delusion. It does not work. It will never work.

This also feels like one of those attempts to remove subjective personal judgment from the process. That is also a snare and a delusion.

Teachers have to be educated by other teachers. That is why student teaching works-- daily constant supervision and feedback by a master teacher who knows what she's doing. That experience is best when it rests on a foundation of subject matter, child development, and pedagogical knowledge. It also works best when the student teacher is helped to find her own teacher voice; co-operating teachers who try to mold mini-me's are not helpful.

The computer era has led to the resurrection of CBE because computing capacities promise the capability of an enormously complicated Choose Your Own Adventure individualized approach to learning-- but that capacity is still not enough for any sort of learning that goes beyond fairly simple, tightly focused tasks. Sure-- creating a CBE teacher prep program would be super easy-- all you have to do is write out a response for every possible combination of teacher, students and content in the world. And then link it all together in a tagged and sequenced program. And then come up with a clear, objective way to measure every conceivable competency, from "Teacher makes six year old who's sad about his sick dog comfortable with solving a two-digit addition problem when he didn't actually raise his hand" to "Teacher is able to engage two burly sixteen-year-old males who are close to having a fist fight over the one guy's sister to discuss tonal implications of Shakespeare's use of prose interludes in Romeo and Juliet."

And if those examples seem ridiculously specific, just remember that at the opposite of the scale is a CBE program where there's only one object-- "Teacher will teach real good." And if you now want to say, "Well, of course, the CBE outcomes will be somewhere between those extremes," then we have to have a conversation about where exactly we intend to land and who is qualified to make that call.

I know-- I really do know-- that it's appealing to dream of reducing teaching to a set list of competencies. But I don't believe you can do it. Particularly if your dream is a list of objectively measurable competencies.

Teaching effectively (which is a much better way to conceive of this than effective teachers) is work for trained, experienced professionals. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, concert pianists-- we need their complex professional judgment to navigate complex human situations. Using a pre-fab program to substitute simplistic non-professional judgment for complex human situations doesn't help anybody. Yes, systems that depend on human professional judgment are prone to Bad Things when that professional judgment fails, but using a program to substitute someone else's non-professional judgment does not help. We do need the very best professional educators we can foster and grow, but CBE will not get us there.

Howard Fuller, Ed Reform, and New Orleans

Jennifer "Edushyster" Berkshire and Aaron "Need a New Twitter Handle" French have released the second of their Have You Heard podcasts, and it further cements Berkshire's standing as the number one interviewer in the education blogosphere.

This time Berkshire has headed to talk to Howard Fuller for a conversation that underlines the degree to which Fuller is-- well, I don't want to say complicated. He has the quality I most admire in anyone working in a troublesome and contentious arena-- he manages to follow the issues and his values without getting sidetracked by labels, tribes and affiliations. Which means, of course, that he manages to piss off a wide variety of people (you can get a quick picture by looking at Lyndsey Layton's profile.from 2014 entitled "A civil rights warrior, or a billionaire's tool?")

Fuller has spent a lot of time on the reformster side of the street, so that is why it's extra interesting to find him explaining to Berkshire the many failures of ed reform in New Orleans.

It began, he says, with conversations over sixteen months with African-Americans in the community, asking two questions: 1) What do you think about education reform in New Orleans and 2) What do you think about black peoples' role in it?

The overriding theme that he heard? "This has been done to us, not with us."

Fuller asserts that some students are now far better off than before, and many are not. But even if there are good outcomes from the complete charterization of NOLA, if African-Americans have not had a significant role, and if this is all more disempowerment of blacks in the community, the reform is a fail. It is unsustainable, because there is no broad support in the black community.

Berkshire observes that New Orleans seems richer and whiter, and Fuller acknowledges that schools alone cannot over-ride issues of class. Ultimately economic policy will have broader impact than education policy in reversing systemic poverty, but the ed reform is still important. Does that seem a bit contradictory? When Berkshire (in her signature gentle nudgery way) calls Fuller on his connection to the Waltons, he replies, "When you are in struggles, you deal with contradictions."

In some cases, that means you need resources and you take them where you can find them. That also means, if you're Fuller, that your relationship with the teachers unions is-- well-- he states clearly that unions have an important role in making peoples' lives better but he also says, "I have real scars from dealing with unions." He also says, "Some people want me to be anti-union, which I'm not. Other people want me to support the teachers' union, which I don't."

He also has some complicated thoughts about pedagogy, particularly when it comes to No Excuses schooling which are worth listening about.

Through all of it, Fuller maintains a focus on making things better for students, getting better education for students, improving the lives of students. Hearing him lay his thoughts out, even in this brief interview, made me respect him even as I disagree with some of the positions he has taken in the past. Beyond the specific points to be made about reform in New Orleans, the interview is also another excellent reminder that the ongoing debate (and the people in it) is more complex than we sometimes admit.

But seriously-- best interviewer in the biz. Listen to this. You'll be glad you did.

Why This Teacher Supports Sanders for President

Every political cycle is a sad reminder that public education in general and teachers in particular are political orphans. Neither party even pretends to be interested in or supportive of traditional public education and the people who work in that sector. Where once upon a time, kissing a baby could be reliably followed by thanking America's teachers. Now both traditional parties just want to punch us in the face.

None of the 147 Presidential candidates at any point showed any concern about making nice with teachers or standing up to the institution to which we have devoted our lives, the institution which is the very foundation of our country, our democracy.

No, not even Bernie. We've been able to get him to cough up a couple of usable quotes that would suggest that he's a fan of teachers and public education, which puts him ahead of Hillary who bent over backwards to avoid letting one sentence worth of charter school criticism upset any of her deep pocketed backers [but even at Sunday night's debate, given a chance to directly address education and educator issues, he punted]. Pretty sure I missed the part where she dispatched Bill to reassure public school teachers that any of her zillion pro-charter comments were no cause for alarm. And the closest that any GOP candidate came to saying something nice about teachers was that time John Kasich said that he would abolish teacher lunch rooms, which sounds mean but, hey-- at least he didn't say he would abolish letting teachers have lunch at all.

If I were a one-issue voter, a candidate who voted his job, I'd have a choice between  a symbolic for D. Jill Stein or just staying home.

Let's not kid ourselves. In the political world, nobody has our collective backs.

But I'm not a single-issue voter. Well, actually, I am. But it's a bigger issue than public education, even though it's the same issue.

My issue is democracy.

Sanders doesn't talk much about education, and I don't get the impression that it's something he's really studied up on or fully grasped.

But he talks a great deal about the ways in which our democracy has been stripped from us, eroded by the toxic spread of big money as the very rich buy up our government, our processes, and, almost without exception, our candidates for major offices.

This ongoing attempt to milk the taxpayers while stripping them of their voices, their say, their ability to help steer the national bus-- that is the problem that, right now, is virtually all problems. The dismantling of our public education, our selling off of the pieces, our transformation of universal public education into a system that serves the needs of only a few, a system that enriches the already-rich while trying to get away with training many young citizens to be nothing more than drones, fodder for their corporate overlords-- that grand perversion of public education is mirrored in the co-opting of our food industry, our military industry, our decaying cities, our twisted political system, our money-sucking health care system.

I care, obviously, about our public education system, about the teaching profession, about the care and nurture of our young people. But I am also aware that the gutting of public education is a symptom of a larger problem, like a shirt that keeps getting bloody because it's being worn by a person with a knife driven deep into his chest. And I can live with somebody who's not too concerned about the shirt if he's focused on removing the knife and healing the wound.

We have candidates who want to punch the shirt-wearer for bleeding all over the place. We have candidates who want to "solve" the problem by putting a different shirt on a different person. And we have more than a few candidates who owe their allegiance to the knife manufacturer and will never do anything with that knife except to drive it in deeper and maybe twist it a little.

I'm concerned about the shirt, and the blood. Sanders is not paying so much attention to the shirt, but he is totally on point about the knife and the wound and the need to draw the weapon out and heal the breach.

To be less metaphorical, education is not anybody's issue-- including Sanders. But the toxic rot and corruption that he rails against in the country is the same toxic rot that is eating at public education. I can get behind that. I'm not a naive kid, and I don't expect miracles. But I can get behind a man who at least talks about the knife and the wound. That's why this teacher supports Bernie Sanders.

What Is the Charter Difference?

What exactly makes a charter school a charter school? What is it that charter supporters expect to get from a charter school that they cannot get from a public one?

Variety and choice? 

Some advocates say that parents and students need choices, a variety, a plethora, a cornucopia of educational options from which to choose. We should have a sciency school for science students and a musicky school for musicians and a welding school for welders.

But we have that. In smaller districts, the possibility of magnet schools and specialty schools is lessened, but even in my mostly-rural county, districts have a co-operative vocational school that prepares welders and auto mechanics and security guards. Large urban districts can have all manner of specialty magnet schools that give students plenty of variety and choice. We don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Quality?

As I've argued before, people don't really want choice, anyway-- they want their children to go to one good school. Being "trapped in a zip code" never comes up when people have a school they like.

There's no arguing that some schools fail to live up to the promise of public education. But if you don't like the color of your house, do you paint the house, or do you buy a second house? If the school that I'm providing for my community's children is not doing a great job, sending some kids elsewhere will leave Sore Thumb High School still right where it is, doing poorly.

If I want it to be a better school, I can make it into a better school. This is what many communities have done over the years-- remade and reconfigured their local school to better reflect their desires at the time. We don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Regulations?

Charter fans say, "Well, we can create schools that don't have to work under the weight of bad government regulations."

I say, "If we know they are bad regulations, why don't we lift them for all schools?" And if it's a bad idea to lift them for all schools, exactly why are they bad regulations? If there are regulations that are not good for education, let's get rid of them for everybody, and if they are good for everybody, then let's have everybody follow them.

We can fix stupid laws on the legislative level. We don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Staffing?

Charter fans like the idea of schools that are non-union, non-professionally-trained teachers who can be paid by whatever mechanism and salary schedule. But in many locations, advocates have successfully imposed such ideas on the public system, with the dismantling of tenure, collective bargaining, and professional requirements to be a teacher. And local school districts are always free to negotiate whatever contracts the local market will bear. We don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Competition?

Free marketteers believe that if schools have to compete, that will drive them into paroxysms of excellence. But we already have competition between school districts-- in fact, competition between school districts is often a single factor in larger competition between communities. One of the ways that communities distinguish themselves as Better (and the houses therein more valuable and the neighborhood more desirable) is by making sure that the schools in East Egg are way better than the ones in West Egg. It is competition that has produced the very tyranny of the zip code that reformsters so hate. Because a feature of free market competition is that it has winners and losers, both in terms of producers and consumers.


We already have a school system handcuffed to a free market system of real estate. Schools already compete-- as best they can, given whatever local limitations they wrestle with. We don't need charter schools to establish a system of competition.

Doing more with less?

Do we need charters to show us how to do more with less? This is a non-starter. Plenty of public schools already have to do more with less every year, while charters frequently decide that the secret of success is more money. Next?

Laboratories of Innovation?

There is nothing to keep public schools from innovating and no signs that charters have discovered heretofore undiscovered revolutionary ideas in education. There is also nothing to indicate that public schools are not already filled with educators intent on finding new and better ways to do educate students. If you want to see more innovation, then by all means, rewrite the rules and regulations of public schools to reward or spur more such innovation.

But we don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Selective enrollment?

All right, this isn't even an advantage that charters claim they want, but it's one they're often accused of-- creating a school with carefully selected student body, with undesirable low-performing high cost students pushed out and desirable high-performing low cost students gathered in.

But this, too, is something we already do in public schools. Districts with magnet or specialty schools require students to move through an admissions process. And systems have an alternate education placement with students whose more severe issues, from autism to social maladjustment to developmental disability, make them a poor fit for the mainstream classroom.

We don't like to admit that we don't always take all comers in public schools, but we know how to be selective about who gets in the door and stays in the building. Some charters go much further, but the basic principle is the same-- public schools just don't fess up. Not that we should be proud of it, but we don't need charter schools to accomplish this goal.

So, really-- what do we need charters for?

Improvements in quality, choice, innovation, instruction, programs-- all of it can be accomplished in a public school system. All of these ideas for improving education could be applied to public schools, which would have the additional advantage of bringing the improvements to ALL students instead of a small group.

Of course, part of the challenge would be that changes and reforms would have to be discussed, debated and deployed publicly. A person who wanted, say, to subject non-wealthy non-white students to boot camp style No Excuses education would have to convince the taxpayers that it was a good idea. It's possible that only charters can provide an opportunity for one driven visionary to impose his or her ideas on a school without being answerable to anyone. But that would be less like a democratic institution and more like a small-scale dictatorship. It's not a very admirable goal-- and anyway, the invention of mayoral control has once again made it possible to establish small scholastic dictatorships without resorting to charters. This, too, we can accomplish without charter schools.

There isn't anything on this list of goals that we actually need charter skills to accomplish.

Is there any other goal I'm forgetting to-- oh, wait a minute.

Redirecting Tax Dollars

Charter schools do accomplish one goal that can't be achieved by public schools-- they manage to redirect public tax dollars into the pockets of private corporations, charter operating companies, corporate shareholders, and guys who just figured they'd make some money in the charter biz.

For everything else on the list, no charters are necessary. For everything else on the list-- well, imagine this: your car needs a new bulb for the headlight, has a flat spare tire, and is filled with discarded beer cans and McDonald's wrappers, and your mechanic says, "Well, obviously you have no choice but to buy a new car." And that makes no sense until you discover that the used car salesman is your mechanic's business partner.

The charter purpose that cannot be achieved by public schools is to move public tax dollars into private pockets. The one true difference between public schools and charter schools as currently envisioned is that only charter schools are making people wealthy. And if that's the only true thing different about charters, maybe we should stop talking about charters and start talking about fixing the issues-- the education-related issues-- that we really want to work on.

KY: Charter Salvation?

Kentucky is one of the few states without a charter law. But what they do have is a new governor, and Matt Bevin would love to bring Kentucky into the loving embrace of the charter industry.

Kentucky residents are getting a crash course in the charter biz. That includes all of the usual arguments, including Education Secretary Hal Heiner's call to put adult interests aside and Do It For The Children. Heiner is a long-standing charter booster and real estate developer who actually ran against Bevin in the governor's race; after defeating him, Bevin appointed him ed secretary.

Heiner and Bevin believe that the children of Kentucky need more choices, but Dr. Donna Hargens, superintendent of Jefferson County Public Schools, points out that the district offers 18 magnet schools and 52 magnet and optional programs.

Charter proponents have been pitching Indiana as a success story, including the Tindley schools of Indianapolis, and that turns out to underline the problem-- Tindley schools have just turned out to be in the middle of a financial mess, and their visionary leader will step down at the end of the year with some of his personal spending under attack. The school has been accused of having a high suspension rate, and there's also a case to be made that some Tindley charters have been the point of the spear for gentrification of neighborhoods.

But most of all, Indiana is one more place where it's becoming evident that you can't have a charter system without hitting the taxpayers up for more money. Tindley's charter company was itself begging just a few years ago when it took over Arlington High and found the finances insufficient for the job. Indiana is a bigger charter mess than we can get into here, but one thing they have conclusively proven time and again is that A) if you want to turn around a failing school, you have to spend more money on it and B) if you try to operate multiple parallel public and private systems, you will either spend a lot more money or watch a bunch of underfunded chaos and business failures. Or maybe both.

Bottom line: as a model for See How Great Charters Would Be, Indiana is a poor choice.

Kentucky charter advocates say that poor kids should have choice, and teachers should have the chance to have their pay linked to test scores.

The head of the Jefferson County School Board has called for charter involvement in the district because A) charters can be super-duper innovative and B) choice and competition are awesome. But he believes that choice is already present, and that it's up to the public schools to get the job done. He would like to bring charter operators in to just kind of help run the district, contributing their bold, innovative ideas. Will anybody be shocked and surprised when the bold, innovative idea turns out to be, "Give us more money"?

Public school proponents are pushing back. Brent McKim, head of the Jefferson County Teachers Association, wrote an op-ed that lays out the issues. Charters don't have financial transparency. Charters don't have public oversight. And he indicts charters for being agents of segregation.

There is a growing concern that the proliferation of independent charter schools is contributing to a much more isolated and homogeneous educational experience for young people that does not prepare them for the diverse and challenging world they will experience as adults.

McKim reminds us that part of the benefit of public education is supposed to be bringing students together from many different backgrounds to learn to live together and to get an education that reflects community values. There's no question that many public schools fail in this mission, but there's no reason to think that charter schools are likely to do any better. Why replace problematic public schools with charter schools which have the same problem? Wouldn't it be better to address the problem?

If Governor Bevin and his friends have their way, Kentucky will have the chance to address many problems. As a state starting from scratch, and with much to observe, they could conceivably be a state that learns from everyone else's mistakes and does charters right. Of course, that would be expensive, and charter fans never seem to want to talk about that with the taxpayers. Good luck, Kentucky.

Involving Introverts

I'm never a fan of embracing technology for technology's sake, but I do love a good technological solution to a teaching problem, and I have found some technology is an absolute boon to engaging introverts.

It helps, of course, to understand what the heck an introvert is. Introverts aren't necessarily shy, and don't hate all human contact. But interaction is work. The classic distinguisher for extroverts and introverts-- two people go to a party, where both mingle and talk and have a good time with all the folks in the room, but the extrovert comes out pumped up and ready to go do something else, and the introvert emerges wrung out and ready to settle into his own chair in his own room in his own home by his own self.

Some extroverts really don't get introversion and suffer from the notion that introversion is a problem that needs to be solved. This can be problematic in a classroom; many introverts can tell you a story of some extroverted teacher who decided to force the introvert to come out of her shell, or to get more engaged with the other students in the room.

When I take a test like, say, the Myers-Briggs inventory, I peg the introvert-o-meter. But I've been a performing amateur musician my whole life, and I was a union president. Your introvert students can do everything that your extroverts can; they just may approach it a bit differently.

Years ago I discovered Moodle, an open-source learning platform. One of its features was a discussion board that allowed threaded conversations. It was handy for any number of classroom activities, but its most powerful feature in my class was discussion. Moodle has a discussion board feature that allows for threaded conversations, and for some of my students, this was a dream-- they could say everything they wanted to say without having to navigate the challenges of group social interaction. Students who had previously had little to say in class now had a great deal to say. Moodle also allowed me to turn on a feature that let the students "score" each others' responses. This was helpful for cutting back on. "Yeah, what he said" posts, but it also underlined the fact that some of my students who weren't adept enough to earn social capital by live meatworld interactions were now earning it by the quality of their writing and reasoning.

For introverts, social interaction is work. As teachers, we often imagine that the social interaction piece of an assignment is not really a real factor, like having point on your pencil or knowing how to sit in a chair. But for introverts, removing the work of social interaction can help them focus on the work of developing an idea or solving a problem.

I'm not suggesting that we shuffle all of our students off to isolated cages or walled-in computer stations. That would be stupid. But just as some teachers try to accommodate different learning styles, it's helpful to remember there are different social styles, and that, for example, deciding to do an assignment as group work is not a break for all of our students-- for some it's more work, not less, to navigate that situation.

Introverts don't need to be fixed and we don't need to be coddled. We don't need to be in an introvert-centered classroom. But it helps is we have a teacher who recognizes how we interact with the world and other humans. It's just one more way that students can be different and teachers can help by recognizing that the differences exist as something other than a problem.

ICYMI: In like a lamb

 Let's kick of March with some good readings, both new and old.

Why I'm Not Impressed with Effective Teachers

Timothy Shanahan makes an important distinction between effective teachers and effective teaching.

Shut Up and Sit Down

Joshua Rothman in the New Yorker looks at our dangerous leadership obsession, tracing it up through the current leadership industry which assumes that leadership and power can be decoupled.

21st Century Learning, Inc

From a couple of years ago, here's Tara Ehrcke's look at the business of 21st century learning, and why it is a bunch of hooey and a marketeer's drea.

Marc Tucker and Common Core Fuel Injection

You probably read this, and you definitely should have. Mercedes Schneider hoists Marc Tucker by his own badly constructed metaphorical fuel injector.

The ESSA Negotiated Rulemaking Committee

A breakdown of who, exactly, is on that committee to flesh out the details of ESSA.

A Bill of Rights for School Children

Russ Walsh has a book coming out soon. I've already read it, and I recommend it not just for your own reading, but as a gift for the civilian in your life who hasn't been paying close attention to what's going on in education. This short piece is a sort of preamble to the book. Check it out.