After the Teachers Are Gone

Does it seem some days as if ed reform is intent on ending teaching as a profession? Well, some reformy folks are not only considering that possibility-- they are positively counting on it and planning for it.

Meet Knowledgeworks. I wrote about them a while back, and it wasn't pretty.

They were founded in Ohio in 1998, with an initial mission of "increasing access" to educational opportunities mostly for poor students and poor working class adults. In 2004 they got on the Gates Small School gravy train and helped create some of those smaller high schools that were Gates' previous theory about how to fix education. In 2009, they switched nimbly to the new Gates gravy train-- college and career readiness; at that time, they also glommed up Napa Valley company New Tech Networks (at least one source says KnowdgeWorks founder built it), a group specializing in transforming schools through blah blah argle bargle my lord in heaven, but these guys soak all of their materials in some sort of corporate word soup that drowns a lot of sense.

The organization was founded by Chad P. Wick (age 72) who has been a CEO of various commercial banks in and around Cincinnati, served on some insurance company boards, and had his hand in Ohio politics one way or another. He seems well-connected to both important people and money, and that has dovetailed nicely with a philanthropic (in the modern sense) career. Wick also co-founded MAYWIC Select Investments, an investment group that bases a lot of its work on "deep relationships" and includes in its portfolio Abe's Market, goldieblox, and One Hope. Over the past several years, Wick has transitioned out of running KnowledgeWorks and into running ACT (yes, the test people).

KnowledgeWorks is networked with EDWorks (who "optimized the school improvement models behind this success by providing curriculum and instruction, supportive high school culture, aligned assessments and comprehensive student support") and StriveTogether ("Every child. Cradle to career." is either their slogan, or maybe just a threat).

If KnowledgeWork's singular talent is reading the prevailing winds of ed reform (and grabbing their share of the Gates money that fills the sails of the ship of reformsterism), then we can assume that competency based education is on its way, because KnowledgeWorks is all in on this Next Big Thing: their "vision" these days is "Every student experiences meaningful personalized learning that enables him or her to thrive in college, career, and civic life."

In fact, their vision is even greater than that, because it involves the end of teaching as a profession, replaced by an "expanding learning ecosystem." They have a whole "report" about this Brave New World (or, as I suppose we must put it these days, BraveNewWorld), and I have read through it so you don't have to.

"Exploring the Future Education Workforce" is all about envisioning about what education will ook like after the teachers are gone. In fact, it focuses on seven new "roles" in the "learning ecosystem." So brush off your resume and get ready for the WorldofTomorrow!

The Preliminary Visionary Filled-with-hot-airy Windup 

Every reformy group has its own special style, and KnowledgeWorks' style is all about high-calibre blather. Here's how they elaborate on the notion that the learning ecosystem is expanding.

It is rapidly becoming more diverse and more personalized as accelerated technological change, increasingly sophisticated data systems, and changing social expectations make it possible for learners and their families to renegotiate their relationships with traditional; education institutions, and, in some cases, to end them entirely. As part of this expansion, new forms of "school" are proliferating in both place-based and virtual settings, and the boundaries between formal and informal learning are melding. Competency based education is spreading. Learning playlists that curate learning resources are gaining sway as a means of organizing and giving students some degree of choice over their learning journey.   

It's an awesome word salad, tossing together unsubstantiated assertions (what changing social expectations, exactly) and meaning-deficient phraseology (how does one meld boundaries, exactly). But later we arrive at something more like a point:

Education stakeholders cannot cultivate vibrant learning ecosystems that work well for all learners without thinking anew, not just about ther structures and cultures, but also about people working in them.

In other words, we have seen the future of education, and it doesn't have teachers in it. Well, maybe not. The authors acknowledge that some things could screw with their vision. There are other possible futures, but they all suck (there's a whole other paper about this, but we'll not go there today).

So let's look at what the BraveNewWorld of education offers for employment opportunities.

1) Learning Pathway Designer

Works with students, parents and learning journey mentors to set learning goals, track students' progress and pacing, and model potential sequence of activities that support learning experiences aligned with competencies.

So, curriculum writer, if you want to imagine a curriculum written like a Choose Your Own Adventure. But "curator of learning journeys" sounds sooooo much cooler than "curriculum director."

2) Competency Tracker

Tags and maps community-based learning opportunities by the competencies they address...

It's been two years since I made the argument that the Common Core aren't really standards, but are actually data tags for all tests, quizzes, worksheets, etc etc etc. Now we're creating a job for somebody who just sits around and tags every single thing that might come in contact with the student so that every step of the "learning journey" can be tagged and bagged and monitored and recorded. King of like Big Brother's Little Brother.

3) Pop-Up Reality Producer

This champion of whiz-bangery is supposed to work with everyone under the sun to produce "pervasive learning extravaganzas that engage learners in flow states and help them develop relevant skills, academic competencies, and knowhow."

I'm not going to lie-- my new professional goal is to provide a pervasive learning extravaganzas every day. When students ask, "What are we doing today?" I am so answering, "Why, a pervasive learning extravaganza, of course." I will use it on every lesson plan. And my planned outcome will be to measure my learners' flow states, probably with a new flowstateomometer, which I will create by my use of knowhow.

4) Social Innovation Portfolio Director

When I dig past the excessive language extravaganza, this appears to be a person who hooks students up with community organizations that will use students as free labor with the excuse that it's a learning experience for those students. This is driven by the "use of collective impact metrics" and should "support students in become transformative agents in their own communities," which I guess means that KnowledgeWorks would consider the Boston student protests an awesome learning extravaganza.

5) Learning Naturalist

Designs and deploys assessment protocols that capture evidence of learning in students’ diverse learning environments and contexts.

This brings to mind Altschool, where teachers constantly make videos of the moments they catch students displaying understanding and competence. Of course, it also brings to mind Steve Irwin, tracking the elusive teen-age ELA student in the wilds of their natural habitat. Although this is driven by "expansion in data capture methods" as well as "increasing neuropsychological understanding of memory, attention, focus, and other aspects of cognition," perhaps we are not so much tracking wild students as we are trying to capture wild data.

6) Micro-Credential Analyst

Provides trusted, research-based evaluations and audits of micro-credential options and digital portfolio platforms in order to provide learners and institutions with comparative quality assurance metrics

An almost palatable start before it veers off into collecting this data not to be certain that students are learning and competent, but in order to do stack ranking and QA oversight. This also brings us back to the idea that not only are we getting rid of teachers, but we're getting rid of schools, with each micro-credential coming from a different learning extravaganza provider. Your education will come from potentialy hundreds of vendors, creating a need for someone who has to "determine whether credential issuers have complied with assessment protocols and whether those protocols are sufficient to reflect and determine mastery." So, some sort of third party overseer of all the various programs and providers. That shouldn't be a bureaucratic nightmare at all!

7) Data Steward

Acts as a third-party information trustee to ensure responsible and ethical use of personal data and to maintain broader education data system integrity and effective application through purposeful analytics.

 Well, if you think the rest of these were a heaping pile of bovine byproduct, then you'll love this one. Data brokers stewards aren't just supposed to oversee the use of the vast data mine created by the rest of this approach, but are supposed to "grow the value of learner's personal data" by looking at the larger connections and helping to manage the ecosystem to the benefit of the community and the learners (I don't know if you've noticed, but there are no students in this BraveNewWorld). The stewards will manage data warehouses and sharing systems "as a sustainable public asset."

Yes, we will collect and endless pile of data about your child, and then we will manage and share it for the good of the community, and to better serve your child, presumably by helping her find her rightful place in the community.

Honest to goodness, this is some of the creepiest crap I've come across, and if you page back through this blog, you'll see I've encountered a lot. The fact that this intrusive Big Brotherliness is dressed up in such florid and flopping language just makes it creepier, like a serial killer dressed as a clown.

Good News & Bad News

So the report will wrap up by considering the "promises and pitfalls" of BraveNewWorld.

Saving the Poor Teachers

The "diversification" of roles will help "alleviate the burden of supporting many of the core functions of learning from today's often overloaded teachers and administrators." Yes, poor teachers. It's just all too hard for them, so lets send them home and replace with them with a bunch of lower-skill corporate functionaries in jobs that will be easier to fill because the training requirements will be less like a trained professional and more like a trained fry cook.

Personalized Learning

Oh, the personalization. The ecosystem will be rife with it, from "transmedia learning assets" on the "learning journeys." Each learner will be served by a bevy of these para-professionals, and the learning will be oh so personalized, as the ecosystem works on their social, emotional and cognitive capacities. We're just going to build a whole person.

Foster Ecosystem Interconnection

Here's where they say something that is flat out dumb. By breaking the job of teaching down into many different jobs and multiplying the number of people working in the ecosystem, we will improve ecosystem communication. No. No, you won't. Adding more people with more functions in more places in the chain of the learning journey will not improve communication. It will certainly increase dramatically the NEED for communication, but systems people often fall into the mistaken belief that because a system demands something, the system will get it.

Extending Partnership and Authority

I really can't overstate just how much gilded word salad fills this report. For instance, these new roles will demonstrate the ways in which "new data streams and sensemaking tools promise to augment human contributions to teaching and learning." I have a sensemaking tool I'd like to use on the authors right now. There's a lot more florid textographical legerdemain in this bullet point, but as I read it, the point appears to be that this ecosystem will help wrest control of the education system away from professional educators and let other organizations get their hands on that sweet sweet cash the pervasive learning extravaganzas.

Ensuring Rigor and Quality

Hard to be certain, but I think this actually means "redefining quality to suit our corporate needs." Also, with the education providing business spread out over so many providers, so0mebody had better keep an eye on quality assurance. That is true. See above point about how just because a system really needs something, that doesn't mean the system will get it.

Reimagining Educator Preparation and Career Pathways

Yeah, that's a bit of an understatement. The "broadening of authority and blurring of boundaries" will mean that anybody will be an "educator" or at least an individual "contributing to learning." New training will be needed and old training will be scrapped. Oh, and then there's this:

Lastly, an expansion of educator roles will call into question current employment structures and labor relations. Some educators may focus on emerging uncertainty about job security as new kinds of career pathways are forged and tenure and retirement systems adapt. 

Educators will have "more options" about how they negotiate job security and how they are "renumerated," as long as they understand that none of those options will include either job security or particularly good wages. Unions will have the "opportunity" to provide new leadership for these new jobs. Ha.

Annd we're out of patience

There are a few final points, but I already feel like I need a pervasive showering extravaganza.

This is a fairly awesome display of the use of language to obscure rather than to clarify. These guys are good. Appreciate, for instance, the use of "ecosystem" when we are really talking about a new system. But people don't like the word "system," which sounds cold and mechanistic and belittling to human beings. On the other hand, everything sounds better with "eco-" in front, and an ecosystem sounds all natural and pretty. System evokes machines and robots. Ecosystem evokes bunnies and butterflies.

There's a frequent use of adjectival extravaganzas, with the piled-up modifiers obscuring rather than clarifying the terms to which they're attached.

So what's the actual plan?

Basically, to chop education up into a million little bits, sell of the rights to each one, hoovering up tax dollars with one hand and a mountain of data with the other.

What's most strikingly ironic about this is that this system requires a huge host of various edu-drones, and to actually provide the level of service would be-- well, we're talking about a personal learning journey concierge who would help hook your child up with dozens of certified-by-somebody micro-credential providers while someone else collected and massaged all your child's data while other people managed connections to the community and your pop-up reality producer monitored and created all the learning modules trotted out just for your child. Go back to the Altschool example-- it is expensive as hell. Only the wealthy and privileged could afford to really do this, and this kind of systematic data-gobblng big-brothering education-in-a-hundred-cans system is the last thing that the wealthy and privileged would send their children to. But with the kind of financing that it would take to install this system in a poor, urban district we could build and staff the Taj Mahal of traditional schools.

Roughly five minutes after a district decided to go this route, the trimming to meet the budget would begin, and we would end up with a "personalized" system with very little or no personalization, but a whole lot of data grabbing and a whole lot of profiteering from companies selling the bits and pieces.

This report is beautiful junk, the unreal, manufactured picture of a product that will never exist, photoshopped and spun so that its inherently ugly parts are not immediately visible. It is the some reformsters favorite wet dream-- a happy future with no unions, no teachers, no schools, no barriers to entrepreneurs who want to make a buck selling edu-crap and who don't have to waste a cent on high-priced well-trained professionals. It is literally education without the teachers, the students, the school buildings, and the education. If this is the future, our whole culture is in huge trouble.

Who Is Being Served

The issues of tech in education are a mixed and mottled bag. Some folks are driven and excited to get any tech into a classroom no matter what, and other folks automatically rise up in revolt when education technology darkens their door. I fall into neither camp.

Modern ed tech can be hugely helpful and enormously valuable. It can open up a whole world of possibilities. But like most magic, it comes with a price, and sometimes the price is too high and the benefits too small. 

When someone wants to drop some tech on us, it's time to ask some questions, and boy, are there many questions to ask. How do we distinguish between tech that can enhance education and tech that needs to be avoided? I think we can cut to the heart of the matter with one question.

Who is being served?

Some software serves students, helping them work better and smarter. A collaboration-enabling software like Google Docs lets students who live far from each other still work together on a project without having the additional hurdle of managing transportation and schedules.

But there is plenty of software that does not serve students at all. For instance, putting a simple test of algebraic functions or elementary grammar on a computer doesn't serve the students a bit. The test isn't any easier to take (in fact, for many students it is harder), and the test doesn't measure anything more accurately. What the software does is make it easier to report the student's results to Other Parties. The software doesn't make it easier for the students to see how they're doing, and it doesn't make it easier for the teachers to see how they're doing-- it makes it easier for Other Parties to see how they're doing.


The computerized Big Standardized Tests do not serve students. They could theoretically help by providing near-instantaneous results-- except that the testocrats insist that the tests must be scored before anyone determines what a passing score will be. But the computerized BS Tests don't make it easier for students or teachers or parents to see how the students are doing-- the tests make it easier for Other Parties to see how students are doing.

As part of the Great Alignment of the Age of Core, many teachers have found themselves creating lesson plans on a computer platform that allows them to link standards to plans, lessons, activities, worksheets, tests and anything else that moves and breathes. This does not serve the teacher, and it certainly does not serve the student. It serves people who want to be able to more easily monitor what the teacher is doing.

Competency based education could be a useful approach to education, but as currently packaged and promoted, it is welded to technology, and that technology is not there to serve the students. It does not make it easier for the students to learn; it makes it easier for Other Parties to monitor student learning. It does not make it easier for teachers to teach-- it makes it easier for Other Parties to monitor what is happening in the classroom.

There will always be people agitating for the Next Big Thing-- we should get this tech for students because then students will have this tech! There will be people agitating for magical tech-- if we put this on a computer, then it will magically transform into a Super Effective Teaching Thing. This is tech that is purchased just to meet somebody's need to feel cool, up to date, and keeping up with the Jones Area School District.

Sure, there are other issues. Are Other Parties collecting data that actually tells them how students are doing, or are they collecting junk? Who will these Other Parties be, and what do they want to do with everything that they collect? Is the price of this magic actually worth the magic that will be performed? Those are legitimate questions, huge questions, important questions.

But the question that matters, the question that tells us whether the technology should be welcomed into the classroom or run out of town on a rail-- that question is the one we started with.

Who is being served?

Because if the answer is not "the students," then we don't even need to move on to the other questions. If the promise of the technology is not to serve the needs of the students, then the conversation should be over. And that promise can't be some sort of indirect quid pro quo-- you scratch our backs and we might do something to help out the students.

Yes, some tech will fail to fulfill its promise, and yes, some tech may fall into a bit of a grey area. But when considering a new tech-based computer-driven slice of whiz-bangery, it is still the most important question:

Who is being served?

Bernie's Charter Lesson

No, not a lesson for Bernie. A lesson from Bernie for the rest of us.

Lots of folks have been trying hard to parse exactly what Bernie Sanders at that Ohio town meeting that gave so much hope and joy to DFER. Does he stand up for public education? Does he think charters are swell? Having poked through his statements on the subject, I'm inclined to conclude what is, really, the obvious-- Sanders doesn't really know or understand much about modern charter schools.

This is not a huge surprise. The modern charter industry has spent millions and millions of dollars to make sure that the public does not really understand charter schools. Sanders's offhand comment is a reminder to the rest of us that those charter efforts have been very successful.

This is easy to forget. Like advocates involved in any issue, public school advocates spend so much time staring straight at the face of reformsterism that we can forget that many ordinary folks are not all that up-to-date on the issues. If we're not careful, we run the risk of being that crazy person in the room hollering, "But look!! It's hoorrrrrrible!!" while our audience turns in genuine confusion to say, "What? That little spider in the corner?"

Bernie Sanders is no dummy, and he doesn't live with his head in the sand. But charter schools and public ed and the rest of the mess have not been on his radar all that much and so, presumably, his knowledge of some issues comes from the ether, the background chatter, the conventional wisdom. And charter school promoters have done a good job of getting their message into the ether. If Sanders doesn't get it, neither do a whole lot of other people.

That is the charter lesson from Bernie-- we public education advocates still got some 'splainin' to do.

I wish I had a direct line to Sanders. I wish my union hadn't squandered an opportunity to build some bridges to his campaign. Both he and the other folks who don't know the charter school score need to get some basic stuff.

Why charter schools are not public schools.

Here's the shortest, simplest list of talking points I can craft.

1) Charter schools use public tax dollars, but are not accountable for how those dollars are spent. 

Charters don't have to tell how they spend public tax dollars. Not a cent of it. In fact, they have gone to court to defend their right to stay unaccountable to elected officials.

2) Charter schools are run by unelected persons who are unaccountable to the voters.

Charter school boards are not elected. Charter corporation executives may not even live in the community where the schools operate. Charter boards do not have to open their meetings to the public-- ever. If you are a parent with a child in the charter, your only "voice" is to pull the child out. If you are a taxpayer without a child, you have no voice at all.

3) Charter schools do not have to accept all students.

The most basic promise of public schools in the US is that they must take every child in their community. Charters do not have any such requirement. Besides pushing students out, charters can use targeted advertisement and demanding application processes that push away the less desirable students.

4) Charter schools are business-centered, not child-centered.

Charter advocates will claim that only a small percentage of charters are for-profits, but a noon-profit charter is just a charter that doesn't have to share its profits with shareholders. Yes, teachers and educators in public schools make money from working there. But if a teacher wants a raise, she must bargain for it with elected representatives of the taxpayers. Because of 1 and 2 above, charter leaders can give themselves as much of a raise as they like. For charter operators, every dollar spent on a child's education is one less dollar they get to pocket.

The Lesson

Charter schools are not public schools. Many members of the public do not get this. In fact, many members of the public have looked this truth right in the eyes and walked on, thinking, "Well, that can't be right. I must just not fully understand things." And charter pushers just keep putting the word "public" in front of "charter schools," because if the word's there, it must be true, right?

We do need to educate Sanders, but we need to educate a whole lot of other folks as well. We don't need to explain anything complicated or confusing. The lesson is pretty simple.

Charter schools are not public schools.

Charter schools are not public schools.

Charter schools are not public schools.

CBE & The One True Path

Competency Works is a one stop shop for all your Competency Based Education PR needs, with a variety of ways to enhance the CBE narrative.

On the website, I came across a piece that, for me, really captures one of the problems I have with the current CBE initiative on a pretty fundamental basis. I'll link us back to the original source of the piece by Courtney Belolan about goal setting.

Belolan is an instructional coach and teachery consultant up in Maine, a state that somehow drew the short straw in the Who Wants To Be a CBE Pilot State contest. Belolan started out in education as a middle school teacher, but then moved on to working with the Maine International Center for Digital Learning which is "a non-profit organization that provides professional development and support for middle and high school leaders and teachers (both in-service and pre-service) regarding student-centered learning and teaching practices in 1-to-1 digital environments for the purpose of fostering student creativity, engagement, empowerment, well-being, and readiness for citizenship, college, and careers in a rapidly changing global society."

Let me just take a moment to note that MICDL has an extraordinarily slippery on-line footprint. This address (http://www.micdl.org/) is offered as theirs, and it looks right, but actually takes you to Gryphondale Educational Services (props for the Harry Potteresque name) which appears to a consulting firm for setting up, operating, making money from blended classrooms. Another lead took me to a site that features MICDL's name and a profile from 2014 of Bette Manchester, credited as founder of MICDL, an award-winning principal (including the middle school where Belolan taught), and a FirstMagic admin-- but the page is so incomplete that it still features body copy filled with "lorem ipsum dolor" placeholders. Manchester is also on the staff of Gryphondale. What else? Hewlett gave them a $41K grant in 2009-- "grantee website" is blank. Artopa, a web design company, boasts of the new website they made for MICDL-- but I'll be damned if I can find the thing! No news clippings. Manchester and MICDL are on a long list of Helpful People in a 2010 "report" boosting digital learning by Jeb Bush's FEE, and the group occasionally turns up in that sort of context, but a google search for their exact name turns up 852 results!


So Belolan's LinkedIn account seems up to date, and it still lists her on the board of this organization that specializes in digital education and yet has no serious online presence. So there's that. But let's get back to what Belolan actually says. Here's the heart of her point:

Goal setting is about deciding to do something and planning to get it done.  Simple as that.  Big or small, lofty or humble, anything can be a goal.  Stop and get eggs: goal.  Get a PHD: goal.  Learn to tango: goal.  Stop losing my keys: goal.  Answer emails: goal.  Walk for 20-30 minutes every day: goal.  Drink less coffee: goal.  I could go on.  The goal itself does not matter. What matters is the process, what you do between deciding to do something and doing it. 

Here's my problem. When you start with the idea that getting eggs, getting a PhD, and ceasing the regular loss of keys-- when you start with the idea that these are all pretty much the same sort of thing, you are in deep, deep trouble. And if you assert, as Belolan does, that simply planning and doing is the secret to all of this, you are in deeper still.

Now, I could craft any number of examples of what's wrong with all that, but let's just use the materials at hand. Belolan actually started out as a music major at Berklee, but then after two years moved on. Somehow the next professional stop was a middle school English teacher's job, which somehow led to consulting and belonging to a shadow organization that was started in 2008 by a woman who worked as a school principal, and THAT organization somehow ended up not exactly changing the international face of education via Maine but is instead-- what? We don't know.

Was that the plan? Did Belolan end up exactly where she planned to be by planning and executing every step of  the way? I am going to bet the answer is, "No," or "Good lord, no" or even "Are you kidding?"

Goals and plans and doing are all very nice, and they certainly have their own place in the world, but if you think that's the Secret of Life, you haven't been paying attention.

I have a lot of favorite metaphors for life-- let me trot out racquetball.

When you play raquetball, you cannot play with a plan other than "When the ball comes, I will hit it." At the moment you are flexing your arm, you may have an intent, which I suppose we can call a plan for about a half a second from now. But anyone who walks onto the raquetball court with a plan that says, "I will win today by scoring more points" followed by a list of the exact moves, swings and hits-- that person is a loon. Readiness and preparation are important. Timing is important. Focus and attention are important. Effort and passion are important. Planning? Not so important.

And since I got a bit personal with Belolan, let me get personal with myself. This is not the life I planned. True, I planned to be a teacher. But not here. And true, I planned to get married, but I was only going to do it once (the plan required me to be a lot better at it the first time). I suppose I could have made plans for my children, but by the time they came along I had begun to suspect that the whole planning thing was kind of a crock. I never planned to be a union president, let alone one leading a strike. And once I had fumbled one marriage, I certainly didn't plan to try again, and when I considered that possibility, I did not plan on the woman who gloriously upended my whole planning cart.

No, I don't mean that one should just flail away randomly. Preparation. Timing. Attention. Focus. And most of all, being aware of what the world is presenting to you. Planning is simply a way of tuning out possibilities, of saying, "Okay, my ship is going to come in, and it's going to be a schooner, and it's going to arrive at this dock." But the more possibilities you tune out, the more possibilities you miss. The more really great ships sail without you because you're sitting they're waiting for just that one.

For yourself, this is just sad. But to enforce this view on another person, a young human-- that's even worse. To say, "No, you don't want that ship. Just stay here." To tell a child, "Out of all the possibilities in the world, you only want those that are on the One True Path, and I will tell you where that One True Path lies." That's criminal. That's educational malpractice.

But it is also the core of what Belolan and other CBE fans want to sell us. Trust us! We will lay out the One True Path, with a couple of side loops and benches along the way so that students can stop and rest where they will (because-- personalization! See!!) We will pre-select the ships for you and we will pre-build the docks and we will pre-plan the voyage.

Because we know where the One True Path lies. We will be able to evaluate your child's planning and execution skills because if your child ends up where we think she should go, then her planning was excellent! We will let your child sit at a computer and step along the proscribed trail that we have set down for her. It's on a computer, so you know it's right.

If it were that simple, teachers would already be doing it. If it were that simple, it would be how most people lived their actual lives. But it's not. And anybody who thinks you can plan your way to a happy, full, rewarding life just like you plan your way to pick up eggs at the store-- that is someone who just doesn't get it, and certainly shouldn't be trying to impart what they do not get to teachers and children.

It's not about a plan. It's not about a marked path with restricting rails and a pre-chosen destination. It's about a map, and a compass, and the skills to travel where you will.

Wasting Time

That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those... of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years.
       --Our Town, Thornton Wilder 


Our Town, like most great works of literature, gives up new rich layers of insight every time it's viewed, read, performed. The only dramatic work I've taught more often is Hamlet, and like Hamlet, it turns out to be about something a little different every time I teach it. But for both works, there are always some constants. Hamlet is always, at least in part, about death. And Our Town is always, at least in part, about wasting time.

The above line is from the bitter, troubled Simon Stimson, talking to Emily about her troubling journey back into her own past (at this point they are both dead-- Simon from suicide, and Emily in childbirth). What Emily has seen is a world of people who don't pay attention, who don't really see, who fail to "really realize." She doesn't say it, but she could have-- people ignore Thoreau's idea to "live deliberately." Emily might even have quoted Hamlet, appropriating the infamous "to be or not to be" not as its cliched contemplation of suicide, but as the question, "Do you want to really, actually live your life, or just sort of sleepwalk through it?" Wilder chooses to put a more apt summary into the voice of the failed and unhappy Stimson-- "To spend and waste time as though you had a million years."

These thoughts are never far from the surface for me; they're central to how I try to live my life. But there are times that strike them hard, make them resonate like a tuning fork planted hard against the bone.

A few weekends ago, my father-in-law suffered a pair of strokes. He's home now, working on his recuperation, and doing pretty well. But he's not an old guy. This is way ahead of schedule.

And this weekend, one of our school board members passed away. He was a retired teacher, just a couple of years older than I. We grew up in the same church. When I was a putzy middle schooler, he was one of the cool high school kids. His son is one of my former students, and his daughter is in my class this year. He beat illness years ago, and it reared up again just recently. This was not supposed to happen.

Tomorrow is not promised, and today only comes once. I get a kick out of people who get extra excited about particular dates. "Woohoo!! January 1st, 2016 only comes once in a lifetime!" Well, yes. March 13, 2016 only comes once. July 16, 2022 will only come once. We make jokes about the loss of time ("Yikes! I just bingewatched Fuller House! That's seven hours of my life that I can never get back!") but it's the truth. The time you're spending reading this right now is time you'll never get back.

One of the central challenges of being fully human is figuring out how to respond to the finite nature of our lives. Panic, despair, nihilism, resignation, frantic racing, irresponsible frittering, and joyless intensity are all answers that I reject (and this is too big a nut, and I am not a wise enough man to crack it, in this space). But I believe there is one clear moral imperative that follows from our finite lives--

Do not waste time.

In particular, do not waste other peoples' time.

It is one of the promises that I make my students every fall-- "I will not knowingly waste any of your time this year. Everything we do we will do because I believe it is not a waste of your time to do it."

I'm pretty sure that's the bare minimum we can promise our students. I'm not saying that it's easy-- one student's critical lesson is another student's waste of time, and without a crystal ball, it's a challenge to read the future and know just what tools will come in handy to the students five, ten or twenty years from now. I even accept that handling the pointless demands of a powerful bureaucracy is, in its own way, useful preparation for a future in These United States (though, in the interests of transparency, I will be honest with my students about what we're doing). These years they spend in school are not some sort of free time, some batch of practice days that don't count against the grand total of their lives. These days in school are part of their slim total. Their lives will not start "someday." Their lives are going on right now.

All of us on the planet make choices daily about how to use our own time. Some of us with power and privilege also make such choices for other, younger humans. We have an absolute obligation to make those choices as responsibly as possible, to not waste the few, finite moments that those students have on earth. We don't have a million years and neither do they-- some of us barely have fifty or sixty, and a few of us, sadly, have even fewer. Why waste that time on one standardized test after another or, even worse, days and days and days of preparing for those Big Standardized Tests. "Life is short-- take more standardized tests" said nobody ever.

Life is grand and joyous and messy and rich and churning with a thousand different flavors of a raw and beautiful power. It is also brief. Do not waste any of it.

ICYMI: A Particularly Good Batch of Readings

From the right to the left, from testing to charters, we've got stirring perspectives from a wide variety of observation posts this week. Enjoy!

PARCC Pusher

A look at Opt Out in New Jersey-- and some of the baloney that testocrats are spreading in an attempt to keep those numbers up

Solving the Mystery of the Schools

In the New York Review of Books, Diane Ravitch takes a look at Russakoff's The Prize and Rizag's book about Mission High. And because it's Ravitch, you get a sharp, clear, pithy look at some of the relevant education history.

Rejecting Charter Takeover of Public Schools

Paul Thomas is a gentleman and a scholar, and one of the great services of his blog is the occasional reading list for a particular issue. This is a great resource for building a serious argument against public school takeovers, with some great links on his list.

On Wisconsin

Well, here's what the destruction of tenure looks like on the ground in higher education. Outspoken scholar Sara Goldrick-Rab talks about why she's leaving the university that she has loved and served, and how the assault on tenure is actually an assault on free speech.

Hubris Core

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you are perhaps not a regular reader of Neal McClusky at the Cato Institute. I pretty much never agree with McClusky when it comes to charter schools and the free market in education, but the man is a great representative of the non-loony right-leaning opposition to Common Core.

The Case for a Broader Approach to Education

Another conservative ed reform fan, Jay Greene (no relation) has always shown a willingness to resolve. Here's his piece about how and why he realized he was wrong to think that a narrow focus on math and reading would be good for education.

Easter and Testing

The Rev. Dr. Hope Lee has written a moving and passionate piece about opposition to the testing culture. It was bouncing all over the interwebs yesterday, but if you missed it then, read it now. It's a powerful testament.

Tech Ed

Alfie Kohn is one of the most articulate advocates for human-centered education around. This recent brief look at the role of tech in education is well worth your time.

What Do You Pay Me To Do?

All job evaluation systems answer the same question for employers-- Are these employees doing what we pay them to do?

In some sectors, this is an easy enough process. If I'm paying you to sell a certain amount of product, I can run the numbers and see if you sold that much product. Anyone who has worked in some version of retail knows how this goes-- did you hit your numbers this week, this month, this year?

But the tricky thing about employee evaluation systems is that they force employers to answer a question-- what do we pay these people to do? In fact, employers answer that question whether they mean to or not, and employers have to be careful.

For instance, if you run a catalog call center, a phone bank that takes the orders that customers call in, you might decide to evaluate your employees on how many orders they take per shift. That might seem to make sense. But as some such companies have learned, there's a problem with this evaluation system. One of my many part-time jobs was at just such a call center. The folks who call in are generally older; they may speak slowly or unclearly, and in some cases you are the only human voice they have spoken to all day. But if your evaluations are based on calls-per-hour, then your call center employee is sitting there thinking, as some nice old person tries to chat pleasantly, "Lady, I am not paid to be nice to you. I am paid to take your money and get you off this phone as quickly as possible." The company that I worked for had long since figured out that this was a bad plan, that one of the things you had to pay your employees to do was, in fact, to treat the customer well. And they had to tweak their employee evaluation system to do that.

A good evaluation system is hard to develop for precisely this reason-- because when you create the system, you define the employee's job. You answer the question, "What exactly do we pay you to do, anyway?"

Which brings us to teacher evaluation systems.

You're a taxpayer. What do you think you're paying teachers to do? Maintain a safe environment? Help your child become more confident, more wise, better adjusted, happier? Help your child discover her strengths? Prepare your child to succeed as an adult? Give your child the tools for a successful career, whatever that child might choose? Maintain a personal bank of knowledge and competence that guarantees the teacher is an up-to-date knowledgeable professional? Develop your child into a well-rounded individual? Model how to develop and maintain healthy relationships? Plan, prepare, and evaluate lessons with a wise, professional focus? Support the child's growth? Nurture the child as a special individual? Push the child to learn a wide range of skills and acquire a full body of knowledge? Not waste your child's time? Develop a set of skills and growth that are unique to your child? Plus a whole long list of other things that would make this paragraph too damn long to list?

But the ed reform model reduces that list to just one item.

Get the child to score well on the Big Standardized Test.

Imagine if you were upset about something that happened with your child. She was bullied and nobody did anything about it. She wanted to do have a class to draw in, and nobody would let her. She wanted to go outside and play. The teacher had been cold and unkind to her. She was having trouble with her science experiment and nobody would help her.

You call the school. You schedule a meeting. You sit down with the principal and teacher, express your concern, and they look you in the eye and say, "Look. We appreciate your concern, but we aren't paid to do that. We're paid to make sure your child gets a good test score, and that's it. That's all you pay us to do."

Nobody would be okay with that. Nobody should be okay with that.

Yet, if we have a system that pays teachers for getting good student scores on the BS Tests, what we're saying is, "Never mind the rest of that stuff. We pay you to get good student test scores. That's what we pay you to do." Everything else is extra, unimportant, not really part of the job.

The biggest problem with linking teacher evaluation to student test results is not that it's inaccurate and invalid. The biggest problem is that these VAMmy test-driven systems redefine the job. They say to teachers, "Get in there and get test scores up. That's what we pay you to do. That's all we pay you to do."

The big sell for recruiting teachers was always, "Come touch the future. Come help mold and support young minds. Come help young people find themselves and grasp their future. Come create a love of learning as you hold up young people and help set them on a path to become more fully human, more fully themselves, ready to take their place as adults in the world." If we change that pitch to, "Come help children get better standardized test scores," can we really be surprised that fewer people feel drawn to teaching as a career?

An evaluation system must answer-- cannot help but answer-- the question, "What do you pay me to do?" Students, teachers, the entire education system-- all need a better answer than, "To get good test scores."