Charterista Faux Teacher Programs Make ESSA Demands of Feds

The damndest things turn up on Twitter some days. Take this document. 

Entitled "Joint Statement Calling for Transparency of Outcomes to Improve Teacher Preparation and Better Serve Students and Districts," this is a fairly transparent demand by several "alternative path" teaching programs that new regulations give them a better advantage in the Brave New ESSA World.

Urban Teachers—along with Aspire Public Schools, Blue Engine, Boston Teacher Residency, Match Teacher Residency, National Center for Teacher Residencies, Relay Graduate School of Education, Teach For America and TNTP—join together to request the Department of Education and Congress create clear guidance for state education agencies as they attempt to act on this opportunity and improve the quality of teacher preparation at the state-level.

And by "improve" of course they mean "make more profitable for folks like us." Specifically, these folks would like the feds to "provide states with specific guidance around developing systems where all teacher preparation programs are accountable for collecting and publicly sharing outcomes data on the success of their programs, participants, and graduates."

Yes, it's one of the Top Ten Dumbest Reform Ideas Ever, back for another round of zombie policy debate. The same VAM-soaked high stakes test scores that has been debunked by everyone from principals to statisticians to teachers, the same sort of system that was called arbitrary and capricious by a New York judge, the same sort of system just thrown out by Houston-- let's use that not just to judge teachers, but to judge the colleges from which those teachers graduated.

Why would we do something so glaringly dumb? The signatores of the letter say that consumers need information.

Without the presence of concrete outcome measures, local education agencies and potential teacher candidates are hard-pressed to compare the quality of teacher preparation programs. Thus, it is a gamble for aspiring educators to select a teacher training program and a gamble for principals when hiring teachers for their schools

Yes, because everyone in the universe is dumb as a rock-- except reformsters. Just as parents and teachers will have no idea how students are doing until they see Big Standardized Test results, nobody has any idea which teaching programs are any good. Except that, of course, virtually every program for teaching (or anything else, for that matter) has a well-developed and well-known reputation among professionals in the field.

As for the "gamble" of hiring-- are these folks really suggesting that administrators can sit and interview teacher applicants, watch them teach sample lessons, and look at their work, decide that thecandidate looks really good and turn out to be wrong because they didn't have hard data about the college program. "My recommendation for the history job? Well, I don't know. She seems smart and capable, her sample lesson was engaging and exciting, and she has a kick-ass portfolio of great ideas. She seems knowledgeable and the exact sort of personality that would fit with our staff here. But I don't have any hard data about her college ed program, so I guess I'm just shooting blindly in the dark. You wanna just flip a coin?"

What sample metrics should we use for this collection of hard data that will be so much more useful than human judgment?

Sample metrics include teacher retention and attrition, principal satisfaction surveys, teacher evaluations, teacher performance on state exams and student achievement gains. 

Because whether a teacher keeps a job or stays in teaching or not is totally the fault of the college program. I don't know why we're collecting principal satisfaction data, since principals are apparently as dumb as rocks. But boy, let's just grab all that BS Test data-- in fact, let's double it up by counting it both in teacher evaluations and by itself.

Oh, but I do have to correct myself. Teacher retention can be controlled by the teacher program if the program is, like the Match system, a program that prepares faux teachers made to order for the charter system that runs the teacher prep program, or like TFA, "prepares teachers" for jobs that it has been contracted to fill. So that's a win for these guys. Remember-- select the right data, and you can always make yourself look better.

The signatores also tout the advantage of data-driven improvements to programs, because that's good for the "customer" (a word that turns up plenty in this three page letter). And of course it will also let states decide which programs to "support." Ka-ching.

Finally, this is just the first of a series of letters to the feds telling them what the people in charge of the nation's shadow network of privatized faux teacher trainers. So there's that to look forward to.

Look, it's not just that this is a terrible terrible terrible TERRIBLE system for evaluating teacher programs, or that it's a bald-faced attempt to grab money and power for this collection of education-flavored private businesses. These days, I suppose it's just good business practice to lobby the feds to write the rules that help you keep raking it in. It's that this proposal (and the other proposals like it which, sadly, often com from the USED) is about defining down what teaching even is.

It is one more back door attempt to redefine teaching as a job with just one purpose-- get kids to score high on a narrow set of Big Standardized Tests. Ask a hundred people what they mean by "good teacher." Write down the enormous list of traits you get from "knowledgeable" to "empathetic" to "uplifts children" to "creative" and on and on and on and, now that you've got that whole list, cross out every single item on it except "has students who get good test scores."

It's the fast foodifying of education. If I redefine "beautifully cooked meal" as "two pre-made patties cooked according to instructions, dressed with prescribed condiments, and slapped on the pre-made buns" then suddenly anyone can be a "great chef" (well, almost anyone-- actual great chefs may have trouble adjusting). These are organizations that specialize in cranking out what non-teachers think teachers should be, and their thinking is neither deep nor complicated, because one of the things a teachers should be is easy to train and easy to replace.

When excellence is hard to define and difficult to achieve, just redefine excellence so that it is low bar shallow narrow mediocrity-- voila! Excellence is now easily within your grasp. Not only that, but the people who keep pursuing actual old school excellence will either knuckle under or be cast aside (silly status quo embracers). Ka-ching!

But first, be sure to write a letter to the appropriate government agency so that they can help you with your redefinition.

PA: A Curious Online Learning Bill

I'm not honestly sure what to make of this one, but this bill has actually passed in the PA House, so we should probably pay a little bit of attention. It deals with online learning, so that demands attention as well.

House Bill 1915 doesn't even have a snappy name, but its purpose is to establish the Online Course Clearinghouse.

The bill was put out there by Rep. Jason Ortitay (R) who indicated that its purpose was "to establish a central repository of online courses accessible to public schools, nonpublic schools, home education programs, and the general public." It was presented back in March, and if we take a trip through the text, we find that it's about, well, setting up a clearinghouse of online courses. The PA Department of Ed is supposed to set it up, and companies or whoever that produce the courses will pay up to $75 to "apply" to have their course listed (there's also a fine of up to $1000 if they turn out to have lied about the course's swellness).

There will be an online catalog of available courses, and you'll be able to buy the course for your school district or charter or home school or whatever through the site. Oh, and it will have reviews and ratings of the courses, just like Amazon. By 2021, the department is required to produce a report showing how many students used how many of the online courses. School systems can still make their own courses or find and purchase them on their own, and nothing in the bill should be construed to mean that students must take these courses.

Oh, and the courses should mostly be focused on stuff related to Keystone exams (our PA version of the Big Standardized Test, which currently inspires so little confidence that legislators recently postponed-- again-- the year in which Keystones will become graduation requirements).

The bill's main sponsor was Rep. Jason Ortitay, who is currently in his second year as a legislator. Before that he was a businessman (President of Jason's Cheesecake Company). Ortitay won an upset victory over Democrat Jesse White. White lost either because A) he got caught using sock puppets on line to attack constituents or B) because he crossed the Marcellus Shale industry, which has reportedly been investing heavily in southwestern PA politics. White himself was an upstart back in 2006 when he rode the statewide wave of anger about that time our wacky legislators voted themselves a pay raise in the middle of the night.
In Pennsylvania, we're not nearly at good as voting people as we are at voting them out.

So why is Ortitay, a legislative non-entity whose life experience is selling cheesecake-- why is this guy making a move to create something so useless?

I mean, would the state need to set up a special listing of textbooks? If you are an actual vendor of online courses, why do you need this? Why do you need the state to be a go-between when its far more effective to send your people out there to sell directly to school systems? What are the chances that a school district will say, "We need to find some online coursework for our school. Let's ask the bureaucrats in Harrisburg which ones they think are acceptable." More than anything else this reminds me of the states online "library" of lesson plans, a patchwork cobble-job consulted by pretty much zero actual teachers in the state because we all know far better places to find teaching materials. This seems like a service that literally nobody, vendor or customer, will use.

But Ortitay proposed this thing and GOP representatives lined up behind it and democrats lined up against it, and so far I can't find anybody who knows why anyone cares or anyone should.

Ortitay's language in plugging the bill doesn't sound exactly like a cheesecake king:

The demand for customized, digital learning opportunities has also intensified in K-12 education, and many schools, including those in Pennsylvania, have become more innovative and forward-thinking in delivering instruction to students so that they can be competitive in college and careers in the 21st Century.   I believe that the online course clearinghouse created by this legislation will provide an additional tool to our educators and schools to help meet this goal by leveraging existing technology to provide students with the opportunity to pursue coursework which is best-suited to their individual needs, and which might not otherwise be available.

He also says that the bill will further innovation by "allowing, but not requiring, schools to utilize courses made available through a school entity, the clearinghouse, or any other source." Which-- again, scratching my head here? Were PA schools not allowed to offer cyber course before? Because I'm pretty sure we've been doing it for at least a decade.

So, a lot of buzzwords and baloney, but nothing of substance to raise the blood pressure of people on any side of the public education debates. However, if anybody is looking for an example of government waste (of time, money, attention, and legislative hemhawing), I think we've got a candidate right here. This smells like a big nothing sandwich.

Twenty Two Years & Lost Possibilities

Our local newspaper runs a "22 years ago today" item most days, a quick snapshot of what people were up to 22, 44 and 66 years ago. This morning I picked up the paper and saw a name I think about every year.

The student was in my class, long long ago. He was what we like to call an "at risk" student, which is such a professional term to use, when the human reality of at risk students is not so clinical. He was a student who could have gone either way-- having the ability and potential to make a stable and happy life for himself, but in circumstances that could easily push him in other directions. Watching an at risk student is like watching a dancer walking along the edge of a knife in a stiff wind, to one side fields of clover and to the other side, a long plunge into darkness.

I won't tell you that this student had the heartwarming charm of a television-ready at risk kid. He was not easy to like, abrasive and with a hair-trigger, not inclined to be kind to his peers. But not stupid, and able to make connections to people that he considered worth his time. I don't remember having to drag and carry him through my class. I didn't particularly build a strong connection with him, but he was never as completely openly defiant for me as he was in other classes. Win, I guess? He had the tools.

But life circumstances were on his side. I don't remember where his mother was, and he was briefly homeless after a huge fight with his father. The subject of the fight? His father refused to his newest batch of drugs with the son.

All of us who teach see the kids. At my school, we call them children who would have been better off raised by wolves. The student who was exhausted all winter because the money that should have gone to pay the heating bill for the trailer went to beer instead. The student whose father punished her misbehavior by shaving her head before sending her to school. The student whose mother was in prison because Mom had tried to drive her car over the eight-year-old child. On purpose.

Some of the students facing these kinds of long odds do great. Others who face something as pedestrian as a parent who can't get it together after a divorce end up in the weeds. I suppose you can try to point to "grit" or some such thing, but you might as well explain it with "the breaks" or "good fortune" or "the right boost at the right moment."

Anyway. The student I was talking about was balanced on just such a knife edge. And then, about twenty-two years ago, he got in a fight with a pair of passing motorists on a back road. Nobody knows exactly what they fight was about, but the end result was that my student took a gun and shot the two people in the car dead. The item in today's paper wayback report was about the beginning of his trial when he was eighteen years old. He was convicted and sent to prison.

He was the first time I had a murderer in class. It was a lot to absorb. I thought, really, what the hell am I even doing here? Should I have spent more time on literature aimed at building empathy and impulse control? Or is my contribution just supposed to be that I'm making sure that he will take good, solid reading and writing skills with him to prison?

I just looked at a teacher survey in which teachers overwhelmingly said that making a difference in a child's life is both a great motivator to enter teaching and a great reward of doing the work. But that "making a difference" thing is just such a tricky uncertain thing. I always tell the story of my fifth grade music teacher who confronted the boys in the back of the room and forced us to match pitch and listen and try, and how that moment was so hugely powerful-- because of that I was able to pass the music aptitude test that I had previously failed and because of that I started to learn an instrument and that has made all the difference. In maybe fifteen minutes, that teacher affected the entire trajectory of my life. Huge. And yet, we should also notice this-- it did not particularly affect the trajectory of the rest of the monotone yahoos that I was sitting with.

Teachers are like prospectors, panning through mountains of ordinary day-to-day earth, looking for the little golden nuggets of possibility so that we can try to clean them off, buff them up, help them find what they can be. And yet we live with the knowledge that some nuggets slip past us, unseen, unpolished. Sometimes we find nothing at all.

I'm not sitting here twenty-two years later imagining that if I had come up with just the right lesson, two people would still be alive and a young man wouldn't have gone to prison. Sometimes-- often, even-- the world is just far larger and more powerful than our classrooms. The story of that student is a reminder to me that we are preparing students for a future without any way of knowing what that future will be, a wide world of possibilities cloaked in darkness and equal parts beautiful and terrible. We do the best we can for as many as we can, and that is never, ever enough, because sometimes it is just beyond our power to keep them from rushing toward a dark and consuming future, scattering their possibilities like ashes in the wind.

It is all so big and terrible and awesome and awful, and when somebody says, "Well, just read this lesson script that's aligned to these standards so that you can prepare the student to get a good score on this Big Standardized Test, and if you do all that, the student will grow up to be well-paid and happy. Guaranteed"-- when somebody says all that I just want to look at them and ask, "What the hell are you even talking about?"

We fail. In public education, we fail a lot, and if we want to do the work of public education, we have to search every day for ways to get it even slightly more right than we did yesterday. I have remembered my student every year for the past twenty-two, reminding me that some students carry huge loads, in their pasts, in their presents, and even in their futures. What I find most enraging and frustrating and gobsmacking about modern ed reform is its relentless devotion to solutions that aren't solutions. I don't know what any of us could have done for that student twenty-two years ago, but I feel absolutely certain that aligning his education to a set of bogus standards or offering him a charter school or a personalized instructional computer program or  getting him really ready for a BS Test-- that none of those things would have made a difference, would undoubtedly have made things worse because at least twenty-two years ago I could talk to him like a human being and not a content-delivery specialist with a stack of prescribed lessons to get through.

I fear that, this time, I have wandered in a circle that doesn't even close. So, an aimless squiggle. But on days like this I feel as if those of us who teach are working on such big things in such a big space with such a huge vast mess of human stuff in front of us, and reformsters insist on offering us little, tiny, grossly inadequate tools, as if they really just don't understand the situation at all. Here's a pair of tweezers; now go break down that beached whale into hamburgers.

Every day possibilities are lost to us, to our students, to their families. I would like to do better. If people aren't going to help us with that work, I wish they would at a minimum, stop interfering. I'm not a young man. I don't have twenty-two more years to work at this.

Live Blogging Ed Reform Marriage Counseling Session

A few weeks ago, Robert Pondiscio wrote what seemed to me to be a fairly well-measured piece about the uneasy and possibly-unraveling collaboration between reformy conservatives and reformy liberals. I even wrote a vaguely thoughtful response. But lots of folks absolutely lost their heads, and the post and various responses to it bounced all over the reformy side of the blogoverse.

That seems to have led to a counseling session, brought to the web by an unprecedented team-up between the right-tilted Fordham Institute and the left-tilted Education Post. Mike Petrilli will be ringmaster in just a few minutes, hosting Derrell Bradford (50CAN), Valentina Korkes (Ed Post), Valley Varro (50CAN), and Lindsay Hill (Raikes Foundation). Because it's summer, and I love a challenge, I am going to attempt my first live-blogging of the event.

I'm really hoping for the moment when everyone says, "You know what? We're all just neo-liberals here. There's no reason we can't get along!" But that's probably not what's going to happen. Let's just see what happens when this kicks off at 4:30 EDT (assuming that I can get all my technology balanced on my desk.)

4:30

Well, the live link for the webcast doesn't seem to be happening yet.

4:34

Still not actually seeing anything, though twitter is abuzz. I always have to remind myself that only in Teacher World do things start exactly to the minute. If this were my class, I would be freaking out about now.

4:37

Well, we have this, so far...

#Edreform has long been heralded as a rare bipartisan success in politics. #EduCommonGround has seen much success @MichaelPetrilli

— Fordham Institute (@educationgadfly) June 20, 2016

4:45

Many people having trouble, then we got a youtube link, then my modem boofed. Now I'm back in media res

Somebody just said that if some Republican  thought this was a fundamentally racist country, they wouldn't be a Republican. Other panelist has story of conservative who says he does believe in systemic racism, and everyone has a good laugh about that

4:46

"There are people in this work as a lever for true equity."

Petrilli "Others of us believe this is a fundamentally just country " and we must give opportunities for all people. Push too far to left and want a revolution, we'll lodse people on the right.

4:48

Bradford: You can't open discussion of racism with "and it's your fault!" It is fundamentally a question of framing and communication

Varro: Policy is blunt object. What brings us together is "what are we doing to make things better for children" and then move on to policy discussoins.

4:50

Varro: To move states, it will take people on right and left

Korkes: Designated progressive, who faces trouble of being called a neo-liberal.

Petrilli wants to know if there are things on center and right who make things difficult for her? She says on twitter that movements are composed of many types of people. But her pressure comes internal. Wanting to make sure that children succeed.

4:52

Bradford talks about peressure he feels as Democrat. "We can disagree on these things. I'm not the lord of the sith" Which is true. He and I had a perfectly good conversation once. He's invested in choice, not because he's neo-liberal or nazi, but because he went to a private school. He can't fix it if someone wants positions to align with party orthodoxy.

Trying to get guy not to hate you is a big deal.

4:54

How does it play out (Petrilli) when we talk about moving too far left because of teacher union politics and all the rest we need everybody.

Varro says can't go too far either way. This should be an apolitical issue, but it's not. Varro says if we've lost people, they're already lost.

Petrili-- we are not the BLM movement; we're the education reform movement.

Varro says broader issue is saving kids lives, whether killing them quickly on street or slowly in classroom but no good outcomes can come from how we're doing school now.

4:57

Contrasts advocacy groups and actually getting policy made groups. Bradford. We thought we could just do policy and that would do it, then we thought we could do heavy advocacy. Neither worked. It's not the advocate's job to build consensus all the time. Politicians should figure policy centers out.

Petrilli tries to explain how he doesn't really buy BLM, and nobody is nodding, but should he be drummed out of ed reform stuff because of it?

5:00

Hill makes the BLM case, because it's about life. Stripping conversations about race and privilege out of education will not get a good outcome.  Conversations about race, class and privilege get results. Petrilli concern trolls that BLM leads to less effective policing and putting black folks in greater danger, which is such weak sauce and really beneath Petrilli's usual high level of argument construction.

5:01

Petrilli: Cities getting bluer, states getting redder. Creating more tension.

Bradford: (Who is wearing awesome socks.) Also, nobody here supports Trump. But his mystification over Trumpism highlights for him that there are things in this country he doesn't understand.

Maybe we're about to figure out that inside beltway and NYC isn't the whole country. "There's a kid in West Virginia right now who's probably getting screwed and we don't know anything about them."

Bradford: the country is changing and there's a lot of stuff we don't know any more. We can't offer old solutions.

5:05

Are we on edge because of election? Korkes says yes-- I have a hard time with people who think Trump is a solution.

Bradford: Hate Trump, believe in some market things he supports. We of political class have to understand what's going on. We are going to have to work with some of these people. The alternative is to do nothing.

5:07

Petrilli calls Trump a despicable human being, but he knows people who will vote for him. You don't have to support Trump's racism to buy into Trump.

Now we'll look for issues that all support.

5:08

High quality charter schools? All say yes, but Hill has caveat-- less doing to and more doing with.

Bradford: the more prescriptive we are, the less people like it. When we say This is a good school, that doesn't work. We should create the conditions for the school people want.

Petrilli says there are people who have attacked Success Academy, KIPP-- but he says these are schools that are doing Great Things, shouldn't we give them the benefit of the doubt. If you're going after SA, you're not in reform movement

Korkes and Hill both say, nope. Korkes-- how are they getting the outcomes? Are the families there because they wanted no academies, but because they are there despite that. Not good.

Hill says some networks are changing over because their grads are telling them they have things to fix.

5:12

Petrilli- Maybe we've overdone structure. And Hill again points out that erasing cultural identity might have been an issue, too.

5:13

High standards, tough tests? We all good on that. Hill says "yes, but" again. There are many ways that people show they are good at things. Bradford: Vastly better than nothing.

5:15

Test based accountability? Everyone says yeah.

Bradford: Teacher evaluation is the thing that is killing test based acountability. Bradford is willing to let it go.

There is a big debate in ed reform about teacher evaluation, causing problems but not getting anything

But lifetime tenure is terrible and being able to fire bad teachers is a thing we need (but don't admit we have).

Hill, let's work on teacher biases without shaming teachers. Teacher empathy can be built

5:17

64 people watching now.

Innovation? Blended learning? All in? sure... but Varro isn't sure she's seen proof points for blended. Is innovation code for something else? She'd rather have accountability

5:19

Bradford: Innovation is shorthand for tools in the tool box, and some tools can be used for great or terrible things.

Hill: innovations make it much faster to some schools than others

Petrilli makes joke about we are all in on corporate takeover of schools. Har.

5:21

Funding? Petrilli admits structural racism in funding. Let's make a deal that charters get more money and so do poor schools. Bradford says we can't just give poor schools more money (New Jersey).

5:23

On the messaging sidebar, discussion is that Petrilli is wimping out by not running right at BLM. On screen, still talking about funding stuff. Referencing teacher shortage, and what we don't know about how to keep teachers in classroom.

5:25

Any other issues? Bradford says world peace.

Last question. There will be issues in ed reform, like discipline disparity, about which we will disagree. Petrilli says he's tried to bring this up and taken big heat with ed reform world. How do we have these conversations more respectfully?

Bradford says talking is key. It's hard hate up close. Talk about it.

Korkes: Own the differences between your positions.

Hill: Our education system is not neutral. It was designed to track and sort, and it was never designed for kids of color. It's not broken, it's doing what it was designed to do. But education is a right, and an equitable system that empowers students is important. Get out of office Get into field.

Varro: Look at sub-issues and subtlety and nuance.

Petrilli: If this movement fractured, it would be bad for kids. After all, there wouldn't be 6,000 charters if people hadn't stuck together. And we'd still have crappy standards with easy tests.

And we're out. Okay-- I'm going to throw on some thoughts in response, and we'll call this done. Back in just a few minutes.

There are some useful insights in this conversation. Bradfordwho is no dummy, offers that the more prescriptive reformsters are, the less people buy in. As in the model where reformsters say we must have school choice, but only a choice of the choices that the choice fans choose. "We have decided what a good school for your children would be, and that's the choice we're going to give you (while we make your public school even less appealing by stripping its resources)."

Bradford also offered an intriguing capsule history of modern ed reform. First they figured they could just get policies passed and things would fall into line. Then they got all loud an advocatey to convince people. Neither worked. I think that's actually pretty accurate, though there are still folks trying both. But I found the distinction between the reasonable policy/political side and the shouty advocacy side interesting.

His idea that reformsters should be setting up the conditions under which good choice can thrive is intriguing-- but it will require government regulation to do it, and it flies directly in the face of the beloved idea of doing reform at scale. The big CMOs are not interested in boutique charters-- they want high volume chains, and so far, government has agreed. So it's an interesting and even productive shift, but it's a much bigger shift than he acknowledges here.

Petrilli sort of stands up for Success Academy as a school that's doing great things. It isn't. It's a school that is doing maybe-okay-ish things for a very, very small slice of selected students. This is not public education. It is not replicable. And it's not even particularly impressive; any school in country could show the same "success" if it could pick and choose who gets to stay and never had to backfill.

But everyone here thinks high quality charters are great, without addressing any of the central issues-- how to pay for them, and how a charter system ever takes care of all students, not just the ones that get into charters. Somebody propose a charter system that doesn't treat public schools like the educational equivalent of the Island of Misfit Toys.

They all profess love for high standards and tough tests, and then immediately take it back by agreeing that lots of people show they are good at things many different ways. Bradford says what we've got is vastly better than nothing, and I believe he's dead wrong on that. I think the current crop of Big Standardized Tests is way worse than nothing-- first, because they waste huge amounts of time and money and second, because they give people the impression that we're getting data that means something when in fact the data that comes from these tests is useless garbage. Petrili makes a reference to Jay Greene's recent post about how research is showing us that raising test scores has nothing to do with improving students' lives. Petrilli dismisses it, but I think it's dead on. BS Tests tell us nothing about student achievement and even less than nothing about student futures.

Test based accountability? Again, they love it, and they're wrong. Test results tell us nothing. Bradford notes that tying the testing to teacher evaluations is killing testing. Well, yes. Because when you use test results for teacher evaluation, you highlight how bad the test result data is.

When they slide into teacher evaluation, Petrilli observes that lifetime tenure is bad and being able to fire bad teachers is good. I have good news for him-- there is no such thing as lifetime for a public school teacher, and you totally can fire bad ones. I'll agree that in some urban settings, the dopes who ran the district at some point let themselves get talked into a contract that made firing really hard, but even then there is a difference between really hard and impossible. Lots of thing in education are hard. Suck it up, buttercup. And outside of those certain urban districts? Firing bad teachers not that hard at all.

Funding? Interesting idea to put more funding into both charters and underfunded public schools. Please web cast the meeting where you convince taxpayers to raise their taxes so that we can pay for some kids to go to a private school and spend more money on those schools for poor (black and brown) kids.

It was an interesting conversation. I had never encountered Hill before, and she had lots of interesting things to say outside of the part where she condemned public education as an unfixable total failure. Also, at the end when she observed they all need to get out of the office and into schools, which, well, yes-- but ed reform since day one has had a critical problem in that they don't talk to any of the millions of adult professionals who are already out in the field. We're called teachers and there are a zillion of us who could tell you lots of things, if the reform movement hadn't dismissed us since day one.

The notion that they're all just neo-libs was addressed and rejected a few times. The big Black Lives Matter elephant in the room was nodded at, but not really addressed (as many on the texting sidebar noted), as was the Other Question--

The Question which Petrilli kept coming back to was some version of "Will you lefties keep harping on things like Black Lives Matter even if it means we conservatives will get pushed out?" I will keep waiting for some left-tilted reformster to answer, "Are you really going to leave because you can't handle a real conversation about racism? Suck it up, buttercup."

Did they save the marriage? I'm not sure-- they talked a lot about talking, but didn't really talk about the things they apparently need to be talking about. I don't think so, but I suppose we'll see in the next hundred blog posts.

As for me-- no more live blogging. My fingers are neither fast nor accurate enough for this. Even if I suck it up, buttercup.

(Update: Also, I somehow decided to type Bradford's name as "Hammond" and then fixed it, but didn't fix it in a way that stuck. So apologies for that. Never again.)

Mexico: How Bad Can the Ed Debates Get?

I try to be careful with word choice. I've been reluctant to call the reformster-driven ed debates in this country a "war" or even an "assault" because when we inflate the nature of some conflict, we dilute the meaning of words, words that we may need when something that does more closely resemble an actual war, with fighting and shooting and killing. Which takes us to Mexico.

Negotiation? Strike? I'm not sure we have any English words for a teacher protest that really rise to this occasion










Reformsterism is, of course, not strictly a USA phenomenon. Lots of nations are experiencing the loving embrace of neo-liberalism and the attempts to create a test-centric school system that puts teachers in their place. But in Mexico, leaders have stopped acting like reformsters and started acting like gangsters.

Before I dig in, I do want to be clear on one point-- I have been trying to make sense of ed reform in the US for roughly 1800 posts over three years. I am now going to address Mexico in just one post. Corners will be cut in discussing what is clearly a complex situation. If this moves you to a high level of concern, I suggest you do what I'm doing-- start reading and then go find some more stuff and read that, too.

Mexico has everything other reformster-infected countries have-- but they have everything on steroids.

Educational crisis? Yup. Writing about Mexico repeatedly points at their PISA scores, and while I'm not deeply respectful of the PISA's diagnostic value, Mexico is almost dead last among members of the Organization of Economic Development and Cooperation nations. Mexico also has one of the highest dropout rates in OECD nations. And while their ed spending as a budget percentage is high among Latin American nations, it has the highest student-teacher ratio of OECD countries and spends less per pupil than any other country. I don't consider any of those data points critical measures of education excellence, but it's pretty hard to look at Mexico's whole picture and think, "Well, yeah, it could still be a great education system."

The country was pretty sure that Something had to be done. But the Something they picked was a pretty direct run at the teachers' union of Mexico, and that may not have been a great tactical move.

See, the teachers' union in Mexico is a bit different from ours. It's large, and it's powerful. You've got the National Union of  Education Workers, and then you've got the more radical lefty arm of that union, known as National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE). The union has traditionally exercised plenty of control over not just wages, but also hiring and firing. In the horror stories that union opponents like to cite, teaching jobs have been both sold and passed down through families (so, kind of like political positions in Chicago). That may seem like a lot of teacher union power. On the other hand, if the country can't get its act together to run a school system, who better to get things organized than the actual teachers. And how did we get to place where it seems crazy that teachers have a major say in who gets to be a teacher. It seems believable that some corruption had crept into the system, but given that Mexico is ranked one of the 75 most corrupt countries in the world, that's not entirely a shock.

But the union, particularly the CNTE, has also been a powerful political force. Ten years ago teachers in the southern state of Oaxaca led a massive civil disobedience movement to push back against government abuse and police violence. In a country without much organized opposition to government authority, teachers in Mexico have often emerged as a powerful force standing up for citizens.

So as always with education reform, Step One is "Establish a crisis." And for Mexico, establishing a crisis was not a huge stretch. The important question is how to respond to that crisis.

In 2010, the OECD offered up a plan of its own with fourteen recommendations. Eleven of them were focused on setting standards and training for teachers and school leaders. One was about school autonomy, one was about local school councils, and just one noted that since schools were getting pretty much no funding, the government might want to look at that, too.

So, would the government address any of its school system financial, infrastructure, crowding or resources issues? Well....

In 2013, the government took big steps to improve schools and strip power away from the union. Well, mostly to strip power away from the union.

President Enrique Peña Nieto signed a law that took control of teaching away from teachers and threatened to remove tens of thousands of current teachers. In particular, it linked teachers' continued employment to measures of their effectiveness derived from student standardized tests. Yes, the government of Mexico decided to VAM its teachers into submission. The proposed law didn't address any of the other issues facing Mexico's schools, from funding to overcrowding to resources-- just the teachers. The bill signed by the president still had to make it past a Congressional rewrite to finally become law. And they were not prepared to have a spirited and respectful conversation about it.

The very next day, government arrested Elba Esther Gordillo, head of the teachers union for over two decades and one of the most powerful women in Mexico. "La Maestra" was certainly not subtle (e.g. reportedly giving away brand new Hummers to regional union leaders in exchange for their loyalty), and she was certainly not universally beloved. But in Mexico, politics is hardball, and the teachers union is essentially one more political party.

The implications of VAMming set in immediately. Standardized tests correlate to income, and students in the poorest parts of the country would fare the worst, meaning their teachers would be axed by the hundreds-- a prospect that was particularly bad to contemplate in those poorer communities where teaching jobs are often an economic anchor.

In September of 2013, the law cleared its last hurdle, and teachers fought back.

"Fight back" in Mexico is not figurative language. In the last two decades, one can find innumerable examples of citizens being shot down by state police forces for protesting government actions.

In 2014, forty-three students on their way to a protest were kidnapped and most likely killed (this after a harrowing chase in which two students and three bystanders were shot dead). Official interest in solving that mystery seemed to fade as more and more evidence pointed toward government forces as the kidnappers.

The government has balked on implementing the 2013 law in the face of continued pressure, strikes and protests. But it has also stepped up propaganda push, singing a refrain recognizable to folks on the receiving end of ed reform the world over-- the schools stink, and it's the fault of the teachers and their unions, so we need to get rid of all the bad teachers, which we can do by using student test scores, and once we do that, schools will be awesome and the economy will totally improve. And the government party, thrown out of some states like Oaxaca as a result of teacher union action, has regained control of some elected offices.

That brings us to the new round of clashes in Mexico from last week. Once again, things have become alarming:

On Sunday night, June 12, as Ruben Nuñez, head of Oaxaca’s teachers union, was leaving a meeting in Mexico City, his car was overtaken and stopped by several large king-cab pickup trucks. Heavily armed men in civilian clothes exited and pulled him, another teacher, and a taxi driver from their cab, and then drove them at high speed to the airport. Nuñez was immediately flown over a thousand miles north to Hermosillo, Sonora, and dumped into a high-security federal lockup.

Just hours earlier, unidentified armed agents did the same thing in Oaxaca itself, taking prisoner Francisco Villalobos, the union’s second-highest officer, and flying him to the Hermosillo prison as well. Villalobos was charged with having stolen textbooks a year ago. Nuñez’s charges are still unknown. 

The kidnappings came the day after President Nieto issued this statement:

The Government of the Republic repeats that it is open to dialogue only when they comply with two conditions: returning to work in the schools of Chiapas, Guerrero, Michoacán, and Oaxaca, and accepting the Education Reform.” 

We'll be happy to talk about the things we're demanding, just as soon as you give us all the things we're demanding. Oh, and we've kidnapped your leaders and put them in prison, too.

From there, it has only gotten worse. The union has been blocking roads in Oaxaca, and government forces have replied with a show of force. Six people have been killed, 100 injured (there are conflicting reports on how many of those six were teachers). That was yesterday.

There's no question that the relationship between the Mexican teachers union and their government is complicated, and also no question that there are plenty of Poor Choices on all sides. But when you reach the point that you are dealing with the teachers of your nation by kidnapping and killing them, you are failing, and failing hard.

So this is what an education war really looks like. Fire and destruction and people killed because they choose to take a hard stand for their profession. And this is how far some reformsters are willing to go if it won't cost them any PR to do it. This is how badly they want to remove teachers as a political force so that they have a clear chance to do with public schools what they will (other than, of course, actually make an effort to invest in their improvement). This is how bad the education "debates" can get.

Teachers' View of Growing Problems of Teaching

Back in May, the Center on Education Policy (located at George Washington University) released their report Listen To Us: Teacher Views and Voices. You may have missed the report because it didn't lend itself to any zippy coverage or grabby sound bite. If you are an actual teacher, virtually nothing in the results will make you go, "Wow! I had no idea!" The Center's own press release ("Demands of Teaching Taking Its Toll on Teachers") went with the story that here's some research showing the impact of reformy stuff and a possible explanation for why the teacher pipeline is drying up (and yes, it also included a usage error in the headline).

The surveys were completed by over 3,000 teachers (the Center bribed them with the chance to win a $500 Amazon card) with a distribution among subcategories by location and income pretty well matching the larger teacher population. There's a whole appendix on methodology that you can consult.

Again-- there are no huge shockers here, but let's check out some of the results. The charts below are all taken from the CEP report.

Teachers become teachers for mostly altruistic reasons. A non-zero number get in for the money. Hmm.

The rewarding part of teaching? 82% said "making a difference in students' lives." No big numbers for "seeing students get good score on Big Standardized Test."

What do teachers see as the big challenge?

Notice the lack of career ladder ( a favorite feature for reformsters to "fix") doesn't rank all that high, and "I don't have challenges" was below 1%. Of those who picked "addressing needs of economically disadvantaged students," they broke those down with 42% saying emotional needs and 40% saying academic needs.

How about job satisfaction?

60% found themselves less enthusiastic? Ouch. And about half would get out if you offered them a higher-paying job. That is a bigger number than I would have predicted.

Respondents were asked what would help with their day to day work. More planning time, smaller classes, and more collaboration time with colleagues topped that list. Curricula that is better aligned to state standards was only selected by 7% of the teachers responding (and teachers could select up to three items on the list).

How about the actual weight of teacher voices?

The researchers correlated this with the previous set of responses (1-C) with predictable results-- the less heard teachers tended to be the less happy teachers, though the correlation is not quite as strong as you might expect.

The survey asked how prepared teachers had felt to enter a classroom. Novice teachers were far more confident that their preparation had prepared them to teach, which means that either teacher prep programs are better than they used to be, or novice teachers are cockier than they used to be. Take your pick!

A series of questions asked about teacher collaboration, which many teachers value but which more often happens in informal, unofficial ways.

Another set of questions asked middle and high school teachers to consider college and career ready skills-- what they think they are, and whether or not their school addresses them. Here:

From which we can determine, if nothing else, that teacher ideas about curriculum values are not veryn influential in their schools.

Next, the survey addressed math and E:LA teachers specifically regarding the standards in their state. There were some curious findings here-

* About two-thirds of teachers said their autonomy had remained the same or increased under state standards-- though "autonomy" was defined as collaborating with other teachers, determining instructional strategies, or developing curriculum.
* They are using materials and curricula from all over the map
* The majority say they are using results from spring tests to modify their instruction in some way
* More than half don't know if the standards will be dumped or changed soon.

And yet, if we ask about autonomy in other ways, we find this:

So, not so much autonomy.

Then the survey went on to ask teachers of Everything Else about the standards and how CCR stuff affected their classroom. The findings:

* About half those other teachers say they are teaching some CCR standards as laid out by the state, but hardly any changed anything they do in class. In other words, rewrite the paperwork for your curriculum so that the same stuff you have always done now "matches" the standards.
* About half the teachers see the test results. Few use those test results to change instructoin.


Next, the report looked at testing time.

Much to nobody's surprise, 81% of the teachers said that they spend too much time on district and state mandated tests. Actually, I'm a little surprised that a whole 16% said there wasn't enough time. A majority of teachers also said they spend too much time preparing for the tests.

When asked what tests to keep or jettison:

Finally, the survey asked about teacher evaluation.

Most teachers reported having test scores used in their evaluation. Most received feedback about their evaluation, but only half found that feedback actually helpful.

There are more charts and details in the actual report, and it all gives a picture of why, for instance, the teacher pipeline is drying up. It's not an earth-shattering report, but it does offer some insights as well as some data for people who want data points for their arguments.

To Lounge or Not To Lounge: The Venting Question

Most beginning teachers have heard the advice-- stay out of the lounge.

That advice has been echoing around the internet for the last month or so, as exemplified by pieces like this one at Edutopia. The concerns is that lounges are where the negative teachers collect, where all that venting about the terrible students occurs.

Should teachers vent? Well, I would be a spectacular hypocrite to say no, sitting here and typing away at what is essentially my personal venting project. So, yeah-- teachers should totally vent.

But there is venting, and there is venting.

Look, if you don't find teaching occasionally frustrating, you're probably not doing it right. And anti-venters sometimes forget that public school teachers work with the entire range of human behavior. Think about the worst person you know, the worst person you've ever read about in the news. That person was, at some point, a child in some teacher's classroom. Some teacher had to deal with the younger version of that awful person.

The one reliable way to never be frustrated in a classroom is to not care what happens. That is not a good sign about a teacher's professional swellness.

But it's also not a good sign if all of the venting is in the form of blaming. There is a difference between "I am going to tear all of my hair out trying to get through to my third period class" and "My third period students are so stupid that there's just no point. Jesus could not teach those morons."

There is a problem if venting takes the form of "othering" students. Any venting that slaps a dehumanizing label on a students is a bad sign. This can be tricky for outsiders, because while there are proper professional terms for a students who faces certain cognitive and processing challenges, or a student who has problem reading and responding properly to social cues and who demonstrates a need to develop some non-cognitive skills, our culture has handy short-hand terms for people with such issues. In other words, when a teacher uses words like "dumb" or "jerk" in a lounge, she doesn't necessarily mean what a civilian means by those terms.

As shades-of-grey as some of this can be, I nevertheless believe in drawing a hard line at othering labels. If a teacher is dealing with stress and frustration by reducing students to something other than people (It's not me-- I just have a big roomful of dummies), then we have a problem.

The other factor is time and repetition. There are going to be days that you might feel a level of frustration, anger, hurt, despair beyond anything you usually feel, and you will say things that, a day later, you would gladly take back. But if someone is bitching and moaning day after day after day, then we have a problem.

To look at from another angle-- sometimes what comes out when someone "vents" is a momentary thought or fleeting reaction, and sometimes a "vent" reveals a more deep-seated and problematic attitude. The first can be an opportunity for sharing, support and problem-solving, while the second can be a sign of trouble and a source of spreading morale rot. The first is necessary for revealing and understanding issues in order to deal with them, while the second is just an excuse for meanness.

I'm a big believer that there's no issue that can't be discussed or spoken about, but I'm also a big believer that being unkind is always a bad thing. Be blunt, be clear, be direct, even be harsh-- but never forget that you are talking about actual human beings with lives and feelings of their own, and that you are supposed to be the professional charged with watching out for the interests of that small human.