More About MI Super

Nancy Flanagan, a top blogger who was one of my earliest inspirations in this bloggy biz, left a comment on my earlier post about Michigan's call for more testing, more often, of more students. It adds some important insights that I lacked, and I think it's important enough to get moved up here where people who don't read the comments will still see it.

Hmm. I actually live in Michigan. And while you didn't say anything that was technically not true--there's more to the story.

Michigan, as you mention, has a really creepy governor (more automaton than Captain Evil) and a batshit crazy, Tea Party-ish Republican legislature. The Superintendent is not--unlike most states--selected by the governor. S/he is chosen by an elected State Board of Education.

Earlier this week, a team of some 30 Republicans crafted a resolution to dismiss the (duly and democratically elected) State Board and the Superintendent--and replace all of them with a CEO, chosen by the Governor. Of course, this would require a change in the constitution, so they're putting that on their to-do list, but they made a really big deal about it. It's their goal. Soon.

The Superintendent was a kind of compromise choice, made by the (mostly Democratic) State Board. There were other (better) candidates, but Brian Whiston was chosen, largely because the Legislature loathes the State Board--and he had built relationships with legislators, when he was a lobbyist. That's right, they picked him *because* he was a lobbyist, and an actual public school superintendent, in a majority-Muslim district.

He actually does know some things about running a school district. The piece you were referring to (start testing earlier!--test more often!) drew lots and lots of scorn, but it was mostly about dumping the MI version of the SBAC/CCSS test, and replacing it with MAP testing in the fall, to address something teachers have been asking for: early feedback on kids.

Personally, I think it's a crappy idea, but I think it's the Supe's way of trying to make nice with the legislature, let them know he's not going to let go of accountability, even though he's recommending dumping the high-stakes test we most recently had.

Furthermore--he's not really in control. The legislature doesn't want a Superintendent or Board. They want to completely trash MI ed funding and firewalls between public and private. They want to "unbundle" the public system. The Superintendent was hoping to give them an idea that would fly, and keep channels of communication open between the Board and the Statehouse.

Brian Whiston is not the worst Superintendent we've ever had, by a long chalk. In fact, he hasn't been in place terribly long, and had a personal tragedy early in his term, so we haven't heard much from him. I would rather have him than someone appointed by Governor Endless Stare.

Sad thing--MI used to be a flagship union state, with excellent public schools and universities.

So maybe Whiston is trying to navigate through a tough place and getting stuck with some crappy choices. We'll see what happens next. 

One System To Rule them All

Every once in a while something turns up in the comments that is just too good not to pass on. This is from reader J. Chaffee (If I had a good elvish font, I'd use it).

 










Data Systems for the administrators under the sky,
Systems for the teacher drones in their halls of stone,
Systems for Mortal students doomed to die,
One system for the Corporate Head on his dark throne
In the Land of Cyber where the Shadows lie.
One System to rule them all, One System to find them,
One System to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Cyber where the Shadows lie.

No More Lone Genius

Earlier this month at the Harvard Business Review, Greg Satell wrote "It's Time To Bury the Idea of the Lone Genius Innovator."

He opens his argument with the story of Alexander Fleming. You know the standard bit-- Fleming finds his experiment with bacteria has been ruined by fungus which is killing every piece of bacteria it touches. So he has a flash of insight, redirects his attention to the fungus, and voila! Penicillin!

Except that, as Satell points out, is not it. Fleming makes his discovery in 1928. It doesn't become widely used until 1943. In between someone had to stumble across Fleming's research, figure out why it was important, figure out how to make the new wonder drug, and finally how to make it to scale. And Satell doesn't even address other steps such as publicizing the new drug widely enough that physicians would catch on to and promote its use.

Satell's point is that we need to drop the lone genius story. Simply having an idea isn't enough, and that such ideas don't happen in a vacuum to begin with-- you're always standing on somebody's shoulders.

He reminds me of this old video clip about First Followers. Favorite line: "A first follower turns a lone nut into a leader."

I'm mindful in both cases of how much our educational models can lean toward the lone genius. We put huge emphasis on Doing It Yourself, and that seems to make sense because if you can't do it by yourself, how do we know if you can do it at all?

But both Satell and Dancing Guy both remind us that the guy who comes up with an idea is not much more important than the guy who can recognize that the idea is worth pursuing and developing.

This kind of first follower, first developer skill is especially on point in an age in which the whole skill set of 'research" has changed. Back in my day (sonny), research meant combing the stacks of the library hoping to find one or two sources. But kids these days can find a mountain of sources-- the trick is to figure out what is worth paying attention to.

Jack Teagarden and Louis Armstrong were jazz geniuses who created solos that were profoundly awesome. But they were influenced by musicians that came before, they were creating those solos while playing with other musicians, based on songs composed by other writers, and they continued to draw influence from a myriad of sources-- some that no authority could ever have predicted (fun fact-- one of Armstrong's favorite bands, which he would often go listen to when they played the same town, was the sweetly unjazzlike Guy Lombardo). No musical genius was ever a lone genius.

We often default to a classroom model in which each student is supposed to be a Brilliant Idea Generator-- a lone genius. A gifted soloist. But perhaps it's a better idea to work with a model that fosters not simply collaboration, but an interlocking set of roles and an ability to separate wheat from chaff, Coke from New Coke, potatoes from potato chips. We still favor an approach that tells every student to keep her eyes on her own paper, but perhaps we should be telling her to look at everybody's paper-- and figure out which one is worth supporting, following and developing.

Satell is ultimately arguing in favor of more public-private-government partnerships. That's fine, I guess, sometimes. But I'm more interested in the human level. It's very American to think that one is either a mighty, heroic leader, or a schlubby drone. But collaboration, innovation, progress, success and culture come out of a much more complex web of relationships, skills and mutual support. This is one more reason that every student should be in band or choir or play on a team. And I'd like to see the rest of us find better ways to bring this reality into the classroom as well.

What Can You Do?

It has become an oft-repeated progression in the world of the public education debates. People become curious, then interested, then informed, then alarmed. Then they ask the question--

What can I do?

In some places, it's obvious. Some cities and communities are on the front lines of these battles and they need people to stand up and make noise right now, today. Parents need ton turn up at meetings. Teachers need to speak up at school. Letter writers. Sign carriers. People to stand shoulder to shoulder with those who are standing up.

But what if your district is not on the front lines (yet). What can you do to stand up for public education? Here are some thoughts.

Educate yourself

Read up on the issues. Dip into the blog list that appears on the right column of this page-- these are just some of the voices out there, but they're a pretty good assortment. If the politics or focus or tone of a particular blog doesn't grab you, keep sampling others. We are a large, literally motley crew. We are large; we contain multitudes.

Read books, too. There are several excellent out there that are great for the general reader.
















There are plenty more, more added to the list every day.

Communicate and Share

Spread and share the word. Tell people what you know.

The biggest weapon the resistance to ed reform has is information. The more people learned about Common Core, the less they liked it and the harder they resisted. And while not everyone may feel comfortable trying to explain what's going on, everyone has access to other writers' explanations.

Share on twitter. Retweet. Post it on facebook. Pin it. I am always surprised at the number of people who ask if it's okay to share a blog post-- certainly you can share it. That's pretty much what all of us have in mind when we write the things. If you like it and if it speaks to you, pass it on. Share, share, share.

And don 't hesitate to communicate with the writers and commenters you see. If you hear a politician say something that you know is wrong, write or call or email them and try to help them understand how they've missed the mark (pro tip: "You idiotic lying sack of beetle dung" is not a very effective way to approach this sort of communication). Reach out. Open a dialogue. You cannot expect people to know what nobody has ever told them.

Join up

There may well be local activist and advocacy groups that you can join and support. The opt out movement has grown many branches, and other regions have the groups that ben formed to face local concerns (for instance, Nebraska has been charter free for years, but now that charter fans have drawn a target on the cornhusker state, a group has been created by supporters of public schools).

Nationally, the movement has taken many forms.  Educolor can be found on line in many communities, doing the work of elevating the voices of public school advocates of color on educational equity and justice. Facebook is peppered with pro-public ed groups; if you prefer large and feisty, there's the Badass Teachers Association.

And the Network for Public Education is doing huge work these days, creating a voice that is anchored in grass roots origins, but which doesn't suffer from looking home made and amateur hour (like, say, certain blogs that individuals maintain on their lunch hour). You can become a member of NPE, and you can offer them some financial support to keep up the important advocacy for public ed. And if you want to step up that support, join and support NPEAction, the political action arm of NPE.

These may seem like small things, but they are actions that anyone can take. Reformsters are spreading their ideas through a massive money-fueled carpet bombing, co-opting of politicians, and a wide array of astroturf group. But folks on the side of the resistance have had some amazing successes fueled by nothing but determination and information. You don't have to be out on the sidewalk, holding a sign, to make a difference. Spread the word.

Stand Up. Stand Together: Reflections on Raleigh

I had a lot of reasons to stay away from this year's Network for Public Education conference in Raleigh, and up until the last minute I thought I wasn't going. Finances, family stuff, social anxiety, time off, general work stress, concerns about the venue-- all that and a few other things made me balk.

I'm certainly not unique. Lots of folks have lots of reasons not to attend a conference, some of them damn good reasons. But in the end, I went. And I'm glad I did.

Here are some of the reasons why.

* Ten hours in the car with my wife, both ways. My wife is my best friend, and we travel well together. It's always a treat, and last weekend it made a nice break for us to sit down in the same place for a while.

* Bonus student reunion. Because we are facebook friends, one of my former students received a facebook alert that I was in her town. I got to see her for the first time in seventeen years, meet her husband and some of her friends. Of the six, three were former North Carolina teachers, so I got offer condolences to some of the people that NC has driven out of the profession.

* Hearing Reverend Barber. The man has a voice, and he has something to say. He put the struggles of education and race and building a better, more just society in context, and with clarity.

* Listening to Tammie Vinson, Margo Murray, and Patricia Boughton from Chicago make a bit more clear how, on the ground, black teachers are being pushed from the profession. Also, learned a terrible thing I did not know-- that CPS had a history of extending tenure only to white teachers.

* Watching Jennifer Berkshire and Peter Cunningham do their thing.

But mostly it was the people. Seeing people that I'd first met last year, and meeting more people that I hadn't had the chance to talk or meet to before. The conference is remarkably plain and simple, and leaders Diane Ravitch, Anthony Cody and Carol Burris set a tone that is warm and open. Ravitch is a hugely important figure to the movement, nationally known, respected and recognized, and yet she spent the weekend looking like she was just hanging out, casual and approachable and so constantly surrounded by people who want to talk to her. One of the lessons that both conferences have underlined for me is that you don't have to posture and put on a big show when you are talking about what you truly at your core believe.

The value of a conference like this is that it reminds you that you're not alone, that you are not the only person who sees what's happening. That mutual support, that building of a national network of people who share a concern and passion for public education. Their interests may not align perfectly, but that for me is one of the beauties of the pro-public ed movement-- I am automatically suspicious of any movement that demands we all be on the same exact page.

Ed reform is barely covered in the press, and coverage is often simply reprinting press releases or presenting unquestioned comments from the reformster side. We could lean just on the blogs and articles that we read and continue to pass them along, but to see the actuals live and in person, to hear their voices, to ask the questions and hear the response is all so valuable (almost in the same way that a live teacher is more effective than education by computer screen).

And while it would be a mistake to just keep preaching to the choir, it's good to spend some time with the choir, to know that we're sharing the same music, to be reminded of just how the song goes before we go back out into a world where other clangorous tones fill the air. My thanks to the leaders, organizers and funders of the conference. For me it has meant renewed focus and energy, and I'm grateful.

Getting Better

Some days I think the problems behind ed reform boil down to a basic misunderstanding of human nature.

In Ed Week a few weeks back, Marc Tucker wrote about getting great teachers in every classroom (I would rather talk about helping the teacher in every classroom to do more great teaching, but okay) and in the midst of that discussion, he drops this

There are, of course, teachers who do work really hard, year after year, to get better and better at the work, but they are the ones driven by an inner demon, not ordinary mortals like you and me.  So, while it is probably true that most of our teachers could be really good, really expert, there are not nearly enough of them, because they have no incentive to do so. 

I'm really stumped here. Is Tucker seriously suggesting that ordinary mortals don't want to get better at what they do?

The observation comes in the context of reporting that it takes ten years to achieve expertise, spurred by the rewards of climbing a career ladder. And here he goes

It says that happens only if the individual keeps working hard, year after year, to become better and better at the work.  But teachers have no incentive to do that.

This is just bonkers. The world is filled with people who work to get better and better at what they do, because that's how people are wired. Every single one of my students cannot help trying to get better and better at things that they value. The confusion, I think, occurs because we force so many people in our society to do things, improve at things, get better at things they don't give a rat's rear about.

Yes, if you want someone to get better at processing G-34/A forms that mean nothing to anyone, you will have to incentivize that work. But where you find people doing something they love, you find people trying to get better for the same reason you find them breathing and eating-- because that is what human beings are wired to do. We are learning and growing machines. But some people have always tried to "harness" that power by breaking people and trying to make them grow in approved directions, like a demented gardener who just keeps chopping and pruning and building obstacles to force trees to grow sideways.

Growing and improving is normal. Every person I know who plays music, in any capacity, is always trying to do better, spurred on by exactly zero external reward-based incentive. Every person I know who does a job they enjoy is always trying to do better. Every kid who ever tried to make a mud pie kept trying to improve the design and construction process. I cannot believe this is a thing we need to explain.

Reformsters keep embedding this faulty notion into their understanding of teaching over and over and over again-- that teachers will only do a non-crappy job of navigating the education maze if policy makers can find a better piece of cheese to offer. Teachers will only improve through training and development if we tie it to the correct complex of carrots and sticks.

This is nuts. First of all, teaching is one field where it is absolutely clear, up front, that you need to be intrinsically motivated to enter. "I went into teaching so I could make big money, power and prestige," said no teacher ever. The appeal used to be that you could do important work and be largely left alone to pursue excellence in your own way. Now the work is forcefully downgraded (help young folks grow has been replaced with help young folks do test prep) and the freedom to pursue excellence is increasingly stripped from the job.

Second, teaching has the best, most immediate feedback loop of almost any profession or research field. Every classroom is a laboratory, and every lesson is an experiment. "Think I'll try teaching adverbs by using fluffy stuffed zebras," you think, and after about ten minutes you know whether you have a genius idea on your hands or something for your Never Again file. And it's not just about measuring data-- a teacher who implements a bad lesson plan gets to suffer the consequences in real time. Make a bad step in the classroom and your students will make you pay for it for the next thirty minutes. No spread sheets or number crunching necessary; the consequences of your choices are felt immediately. This is one more reason that teachers are hugely motivated to get better.

There's no question that mentoring from other teachers is hugely, enormously, infinitely helpful, and that many school systems have grossly inadequate systems in place to support such mentoring. But again-- when a helpful experienced teacher shows up at your door when you're trying to figure out how to approach a tricky lesson, it's not necessary for them to say, "I'll give you thirty bucks to take my advice."

Everything in my personal experience says that people want to get better at the things they value. There's a whole world of argument and discussion to be unpacked form the words "better" and "value," not to mention the whole "how to" question-- but everything I know says the basic motivation is in there if it hasn't been too badly damaged or broken. My entire teaching career is about finding it and tapping into it. And teaching, as a career, is uniquely configured to tap into it. Reformers need to stop trying to build a bridge across a beautiful valley that we can just walk through.

The Morality of Artificial Intelligence

The rising tide of support for computer-centered competency based education is a computer with artificial intelligence (AI), a computer smart enough to be to follow, understand and respond to the behavior and choices of the human students linked up to the system. But this presents problems.

Some are pretty obvious. Just a month ago, Microsoft hooked an AI-powered chatbot up to Twitter and watched in horror as it proceeded to tweet horrible racist comments. That was not the plan, but any AI development has to wrangle with the problem of installing human values into a machine.

How can an AI-driven system "teach" children if it can't be instilled with human values?


There's an interesting discussion of these issues in an article posted at Slate today. It has nothing at all to say about CBE or other computer-driven education systems-- at least not directly-- but much to ponder about the business of creating a computer program that could handle the job.

There are scientists working on it; there have been since the days that Isaac Asimov designed the Three Laws of Robotics, meant to give robots something like a moral center. The article says that these folks want to achieve AI "provably aligned with  human values." Which is a hugely reductive statement of the problem, because the first question we have to answer is, "Which human values?"

You may think that there are surely some clear, central core values shared by all humans, but the Slate article reaches back to work by Joseph Henrich that I've discussed here before which suggests that most of what we think of as "normal" is really just the product of our own culture. This extends not just to silly, obvious examples like how to shake hands but, as Henrich shows, actual perception-- what is an optical illusion in some cultures is not one in others.

AI has depended on knowledge based and outward behaviors, but it is hugely limited. As writer Adam Elkus says in the article's opening, "Computers are powerful but frustratingly dumb in their inability to grasp ambiguity and context."

That means that AI often falls back not so much on creating intelligence, but on creating a complex of behaviors that simulate intelligence, but are still just the computer responding stupidly to a series of complicated instructions.

This obviously matters to more than just people in the way of educational AI. One of the challenges of programmers trying to perfect computer-driven cars is the big question-- in an accident involving many people, which people should the AI car most try not to kill?  In such an accident, the decision of whose life to try to save will not be made by the car-- it will be made by the programmer who wrote the software that tells the car which individual to "value" most.

An AI teacherbot will implement a complex algorithm, a super-rubric, and those directions will come from programmers who will include their own values, their own beliefs about how that educational moment/issue/response/thingamabob ought to be handled. "Well," you may say, "So will a human teacher. A human teacher will bring biases and views to the classroom as well."

And that's true. But the programmed-in bias of computers is an issues because A) it will most likely be put there by people who are NOT trained, experienced classroom professionals and B) because, like a standardized test, the computer centered CBE program will come wrapped in a mantle of objectivity, a crown of bias-free just-the-facts-ma'm, all of which will merely be an illusion. Furthermore, it will be an illusion that cannot be challenged or modified. As a live human, I can be challenged by my students on a point; they can even convince me to change my mind as we all wrestle with context and ambiguity.

Teaching is a moral act, an act that comes with a heavy moral and ethical context. AI does not currently have that capacity, and may very well never have it. Putting an educational program under the control and guidance of an AI-flavored computer program is putting a classroom in the hands of a sociopath who literally does not know right from wrong but only, at best, a list of rules given to them by someone, rules that it now follows slavishly.

Well, what if we have those rules written by someone who we agree is a highly moral person? Would that satisfy you, you cranky old fart?

My answer is no. Moral and ethical behavior by its very nature must deal with ambiguity and context, and it must be able to change and grow in understanding. It requires wisdom, not just intelligence. When folks push AI computers as a solution to the classroom, they are pretending to have solutions to problems that the leading minds in the computer world have not solved, and even if those solutions existed, we would still have to argue about whether or not they made a teacherbot fit for the classroom.