Born To Teach

The romantic notion has always been there, and plenty of teachers feed into it-- some people are just born teachers.

But the belief in born teachers has two seriously destructive side effects, one of which is becoming obvious and the other, perhaps less so.

Training

If teachers are born and not made, then teacher certification programs are a waste of time. A smart person with an ivy league degree and five weeks of training could be a teacher, right? The belief also manifests in the argument that we should open the teaching profession to all sorts of alternative certification programs because that guy working as a civil engineer or that woman working as a computer programmer-- it could be that they are just born teachers who need the chance to put their God-given gift to work.

This line of reasoning is reaching its predictable conclusion in places like Utah, the latest state to deal with its teacher "shortage" by letting any warm body with a college degree walk into a classroom.

There is a similar belief out there-- the belief that really, nobody is actually a born or trained teacher because teaching can actually be reduced to a simple set of tasks that anyone can perform. We've got this great unit-in-a-box from Pearson, and any warm body can follow the instructions. We've got this super-duper adaptive learning software from the computer, and we barely need an adult human in the room at all. So when you come right down to it, teaching isn't anything special and everyone is born with the necessary capabilities.

If there is no training component to teaching, nothing to learn about the material or child development or educational techniques or pedagogy or instruction, then we can either stick any meat widget in a classroom, or, if we believe there's a gift, we don't so much need a training program as we need a method of sifting through the general population to find the people with the teacher gene, the inherited gift. Maybe a sorting hat.

Choice

We've seen the effects in training and the general assault on the profession as one that requires training and professionalism. But we're seeing another effect as well. Here's how the line of reasoning goes.

If Chris is Born To Teach, then that's what Chris is going to do. And that means that as employers, as policymakers, as contract negotiators, we don't ever have to think about making the job attractive to Chris. Chris was born a teacher, so it's not necessary to do anything to convince Chris to be a teacher or stay a teacher.

If teachers are Born To Teach, then the education field is not, say, competing with law and medicine and taxidermy and engineering and any number of other professional fields that Chris might be perfectly well-suited for.

If teachers are Born To Teach, nobody ever has to deal with them while thinking, "Damn, if we screw this up, they might all just leave and go do something else for a living."

If teachers are Born To Teach, they are essentially helpless, trapped by their inborn proclivity to settle for whatever they are offered because surely they can never choose to leave a classroom (and if they do, that just proves they weren't really born to be teachers).

This underlying assumption-- that teachers can't be anything else, can't leave, can't choose another profession-- underlies everything from contract negotiations to policy design.

Shortage

Even now, as state leaders across the country scratch their heads at the ongoing teacher shortage, we see this set of assumptions in play. And it's just stupid. The convenience stores in my town understand that nobody has to work for them, and when people don't want to work for them, they have to make the job more appealing to get people to apply for a position-- or stay in the position they have.

But no matter how many times teachers say some version of, "You know, I don't have to do this. I can make a living some other way," education leaders don't hear it.

After all, teachers are Born To Teach. What else would they do?

Well, we're finding out.

Because the answer is-- Lot's of things. Things that pay well enough to support a family. Things that allow the autonomy to exercise professional judgment, to use your brain and your wits. Things that get you to a work environment where you are treated with respect and like a grownup.

What kind of difference would it make if, in policy discussion, we never used the word "teacher" again. What difference would it make if we started talking about people, and about how to encourage people to get the training needed to teach well, and about how to keep those people working in the classroom, and just generally stopped talking about "teacher" as if that were a specific type of meat widget that has no control over its purpose.

I love teaching. I have the best job in the world, and I wouldn't trade a second of my career (well, maybe a couple of seconds) for anything. It fits me so well, and makes me feel as if every part of who I am creates a clear and vivid line that points directly at that classroom. But I also believe that it does take a level of dedication and training and hard work and professionalism and study and growth to teach and to teach well.  I also believe that we have to stop talking about teachers like they are a special brand of unicorn that arrives shining magically from the moment they emerge from the womb. The idea that people are Born To Teach hurts us as a profession, it hurts the schools where we work, it hurts the students who are waiting to be taught, and these days, it is hurting us as a nation.

ICYMI for August 14

 Yeah, I don't have a clever way to tie all this together. These are just some worthwhile reads.

Student Test Scores: How the Sausage Is Made and Why You Should Care

How can I not feature a Brookings article when they finally manage to post something that's not complete baloney? This is a little technical, but overall a pretty good explainer for standardized test scoring

I Am Kind of in It for the Money

Tired of pieces about how teachers are noble and only in the profession because of the deep emotional rewards and so we'll be happy to do the job for $1.98? Here's a counterpoint.

5 Non-negotiables When Designing Instruction

Not the greatest writing instruction post in the history of the world, but still something to chew on as we head back to school.

Choice and Segregation

How the spread of charters destabilized one school district and undid decades of progress on desegregation.

Frack the Vote

Details on one more local election being flooded with dark money from the voucher wolves. No, you don't live there, but we all need to be studying up on how this game is played, because your home court may be the next one to get hit.

Class Privilege 101

Blogger Rita Rathbone makes a guest appearance at Edushyster to talk personally about the culture shock of poor students in the middle class world of college.

No Excuses Amistad School Teaches Joyless Compliance

Depressing look behind the walls of a "no excuses" charter from someone who taught there. This is why these schools need to go away.

We Act Like We Don't Want Talented People To Become Teachers

The Gawker, of all things, runs a piece about teacher pay. You will probably want to avoid the comment section.

UT: Fewer Teachers, Please

I keep waiting to hear something from one of the proponents of free market for education.

After all-- no other part of the trained labor market works like this. If a hospital can't find enough doctors to fill its staff, nobody says, "Well, okay-- let's just let anyone with a college degree work in the operating room."

If you're looking for someone to rebuild your porch, but you only want to pay $1.50, you'll have trouble finding anyone to hire. The first solution that will enter your mind would not be, "Well, I'll just hire some fourth graders instead of experienced construction guys."

If you can't find someone who is willing to babysit your kids, you and your fellow parental unit don't sit down and say, "Well, our problem is that we're defining 'babysitter' too narrowly. Who says it have to be a human? Who says we couldn't just leave our two-year-old at home with the dog? Sure-- the DOG can be our babysitter."

No, as any free marketeer can tell you, if someone will not sell something to you under certain conditions, whether we're talking about buying labor or a toaster, you must offer better conditions. If nobody will sell you a Porsche for $2.99, that does not mean there is an auto shortage.

But in Utah, the state school board has just thrown up their hands and said, "Let's just get our spleens operated on by a twenty-one year old with a music degree."

Starting Monday, any warm body with any college degree-- and no additional training-- can be hired as a teacher.

"I don't view this as an attack on traditional teachers," Thomas said. 

That's Dave Thomas, State School Board vice chairman, who ran as a "common sense conservative." Thomas's resume includes State Senator, but by profession, he is a Civil Deputy County Attorney. [Update: Also, he's apparently also a charter school operator-- see comments below] I am wondering how Thomas would feel if the court said, "We're having too much trouble finding actual attorneys to try cases, so we're going to start letting anyone with a college degree come in here and try cases? Training? Nah-- college degree should do it."

The board says it's not so bad because local districts can still set whatever job requirements they want. But let's think about this? Which districts will be able to recruit actual teachers by offering better conditions for employment, and which districts will be left even further behind in a talent bidding war? Which districts do you suppose will end up filling classrooms with unqualified faux teachers? Yes, this is a plan that will further shaft students and families of poorer communities.

And because it will drive teacher pay further down, and make working conditions worse (which actual experienced and trained teachers will really enjoy working in a hall with a constantly changing roster of not-ready-for-prime-time faux teachers?) It will destabilize schools-- look, we tried just the lightest version of this in PA with a system for letting anyone with a college degree become a substitute, and the turnover is huge because-- shocker-- a lot of civilians who haven't been in a school since they were eighteen nor spent any time studying or training about education--a lot of those people find actual school a lot harder and different from what they imagined.

And it is, absolutely, an attack on "traditional" (aka "actual") teachers. Utahns may feel some desperation about the teacher shortage, but telling the teachers you've got, "Yeah, we're not going to get you real colleagues, because you're probably not all that special anyway. We don't really take you seriously. Now don't you feel like a sucker for spending time and money on a teaching degree? Oh, and if you don't like it-- we can replace you really, really easily"-- that's going to feel a lot like an attack.

Utah will reap the same reward you get when you need surgery and instead some amateur slaps some duct tape on your injury-- you've made matters worse, not better, because you've used a fake solution and you haven't addressed your problem.

If Utah can't find enough teachers, the question to ask is not "Well, can we just redefine 'teacher' and lower the standards?" The question to ask is, "Why don't people want to take teaching jobs in our state?" And then address your actual problems. Because, despite the state motto, if I were a Utah teacher, I would not be feeling all that elevated.

FL: Attacking Children and Teachers

AP reporter Gary Fineout did yeoman's work yesterday, live tweeting the Florida hearing about the retention, in some districts, of third grade students who passed their courses but didn't take Florida's Big Standardized Test (the FSA). There were many low-lights as the hearing unfolded, but this had to be the lowest:

Lawyer for @EducationFL said that reports card are meaningless and don't show if someone can read at grade level

— Gary Fineout (@fineout) August 12, 2016

Yes, that would be the representative of the state's department of education saying that report cards are meaningless.

I'm trying to imagine the wacky good times in faculty meetings and in-service days across Florida next week, as That Person on staff raises their hand and asks the superintendent, "Now that we know the official state policy is that report cards are meaningless, will we just be discontinuing them? Can we replace them with ribbons or maybe give each child a mug that says Good Job?" Does the state's disavowal of report cards mean that teachers no longer have to spend the time to record grades at all-- because that could free up all sorts of time, and allow districts to dump all that costly grade-recording software. Or can teachers just assign grades randomly? Play a little AC-DC?

(Oh, and for those of you who are thinking, "Well, if only the test matters, then why not give the test in September and let every kid who passes it skip the grade," all I can say is, just wait until Competency Based Education hits Florida...)

Especially in the districts like Orange County that are actually pursuing this stupid policy, I hope that teachers stand up, look their superintendent in the eye and ask, "Do you agree with the state that the report cards I fill out for my students are meaningless? Do you agree with the state's contention that the work I do in assessing students is junk and has no value or should carry no weight? Do you agree with the state that my professional judgment as a teacher is worthless?"  And if the superintendent hides in the office (which would be wise because really, how could any self-respecting superintendent face their teaching staff after this bullshit) feel free to send them a copy of this.

But kudos to the state for turning what was merely an attack on children and the rights of their parents into a wholesale attack on the integrity and competence of all teachers in the state. Because if report cards are meaningless, it can only be because all teachers are incompetent boobs. Well played, Florida education department.

The hearing included other lowlights as well. Children and their parents came to testify and all of the district lawyers filed objections-- because if you have to actually look at the children that you're doing this to, the small humans that you are, as the judge put it, "taking hostage," it's a lot harder to justify your brain-dead, abusively stupid policy. You end up looking almost as bad as you should look. Ultimately the children and families did testify.

Orange County mother Michelle Rhea started crying on the stand, says her child is a good kid. "Her report card does mean something."

— Gary Fineout (@fineout) August 12, 2016

9-year-old from Maitland tells judge she was sad when she heard she wouldn't be in 4th grade with her friends

— Gary Fineout (@fineout) August 12, 2016

Grandmother of a 9-year-old Hernando County student being held back says she took accelerated reader tests that put her level at 4.6

— Gary Fineout (@fineout) August 12, 2016

One of the children is now crying after hearing her grandmother testify - judge asks if she wants to says something. She says no.

— Gary Fineout (@fineout) August 12, 2016

The judge seems sympathetic and may rule within a week. Meanwhile, state and district school leaders in Florida don't know what the hell they're doing. One district said the FSA is mandatory; another said it isn't. The state department doesn't know what its regulations say. And all of these people are going to grind up some nine-year-olds just to prove that they are too the bosses of everyone in Florida and everyone must comply or else.

But let me leave you with this clip that popped up during the discussion of the hearing yesterday. It'[s video from a meeting of the Keep Florida Learning Committee. In it, a parent objects, pretty politely, to the use of test results to punish students, teachers and schools. Pam Stewart, Florida's education chief, says that, gosh, test results are never used to punish anybody. That is astonishing enough, but stick with it, because then whatever functionary who's recording the discussion on paper asks the parent to rephrase, because "punish" is just so mean and judgy and suggests that the benevolent overlords of the department have ill intent. God forbid that anyone in the department have their feelings hurt.



I hope a few more people are impolite. I hope superintendents and Pam Stewart and the department are inundated with videos from real live nine-year-olds who are being punished for their test non-compliance. I hope teacher challenge them, directly and vocally, on their dismissal of the teachers' ability and professionalism. Mostly I hope this stupid, stupid rule is thrown out. Not just thrown out, but thrown out accompanied by a public tongue-lashing for the terrible, no-good, really bad, awful superintendents and state officials who thought it would be a good idea to make third grade honor students repeat third grade just to prove that parents, teachers and students must bow before and comply with the state.

CO: Damn, PARCC-- You Had One Job

Well, the lead from this Chalkbeat article gets it.

For a second year in a row, schools across Colorado are back in session and principals are empty-handed.

Somehow the Colorado Department of Education has statewide results, but districts and schools and teachers will have to wait a few more months, because those results will be released "later." And how is that even possible?

The article quotes both a public school principal and a charter CEO, and I guess we can credit PAARC with putting them on the same page, that page being, "Well, in a few months when those results get here, we'll have already set our instructional sales for this year. Maybe someday PAARC data will actually be useful. In the meantime, we're depending on other stuff."

Man, where is the invisible hand of the free market when you need it. Isn't PARCC supposed to be convulsing in paroxysms of excellence, working their butts off to make sure they keep their test-crunching job in one of the nine states (if you count DC) that are still PAARCkified. But no-- Colorado will once again get whatever meager data PARCC can offer months too late to be of any real use. 

Why does anybody bother with this test, again?

The state's comment-- "Well, at least the test results won't arrive as hugely unspeakably late as they did last year." The state's chief testing officer blames the delay on the 6% of the tests taken with paper and pencil. Let's see. Colorado has a little under 900,000 students pre-K through 12. PARCC covers testing for grades 3 through 9. So, very roughly, 450,000.About 10% of Colorado students opted out. Six percent gets us very roughly 24,000. 24,000 paper tests take months to correct. Does PARCC have only one scantron machine? Is it broken? How did they think they were going to manage all the tests involved if a dozen other states hadn't dropped out of the consortium?

The last line of the story is just as telling as the first:

A spokesman from PARCC declined to comment.

There are so many things wrong with the PARCC test, so many things wrong with the whole business of using a large, narrow standardized test to determine whether students are learning or teachers are teaching or schools are any good. But if we are going to maintain the fiction that PARCC somehow yields data that teachers and schools can use to adjust instruction (which they probably can, if by "instruction" you mean "test prep"), then the whizzes at PARCC need to get the data to schools before the school year is largely over. PARCC, you have one job-- to get useful data to schools within a useful time frame. And you blew it again. 

To Save the Village...

There's a new documentary out dealing with the history of the Cabrini Green project in Chicago. 70 Acres in Chicago deals with the many complicated issues of race and urban poverty. But as the Slate article about the documentary notes, it underlines another huge issue with the "improvement" of some urban neighborhoods.

Cabrini building demolition. (Photo: MJ Rizk)












The idea behind these housing project upgrades is always pretty simple. Here comes the city to say to the poor folks living in the projects, "Aren't you tired of living like this? We are going to knock these projects down and replace them with something better. Yes, you are going to have to find another place to live, but when we've finished, you'll be eligible to come back here and live in the newer better place."

That seems like a great idea, a straightforward way to improve quality of live for those living in public-assistance housing.

But as writer Dianna Douglas notes, that's not how it works. Mostly, the people who have been displaced by the new project do not come back. The most successful such project in the country was in Atlanta, and that project brought back a whopping 25% of the original residents. The national average "hovers below 19 percent."

Some of this is simply circumstance. Moving is expensive. Doing it twice is way expensive. But some of this is also design. The Cabrini-Green redevelopment will follow the new model of mixing low-cost housing with higher SES models for a mixed neighborhood. But there's a problem.

The decrepit, infamous Cabrini-Green had 3,600 public housing units. When the rebuilding is complete in 2019, there will be around 2,830 units. Only 30 percent are for families in public housing. Got that? Fewer than 900 units.

And as Douglas notes, the rules for getting into those limited units can be pretty strict.

The message for the urban poor when it comes to gentrification is simple-- we're going to make this neighborhood better by moving you out of it. Meanwhile the actual humans who have been moved out may find themselves in a rougher situation, an equally bad neighborhood, but now without the neighborhood ties, the little bit of social capital that they had previously worked up in the original (now "improved") neighborhood.

Does this apply to charter schools in some cities? Here's a response from a reader in a recent Valerie Strauss/Carol Burris piece at Washington Post

As a mother of four whose children attend public schools and charter schools, I can tell you exactly what's occurring in both public and public charter schools.

I live in a neighborhood in Washington,DC that is undergoing regentrification. It is still prodominately African American but Whites have moved in within the last five years. The Washington Latin Public Charter School which opened about four years ago has a predominately White student body in a predominately African American neighborhood. I have two children that are in Middle School and High School and they are not allowed to attend the school that is in walking distance ( school sits at the end of my block). They have been wait listed for years. I finally just enrolled them in another charter school that has a predominately African American and Hispanic student body. When we drive past the school every morning we see White kids being bused from outside the neighborhood. My kids now know what segregation looks like in 2016. These white students are coming from Eastern market, Tenley Town, and Logan Circle. All of those white kids live outside the neighborhood. I brought it to the attention of the Charter School board here in Washington and nothing changed. As stated in the article the members of Washington Latin School Board are predominately all Attorneys from Georgetown, Yale and Harvard Law School. This means that trying to change the policies on how students are selected will be extremely difficult. It's as if the Charter School Board is afraid of the elected members at this school. 

The save the village, we have to lose the villagers.

But what good does it do to save a neighborhood or a school if we throw away the people? What good does it do to "fix" a neighborhood school when the neighbors are gone and the students come from some other neighborhood? If the actual problem was that the neighborhood or the school were not meeting the needs of the people, how have we solved that problem? The same people who were not served before are still not being served-- they're just not being served somewhere else. Of all the wrong ways to do charter schools, this is the wrongest. 

Resolve To Breathe

For the next couple of weeks, as the beginning of my school year approaches. I'm going to write to renew my resolve to keep focus in my practice. This is one of that series of posts.

Years ago, when I would take a long trip either by myself or with family, my focus stayed on the destination, the goal. Drive-through restaurants so that we wouldn't "lose" time stopping to eat. No more restroom stops that were absolutely necessary. Eyes ahead, foot to the floor-- let's get to where we are going.

It's easy to start teaching like that. You've got that list, whether it's in your curriculum or your pacing guide or just in your head, and by God, you are going to get through that journey before the sands of the school year clock run out. And then before you know it, you're designing units based not on effectiveness or engagement or possible usefulness to the students, but based on speed. "If I cover the major aspects of Romanticism like this, I can polish that off in a day."

Worse, you start to roll over the students. Hopefully it just stays in your head, but there's a voice saying, "Dammit, kids-- stop asking questions and trying to discuss this stuff. We've got material to get through and we don't have time to waste on your yakkity-yak." You're getting unreasonably irritated with that student who doesn't understand something and makes you go back and re-explain a concept when in your head, you know you're supposed to be moving forward.

When you reach that point, you know you have completely lost your sense of what you're supposed to be doing. You've lost the thread, missed the point.

It's time to breathe.

First, there is no pedagogical value in ripping past a bunch of material at high speeds, turning the passing landscape into a blur that nobody can discern or make sense of. Sure, there's such a thing as going too slow, of boring the brains out of everyone in the room. But that's not really a danger at the moment, is it.

Second, and I think this is way more important to remember, this is your students' lives.

At some point, I came to understand that the journey was not a chore to get through so that the adventure, the vacation could begin. The trip was part of it, and it could be enjoyed and savored and experienced just like whatever awaited at the destination.

Our students are not putting in time in school to stock up on knowledge and skills in anticipation of the day, somewhere off in the future, when their lives will actually start. Their lives are not going to start later. Their lives are going on right now. This, while they're sitting in my classroom, right now-- this is their life.

Primary teachers have perhaps the hugest level of responsibility in all of education. Sure, they are teaching the fundamentals of reading and writing and art and science and all the rest. But those primary kids are babies. Their lives have been so short (particularly if you only count what they remember) and they have seen so little, and so the subtext of every single day in class is "This is how the world work. This is what life is like."

That is perhaps less true for my high school students, but still-- this is part of their journey, and there's no reason, no excuse for it to be a senseless breathless blur. When I drag them through high-speed instruction, piling lesson on lesson like a berserk tennis-ball cannon, I'm wasting a day of their life. I'm not teaching reading or writing or literature and I'm certainly not teaching speaking or learning-- I'm teaching that education and life are about keeping your head down, holding on, and waiting for it all to be over.

I fall into this trap with the best of intentions. Over the past decade, my teaching periods have been literally shortened, and my teaching year has been virtually reduced, with days given up to testing, test prep, the rest. One of my colleagues ran the numbers, and my teaching year is essentially about eight weeks shorter than it was a decade ago, and every year it seems I have to grieve those lost weeks again, fight against giving up the instruction that would have filled those dear, departed hours.

But what's gone is gone, and while I try hard to be efficient and clever, I only have the hours I have. I need to breathe, to remember that the pace in my room is sometimes set by my students. When the teachable moment comes, I can't just drive the car over it because, dammit, we've got places to go. When the students need to talk, to process, to ask, my job is to respond to that. My content is important, and every year I promise on Day One that I will do my best to never, ever waste their time. But ultimately I don't serve my content-- I serve my students, and I must remember not to get so caught up to driving to the destination that I treat my students like cargo instead of fellow travelers on a long road through rich and beautiful country.