Lots of worthwhile reading from last week. And remember-- you can keep up on many worthwhile bloggers just by using the links in the lefthand column.
Debunking the Belief that Earlier Is Better
Rae Pica, known for her work at BAM Radio, comes to Parent Toolkit with a great explanation of why earlier is not, in fact, better.
The Politics of the Paragraph
I wrote about this article last week, and if you didn't click through and read the whol thing, here's your chance to correct that oversight.
Why Can't My New Employees Write
Same thing. I wrote about this piece last week and you really should read this look at writing instruction.
Teach for America Has Gone Global, and Its Board Has Strange Ideas About What Poor Kids Need
"By promising innovative classroom techniques and inspirational leadership, the Teach for All model seeks to transform tremendous material deficits into a problem of character." A super-solid look at one more attempt to expand the TFA model, and how that fits into the privatization agenda.
A New Argument for More Diverse Classrooms
I actually have mixed feelings here. I'm not sure we need an argument for mixed classrooms any more than we need an argument for co-ed schools-- school needs to look like the world, period. But if you need an argument for diversity, here's a good one.
Advanced Stage Charter Syndrome
Nancy Flanagan has been quietly kicking ass in the edu-blogging world for years. Here is a great piece from her about the ways in which the charter biz must inevitably show an ugly side.
It's Like Invisible Drones
Nancy Bailey shows one more way to think of the data mining in schools and its bad effects.
How Can I Make My Students Republicans?
Clever, and worth a read. That's all I'll say.
Amidst a Catastrophic Budget Crisis, Louisiana Legislators Vote To Fully Fund a Charter Boarding School Forever
Do you have time to read one more example of charter school shenanigans? From Crazy Crawfish, one more example of how the charter biz can turn into a nest of vipers.
Sunday, July 3, 2016
Dem Platform: Public Ed Can Get Stuffed
Somebody leaked a copy of the Democratic platform draft to Diane Ravitch, and so now we can all see that trajectory of public ed in the Democratic party plan.
It looks pretty much like this.
Now, there are two things to note before we start. One is that there are no surprises here to anyone who has been paying attention to the Democratic Party, which has been clear on what it would like to do with its historic concern about public schools and the teachers who work there.
No, I didn't make a mistake and post the same picture twice
The second-- and this is the important one if we want to keep our blood pressure down-- is that party platforms are quite possibly the most meaningless political documents ever. "Although I am not personally very committed to this policy, I am going to aggressively pursue it because my party put it in the plaform at the last convention," said no President in the history of the United States.
That said, it does tell us a little bit about where the hearts and minds of the party are, and since it appears we're going to have a race between the two worst candidates for President in the entire history of anything ever, we might as well pay attention to what the party is up to. So what does this draft version of the platform tell us about the heart and mind of the Democratic Party?
Well, education does get a subheading, so I guess that's something. The heading says "Provide Quality and Affordable Education" and since this is a rough draft, I'm not going to subtract points for coming up with a subtitle that doesn't exactly sing.
First up-- higher education. The Democratic Party wants you to know that they noticed that a whole bunch of folks were excited about Bernie Sanders, and they think that might have had to do with the college thing. So they're going to come out for free community college, and "strengthen" historically "minority-serving" colleges. Strengthen how? Who knows. Have them all do a lot of push ups, maybe. Everybody should get a college education without going broke.
College debt. Those who have some, the Dems think you should get to refinance "at the lowest possible rate," which-- lowest possible according to whom? Because according to some people that's where we are right now. And I say "we" because I am still paying off a couple of college educations, and I can tell you in the last twelve years nobody has ever called me up to say, "Yeah, it's possible for you to get a lower rate, but we're just not going to do that." Also, the Dems want borrowers to get a Student Borrower Bill of Rights, because one more piece of jargon-encrusted paperwork is just what the college loan process needs ("Sign right here to certify that I showed you this damn thing.") The Dems want to hold lenders to "high standards," too. And they'd like to bring back the bankruptcy emergency exit from college loanery. So, mostly platitudes and baloney. That's what you guys took away from Bernie Sanders? Damn.
Minority-serving institutions. And may I just say that you guys may want to take a look at that whole "minority" thing, since particulary in schools "minority" also means "white" at this point. Maybe it's just me, but "minority" seems like a way to keep the non-white folks down in their place linguistically speaking. Anyway, the Dems would like to throw a lot of money at these schools, because diversity in the workplace is good.
For-profit schools. The Dems want you to know that Donald Trump had one of these, and it was Very Naughty. "Democrats will not tolerate this type of fraud," they say, and I would be so much happier if it didn't raise the question of what sorts of fraud they will continue to tolerate, because it's not like it's strictly GOP politicians who are aiding and abetting profit-based school fraud in places like New York and Connecticut. The Dems also promise to "continue" to crack down on for-profit colleges, except I don't know what they're talking about since so far "crack down" has meant "carefully safeguard the investors who are backing these places."
"We will go after for-profits that engage in deceptive marketing, fraud, and other illegal practices," say the Dems, which I take to mean that they otherwise think for-profit schools are perfectly okay. That is the incorrect answer; the correct answer is that profiteering has no place in the education world, even if the profiteers aren't Donald Trump. Particularly when those profits come at the expense of the US taxpayer.
Early childhood, pre-K, and K-12. "Democrats believe we must have the best-educated population and workforce in the world. That means making early childhood education a priority, especially in light of new research showing how much early learning can impact life-long success." What new research is that, exactly? I mean, pre-K and early childhood are great things-- done right-- but I have a feeling the Democratic Party is speaking out of its butt here. Somebody ask them what research they're looking at, please.
But hey-- if you want some other great buzzwords, we've got them. There will be a great school in every zip code (the zip code thing is a popular piece of charter rhetoric), and every child will have access to a great education (and I'll ask once more-- why "access"? Everyone on the Titanic had access to a lifeboat, but only a few actually got to ride in one. Why not just have every student in a great public school?)
I will give the Dems credit for some language here that talks about public education as both an economic "propeller" and a means for the whole child to achieve his/her dreams-- which is better than suggesting that the only purpose of education is to get students ready to be useful to future employers.
But then we're back to the baloney. We're going to have high standards, and we're going to hold schools, districts, communities and states accountable for raising achievement for poor, ELL, etc etc students (but not, I guess, legislators for making sure schools have necessary resources). And Dems want to "strike a better balance on testing" so that it "informs" instruction but does not "drive" it. Which is a perfect piece of political rhetoric, because it really sounds like a cool distinction but has absolutely no meaning in how testing works in the real world. The perfect balance on Big Standardized Tests is to do away with them and trust the trained and experienced professional educators in our classrooms. But a second choice would be to remove all stakes from the testing and replace the current battery of BS Tests with tests that actually provide useful information in a timely manner, because if the tests were actually useful, teachers would use them without threats and punishment. So there's an actual policy proposal for you, Democrats.
You could say, "Well, a platform doesn't get so specific" except that the very next paragraph is a highly specific proposal about getting mentors for poor kids! Which is a great idea because it is a "low-cost high-yield investment." Which genius on the committee has a bunch of money sunk in some mentor-consultant business?
Oh, and now teachers. Democrats know teachers are important, so they will launch a national campaign to "recruit and retain high quality teachers" as well as making sure teachers get really swell professional development. "We also must lift up and trust our educators, continually build their capacity, and ensure that our schools are safe, welcoming, collaborative, and well-resourced places for our students, educators, and communities." Man-- someone knows you need three things for a list, but they could only think of two nice promises to make about teachers, so we threw in a third promise about the buildings instead. It would be nice to be trusted, but I don't see anything anywhere else on the platform to suggest that's actually happening, and I don't know how you plan to build my capacity, but you can just take a step back. Build my capacity? What the hell is the supposed to mean? Fix it so I can teach more students? Work a longer day? Special stomach surgery so I can eat more corn on the cob at Fourth of July picnics?
STEM is swell, we think. No more school-to-prison pipeline. And let's end bullying. These get cramped together in one short paragraph, like leftovers in the last Tupperware container, while damn mentoring gets its own twice as long paragraph.
And finally, let the Democrats re-affirm their love for school choice and charter schools. "We support great neighborhood public schools and high-quality public charter schools, and we will help them disseminate best practices to other school leaders and educators." This overlooks the fact that under current policy, charter schools (which are not public schools, but we don't understand that, either) can only exist at the expense of neighborhood schools. It's like saying we support both healthy internal organs and cancer-- you can't really support both, and the game is rigged in favor of the cancer. Democrats want you to know that they totally don't support for-profit charters, but non-profit charters are mostly for-profit charters with good money laundering systems. Democrats oppose for-profits making profit off public resources, but if Eva Moskowitz wants to pay herself a half-million dollar salary with taxpayer money, that's totally cool. But the Democrats are just going to support charter transparency and call it a day. Basically, the Democrats have a plank here that would fit comfortably in the GOP platform; I would love to hear Democratic Party leadership explain how they are the slightest bit different from the Republicans when it comes to charters and choice.
So if you were hoping for a sign that the Democratic Party even knows what the issues in public education are or has any interest in addressing them, the early draft is not encouraging. They could more honestly address toxic testing, or they could make an actual commitment to the institution of public education instead of the business of charter schools. They could speak out against the privatization of a historic and foundational public resource. They could express some sort of meaningful support for the teaching profession. And they could make a commitment to getting each school the funding that it needs and deserves. Who knows? Maybe they'll do all that in the next draft.
But mostly I'm afraid that if you had hopes that the Democratic Party would emerge as a champion of public schools and the teachers who work there, well, I think I know where those hopes can go.
It looks pretty much like this.
Now, there are two things to note before we start. One is that there are no surprises here to anyone who has been paying attention to the Democratic Party, which has been clear on what it would like to do with its historic concern about public schools and the teachers who work there.
No, I didn't make a mistake and post the same picture twice
The second-- and this is the important one if we want to keep our blood pressure down-- is that party platforms are quite possibly the most meaningless political documents ever. "Although I am not personally very committed to this policy, I am going to aggressively pursue it because my party put it in the plaform at the last convention," said no President in the history of the United States.
That said, it does tell us a little bit about where the hearts and minds of the party are, and since it appears we're going to have a race between the two worst candidates for President in the entire history of anything ever, we might as well pay attention to what the party is up to. So what does this draft version of the platform tell us about the heart and mind of the Democratic Party?
Well, education does get a subheading, so I guess that's something. The heading says "Provide Quality and Affordable Education" and since this is a rough draft, I'm not going to subtract points for coming up with a subtitle that doesn't exactly sing.
First up-- higher education. The Democratic Party wants you to know that they noticed that a whole bunch of folks were excited about Bernie Sanders, and they think that might have had to do with the college thing. So they're going to come out for free community college, and "strengthen" historically "minority-serving" colleges. Strengthen how? Who knows. Have them all do a lot of push ups, maybe. Everybody should get a college education without going broke.
College debt. Those who have some, the Dems think you should get to refinance "at the lowest possible rate," which-- lowest possible according to whom? Because according to some people that's where we are right now. And I say "we" because I am still paying off a couple of college educations, and I can tell you in the last twelve years nobody has ever called me up to say, "Yeah, it's possible for you to get a lower rate, but we're just not going to do that." Also, the Dems want borrowers to get a Student Borrower Bill of Rights, because one more piece of jargon-encrusted paperwork is just what the college loan process needs ("Sign right here to certify that I showed you this damn thing.") The Dems want to hold lenders to "high standards," too. And they'd like to bring back the bankruptcy emergency exit from college loanery. So, mostly platitudes and baloney. That's what you guys took away from Bernie Sanders? Damn.
Minority-serving institutions. And may I just say that you guys may want to take a look at that whole "minority" thing, since particulary in schools "minority" also means "white" at this point. Maybe it's just me, but "minority" seems like a way to keep the non-white folks down in their place linguistically speaking. Anyway, the Dems would like to throw a lot of money at these schools, because diversity in the workplace is good.
For-profit schools. The Dems want you to know that Donald Trump had one of these, and it was Very Naughty. "Democrats will not tolerate this type of fraud," they say, and I would be so much happier if it didn't raise the question of what sorts of fraud they will continue to tolerate, because it's not like it's strictly GOP politicians who are aiding and abetting profit-based school fraud in places like New York and Connecticut. The Dems also promise to "continue" to crack down on for-profit colleges, except I don't know what they're talking about since so far "crack down" has meant "carefully safeguard the investors who are backing these places."
"We will go after for-profits that engage in deceptive marketing, fraud, and other illegal practices," say the Dems, which I take to mean that they otherwise think for-profit schools are perfectly okay. That is the incorrect answer; the correct answer is that profiteering has no place in the education world, even if the profiteers aren't Donald Trump. Particularly when those profits come at the expense of the US taxpayer.
Early childhood, pre-K, and K-12. "Democrats believe we must have the best-educated population and workforce in the world. That means making early childhood education a priority, especially in light of new research showing how much early learning can impact life-long success." What new research is that, exactly? I mean, pre-K and early childhood are great things-- done right-- but I have a feeling the Democratic Party is speaking out of its butt here. Somebody ask them what research they're looking at, please.
But hey-- if you want some other great buzzwords, we've got them. There will be a great school in every zip code (the zip code thing is a popular piece of charter rhetoric), and every child will have access to a great education (and I'll ask once more-- why "access"? Everyone on the Titanic had access to a lifeboat, but only a few actually got to ride in one. Why not just have every student in a great public school?)
I will give the Dems credit for some language here that talks about public education as both an economic "propeller" and a means for the whole child to achieve his/her dreams-- which is better than suggesting that the only purpose of education is to get students ready to be useful to future employers.
But then we're back to the baloney. We're going to have high standards, and we're going to hold schools, districts, communities and states accountable for raising achievement for poor, ELL, etc etc students (but not, I guess, legislators for making sure schools have necessary resources). And Dems want to "strike a better balance on testing" so that it "informs" instruction but does not "drive" it. Which is a perfect piece of political rhetoric, because it really sounds like a cool distinction but has absolutely no meaning in how testing works in the real world. The perfect balance on Big Standardized Tests is to do away with them and trust the trained and experienced professional educators in our classrooms. But a second choice would be to remove all stakes from the testing and replace the current battery of BS Tests with tests that actually provide useful information in a timely manner, because if the tests were actually useful, teachers would use them without threats and punishment. So there's an actual policy proposal for you, Democrats.
You could say, "Well, a platform doesn't get so specific" except that the very next paragraph is a highly specific proposal about getting mentors for poor kids! Which is a great idea because it is a "low-cost high-yield investment." Which genius on the committee has a bunch of money sunk in some mentor-consultant business?
Oh, and now teachers. Democrats know teachers are important, so they will launch a national campaign to "recruit and retain high quality teachers" as well as making sure teachers get really swell professional development. "We also must lift up and trust our educators, continually build their capacity, and ensure that our schools are safe, welcoming, collaborative, and well-resourced places for our students, educators, and communities." Man-- someone knows you need three things for a list, but they could only think of two nice promises to make about teachers, so we threw in a third promise about the buildings instead. It would be nice to be trusted, but I don't see anything anywhere else on the platform to suggest that's actually happening, and I don't know how you plan to build my capacity, but you can just take a step back. Build my capacity? What the hell is the supposed to mean? Fix it so I can teach more students? Work a longer day? Special stomach surgery so I can eat more corn on the cob at Fourth of July picnics?
STEM is swell, we think. No more school-to-prison pipeline. And let's end bullying. These get cramped together in one short paragraph, like leftovers in the last Tupperware container, while damn mentoring gets its own twice as long paragraph.
And finally, let the Democrats re-affirm their love for school choice and charter schools. "We support great neighborhood public schools and high-quality public charter schools, and we will help them disseminate best practices to other school leaders and educators." This overlooks the fact that under current policy, charter schools (which are not public schools, but we don't understand that, either) can only exist at the expense of neighborhood schools. It's like saying we support both healthy internal organs and cancer-- you can't really support both, and the game is rigged in favor of the cancer. Democrats want you to know that they totally don't support for-profit charters, but non-profit charters are mostly for-profit charters with good money laundering systems. Democrats oppose for-profits making profit off public resources, but if Eva Moskowitz wants to pay herself a half-million dollar salary with taxpayer money, that's totally cool. But the Democrats are just going to support charter transparency and call it a day. Basically, the Democrats have a plank here that would fit comfortably in the GOP platform; I would love to hear Democratic Party leadership explain how they are the slightest bit different from the Republicans when it comes to charters and choice.
So if you were hoping for a sign that the Democratic Party even knows what the issues in public education are or has any interest in addressing them, the early draft is not encouraging. They could more honestly address toxic testing, or they could make an actual commitment to the institution of public education instead of the business of charter schools. They could speak out against the privatization of a historic and foundational public resource. They could express some sort of meaningful support for the teaching profession. And they could make a commitment to getting each school the funding that it needs and deserves. Who knows? Maybe they'll do all that in the next draft.
But mostly I'm afraid that if you had hopes that the Democratic Party would emerge as a champion of public schools and the teachers who work there, well, I think I know where those hopes can go.
Saturday, July 2, 2016
Writing Junk
First, we need to understand that the state of writing instruction has never been great.
If you are of a Certain Age (say, mine) you may recall a type of writing instruction that we could call the Lego Building Approach. In this method, students are first taught to construct sentences. Then they are taught how to arrange a certain number of sentences into a paragraph. Finally, they are taught to assemble those paragraphs into full essays.
This is junk. It assumes that the basic building block of a piece of writing is a sentence. No-- the basic building block of a piece of writing is an idea. To try to say something without having any idea what you want to say is a fool's errand.
Not that the Lego Building Approach should feel bad for being junk. The instructional writing landscape is littered with junk, clogged with junk, sometimes obscured by the broad shadow of towering junk. And on almost-weekly basis, folks try to sort out what the junk is and how best to clear it away.
Here's John Warner at Inside Higher Ed trying to answer the question, "Why can't my new employees write?" Warner reports that he hears that question often from employers. With a little probing he determines that what they mean by "can't write," is "They primarily observe a fundamental lack of clarity and perceive a gap between the purpose of the writing and the result of what’s been written, a lack of awareness of audience and occasion."
In other words, they don't seem to get the idea that they are supposed to be communicating real ideas and information in a real way to real people. It's not a question of rigor or expectations, Warner notes. It's that they were trained to do something else entirely.
I believe that in many cases, these young professionals have never encountered a genuine and meaningful rhetorical situation in an academic or professional context. They are highly skilled at a particular kind of academic writing performance that they have been doing from a very early age, but they are largely unpracticed at that what their employers expect them to do, clearly communicate ideas to specific audiences.
My students’ chief struggle tends to be rooted in years of schooling where what they have to say doesn’t really matter, and the primary focus is on “how” you say things.
This is the flip side of our current bad ideas about reading-- the notion that reading is a set of skills that exist independent of any actual content. Current writing standards and therefor instruction assume the same thing-- that a piece of writing involves deploying a set of skills, and the actual content and subject matter are not really important. This is not so much a pedagogical idea as a corporate one, somehow filtered down form the world where it's believed that a great corporate manager will be great whether the company makes lubricating oil, soup, soap, or fluffy children's toys.
Michelle Kenney at Rethinking Schools talks about how this skills-based writing turns to junk in "The Politics of the Paragraph." Innumerable schools have found ways (or borrowed or bought ways) to reduce writing to a simple set of steps, providing a checklist for students to follow when writing (and for teachers to use when scoring). Kenney writes about the inevitable outcome of this approach, even when using a procedure developed in house:
I also noted a decline in the overall quality of thought in these paragraphs. Students had more confidence in their writing, but they were also less invested in their ideas. Writing paragraphs and essays was now a set of hoops to jump through, a dry task only slightly more complex than a worksheet.
Mediocre writing starts with the wrong questions, and a focus on a set, proscribed structure and process encourages students to ask the wrong questions. Hammer them with writing templates, and students start to see an essay as a slightly more involved fill in the blank exercise. "I have to have five paragraphs-- what can I use to fill up the five paragraph-sized blanks?" "I need three sentences to make a paragraph-- what can I use to fill in the the three sentence-shaped empty spaces." This gets you junk.
The appeal of the template is easy to see-- teaching writing is hard and grading writing is even harder. Every prompt has an infinite number of correct answers instead of just one, and every piece of writing has to be considered on its own terms. The very best writing includes a unique and personal voice, and teaching a students to sound like him- or herself is tricky. Much easier to teach them all to sound like the same person.
The important questions for writing are what do I want to say, who do I want to say it to, and what's the best way I can think of to say it. But the results of those are really hard to scale up, if not impossible. So it comes as no surprise that the Age ofCommon Core College and Career Ready Standards has provided us just with more junk writing instruction.
Here's Madeline Will over at Education Week, trying to make the case that the Core somehow "include detailed writing expectations that go well beyond previous state requirements. Specifically, they call for proficiency in argumentative, explanatory, and narrative writing that draw connections from and between texts."
This is a tricky claim to respond to because, first, if the standards did include detailed writing expectations, that would not be a good thing. "Detailed expectations" is just another way to say "template," and a template is junk writing instruction. But the writing standards are, by and large, gibberish. I'm going to take a look at the Original Common Core State [sic] Standards for writing. In your state the standards may have been rewritten a bit (or simply rebranded), but the original flavor standards certainly capture the essence of what we're dealing with. But we need to go back to the standards because Will makes the usual Common Core mistake-- "Okay," says some consultant or state official or district administrator, "Let's put these yellow yarmulkes on our heads, because that is totally what the standards say to do." In the unpacking stage, lots of folks have added their own versions of ideas about interpretations about readings of the standards and we end up with classrooms haunted by the pedagogical ghosts of standards that never really lived.
Let's start with a second grade standard for writing.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.2.1
Write opinion pieces in which they introduce the topic or book they are writing about, state an opinion, supply reasons that support the opinion, use linking words (e.g., because, and, also to connect opinion and reasons, and provide a concluding statement or section.
First, let me get a pet peeve out of the way-- the Core repeatedly talks about giving "reasons" for opinions, when I suspect what they actually mean is "evidence." I think this liver casserole stinks. What's my reason? I hate liver. I'm pretty sure that the standards want me to provide evidence about the nature of the casserole, but my "reason" for having an opinion is that I have that opinion. Asking me for the reason I love my wife is a whole different question from asking for evidence that my wife is lovable.
Here we also see the standards' focus on specific vocabulary to connect ideas in a very specific way. And the implication here in this standard for seven year olds is that there is just one correct way to write about your opinion, which is the death of decent writing.
Ten years later, that standard has morphed into this standard for 11-12 graders.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1
Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.
Emphasis mine. Because as a writer, my first thought is, "Oh, you want me to use valid reasons. I'm glad you said something, because I was totally going to use stupid, irrational, insufficient reasons." My second thought is "substantive, valid, relevant, and sufficient" according to whom?
Because one of the underlying themes of the writing standards is that writing is a set of skills that you perform to someone else's satisfaction. It's not about you saying what you have to say; it's about you saying what somebody else wants you to say, the way they want you to say it. It is about jumping through hoops.
And that's just the "master" standard. Here are the sub-standards.
Again, my emphasis on some of the terms that are not objective, but will have to be set by whoever is judging the writing. But here we have a template for the essay, right down to sentence structure. Some of these (heck, most of these) represent very specific requirements for an essay, even more of a straightjacket than the templates that Kenney discusses, and they also represent matters of personal style and choice. For instance, the standards love conclusions. Gotta have a conclusion. Which would not fly with my college professor who said that a bad, generic conclusion is worse than no conclusion at all-- if you don't have a good finish, then just make your point and then stop talking. But no-- to write an Essay According To The Standards, you must fill in the conclusion blank with something.
And we also have the usual weird mix of the obvious and the specific. "Use words, phrases, clauses or syntax" to connect the ideas-- which rules out, what, semaphore? Arrows drawn on the page? But that is followed by a list of three specific relationships that must be covered in your essay, because no good essay about opinion can be written without showing the relationship between your reasons and your evidence? Ever?
Of course the writing standards also cover informative/explanatory essays and narrative writing, and the mere division of writing into three separate types suggests a set of rules that don't really exist in the world of actual writing, but are created for the convenience of people who want to test and measure writing. The narrative standards are particularly restrictive and terrible and arbitrary and would disapprove of much of the great works that we teach in English classes-- but that's an issue for another day
Most of all, meeting these standards would not help a single one of the employers who asked Warner why the new employees can't write. The standards provide a set of hoops to jump through so that the students can display certain writing skills-- but not any thinking or communication skills. A student can satisfy all of these standards and still not grasp that writing is about figuring out what you want to say, who you're going to say it to, and the best way for you to say it. The standards foster junk writing.
Will highlights one single true benefit of the standards-- they call for writing frequently, which is smart. If you made your students write twice a week for a year and never even graded any of it, that would probably still be better than the classic four week long Writing Unit in April.
I know there are teachers who think these standards are swell. I've met some. Here's why some teachers like these writing standards:
1) They are teaching their own set of standards and pretending that their own standards have something to do with the Core standards.
2) They don't like to teach writing, and what they want someone to do is just reduce it to some simple rules so that they can just go through the motions and be able to say they're teaching writing without having to suffer through the hard work.
3) They don't know how to teach writing.
I'm sorry, but if you tell me that you think the standards are great for writing instruction, I will judge you. I'm not proud of it, but there it is (especially in Pennsylvania, where we have found ways to make the writing standards even worse). Will argues that teachers need more support, that there are "veteran teachers who had no practice in teaching the kind of writing, particularly argumentative writing, that the standards call for," and that's probably true, but I'm okay with that, because the standards call for junk. Teachers do need "support" in the teaching of writing (I do love how "needs support" is now our code word for "needs to be whacked upside the head and straightened the hell out"), but the standards are not the place to find it, and they're not the foundation on which to base it. I promise that I'll present my Writing Instruction Professional Development in a Can but this is already a long post, so we'll save that for another day.
But I will give you Step One, because summer is the perfect time to work on it.
Write. Write for a blog. Write letters to the editor of your newspaper. Write long thoughtful letters to friends. You can no more teach writing without actually doing writing than you can teach reading if you've never cracked open a book. So go do that. And don't consult any standards or templates when you do. Just ask yourself-- what do I want to say? That's the only thing you need to get started.
If you are of a Certain Age (say, mine) you may recall a type of writing instruction that we could call the Lego Building Approach. In this method, students are first taught to construct sentences. Then they are taught how to arrange a certain number of sentences into a paragraph. Finally, they are taught to assemble those paragraphs into full essays.
This is junk. It assumes that the basic building block of a piece of writing is a sentence. No-- the basic building block of a piece of writing is an idea. To try to say something without having any idea what you want to say is a fool's errand.
Not that the Lego Building Approach should feel bad for being junk. The instructional writing landscape is littered with junk, clogged with junk, sometimes obscured by the broad shadow of towering junk. And on almost-weekly basis, folks try to sort out what the junk is and how best to clear it away.
Here's John Warner at Inside Higher Ed trying to answer the question, "Why can't my new employees write?" Warner reports that he hears that question often from employers. With a little probing he determines that what they mean by "can't write," is "They primarily observe a fundamental lack of clarity and perceive a gap between the purpose of the writing and the result of what’s been written, a lack of awareness of audience and occasion."
In other words, they don't seem to get the idea that they are supposed to be communicating real ideas and information in a real way to real people. It's not a question of rigor or expectations, Warner notes. It's that they were trained to do something else entirely.
I believe that in many cases, these young professionals have never encountered a genuine and meaningful rhetorical situation in an academic or professional context. They are highly skilled at a particular kind of academic writing performance that they have been doing from a very early age, but they are largely unpracticed at that what their employers expect them to do, clearly communicate ideas to specific audiences.
My students’ chief struggle tends to be rooted in years of schooling where what they have to say doesn’t really matter, and the primary focus is on “how” you say things.
This is the flip side of our current bad ideas about reading-- the notion that reading is a set of skills that exist independent of any actual content. Current writing standards and therefor instruction assume the same thing-- that a piece of writing involves deploying a set of skills, and the actual content and subject matter are not really important. This is not so much a pedagogical idea as a corporate one, somehow filtered down form the world where it's believed that a great corporate manager will be great whether the company makes lubricating oil, soup, soap, or fluffy children's toys.
Michelle Kenney at Rethinking Schools talks about how this skills-based writing turns to junk in "The Politics of the Paragraph." Innumerable schools have found ways (or borrowed or bought ways) to reduce writing to a simple set of steps, providing a checklist for students to follow when writing (and for teachers to use when scoring). Kenney writes about the inevitable outcome of this approach, even when using a procedure developed in house:
I also noted a decline in the overall quality of thought in these paragraphs. Students had more confidence in their writing, but they were also less invested in their ideas. Writing paragraphs and essays was now a set of hoops to jump through, a dry task only slightly more complex than a worksheet.
Mediocre writing starts with the wrong questions, and a focus on a set, proscribed structure and process encourages students to ask the wrong questions. Hammer them with writing templates, and students start to see an essay as a slightly more involved fill in the blank exercise. "I have to have five paragraphs-- what can I use to fill up the five paragraph-sized blanks?" "I need three sentences to make a paragraph-- what can I use to fill in the the three sentence-shaped empty spaces." This gets you junk.
The appeal of the template is easy to see-- teaching writing is hard and grading writing is even harder. Every prompt has an infinite number of correct answers instead of just one, and every piece of writing has to be considered on its own terms. The very best writing includes a unique and personal voice, and teaching a students to sound like him- or herself is tricky. Much easier to teach them all to sound like the same person.
The important questions for writing are what do I want to say, who do I want to say it to, and what's the best way I can think of to say it. But the results of those are really hard to scale up, if not impossible. So it comes as no surprise that the Age of
Here's Madeline Will over at Education Week, trying to make the case that the Core somehow "include detailed writing expectations that go well beyond previous state requirements. Specifically, they call for proficiency in argumentative, explanatory, and narrative writing that draw connections from and between texts."
This is a tricky claim to respond to because, first, if the standards did include detailed writing expectations, that would not be a good thing. "Detailed expectations" is just another way to say "template," and a template is junk writing instruction. But the writing standards are, by and large, gibberish. I'm going to take a look at the Original Common Core State [sic] Standards for writing. In your state the standards may have been rewritten a bit (or simply rebranded), but the original flavor standards certainly capture the essence of what we're dealing with. But we need to go back to the standards because Will makes the usual Common Core mistake-- "Okay," says some consultant or state official or district administrator, "Let's put these yellow yarmulkes on our heads, because that is totally what the standards say to do." In the unpacking stage, lots of folks have added their own versions of ideas about interpretations about readings of the standards and we end up with classrooms haunted by the pedagogical ghosts of standards that never really lived.
Let's start with a second grade standard for writing.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.2.1
Write opinion pieces in which they introduce the topic or book they are writing about, state an opinion, supply reasons that support the opinion, use linking words (e.g., because, and, also to connect opinion and reasons, and provide a concluding statement or section.
First, let me get a pet peeve out of the way-- the Core repeatedly talks about giving "reasons" for opinions, when I suspect what they actually mean is "evidence." I think this liver casserole stinks. What's my reason? I hate liver. I'm pretty sure that the standards want me to provide evidence about the nature of the casserole, but my "reason" for having an opinion is that I have that opinion. Asking me for the reason I love my wife is a whole different question from asking for evidence that my wife is lovable.
Here we also see the standards' focus on specific vocabulary to connect ideas in a very specific way. And the implication here in this standard for seven year olds is that there is just one correct way to write about your opinion, which is the death of decent writing.
Ten years later, that standard has morphed into this standard for 11-12 graders.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1
Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.
Emphasis mine. Because as a writer, my first thought is, "Oh, you want me to use valid reasons. I'm glad you said something, because I was totally going to use stupid, irrational, insufficient reasons." My second thought is "substantive, valid, relevant, and sufficient" according to whom?
Because one of the underlying themes of the writing standards is that writing is a set of skills that you perform to someone else's satisfaction. It's not about you saying what you have to say; it's about you saying what somebody else wants you to say, the way they want you to say it. It is about jumping through hoops.
And that's just the "master" standard. Here are the sub-standards.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1.a
Introduce precise, knowledgeable claim(s), establish the significance of the claim(s), distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and create an organization that logically sequences claim(s), counterclaims, reasons, and evidence.
Introduce precise, knowledgeable claim(s), establish the significance of the claim(s), distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and create an organization that logically sequences claim(s), counterclaims, reasons, and evidence.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1.b
Develop claim(s) and counterclaims fairly and thoroughly, supplying the most relevant evidence for each while pointing out the strengths and limitations of both in a manner that anticipates the audience's knowledge level, concerns, values, and possible biases.
Develop claim(s) and counterclaims fairly and thoroughly, supplying the most relevant evidence for each while pointing out the strengths and limitations of both in a manner that anticipates the audience's knowledge level, concerns, values, and possible biases.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1.c
Use words, phrases, and clauses as well as varied syntax to link the major sections of the text, create cohesion, and clarify the relationships between claim(s) and reasons, between reasons and evidence, and between claim(s) and counterclaims.
Use words, phrases, and clauses as well as varied syntax to link the major sections of the text, create cohesion, and clarify the relationships between claim(s) and reasons, between reasons and evidence, and between claim(s) and counterclaims.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1.d
Establish and maintain a formal style and objective tone while attending to the norms and conventions of the discipline in which they are writing.
Establish and maintain a formal style and objective tone while attending to the norms and conventions of the discipline in which they are writing.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1.e
Provide a concluding statement or section that follows from and supports the argument presented.
Provide a concluding statement or section that follows from and supports the argument presented.
Again, my emphasis on some of the terms that are not objective, but will have to be set by whoever is judging the writing. But here we have a template for the essay, right down to sentence structure. Some of these (heck, most of these) represent very specific requirements for an essay, even more of a straightjacket than the templates that Kenney discusses, and they also represent matters of personal style and choice. For instance, the standards love conclusions. Gotta have a conclusion. Which would not fly with my college professor who said that a bad, generic conclusion is worse than no conclusion at all-- if you don't have a good finish, then just make your point and then stop talking. But no-- to write an Essay According To The Standards, you must fill in the conclusion blank with something.
And we also have the usual weird mix of the obvious and the specific. "Use words, phrases, clauses or syntax" to connect the ideas-- which rules out, what, semaphore? Arrows drawn on the page? But that is followed by a list of three specific relationships that must be covered in your essay, because no good essay about opinion can be written without showing the relationship between your reasons and your evidence? Ever?
Of course the writing standards also cover informative/explanatory essays and narrative writing, and the mere division of writing into three separate types suggests a set of rules that don't really exist in the world of actual writing, but are created for the convenience of people who want to test and measure writing. The narrative standards are particularly restrictive and terrible and arbitrary and would disapprove of much of the great works that we teach in English classes-- but that's an issue for another day
Most of all, meeting these standards would not help a single one of the employers who asked Warner why the new employees can't write. The standards provide a set of hoops to jump through so that the students can display certain writing skills-- but not any thinking or communication skills. A student can satisfy all of these standards and still not grasp that writing is about figuring out what you want to say, who you're going to say it to, and the best way for you to say it. The standards foster junk writing.
Will highlights one single true benefit of the standards-- they call for writing frequently, which is smart. If you made your students write twice a week for a year and never even graded any of it, that would probably still be better than the classic four week long Writing Unit in April.
I know there are teachers who think these standards are swell. I've met some. Here's why some teachers like these writing standards:
1) They are teaching their own set of standards and pretending that their own standards have something to do with the Core standards.
2) They don't like to teach writing, and what they want someone to do is just reduce it to some simple rules so that they can just go through the motions and be able to say they're teaching writing without having to suffer through the hard work.
3) They don't know how to teach writing.
I'm sorry, but if you tell me that you think the standards are great for writing instruction, I will judge you. I'm not proud of it, but there it is (especially in Pennsylvania, where we have found ways to make the writing standards even worse). Will argues that teachers need more support, that there are "veteran teachers who had no practice in teaching the kind of writing, particularly argumentative writing, that the standards call for," and that's probably true, but I'm okay with that, because the standards call for junk. Teachers do need "support" in the teaching of writing (I do love how "needs support" is now our code word for "needs to be whacked upside the head and straightened the hell out"), but the standards are not the place to find it, and they're not the foundation on which to base it. I promise that I'll present my Writing Instruction Professional Development in a Can but this is already a long post, so we'll save that for another day.
But I will give you Step One, because summer is the perfect time to work on it.
Write. Write for a blog. Write letters to the editor of your newspaper. Write long thoughtful letters to friends. You can no more teach writing without actually doing writing than you can teach reading if you've never cracked open a book. So go do that. And don't consult any standards or templates when you do. Just ask yourself-- what do I want to say? That's the only thing you need to get started.
Friday, July 1, 2016
Discovering Gloria Jean Merriex
Gloria Jean Merriex grew up in Gainesville, Florida. Gainesville is a city of extremes; on the one hand, it's the home of the University of Florida and has many of the features of a big college town; on the other hand, the southern and eastern neighborhoods of Gainesboro are home to crushing poverty. Charles Duval Elementary School is located in the center of an eastern neighborhood filled with crime and poverty.
Merriex saw teaching as a path out of the poverty of her neighborhood, but she did not choose to leave the neighborhood itself. Once she had her degree, she chose to teach at Duval Elementary, where for about twenty-five years she was a middle-of-the-road, competent-but-not-exceptional teacher.
I became acquainted with Merriex through the work of filmmaker Boaz Dvir; my nephew, who studied film at Penn State, had Dvir as a teacher and thought we might have a few things to say to each other. But years ago, Dvir was a professor in Florida who heard about Merriex and decided to tell her story. The result is a documentary in progress entitled "Discovering Gloria." I've watched a rough cut of the film, and it is a challenging and moving story.
Photo Courtesy of Discovering Gloria
The story, of course, is not about the first twenty-five years of Merriex's career. The story really starts with Florida's reform efforts, Florida's Big Standardized Test (FCAT), and Florida's assignment of letter grades to schools, back in the days when No Child Left Behind was the hot, new thing.
Duval scored a big fat F, and Merriex was troubled. Couldn't-sleep-at-night troubled.
The school having "failed," the state stepped in with strict pacing guides and mandated materials so that the school would be working toward Meeting the Standards. Meanwhile, Merriex faced the realization that she could not keep teaching as she had. It was a transformative moment for her, not just as a teacher, but as a person. She began to think about what she really had to do.
She dumped the state pacing guides and teaching materials. When she got caught, she begged Duval principal Lee McNealy for a chance to give her methods a try, and McNealy had the guts and trust to give it to her. So Merriex developed materials and approaches of her own, and for the early 2000s, her choices were a bit out there. She wrote raps and dances to do with her students for learning math vocabulary and basic processes. She used call and response in the classroom. She was stern and demanding in a classic sense, but she did constant outreach and made family connections in the modern teacher-counselor sense. She visited homes, saw to students' non-academic needs, provided instruction to entire families. Cooked classroom meals. mended school uniforms. Held Saturday classes for FCAT prep. She refined and reflected, developed and grew more materials.
Duval became a miracle school, getting spectacular test results. Duval scored A after A, Merriex's students posting the greatest test score gains in the state. The school was filled with pride, the students confident and accomplished. Duval-- and Merriex-- became one of Florida's great success stories. Merriex created a math team, a group of students who toured and demonstrated their math rap and math skills. Merriex herself was in increasing demand, speaking and demonstrating her techniques for teachers and administrators from all across the state and country.
Merriex's story defies simple categorization. There is frankly much here that reformsters will like. The letter grade system shocked Merriex and her school out of their old ways. And once it was clear that Merriex was on to something, Duval's administration packed her classroom, having her teach forty or fifty students at a time. And the rough cut of Dvir's film tells the story of a student previously labeled learning disabled who blossoms and succeeds under Merriex's tutelage, an apparent confirmation of the "replace special ed with high expectations" reformster camp.
At the same time, reformsters should also note that Merriex completely dismantled and dismissed the state plan for how the courses should be taught. The pacing guide? Out the window. Dvir talks to one of the many academics who came to watch Merriex to try to figure out what she was doing; one striking feature was that Meriex would work completely out of the "normal" sequence and jump from one math subject to another in ways that defied conventional approaches. Yet somehow they worked.
Merriex met her students where they were, creating her materials to match their own concerns and interests. Her techniques defied "scaling up" because they were developed for the children of that neighborhood-- a neighborhood that she had known her whole life. It would never be possible to take five weeks to teach a bunch of college kids the Merriex Method and send them out into schools all across the nation in communities that they've never set foot in before. Merriex's techniques were custom made for students in that community by a lifelong member of that community.
Nevertheless, the Lastinger Center for Learning at the University of Florida decided to study her, even mounting cameras in her classroom intending to stream her lessons around the world. And the Kellogg Foundation-- one of the great reformster money-spreaders-- awarded the center grants to help fund the study. But Kellogg went one better-- in May of 2008, they awarded Merriex a grant to develop a national math curriculum.
Merriex appeared to be living proof of concept for the Hero Teacher.
On the day after the awarding of the Kellogg grant, Merriex suffered a diabetic stroke. She died at the age of 58. It is hard not to conclude that in order to be a Hero Teacher, Merriex had worked herself to death.
What are the lessons of Merriex's story? Dvir does a good job of providing some balance. The fact that he's been wrestling with this film for several years is, in part, a testament to how tricky a story this is to tell. If you watch the trailer, you'll note that the film is funded in part by the ever-reformy Kellogg Foundation, about which Dvir has this to say:
Although I received a grant from Kellogg., I’ve had 100 percent editorial and creative control. I never had even one conversation with Kellogg about the making of the film. I interviewed a Kellogg rep as part of the filming process, but he never asked me about what I was doing. He simply answered my questions. I’ve never even screened the rough cut for Kellogg! As I said, I’ve had complete editorial and creative control over this film – as I have and continue to have on all my films. I’m as strict as any documentary filmmakers get about this. Part of it is my journalistic DNA. Another part is that I do this work purely for scholarship and making a difference.
I've talked to him (and I trust my nephew as a judge of character) and I see the documentary as objective and journalistic in character. I don't smell reformy agenda here.
As I suggested above, I think reformsters may rush to learn the wrong lessons from this story-- that you just need to find a super-teacher and clone her, that BS Tests are great for measuring and fixing education (a premise that everyone in the film accepts and nobody actually challenges), that if you just believe and try real hard then poverty and race don't really matter. But I think there are far more important lessons to be learned from Merriex's story.
One is the power of administration to protect teachers from bad state and federal policy. Merriex's story of transformation and achievement would never have happened if, in the very beginning, her principal had said, "Dammit, no. We scored an F, so there will be no experimenting. You get back in that classroom and follow the pacing guide the state sent us, and you follow it to the letter." But Merriex's principal trusted her, trusted her professional judgment, and trusted her commitment to her students, and so that principal let Gloria Jean Merriex do her thing. It was easy for everyone to fall in behind Merriex after the fact, and therefor it's easy to forget that Merriex and her principal were risking their careers and bucking the district, the state and the feds.
Another lesson is the limits of the administrative power-- the school still had to face having its success measured by the BS Test and a single letter grade.
Another lesson is the value of community connection. Merriex could figure out what needed to be done because she was of that community, in that community. She knew the language, the values, the streets and neighborhoods, the families. It mattered that she grew up there as a young black girl, to become a teacher in a 99% black school. All the fresh-scrubbed ivy league honor roll graduates in the world could not substitute for what Merriex knew by being of her community. There's a moment (it's also in the trailer) where Merriex's former principal tells the story of letting the teacher know that the school received an F and she appears to almost says "She just turned white" and then catches herself. If you like extra-close readings of moments, it's a resonant moment because if Gloria Jean Merriex had turned white, her success would never happen. If anything, Merriex achieved success in that school by turning less white, by more fully rejecting what the classically white education system told her she was supposed to do and by more fully embracing the culture of her community.
Also-- sitting each of those students down with a computer to work on their interactive adaptive education software would also have failed as a substitute for Merriex.
That points to another huge lesson- while reformsters may say, "Look, high standards and hard work erased the effects of poverty," that overlooks the fact that for Merriex, offsetting the effects of poverty was a second full-time job on top of her teaching job. Working with families, providing concrete support for students, providing emotional support for students and families and co-workers-- Merriex was doing all those non-teaching duties with every spare hour she had so that her actual teaching would have a chance of actually being effective. And ultimately, her second full time job of offsetting the effects of poverty required everything she had. To say that Merriex overcame the effects of poverty "just" with high standards and high expectations would be a lie.
I found it humbling to watch her story, to realize that while I can talk about dedicating my life to teaching, I don't mean anything like what Gloria Jean Merriex meant. I've written about the limits of what we can do as teachers, and most of us who teach are aware of those limits, but few of us push ourselves as close to (or over) those limits like Merriex did.
I will be sure to let you know when the completed film is finally released. In the meantime, here's the trailer for what is, for better or worse, a teacher story for the new millennium.
Merriex saw teaching as a path out of the poverty of her neighborhood, but she did not choose to leave the neighborhood itself. Once she had her degree, she chose to teach at Duval Elementary, where for about twenty-five years she was a middle-of-the-road, competent-but-not-exceptional teacher.
I became acquainted with Merriex through the work of filmmaker Boaz Dvir; my nephew, who studied film at Penn State, had Dvir as a teacher and thought we might have a few things to say to each other. But years ago, Dvir was a professor in Florida who heard about Merriex and decided to tell her story. The result is a documentary in progress entitled "Discovering Gloria." I've watched a rough cut of the film, and it is a challenging and moving story.
Photo Courtesy of Discovering Gloria
The story, of course, is not about the first twenty-five years of Merriex's career. The story really starts with Florida's reform efforts, Florida's Big Standardized Test (FCAT), and Florida's assignment of letter grades to schools, back in the days when No Child Left Behind was the hot, new thing.
Duval scored a big fat F, and Merriex was troubled. Couldn't-sleep-at-night troubled.
The school having "failed," the state stepped in with strict pacing guides and mandated materials so that the school would be working toward Meeting the Standards. Meanwhile, Merriex faced the realization that she could not keep teaching as she had. It was a transformative moment for her, not just as a teacher, but as a person. She began to think about what she really had to do.
She dumped the state pacing guides and teaching materials. When she got caught, she begged Duval principal Lee McNealy for a chance to give her methods a try, and McNealy had the guts and trust to give it to her. So Merriex developed materials and approaches of her own, and for the early 2000s, her choices were a bit out there. She wrote raps and dances to do with her students for learning math vocabulary and basic processes. She used call and response in the classroom. She was stern and demanding in a classic sense, but she did constant outreach and made family connections in the modern teacher-counselor sense. She visited homes, saw to students' non-academic needs, provided instruction to entire families. Cooked classroom meals. mended school uniforms. Held Saturday classes for FCAT prep. She refined and reflected, developed and grew more materials.
Duval became a miracle school, getting spectacular test results. Duval scored A after A, Merriex's students posting the greatest test score gains in the state. The school was filled with pride, the students confident and accomplished. Duval-- and Merriex-- became one of Florida's great success stories. Merriex created a math team, a group of students who toured and demonstrated their math rap and math skills. Merriex herself was in increasing demand, speaking and demonstrating her techniques for teachers and administrators from all across the state and country.
Merriex's story defies simple categorization. There is frankly much here that reformsters will like. The letter grade system shocked Merriex and her school out of their old ways. And once it was clear that Merriex was on to something, Duval's administration packed her classroom, having her teach forty or fifty students at a time. And the rough cut of Dvir's film tells the story of a student previously labeled learning disabled who blossoms and succeeds under Merriex's tutelage, an apparent confirmation of the "replace special ed with high expectations" reformster camp.
At the same time, reformsters should also note that Merriex completely dismantled and dismissed the state plan for how the courses should be taught. The pacing guide? Out the window. Dvir talks to one of the many academics who came to watch Merriex to try to figure out what she was doing; one striking feature was that Meriex would work completely out of the "normal" sequence and jump from one math subject to another in ways that defied conventional approaches. Yet somehow they worked.
Merriex met her students where they were, creating her materials to match their own concerns and interests. Her techniques defied "scaling up" because they were developed for the children of that neighborhood-- a neighborhood that she had known her whole life. It would never be possible to take five weeks to teach a bunch of college kids the Merriex Method and send them out into schools all across the nation in communities that they've never set foot in before. Merriex's techniques were custom made for students in that community by a lifelong member of that community.
Nevertheless, the Lastinger Center for Learning at the University of Florida decided to study her, even mounting cameras in her classroom intending to stream her lessons around the world. And the Kellogg Foundation-- one of the great reformster money-spreaders-- awarded the center grants to help fund the study. But Kellogg went one better-- in May of 2008, they awarded Merriex a grant to develop a national math curriculum.
Merriex appeared to be living proof of concept for the Hero Teacher.
On the day after the awarding of the Kellogg grant, Merriex suffered a diabetic stroke. She died at the age of 58. It is hard not to conclude that in order to be a Hero Teacher, Merriex had worked herself to death.
What are the lessons of Merriex's story? Dvir does a good job of providing some balance. The fact that he's been wrestling with this film for several years is, in part, a testament to how tricky a story this is to tell. If you watch the trailer, you'll note that the film is funded in part by the ever-reformy Kellogg Foundation, about which Dvir has this to say:
Although I received a grant from Kellogg., I’ve had 100 percent editorial and creative control. I never had even one conversation with Kellogg about the making of the film. I interviewed a Kellogg rep as part of the filming process, but he never asked me about what I was doing. He simply answered my questions. I’ve never even screened the rough cut for Kellogg! As I said, I’ve had complete editorial and creative control over this film – as I have and continue to have on all my films. I’m as strict as any documentary filmmakers get about this. Part of it is my journalistic DNA. Another part is that I do this work purely for scholarship and making a difference.
I've talked to him (and I trust my nephew as a judge of character) and I see the documentary as objective and journalistic in character. I don't smell reformy agenda here.
As I suggested above, I think reformsters may rush to learn the wrong lessons from this story-- that you just need to find a super-teacher and clone her, that BS Tests are great for measuring and fixing education (a premise that everyone in the film accepts and nobody actually challenges), that if you just believe and try real hard then poverty and race don't really matter. But I think there are far more important lessons to be learned from Merriex's story.
One is the power of administration to protect teachers from bad state and federal policy. Merriex's story of transformation and achievement would never have happened if, in the very beginning, her principal had said, "Dammit, no. We scored an F, so there will be no experimenting. You get back in that classroom and follow the pacing guide the state sent us, and you follow it to the letter." But Merriex's principal trusted her, trusted her professional judgment, and trusted her commitment to her students, and so that principal let Gloria Jean Merriex do her thing. It was easy for everyone to fall in behind Merriex after the fact, and therefor it's easy to forget that Merriex and her principal were risking their careers and bucking the district, the state and the feds.
Another lesson is the limits of the administrative power-- the school still had to face having its success measured by the BS Test and a single letter grade.
Another lesson is the value of community connection. Merriex could figure out what needed to be done because she was of that community, in that community. She knew the language, the values, the streets and neighborhoods, the families. It mattered that she grew up there as a young black girl, to become a teacher in a 99% black school. All the fresh-scrubbed ivy league honor roll graduates in the world could not substitute for what Merriex knew by being of her community. There's a moment (it's also in the trailer) where Merriex's former principal tells the story of letting the teacher know that the school received an F and she appears to almost says "She just turned white" and then catches herself. If you like extra-close readings of moments, it's a resonant moment because if Gloria Jean Merriex had turned white, her success would never happen. If anything, Merriex achieved success in that school by turning less white, by more fully rejecting what the classically white education system told her she was supposed to do and by more fully embracing the culture of her community.
Also-- sitting each of those students down with a computer to work on their interactive adaptive education software would also have failed as a substitute for Merriex.
That points to another huge lesson- while reformsters may say, "Look, high standards and hard work erased the effects of poverty," that overlooks the fact that for Merriex, offsetting the effects of poverty was a second full-time job on top of her teaching job. Working with families, providing concrete support for students, providing emotional support for students and families and co-workers-- Merriex was doing all those non-teaching duties with every spare hour she had so that her actual teaching would have a chance of actually being effective. And ultimately, her second full time job of offsetting the effects of poverty required everything she had. To say that Merriex overcame the effects of poverty "just" with high standards and high expectations would be a lie.
I found it humbling to watch her story, to realize that while I can talk about dedicating my life to teaching, I don't mean anything like what Gloria Jean Merriex meant. I've written about the limits of what we can do as teachers, and most of us who teach are aware of those limits, but few of us push ourselves as close to (or over) those limits like Merriex did.
I will be sure to let you know when the completed film is finally released. In the meantime, here's the trailer for what is, for better or worse, a teacher story for the new millennium.
Teach for Privatization in India
If you ever wanted to see how the pieces of the privatization movement in ed reform fir together (though nobody really wants to see that any more than they want to get a close look at road kill or watch video of an operation on their own pancreas), then I have the article for you.
The Nation has a new piece by George Joseph looking at the spread of the spread of Teach for America's operating philosophy into India. This is apparently a different group than Teach for All, Teach for America's own multinational brand. But the founder of TFI met with Wendy Kopp and McKinsey consulting, so it's not exactly a completely independent entity, either.
India's education system is one of the most grossly underfunded systems in the world. Even though they are booming economically, Joseph reports that the most they have ever spent on education is just 4.4% of their GDP (and that peak came sixteen years ago). In 2013-2014, the country had over half a million vacant teaching positions. Only one in five teachers working had ever received in-service training. Half of all schools could not meet the requirement of no more than thirty students to a classroom. And over 91,000 schools had only one teacher.
But TFI features the same old TFA theory of change, which Joseph has summed up as clearly as anyone I've ever read:
By promising innovative classroom techniques and inspirational leadership, the Teach for All model seeks to transform tremendous material deficits into a problem of character.
His article repeatedly cites individuals who say that India's schools do not need more money, but basically just need somebody smart to whip these kids into shape. Meanwhile, the TFI board includes guys like Ashish Dhawan, an exceptionally wealthy guy who has thrown his money and power behind successful efforts to have public schools simply turned over to private businesses to operate (and profit from).
Against that background of spreading privatization of education, TFI is very clearly not meant to provide students with an education, but instead is to provide field training for the people who are going to become the movers and shakers and money-makers in the new privatized education business. Though Joseph does not say so, one gets the impression that India's reformsters feel far less pressure to pay lip service to the idea that this is all For the Poor Children.
It's a fascinating look at what the Same Old Reformy Stuff looks like when played out in another culture and country. Follow the link above and read this.
The Nation has a new piece by George Joseph looking at the spread of the spread of Teach for America's operating philosophy into India. This is apparently a different group than Teach for All, Teach for America's own multinational brand. But the founder of TFI met with Wendy Kopp and McKinsey consulting, so it's not exactly a completely independent entity, either.
India's education system is one of the most grossly underfunded systems in the world. Even though they are booming economically, Joseph reports that the most they have ever spent on education is just 4.4% of their GDP (and that peak came sixteen years ago). In 2013-2014, the country had over half a million vacant teaching positions. Only one in five teachers working had ever received in-service training. Half of all schools could not meet the requirement of no more than thirty students to a classroom. And over 91,000 schools had only one teacher.
But TFI features the same old TFA theory of change, which Joseph has summed up as clearly as anyone I've ever read:
By promising innovative classroom techniques and inspirational leadership, the Teach for All model seeks to transform tremendous material deficits into a problem of character.
His article repeatedly cites individuals who say that India's schools do not need more money, but basically just need somebody smart to whip these kids into shape. Meanwhile, the TFI board includes guys like Ashish Dhawan, an exceptionally wealthy guy who has thrown his money and power behind successful efforts to have public schools simply turned over to private businesses to operate (and profit from).
Against that background of spreading privatization of education, TFI is very clearly not meant to provide students with an education, but instead is to provide field training for the people who are going to become the movers and shakers and money-makers in the new privatized education business. Though Joseph does not say so, one gets the impression that India's reformsters feel far less pressure to pay lip service to the idea that this is all For the Poor Children.
It's a fascinating look at what the Same Old Reformy Stuff looks like when played out in another culture and country. Follow the link above and read this.
Thursday, June 30, 2016
NJ: A Research Answer to Christie's Terrible Funding Proposal
Imagine that a state decides to stop offering any sort of food stamp program. The governor declares, "Everybody in our state deserves to eat, so from now on, instead of any sort of means-tested system, we will just give five bucks per week to every citizen of the state to buy food with. "
Or a governor from a state like Colorado announces that he's tired of paying so much more for snow removal on mountain roads than he is for small residential streets. Therefor, in the future, he will set aside $100 bucks for each road in the state and that's all each roadway, whether it's a twenty mile road through a mountain pass or a two block street in the suburbs.
Or a parent decides that to be absolutely fair, she will spend exactly the same amount of money on each child, including the youngest one-year-old child, the middle child who has physical issues that confine her to a wheelchair, and the oldest child who has just been diagnosed with cancer. Each one gets ten dollars a week spent on them, and that's it. Because, fairness.
Regular readers know I am all about the illustrative comparison, but the fact is that I am stumped for examples that really convey just how criminally dumb and destructive Chris Christie's proposal to spend exactly and only the same amount on each student in New Jersey. The proposal will be a windfall for wealthy districts and leave poor district further impoverished.
In addition to being brutally crippling, it also reveals a warped attitude about school funding. Christie is clearly approaching education funding as if it's a reward that students earn, and not the instrument by which the state meets its obligation to its children. Christie's approach is like going to the bank and saying, "Well, I guess I will give you as much of this mortgage payment as I think you deserve." Nope. The state has an obligation to its children, and the question the governor should be asking is, "How can we best meet that obligation for all children."
Nobody likes this proposal. Tom Moran, ever a Christie booster, doesn't like it. Erik Hanushek, who has produced plenty of research-like product supporting the unimportance of school funding, doesn't like it.
But if you would like a scholarly, research-based, rational non-invective-laced explanation of exactly how awful this plan is, Mark Weber and Ajay Srikanth have you covered. Weber has set aside his Jersey Jazzman snark hat and put on his Legitimate Scholarly Researcher hat to produce a report to answer the question, how fair is the fairness formula?
I recommend you read the whole thing, and then, if you live in New Jersey, I suggest you pick up the phone and call some elected official. This proposal deserves to die, but you know that Chris Cjristie does not play well with others.
In the meantime, here's the executive summary of the report to whet your apetite:
Or a governor from a state like Colorado announces that he's tired of paying so much more for snow removal on mountain roads than he is for small residential streets. Therefor, in the future, he will set aside $100 bucks for each road in the state and that's all each roadway, whether it's a twenty mile road through a mountain pass or a two block street in the suburbs.
Or a parent decides that to be absolutely fair, she will spend exactly the same amount of money on each child, including the youngest one-year-old child, the middle child who has physical issues that confine her to a wheelchair, and the oldest child who has just been diagnosed with cancer. Each one gets ten dollars a week spent on them, and that's it. Because, fairness.
Regular readers know I am all about the illustrative comparison, but the fact is that I am stumped for examples that really convey just how criminally dumb and destructive Chris Christie's proposal to spend exactly and only the same amount on each student in New Jersey. The proposal will be a windfall for wealthy districts and leave poor district further impoverished.
In addition to being brutally crippling, it also reveals a warped attitude about school funding. Christie is clearly approaching education funding as if it's a reward that students earn, and not the instrument by which the state meets its obligation to its children. Christie's approach is like going to the bank and saying, "Well, I guess I will give you as much of this mortgage payment as I think you deserve." Nope. The state has an obligation to its children, and the question the governor should be asking is, "How can we best meet that obligation for all children."
Nobody likes this proposal. Tom Moran, ever a Christie booster, doesn't like it. Erik Hanushek, who has produced plenty of research-like product supporting the unimportance of school funding, doesn't like it.
But if you would like a scholarly, research-based, rational non-invective-laced explanation of exactly how awful this plan is, Mark Weber and Ajay Srikanth have you covered. Weber has set aside his Jersey Jazzman snark hat and put on his Legitimate Scholarly Researcher hat to produce a report to answer the question, how fair is the fairness formula?
I recommend you read the whole thing, and then, if you live in New Jersey, I suggest you pick up the phone and call some elected official. This proposal deserves to die, but you know that Chris Cjristie does not play well with others.
In the meantime, here's the executive summary of the report to whet your apetite:
Executive Summary
This brief provides a first look at the “Fairness Formula,” Chris Christie’s school tax reform plan. In this analysis, we show:
- The “Fairness Formula” will greatly reward the most-affluent districts, which are already paying the lowest school tax rates as measured by percentage of income.
- The “Fairness Formula” will force the least-affluent districts to slash their school budgets, severely increase local property taxes, or both.
- The premise of the “Fairness Formula” – that the schools enrolling New Jersey’s at-risk students have “failed” during the period of substantial school reform – is contradicted by a large body of evidence.
The “Fairness Formula,” then, would transform New Jersey’s school funding system from a national model of equity[1] into one of the least equitable in the country, both in terms of education and taxation. This proposal is so radical and so contradicted by both the evidence and economic theory that even the harshest critics of school funding reform cannot support it.
Why Investors Love Charter Schools
When you see the announcement that the Waltons want to pump another $250 million into charter schools, you just have to wonder why.
I know the Waltons (of Wal-Mart fame) are big fans of charter schools, but they didn't become gazillionaires by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on things they just find shiny. And if they really wanted to push charters, they have an army of employees that could be incentivized to push charters. Heck, the Waltons are in a position to offer employees some sort of bonus or support to send their own children to charter schools. So maybe the quarter billion bucks is just heartfelt charity. But I have my doubts.
Part of the clue is in exactly what the Waltons want to spend that $250 million on. They're not really pumping money into the charter school industry-- they're pumping money into the charter school building industry. They make the periodically made point that the charter industry suffers from not having Uncle Sugar to buy buildings for them. I'm not sure that's a real problem.
There's a good case to be made for the charter industry being a large real estate scam, and Leslie T. Fenwick made it pretty forcefully a few weeks ago in Valerie Strauss's column at the Washington Post.
In the most recent cases of Washington D.C. and Chicago, black parents and other community members point to school closings as verification of their distrust of school “reform” efforts. Indeed, mayoral control has been linked to an emerging pattern of closing and disinvesting in schools that serve black poor students and reopening them as charters operated by education management organizations and backed by venture capitalists. While mayoral control proposes to expand educational opportunities for black and poor students, more-often-than-not new schools are placed in upper-income, gentrifying white areas of town, while more schools are closed and fewer new schools are opened in lower-income, black areas thus increasing the level of educational inequity. Black inner-city residents are suspicious of school reform (particularly when it is attached to neighborhood revitalization) which they view as an imposition from external white elites who are exclusively committed to using schools to recalculate urban land values at the expense of black children, parents and communities.
But there's more to it than that-- and there has been for sixteen years. We've been reminded repeatedly, but I'm going to remind us again.
Included in the Clinton era Community Tax Relief Act of 2000, and renewed repeatedly since then (it was just upped for another five years in the 2016 spending bill) is the New Markets Tax Credit. Here's the simple explanation from Investopedia:
The NMTC has two components: a 39% tax credit on charter schools contributions over a seven-year period plus the ability to collect interest on the money they contribute. A hedge fund could double its investment in seven years, and the tax credit can be combined with other tax breaks without limit. It is not surprising that hedge funds have flocked to this deal handed out by the federal government.
Double your investment in seven years.
Double. Your. Investment. In. Seven. Years.
Not only do you double your investment in seven years, but this is not like investing in the latest tech start-up vaporware producer. Risk is tiny. Return on investment is huge. Is it any wonder that hedge funds love charter schools, or that companies like NewSchools Venture Fund, a firm that exists just to put investor money together with charter school projects, are an actual thing. I mean, for all our talk about the Importance of Classroom Teachers, is there anybody running a big company just to recruit and place the very best teachers in schools? No-- just outfits like TFA which, whatever its original best intentions, is now a wing of this moneymaking industry ("You can double your money on the building and, since we've got to put something in the building in order to call it a school, we can hook you up with these low cost, low trouble, quick turnover sort-of-teachers .")
Plus, you look like a real mensch for investing schools. It's like investing in puppies-- everyone just assumes that you are up to something admirable and fine. After all, it's a school. It's For The Children. Who would cast a gimlet eye at such a noble enterprise?
Well, more of us should. "Follow the money" remains good advice when people who have not otherwise shown the slightest interest in a sector of our society suddenly want to plunk down their money and get in the game. The last two decades have been marked by a huge influx of amateurs with thick wallets pushing their way into the education biz; I don't think it's an incredible coincidence that they're able to get rich doing it.
I know the Waltons (of Wal-Mart fame) are big fans of charter schools, but they didn't become gazillionaires by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on things they just find shiny. And if they really wanted to push charters, they have an army of employees that could be incentivized to push charters. Heck, the Waltons are in a position to offer employees some sort of bonus or support to send their own children to charter schools. So maybe the quarter billion bucks is just heartfelt charity. But I have my doubts.
Part of the clue is in exactly what the Waltons want to spend that $250 million on. They're not really pumping money into the charter school industry-- they're pumping money into the charter school building industry. They make the periodically made point that the charter industry suffers from not having Uncle Sugar to buy buildings for them. I'm not sure that's a real problem.
There's a good case to be made for the charter industry being a large real estate scam, and Leslie T. Fenwick made it pretty forcefully a few weeks ago in Valerie Strauss's column at the Washington Post.
In the most recent cases of Washington D.C. and Chicago, black parents and other community members point to school closings as verification of their distrust of school “reform” efforts. Indeed, mayoral control has been linked to an emerging pattern of closing and disinvesting in schools that serve black poor students and reopening them as charters operated by education management organizations and backed by venture capitalists. While mayoral control proposes to expand educational opportunities for black and poor students, more-often-than-not new schools are placed in upper-income, gentrifying white areas of town, while more schools are closed and fewer new schools are opened in lower-income, black areas thus increasing the level of educational inequity. Black inner-city residents are suspicious of school reform (particularly when it is attached to neighborhood revitalization) which they view as an imposition from external white elites who are exclusively committed to using schools to recalculate urban land values at the expense of black children, parents and communities.
But there's more to it than that-- and there has been for sixteen years. We've been reminded repeatedly, but I'm going to remind us again.
Included in the Clinton era Community Tax Relief Act of 2000, and renewed repeatedly since then (it was just upped for another five years in the 2016 spending bill) is the New Markets Tax Credit. Here's the simple explanation from Investopedia:
The NMTC has two components: a 39% tax credit on charter schools contributions over a seven-year period plus the ability to collect interest on the money they contribute. A hedge fund could double its investment in seven years, and the tax credit can be combined with other tax breaks without limit. It is not surprising that hedge funds have flocked to this deal handed out by the federal government.
Double your investment in seven years.
Double. Your. Investment. In. Seven. Years.
Not only do you double your investment in seven years, but this is not like investing in the latest tech start-up vaporware producer. Risk is tiny. Return on investment is huge. Is it any wonder that hedge funds love charter schools, or that companies like NewSchools Venture Fund, a firm that exists just to put investor money together with charter school projects, are an actual thing. I mean, for all our talk about the Importance of Classroom Teachers, is there anybody running a big company just to recruit and place the very best teachers in schools? No-- just outfits like TFA which, whatever its original best intentions, is now a wing of this moneymaking industry ("You can double your money on the building and, since we've got to put something in the building in order to call it a school, we can hook you up with these low cost, low trouble, quick turnover sort-of-teachers .")
Plus, you look like a real mensch for investing schools. It's like investing in puppies-- everyone just assumes that you are up to something admirable and fine. After all, it's a school. It's For The Children. Who would cast a gimlet eye at such a noble enterprise?
Well, more of us should. "Follow the money" remains good advice when people who have not otherwise shown the slightest interest in a sector of our society suddenly want to plunk down their money and get in the game. The last two decades have been marked by a huge influx of amateurs with thick wallets pushing their way into the education biz; I don't think it's an incredible coincidence that they're able to get rich doing it.
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