ICYMI: Goodies for the week (10/16)

Here's some reading for the day. remember to share the stuff you like; only you can prevent good writing from vanishing into the white noise of the interwebs.

Before We Create Opportunity School Districts..

A Georgia teacher talks about what Opportunity District threats look like on the ground, and what would be a better way to serve the students.

Independent Reading: A Research Based Defense 

This practice has been around forever. When I first started teaching it was Middle School Sustained Silent Reading, shortened to MSSR by the school and called Misssery by the students. But look-- we've finally got some research to back it up.

The Nine Types of People Ruining Your School Email

A fun article. You should send it to everyone on your staff.

California's Charter Mess

Third in a series of four pieces by Carol Burris showing just how big a mess California's charter biz has become

VAM-based Chaos in Florida

How just one district is being upended and trashed by Florida's mandatory VAM-based baloney.

Fed-up Philly Teachers Jumping Ship

Philadelphia continues to find ways to drive teachers away-- and it's working.

The Battle of Hastings: What's Behind the Netflix CEO's Fight To Charterize Public Schools

A more in-depth look at Reed Hastings and his goal of doing away with public education

Pruning Teacher Education

John Merrow takes a look at the USED's new rules for evaluating and shutting down teacher education programs.

To Write or Not To Write

I consider this a question on the order of  "To eat or not to eat," but somehow there are teachers of writing in the world who don't write themselves. This essay answers that problem.

What My Students Have Led Me To Believe 

Finally, from Emily Kaplan, a great way to kick off the week.

There Are More Important Things

This is Homecoming week at my high school; Thursday parade, Friday game, and tonight, the Big Dance. It's a big deal. I've been the Student Council adviser in charge of all this stuff for years and years now, and I never cease to be amazed at how worked up some students get about it. After all, it is the first Big Dance of the year, and for our freshpersons, the first Big dance of their entire high school career. Feelings run high. It's not really the Homecoming dance until some freshperson is crying in the lobby.

But watching the teenaged angst in bloom, it occurs to me once again that one of our more treasured debates in education is a little overwrought and misplaced itself.

Teenaged angst is so fraught because students are still trying to work out the sense of perspective. Did my friend's unkind comment to me just now really signal the End of the World, or does it just feel like it, or is there even any difference between the two things? When that other person just touched my hand, did that mean a little? A lot? Everything? Is anybody else's heart beating as hard as mine right this second? This will all be better in five or ten years? I'll look back on this fondly in five or ten years!? Are you freaking kidding me, Old Person?? Five or ten years is practically forever!

The scale of personal stakes gets even tougher for students who are dealing with more adult-style issues-- family troubles, children of their own, scraping enough money together for things like food and heat. Abuse. Neglect. Abuse and neglect that do not jump out like an obvious after-school special, so it's hard for anyone to know, to judge.

In the education debates, we love to debate the importance of poverty. Reformsters like to accuse folks of using poverty as an excuse for poor student achievement. They accuse pro-public-edsters of claiming that poor kids can't achieve anything. Meanwhile, reformsters make the argument that if we just boost student achievement, those students will lift right up out of poverty. We can't fail to push students to achieve just because they're poor, say the reformsters. We can't pretend that poverty doesn't have a profound effect on how students learn, say the rest of us.

But I watch all the sturm and drang of this week and wonder once again if we're not just overthinking this.

When you're young, and especially when you're young and poor, there are just more important things.

When you are worried if you will be safe at home tonight, if you will be screamed at or hit for reasons you can't even predict, unlocking the secrets of participial phrases just doesn't seem like the most important thing in your life.

When you are tired because there was no heat in your home last night, and tense because you know there won't be any heat again tonight, gaining a deeper understanding of quadratic equations is just not the most important thing in your life.

When you know your single parents is hurting and struggling to provide enough for you, and you're hungry because there isn't much food in the house and there still won't be tonight, coming up with the right answer for the Big Standardized Test is not the most important thing in your life.

And if you are a young person with a child of your own, worrying about how to provide for that child and care for that child, making sure that you use the right formula for constructing open response answers on yor BS Test is just not remotely the most important thing in your life.

The ongoing debate about the roll of poverty in student achievement often assumes a framework not in evidence-- that poverty is some sort of obstacle standing between students and their academic achievement on a Big Standardized Test. We spend a lot of time arguing about what kind of obstacle poverty constitutes, and not nearly enough time examining our assumption that pumping out those student achievement numbers is any sort of priority or important factor in the lives of the students.

We spend a lot of time agreeing and asserting that school is a super-important factor that will Make All the Difference and therefor is of Utmost Importance, and if we're not careful, we kind of forget to check with students to see if they got the memo. It would be easy to see why they might not have-- there's plenty of evidence that their future trajectory has more to do with their family's class and not educational achievement, and that translates into their vision of the future being defined by what they see around them. Plus, there's that whole future thing ("This education biz will pay off maybe in ten years or so? Are you freaking kidding me, old person?")

But mostly they are kids, with lives. We have this weird tendency to forget that children still have lives of their own, even if they are children. Occasionally we take a super-toxic approach to the issue (What is the no excuses approach except a demand that students suppress, ignore and otherwise drop all concern in their own actual lives).

They are small people with lives, concerns, priorities, fears, issues, struggles and questions about how to sort it all out. These are all important to the students in our classrooms. One of the worst things I can do in my classroom is demand that in order to be heard, seen, or cared about, students must drop their own list of life concerns and substitute the list that I thrust in their faces. But some of us (even the best of us on bad days) get really pissy about this business. The child is lazy. The child is obstinate. The child is oppositional defiant. The child is an ass.

No.

There are just more important things.

Almost every teacher has a story, though we don't like to tell them and when we do, they are tinged with regret. My very first year in a classroom, I had a student who would put his head down every other day, sometimes full on asleep. How disrespectful! What a jerk! I kept him after class, prepared to read him the riot act, to mount a towering explanation of how missing even a period of my scintilating instruction was a loss to him, to his future. And then he explained (and someone else later confirmed for me) that he was working two jobs so that he could afford a lawyer so that he could fight his ex to retain partial custody of their child and it was killing him but (and this where his eyes welled up) that child was so very important to him and he wanted to be sure that he was in a position to help her have a good life. But he promised the next day he would try to pay better attention while I was explaining a five-paragraph essay. Yeah, at that point somebody was feeling like a jerk, all right.

There are more important things.

Look, I love my job, and I do my job as well as I can because I believe it's hugely important. But sometimes, there are more important things. One of the privileges of wealth is that most of those things are well taken care of by other folks. One of the problems of poverty is that issues other folks don't even think about (It's cold out. Do I have a coat today?) can swallow up a whole day's worth of worry. And our time spent trying to sort out pedagogy and policy and instruction and curriculum and standards is all well-spent. But I have to think that some days, it all boils down to the simple fact that students are human beings who have more important things to worry about than what answer to click on in a Big Standardized Test that won't solve a single problem in their lives.

Student$Fir$tNY Bankrolls GOP

StudentsFirstNY launched back in 2012, an Empire State spin-off of the StudentsFirst orgnization launched by former DC chancellor, She Who Will Not Be Named. She was always nominally a Democrat (check out this awesomely non-prescient article from 2012 that says she's taking over the Democratic Party), but the NY branch of StudentsFirst was formed by Jenny Sedlis, who worked with Eva Moskowitz (theoretically a Democrat) to build Success Academy, with an assist from Joel Klein (also theoretically a Democrat) for the express purpose of backing Mayor Mike Bloomberg (originally Democrat, elected as mayor as Republican, but later switched to Independent because when you're really rich, you just form your own party).

StudentsFirstNY has thrown lots of its weight behind busting the union more rigorous and punishing teacher evaluations and flexing its political muscles, as well as pursuing the Moskowitzian ideal of a world in which charter school operators don't ever have to answer to anyone about anything but can just sit on their giant pile of money, untroubled by the little people. Because the children really want to see folks get rich from education.

All of that appears to be continuing in the present election cycle, in which StudentsFirstNY has decided that what the children of NY really want is more Republicans in the legislature (who knew the children were so interested in party politics). The children of New York also wish that Bill DeBlasio wasn't mayor, and StudentsFirstNY has been working hard to speak up for all those children, putting together lots of tv spots about how DeBlasio is after your money and no Democrats should be sent to Albany to help him. So supporting GOP candidates by attacking Democrats. Because these are the things that children really worry about.

The Wall Street Journal reports that StudentsFirstNY has teamed up with the high-rolling Real Estate Board of NY, because children really want a more robust, free-wheeling and profitable real estate market. They have also hired Bradley Tusk ("Mayor Bloomberg's Secret Weapon") whose profession seems to be exerting power and making money. Because children want to be secure in the knowledge that hedge fund guys can afford as many nice cars as they want.

DeBlasio's office is aware.

A spokesman for Mr. de Blasio’s campaign said: “When Bradley Tusk says he wants to team up with hedge funds and real-estate developers to defeat Democrats and stop progressive ideas, believe him.” 

Meanwhile, WSJ reports that Democrats shooting for the state capital prefer that DeBlasio just go sit quietly in the corner. I'm sure none of this has to do with New York Governor (theoretically not the mayor) Andrew Cuomo (theoretically a Democrat, but the evidence is pretty thin). In the meantime, StudentsFirstNY appears to be dropping all pretense of being even sort of concerned about actual education issues, but is simply one more batch of folks with big bank accounts trying to game the NY political system so that they can get even more money and power.

Trying to work this stuff out by paying attention to actual party labels is rather a challenge these days. I would love to see someone make sense of it. Not for me, mind you. It's just that the children are asking.

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.