Embracing Education Productivity?

Rick Hess recently posted a piece that makes a couple of discussion-worthy points while neatly sliding right past a couple of other ones.

In "Why You Should Learn to Love Educational Productivity," Hess argues for an embrace of "productivity," but I'm not sure that word means exactly what he thinks it means.

We get to the "productivity" issue by sliding past a different one. Hess opens by noting that there have been many attacks on charter schooling lately, and he expresses not-so-much surprise:

At one level, this isn't shocking. Education has long been rife with suspicion of ideas that seem too "businesslike." The very term "productivity" can set teeth on edge. 

But here Hess makes two large leaps. First, we leap from charter opposition to ideas that seem too businesslike. But charter opposition is based on far more than any opposition to a businesslike approach to school. For instance, my objections to modern charters include the destruction of democratic and transparent process as well as the charter refusal to serve all students instead of just a chosen few. Second, Hess leaps from "businesslike" to "productivity." But many folks object to a businesslike approach to school because it usually values dollars over students.

So the whole opening of this piece is rather a cheat. However, I'm just going to pretend that Hess wrote, "I'd like to talk about productivity in education now," and move forward.

Hess argues that we should not resist "productivity" because it's just an attempt to make best use of resources. "... productivity itself simply means being able to do more good for more kids." I'll just note here that he didn't use "efficient," most likely because efficiency is directly opposed to excellence. But now Hess's point gets interesting.

Skepticism about "productivity" is sometimes coupled with doubts about the value of new technologies. As the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously remarked, producing a Mozart quartet two centuries ago required four musicians, four stringed instruments, and, say, 35 minutes. Producing the same Mozart quartet today, he said, requires the same resources.

Moynihan's analogy, while correct, is ultimately misleading when applied to schooling. In the arts, what has changed over two centuries is that radio, CDs, television, and digital media have profoundly increased the number of people able to hear and appreciate a given performance—at an ever-decreasing cost. 

But in Hess's example, the musicians do not produce any more Mozart than they ever did, nor do they need fewer resources to do so. They use the same resources, the same time, the same effort, and the same equipment; and they create the same amount of product as ever. Their productivity has not changed.

What has changed is the consumers' ability to consume. What we have increased is some thing we don't even have a word for-- consumertivity. We had made it easier for audiences to consume some version of the product. A somewhat debased, lower-quality version of the product but, as Hess correctly notes, a better version of the product than none at all, "a passable version of the experience to millions who would have otherwise never been able to experience the original."

Productivity and consumertivity are two different things that technophiles-- particularly those working the education biz-- frequently get confused.

Increased productivity by definition requires the production of more product. Hess's Mozart quartet does not increase productivity until they play several more pieces-- a feat they cannot accomplish without more resources,  more rehearsal, and more time for creating the actual performance. Only increased consumertivity allows increased customers without having to invest more time and resources in the making process.

Increased consumertivity is the cheap way to reach more customers. Increased productivity costs you more time and resources. In the business world, you make that investment in hopes that it will make itself back--plus profit. But that's not how it works when the "product" is a human service.

So when it comes to increased consumertivity in teaching, we're talking Khan Academy or some piece of software, where the makers only have to produce one product, but an infinite number of consumers can take it in. And we can do that without having the "teacher" or programmer expend any more time or resources. When Hess says this:

In schooling, technologies today offer the promise of extending the impact of the instruction, tutoring, and mentoring of a terrific teacher, so that she can coach, tutor, or instruct hundreds with the same energy she once expended reaching only five or twenty-five. 

I have to disagree. Instruction, tutoring and mentoring are "products" that are the unique result of a specific relationship. And that productivity can't be increased-- and neither can the consumertivity.

Consider a surgeon. We cannot increase the consumertivity of the surgeon's work, because that surgeon can only operate on one patient at a time. There's no way to scale things of technofy the surgery so that an infinite number of patients can have their spleens rotated by the surgeon's single operation. To increase the surgeon's productivity, you'll have to find ways to get more patients under that knife, and that is going to take more time and more resources. A surgeon cannot operate on hundreds of patients with the same resources used for five or twenty-five operations.

Ditto real teaching. You can only increase consumertivity when the arrow moves one way; the Mozart quartet flows toward the audience, but nothing flows the other way (yes, I know that's not strictly true, but let's skip that for the moment). Khan Academy lessons flow only one direction-- nothing flows back to the teacher. When the arrow flows in only one direction, you can make it branch into a thousand arrows.

But in surgery or actual teaching, the arrows flow both ways. The surgeon has to see and hear and watch and respond to the patient; surgery cannot, like a Khan Academy lesson, be performed blind. Likewise, the arrows of teaching flow both ways; you cannot run a class discussion when you cannot see or hear the class.

Every mentoring, coaching or tutoring relationship takes its own time and resources. As anyone who has ever cheated on their spouse can tell you, you cannot run multiple relationships with the same resources used for just one.

What reformsters really want to increase is consumertivity. Increasing consumertivity brings in more customers with little increase in time or resources spent on production. But consumertivity in teaching cannot be increased, unless you are willing to settle for a thin shadow of the real thing-- and why should you want to other than to make operating charter businesses cheaper and more profitable. Great for them; not so much for students.

It's possible that I'm missing part of Hess's point, because he wraps up with this quote from Cathy Davidson (Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn) :

In fact, I believe that if teachers can be replaced by computers, they should be. By that I mean if a teacher offers nothing that [a] child can't get from a computer screen, then your child might as well be learning online. On the other hand, no screen will ever replace a creative, engaged, interactive, relevant, and inspiring teacher, especially one who takes advantage of the precious face-to-face experience of people learning together.

I don't entirely disagree, but this, to me, argues against the rest of Hess's article. There are ways to increase teacher productivity by doing things like taking away tasks like hall monitoring and soul-sucking meetings. Heck, hire every teacher a personal secretary. But that doesn't get you the kind of scale Hess is talking about. Either you increase consumertivity by degrading the teaching "product," or you-- well, I can't think of any way to create the kind of superteachers who actually really personally teach hundreds of students at once.

Scaling up remains an ed reform dream, but increased productivity requires money, and increased consumertivity requires a process that can be made easily accessible to many consumers. Neither seems like a good fit for our current educational landscape. This may be one more reason that businesslike approach to schools is just a bad idea.

Fed's Stupid Teacher Prep Program Rules

The feds have released their rules governing teacher preparation programs, and they are just as stupid as they have promised to be all along.

How stupid? Kate Walsh of the impossible-to-take-seriously National Council on Teacher Quality saw the rules and pronounced them even "better" than she had expected, with extra-super-accountability.

The genius portion is the part that links college teacher program ratings to student results on the Big Standardized Test. Chris goes to Wossamotta U's teaching program, then gets a job at Struggling High School, where Chris is assigned the bottom rung on the remedial track. Chris's students do poorly on the BS Test, and therefor Wossamotta U's teacher program is downgraded, perhaps even loses some of its nifty federal grants. But wait-- it gets worse-- imagine that Chris is a shop or history teacher, in one of those states where Chris's VAM score is based on students Chris doesn't have in class taking a test about subject matter that Chris doesn't teach. And now Wossamotta U's teacher program still gets downgraded.

There are a couple of obvious outcomes of a policy like this, the most obvious and damning being that if Wossamotta U's program wants to survive, it has to avoid sending its graduates to low-performing (aka poor and under-resourced) schools. And since teachers most commonly teach somewhere near their community of origin, that means Wossamotta U will definitely consider not accepting students from poor and under-resourced communities.

This is a terrible, terrible, counter-productive, stupid idea, basing the evaluation of a system on bad data that is three or four degrees of separation away from what we're trying to evaluate and completely beyond the control of the program being evaluated.

But let's pretend it isn't. If this is actually genius, then maybe we can apply the same principle of long-distance evaluation in other ways.

Let's evaluate all college programs based on this sort of reasoning. Let's check on how nice a home each graduate lives in, and how attractive their spouses are. After all, if the graduates are living in lousy housing with an ugly partner, or no partner at all, that represents a failure of their college degree.

Let's try this with medicine. If people are well-cared for, then that healthiness should influence their immediate community. So let's evaluate your doctor based on the number of times that an ambulance is called to your neighbor's house.

Or evaluating parenting. If I'm a good parent, then my child will seek out a good partner, who will themselves have a good parents, whose good parenting should apply to all of their children. So my parenting can be effectively judged by looking at the annual income and number of arrest warrants for my child's brother-in-law.

The new federal rule also suggest that we have not yet fully tapped the valuable data generated by a badly-written narrow standardized bubble test taken by bored children who may or may not even try. This data is magical and wondrous, so let's really put it to work.

Hungry children can't do well on a test, so let's use results from the BS Tests to evaluate the school's cafeteria. And children who have had a chaotic ride to school would be distracted and unfocused, so let's use the BS Test to evaluate the bus company for the district. In fact, let's use the test results to evaluate the manufacturer of the buses. And since the children sit in chairs, at desks, we can justly use the test results to evaluate the quality of those tables and chairs-- in fact, let's go ahead and use test results to evaluate the schools of the workers who manufactured and designed the tables and chairs.

Of course, we could also use test results to evaluate the work of officials who set education policy, and if test results fail to go up annually, we could simply fire all those officials, whether they are officially appointed ones like John King or unofficially self-appointed ones like Bill Gates. But that would just be crazy talk. Almost as crazy as doing an actual evaluation of tests themselves. Those holy instruments may be used to evaluate everything in sight, but the sacred magical tests themselves must never be questioned, remaining in place as the twisted foundation of one wobbly edifice after another.

Closing the Achievement Gap

There are some educational issues that have become so covered with layers and layers of detail and nuance and policy and jargon and baloney and nature's own fertilizer that it can become difficult to see the relatively simple problem that lies beneath the giant mounds of stuff.

Closing the achievement gap is one such issue. It's the subject of considerable discussion and policy wrangling, and is the raison d'etre given for a variety of programs. But let's talk about what's really going on here. There are two ways to discuss closing the achievement gap, and only one of them is remotely useful.

Let's say that all students have to run a 5K race. The distance between the lead runners and the last-place runners is our Racing Gap.

If we're going to close the gap in one race, here's what we have to do. Chris is up front, leading the pack. Pat is far behind. Pat is behind because Pat runs slower. If we get Pat to run as fast as Chris, that just keeps the gap static. In order to close the gap, Pat-- who is demonstrably our slowest runner-- must run faster than Chris-- who is demonstrably our fastest runner.

This is nuts.

We can close this achievement gap one of two ways-- we can either strap Pat to a rocket or car or other faster-than-human conveyance, or we can weigh Chris down, Harrison Bergeron-style, so that Chris runs slower. Neither option is okay.

Trying to get everyone to run faster will help them beat their old times, but it will not close the gap. In fact, it will probably make it worse, just as giving all workers a 10% raise would make the pay gap worse.

Now, the achievement gap is not a completely useless construct if I work on a larger scale. If I look at the gaps over long stretches of time, I might see some trends that help me diagnose a problem. If Chris's parents beat Pat's parents by twice (or half) as much as Chris beats Pat, that might suggest that something has changed (though good luck narrowing down what, exactly).

But that's only a sort-of-useful diagnostic tool. Whether gap widens or narrows is symptomatic of something, but it's far more useful to try to address underlying problems than to simply try to make the symptom go away. The focus on closing the achievement gap is the same sort of myopic focus on massaging the numbers instead of addressing reality that infects so much of reformsterdom and leads us to ridiculous solutions like trying to figure out ways to make the slowest runners run faster than everyone else.

FL: Oh, Come On Now!

I don't even want to be still writing about this story, but apparently Florida's flock of school administrators include some of the most terrible people ever. So here we are.

You will recall that several Florida parents sued their district, the state, and anyone else connected to the baloney-faced rule about refusing to pass third graders who hadn't scored on the third grade reading Big Standardized Test. Along the way, the state offered the defense that teacher-made report cards are meaningless, which makes one wonder if Florida doesn't intend to save money by completely defunding schools and just sending students to test centers to take their uber-important BS Tests.

Nobody in power in Florida was asking if the flunk-third-grade policy was even a valid or viable one (spoiler alert-- it isn't). They were just going to hold the line so that students would be forced to bow at the altar of the Holy Test.

Hey! Who gave that bird permission to fly without taking a flight test!

The ultimate result of this case was that children in particular and common sense in general won. A student who, for instance, was an honor student with straight A's in reading should not have to take the BS Test in order to be passed to fourth grade. The judge gave a pretty clear reading of the law, and that really should have been it, right?



Not right. Which is exactly how we will now start describing certain Florida administrators. The court said, "Put these kids in fourth grade." Some districts said, "Oopsies-- we just don't seem to have a seat for them in the school they used to attend."

Now several school districts have, predictably, appealed the ruling, and reportedly hiring a busload of lawyers to do it while the parents scrape together what they can to hire a couple of pros. Because really-- if we start letting students advance grades based purely on academic skills, teacher assessments, and demonstrated ability, then mere anarchy will be loosed upon the world, and some rough beast will soon be slouching toward fourth grade, demanding to be admitted. Nobody can disrespect the BS Test. These rowdy nine-year-olds must be put in their places. No, wait. These rowdy nine-year-olds must NOT be put in their places, even if the court says they must.

It has now been about a month since the latest move in this lumpy dance. Hernando schools refused to admit the fourth grade students, claiming that it was being swell by offering them the chance to do a testing portfolio to advance, which is kind of pretty much what the judge told them was not okay in the first place. Meanwhile, by appealing the ruling, the district put a stay on the execution of the judge's order. In other words, the alleged grown-ups of the district chose to play legal maneuvering games while the clock is ticking on the students' school year. A request to vacate the stay was denied by Gievers, mostly because the parents had gotten their children into home schooling. So in other words, if they had gone ahead and left their children stuck in the wrong assignment at school, taking actual damage from the district's decision, they'd have been in a better legal position. Sigh.

By the end of September, Hernando schools were showing signs of-- well, this article says cracks are appearing in the wall, but I believe the headline writer is mistaken.  A real change in Hernando would be to, well, comply with the Florida law that requires districts to provide a true portfolio option. No, they're going to stay proudly illegal on that point. Instead, they have found what they think might be an okay standardized test to substitute for its other standardized tests. I do not live in Florida, and I don't have a child in Hernando county, so I think that as an observer with no vested interest, I can go ahead and say that Hernando school administration sucks.

This whole ugly mess continues to be proof positive that state and district officials in Florida have exactly zero interest in students and their learning. Nobody is saying, "How can we best determine whether a student has the necessary reading skills." This whole case is about one question-- "How can we force these families to comply with our demand that all students take a BS Test." This is not about meeting the needs of students; this is about forcing students to meet the demands of the school system. This is indefensible crap, and it should have been done months ago. Shame on you, Florida.

Community

I am just emerging from the final sprint of my seasonal fall marathon. I've been directing a community theater production of Disney's Little Mermaid, a show which may not have a great deal of intellectual heft, but which does include a great number of moving parts.

The show ran for two weekends in our community theater, with the second weekend corresponding with our local festival. As one of the gazillion places that John Chapman turned up in his life, we have appropriated him and fall and named it Applefest, and it has grown into a regional behemoth of a festival. It always gives me a great deal to do and a great deal to think about after the dust has settled.

Things already hopping at 8 am

Fall festivals are a century-old tradition. 1920 is a watershed year in US census history-- for the first time there were more city dwellers than country- and small town folks. Small towns found it necessary to name streets when previously "Up over behind Wally Schweibeck's house" had been good enough. And because so many people were leaving their small town origins behind, it became A Thing to have a fall festival, sometime when the fall harvest was winding down but before the snow was descending. Folks would come back to the old hometown for a week or a weekend, and the town would throw a party. A century ago, Franklin, like many other places, held a full-blown Old Home Week every five years or so, and while the custom of old home weeks or harvest home festivals faded, it still holds on in some places as Homecoming.

Applefest features booths and crafts and on Saturday and Sunday we shut down the street for a 5K race and a car show, plus appearances by the high school band. There's an apple pancake breakfast, and all manner of fried foods and advanced sugar delivery systems, and live performers in all corners. But the centerpiece of the festival is the people. Filling the small town to the brim are plenty of touristy types, but like the marshmallows in Lucky Charms, there's a constant mix of local folks from all across the country. Keep walking and you will meet old friends and, if you're a teacher, lots of former students. Even when I blank on the name, I'm happy to see the face, hear the stories, find out how folks are doing.

Thursday night the high school's Hall of Fame (yes, we have one-- everybody should) inducted my friend and former band director, and people turned out from all over for that event, a reminder of how far and wide his influence stretches. Not just for those students who became professional musicians or teachers, but all the folks who grew up to make music an integral part of their lives.

Organizing picture with gangsta fish

Meanwhile, I was wrapping up nine weeks of show preparation with a cast that included a wide variety of folks from all over the region, including some old friends, some kids of old friends, and some interesting new people. Children of a guy I used to play in a band with. The nephew of a woman I took to her junior prom about 44 years ago. My son and his fiance were up to see the show, and to talk to the theater manager because they are getting married on this same stage in a few months, because they met doing theater here together years ago.

My wife walked in the 5K race while I played on the bandstand with our 160-year-old town band. She edged me out in the Who Will Run Into More Students contest. And at every performance of the show, a few hundred little girls ooh-ed and ahh-ed and called out encouragement to Ariel, absolutely carried away in wonder and joy and hearts chock full of the feels.

All right, I'm getting a little rambly, but fairly intense, sleep-deprivey weekends like this remind me of just how rich and deep and wide the web is that ties us together in this community. And yes, there are a host of issues that go with small town life and some of them are pretty ugly. But still.

For one thing, I think small town's solve some of the issues of accountability fairly organically. Not a day goes by that I do not face a student, a student's family member, or a former student. If I stink up my classroom, I have to face the people who breathe in that stink day after day after day. Where I live, nobody is separated a full six degrees from anyone. Former students, current students, or families of both (and after a few decades, there is some overlap in that Venn diagram) fix my car, pack my groceries, wait on my table, sit with me in band, perform in shows with me, pass me on the street. This is the kind of accountability that corporate types have studiously avoided for years-- I must daily look the people whose lives I affect right in the eye.

Car show day.

 
For another thing, while we are certainly not as diverse as some cities, what diversity we have is all mushed in together. The great web of connections and humanity that binds us is visible across much of its span. Human beings are so varied and rich and just plain cool. When I think of how much broader and richer and varied human experience is beyond the borders of my little corner of the world, I am just amazed. How anybody ever gets it into their head that standardizing human beings or their experience into one-size-fits-all uniformity is, on some days, absolutely beyond me. We are a huge, rich people, and I reject those whose vision for us is tiny and cramped and meager. Let's be a community, and let's be a big one.

Why Are Teachers So Stressed?

Last week at the Atlantic, teacher-author Timothy Walker took a broad look at the reports of teacher stress (a good follow-up to his earlier piece on teacher burnout). Walker did a good job of gathering up the current data on teacher stress, but he stopped short of one huge question. On twitter he opened the door to that question, so I'm going to go ahead and step through it.

Walker's compendium of current reports is a good one. Here's the Gallup report from 2014. The research brief out of Penn State this year. The admittedly unscientific survey by AFT and the BATs. He cites a representative sampling of the ubiquitous "Why I'm Quitting Teaching" letters that are now as common as empty political promises to elevate the teaching profession. And he traces the connections between teacher stress and students issues, as well as bringing in the Learning Policy Institute's recent report tying teacher stress to the huge loss of veteran teachers, in turn tied to the teacher "shortage." (He might also have folded in LPI's work showing that veteran teachers are hugely beneficial, and therefor worth holding onto.) And he wraps it up with some anecdotal data from Mike Anderson (The Well-Balanced Teacher), a traveling ed consultant.

Walker's piece makes one point exceedingly well-- there's reason to believe that teaching has become a hugely stressful line of work. His piece and the pieces that he links to suggest some causes for that (as does somebody at the Atlantic, who made the tab title of the piece "Testing, Common Core Place Additional Stress on Teachers"). Walker lumps much of it together as "an abundance of professional demands" without either the training nor the time to meet those demands. Several of the reports he cites point to the lack of autonomy and power that teachers now live with, a feeling of no control over their own work. Anderson cites the "flavor of the month" approach to instructional programs and reforms, and Anderson also believes that the barrage of demands creates feelings of incompetence among teachers.

[T]he system that we have right now in America, which is focusing on test scores and accountability, and has teachers being pulled in so many different directions at once, has got so many different pressures coming from so many different places. It’s almost like a recipe for making people feel incompetent.

Hmm. Yeah, it kind of is, isn't it.

Had Walker's editor asked for another 500 words or so, this is the spot where he might have moved on to ask why, exactly, all this stressy weight is being loaded onto teacher shoulders, as well as the related question-- is this a bug or a feature?

Let's consider some possibilities.

Oopsies 

I suppose it's possible that some reformsters simply had no idea that uber-stressed teachers would be a side effect of the reform movement. "When we get these Common Core standards launched," they told themselves, "teachers will be grateful that we have provided useful standards that make their professional lives so much better. They will be delighted that standardized testing provides such a fine measure of their work."

Yeah, it's a stretch, but remember all the folks who were certain that the only thing wrong with the Core was that it wasn't implemented quite right. If we just get teachers a little more Professional Development, a thousand beautiful Common Core blossoms will bloom, just like we'll be greeted as liberators in Iraq (where the war will be over in months).

In other words, we should never overlook the possibility that some folks are so completely divorced from reality that the only future they can see is the one that manages to bleed through their rose-colored contact lenses.

Of course, just as virtually everyone has grasped that the Mission was not Accomplished quite as soon as expected, one would have to be exceptionally thick not to notice that the rise of reformsterdom has, in fact, stressed a whole bunch of past, present and future teachers right out of the profession. So let's move on to the next group--

Tough Love

This would be the reformy crowd that always knew that corporate ed reform would lead to a lot of stress and strain for teachers, but they figured that was also the good. They're the tough camp counselor slapping the cupcake out of the fat kids' hands. The teaching profession is fat and flabby and needs to be shaped up. Education should be

We need to shake the education tree to shake out the dead wood. We need to stop coddling children and start demanding results (time to start flunking those lazy eight year olds who won't pass their reading tests). School system heads need to act like CEO's so that there will be none of this union protection for the slackers who aren't producing the kind of products we need. Yes, right-sizing any organization can be painful, but it's how we slough off the fat and get those lean, mean corporate profits desired outcomes.

We might also include the reformsters who were dedicated to rooting out the Bad Teachers, like the governor of New York who decided that if two thirds of students were bombing the Big Standardized Test, that must mean that two thirds of all teachers stink, and we'd better keep tweaking the teacher eval system until it's finding us as many crappy teachers as we already know are out there.

These folks knew that reform would create stress for teachers, and they figured that was a good thing because teachers have been fat and happy for too long. It will be better for everyone, they figure, if the system is put through some stress in the process of getting straightened out.

So what?

Then there are the reformsters who knew that teachers would find reform stressful for the same reason that animals find forest fires stressful.

For some the intent has been to redefine what a teaching career means in the same way that McDonalds redefined what it means to be a cook. Rather than trained high-skill professionals, these reformsters want teachers who are easily-replaceable content delivery systems, who simply walk through teacher-proofed programs-in-a-box (if it's Tuesday, you must be on Module 12) and move on before they can demand high salaries, pension payments, or a say in how the school is run. Old school teachers have a hard time fitting into this new role in the same way that The Rock has a hard time fitting into a costume made for a Munchkin. Stressful.

Other reformsters are thinking bigger, longing for more New Orleans-style reform where the public schools are swept away, to be replaced with charters and chains, perfectly refined systems of schools where teachers can come and go and deliver identical content to compliant students.

Of course, where there is no Hurricane Katrina, other crises must be created. Starve the schools for resources. Force them to be judged by terrible B S Tests, stewed in a VAM system that generates ratings so randomly that teachers have to feel that their fate rests on a roll of the data dice.

Stressful? Sure. It's not that these reformsters intend for teachers to feel stress. But these reformsters do intend to bulldoze away the old guard of teachers, and if that's stressful for them, oh well.

The other source of stress ?

Divining intent from results is a tricky business. I teach teenagers, so I have had the conversation a few million times in which we note that just because Chris did something that makes you feel sad, it does not actually follow that Chris intended to make you sad.

But when Chris punches you in the face, and then you point out that it's happening, but Chris goes ahead and punches you in the face some more-- well, at some point you can legitimately infer that the face-punching is intentional, purposeful, and done with full knowledge that you don't like it. Badly written, misused BS Tests are a punch in the face. Making them the center of the school system is another one. Judging schools and teachers based on bad data run through bad magical formulas is a punch in the face. Undermining, demeaning and diminishing the profession is a punch in the face. Stripping the profession of autonomy and freedom to pursue our craft so that we can seek out the best for our students-- that's a punch in the face with a thousand fists.

But for at least a decade, teachers have been inflicting another sort of stress on themselves. I think we've all heard someone say it in a lounge, in a staff meeting, in a classroom-- "It's almost like they actually want us to fail these tests. It's like they actually want the school to look bad." But so many of us don't really want to believe that the people who are supposed to be helping us make schools useful, functional, nurturing places are actually lined up against us-- that's just so scary, so upsetting, so frustrating, so rage-inducing, even so hopeless an idea, that some of us convince ourselves that just couldn't be what's going on. And then we get the extra stress of managing the cognitive dissonance, of holding onto a happier view of the world through the heavy lifting of denial. Like abused children, some teachers deal with the dissonance by telling themselves, "It must be me. It must be my fault. There must be something wrong with me." And we try to keep from creating more of the failure that we never actually manufactured in the first place. Now that is stressful.

Bug or feature?

Yeah, that was my question. And I guess my answer is that for some reformsters it's a bug, for more reformsters it's a feature, and for still other reformsters, it's just a byproduct of trying to privatize and remake a nation's entire education system, the side effect of living in a building that others are trying to demolish while you're still in it with children.

Here's what the current teachers stress is not-- some sort of act of God, some natural event that just happened to land on this generation of teachers. It's the result of deliberate actions, a purposeful assault on the public education system. It's not an accident. It's not a quirk of history on the march. 


The stress for teachers is ultimately the same stress that many professions that have been stripped of their professionalism (nursing, health care, even lawyers), and whether it's the result of ignorance or indifference, the challenge is how much we think we can stand, fight back against, or overcome. I believe we will win in the long run, but that doesn't mean that everyone can stay in the race until we make it home again. All we can do is keep running as hard and long as we can.

Sure, it's stressful. But the most important thing to remember about the stress is that it exists only because we care about the work, because we care about doing the best we can for our so-very-important charges. We feel the stress precisely because we are trying to keep running, no matter what they throw at us or how badly they break the road. We can regret that we were born to teach in these times, and that we face such unnecessary and destructive obstacles. But no matter the stress, we should never regret that we cared enough to try to do some of the most important work in the world.

Don't Wait for the Authorities

This morning we had some professional development from our local police department, The training centered around the ALICE method of dealing with an active shooter. What are we supposed to do when there's an active killer in the building?

ALICE focuses on three choices-- run, hide or fight. There were some specifics mixed, including some of the specifics of blockading a classroom door and making the mental and emotional jump to deciding you will actively, aggressively hurt your attacker. We got into some of the specifics of my building and the classrooms in it. We watched some videos. It was mostly pretty disturbing.

I'm not here to critique the methods mentioned in the presentation, nor am I going to write one more piece reflecting on the general awfulness of a world in which this kind of PD session makes sense for public school teachers and staff. I'm focusing on one moment that stood out.

After being presented with various scenarios and some of the ins and outs of how to respond, we were given one other simple message. That message was that while all three of these were options, it would be up to us as classroom teachers to choose the option that seemed best under the circumstances-- what we knew (or didn't) about the killer, our own students, the situation of our room, what seemed best in the moment.

Our police chief sent a clear message-- while he could give us options, it would be up to us to use our judgment.

Granted, this was a far different context than  instructional PD, but I was still struck by hearing a presenter say, "I'm not here to tell you what to do or what to choose. We have to trust you to use your best judgment."

How rare is it for teachers to hear that message? As opposed to the many sessions in which a presenter says, "I am here to tell you How This Must Be Done." A Common Core aligned-style set of instructions would tell us that we must always respond to every active killer situation with the exact same behavior. "It's important to know," experts would tell us, "that whenever an active shooter walks into any building in this country, the students will react exactly the same way."

The chief said something else striking-- he not only underlined the need for us to use our individual judgment in that moment, but he also kept saying that he was giving us permission to.

Now, I didn't take that as him being all high and mighty and suggesting that we had never previously been free to act without his permission. Instead, what I heard was him saying that we needed to worry less about what we were "supposed" to do, needed to worry less about whether we were following some official policy. Teachers really do worry often and much about whether we are behaving as we are "supposed." We are often lousy rebels. The police were telling us that we should go ahead and rebel, that we should worry less about following some set of rules and worry more about doing whatever it takes to save our students.

These evens, we were told, are generally over in ten to fifteen minutes. Sometimes less. It will likely all be over before any authorities to arrive, so don't wait for them. If it's happening where you are, you are on your own. Use your common sense. Make your best judgment.

It was sobering and more than a little bit depressing. But it was also a bit bracing to hear the message that as classroom teachers, we are the ones who are on the scene. We are the ones in the best position to see what needs to be done, and to do it. The modern message in education is that teachers should not be making any of the important decisions, that teachers should be following the rules and guidelines and programs laid out by the Important People. Don't try to come up with anything on your own. Wait for word from the authorities.

I don't expect to ever have to use my judgment in an active shooter situation (though I have some plans for such an occasion). The vast majority of us never will. But the session was reminder that in the classroom, in maters big and small, educational and emergency, we are the boots on the ground, the folks who are on the scene before first responders even hit the streets. It is up to us to choose, to decide, to lead, to teach. We don't need to wait for the authorities, because we are authorities, and we are already here. Anyone who says otherwise simply doesn't understand the situation.