Uganda Shuts Down For-Profit Ed Provider

We can get so focused on the USA aspects of reformsterism that we forget how much privatization is being exported. Take, for instance, the export of some of our worst, most developmentally-inappropriate ideas to schools in Ecuador. 

But one of the thriving edu-exports has been the business of selling school-in-a-can t9o nations in Africa.

Bridge Academies are one such edu-business, founded by a now-husband-and-wife team back in 2009. Their goal has been a pre-packaged, computer-housed school program that doesn't need actually trained educators to make it work. Here's how NPR described it earlier this year:

The exact same lesson being taught in this classroom is being taught in every other sixth-grade class at Bridge schools across the country, says Bridge co-founder Shannon May.

"If you were at one of the other 200 locations right now, you'd be seeing the exact same thing," she says. "In some ways, it is kind of the magic of it."

That "magic" of standardized lesson plans changes the role of the teacher. It allows Bridge to hold down costs because it can hire teachers who don't have college degrees.

The whole system is built around tablets linked to a central server. Content delivery specialists log in, read the script, deliver the lesson. The computer knows exactly where everyone is in the lesson. And the whole business model is aimed to find a way that you can get a little bit of money out of people who have practically none, and still turn a nice profit. It has attracted lots of friendly press and the support of big name venture philanthropists like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

They can sling the jargon like the best of them:

The key to Bridge International Academies’ success lies in our vertically-integrated system.   Through it, we have re-engineered the entire lifecycle of basic education, leveraging data, technology, and scale.

It's a model straight out of the, "It's not very good, but it's good enough for those poor, Third World kids" playbook, targeting countries where government education is pretty shaky to begin with.  Except that the government of Uganda has decided that it's not.

As reported by the BBC, Uganda has discovered a variety of problems with Bridge schools. Almost a third of the "teachers," are absent during the week. These same "teachers" are largely unable to pass basic literacy and math tests. Over two thirds of the students do not finish primary education. There are also concerns over sanitation in the school buildings.

The government shut the schools down in July, so Bridge took them to court. And lost. They had been in Uganda for about a year.

Don't feel too bad for them, though. Bridge is still providing its bottom-shelf edu-product in India, Nigeria, Kenya and Liberia. The last is a particularly lucrative opportunity; Bridge was originally positioned to simply take over the nation's school system, though that partnership has morphed a little bit so that there's an intermediary agency and the suggestion that although Bridge is the only "partner" school now, others could theoretically be hired as well.

Principled Bullies

At the end of this seemingly endless week (perhaps it just seems linger because I've spent so little of it sleeping), what I most treasure are people of principle. And I'm going to ask you to do something for me here, because if you get mad and check out in the middle of this piece, you are going to miss the point.

One of the most striking and disappointing things about many Trump supporters has been the speed with which they jettisoned previous convictions. Adultery was a disqualifier, until it wasn't. In the face of tons of evidence of his Christian faith, Obama was endlessly labeled an anti-Christian. Despite the tons of evidence that he worships no God but He, Trump, DJT was excused away as probably an instrument of God. Yesterday's "This man cannot be President" became today's "Yes, Sir, I would love to have a job in your awesome administration!"

Meanwhile, folks from the other side have taken to moves like slut-shaming Melania Trump, because misogyny is okay if the woman really deserves it.

And the pledges. "I will give Trump and the GOP the same cooperation and respect they gave Obama."

And this one, which oddly enough came this week out of a context having nothing to do with the election: "I will treat that person decently when they earn it."

No. Just, no.

When my children were little, their mother and I repeated one sentiment often-- You treat people with decency and respect because that's the way you're supposed to treat people. You don't treat them well because you think they deserve it-- or rather, they deserve to be treated decently because they are human and alive and here on the planet.

"Use every man after his desert and who should 'scape whipping?" That's from Hamlet. It's a reminder that nobody really deserves to be treated well so, Hamlet goes on, so treat them based on your own ideas of honor and dignity.

This does NOT mean that you become a doormat. It is not respectful of a person to let them repeatedly punch you in the face. It is not respectful of a person to sit still for them to treat you badly.

And this absolutely positively does NOT mean that you cease taking a stand on principle. I expect and hope that every single time President Trump sets out to do something wrong, a whole chorus of people will stand up and shout "No!" and "Hell, no!" I hope that every stupid policy he tries to implement (and I expect hundreds) will become a difficult slog upstream until he becomes bone weary of trying to inflict stupid things on the American public.

But there is a difference between standing up for a principle and setting out to hurt someone no matter what they do. There is a difference between setting out for justice and setting out for vengeance. Like many endeavors in life, the goal shapes the journey. If our goal is "to make sure they get what's coming to them," our journey goes through some dark places, because ultimately our objective is to hurt other people, and the more we embrace that goal, the more awful things we are willing to do. On the other hand, if our goal is something positive, a principle that stands for something good and right in the world, we can take a lot of punishment  and ignore a lot of temptation on the way.

I think a lot about this in the context of bullying because I teach teenagers and so, bullying. Bullies put target above principle, though they will always have a principle to invoke, no matter how "flexible" their hold on principle may be. Note the guys like Joe Walsh who was ready to "grab his musket" and take to the streets to exercise his First (and Second) Amendment rights-- well, right up until Trump one. Then Walsh was ready to slap down those damn protestors who wouldn't cheerfully accept the results of the perfectly good election. Note that right now, people who do or don't support the ideas behind the Electoral College divide pretty much along the same lines as who supported which candidate.

When we deal with bullying in school, we talk a lot about tolerance, which I think is pretty much the wrong way to go about it. "Tolerance" implies that, well, I know you're wrong and you probably deserve to get punched, but I'm going to hold off on that. This accepts the underlying premise of all bullying-- that there are some people in the world who just deserve to get punched, get hurt, get the suffering that they have coming to them. I'm not a bully-- I'm just the universe's righteous delivery system for the hurt that some people have coming to them.

It gets so complicated-- I have to remember every slight, every misbehavior, and keep a giant list of who has "earned" which kind of treatment from me. It's exhausting, and it can become ridiculous when I am responding to two different people in completely different ways even though they did the same thing, because I have them on different "deserving" lists.

Rather than tolerance, I would prefer to teach principle. If it's wrong to punch a person in the face, that applies to all people and all faces. If it's wrong to tell awful lies about someone, it's always wrong to tell lies about anyone. If all human beings should be treated as if they have value, there is no "except for..." clause. In short, there's no measure of right and wrong that includes who's doing the thing and to whom they are doing it.

Lord knows, my belief in all of this has been hugely tested this week. I have a huge intolerance for willful ignorance, for deliberately trying to NOT understand, for chopping down a forest of comprehension to make fuel for a bonfire of hate. And that's what we've installed in the highest office in the land. As a middle-aged white guy, I will never have the kind of crap directed at me that others get, but some of those others are loved ones of mine, and as a middle-aged white guy who has 'scaped a lot of whipping of my own, I have an obligation to try to get this stuff right.

But I can't walk into my classroom and try to sort out issues by telling my students, "Well, you shouldn't hate these people because you should be hating these other people instead." I have always accepted as one of my premises as a teacher is that no student in my classroom has to earn my respect or my support, and that has over time bled into the rest of my life. But now we have this dark mess. like many folks, I'm just looking for a light to find my way through it.

There is a difference between being a bully against someone and a warrior for something important. The world needs more of the latter; we already have a surplus of the former.

Education's Trumpian Crystal Ball

Today's new cottage industry is Trumpian predictive activities-- what will he do, what will happen next, what will he decide about My Favorite Issue. This is a bit of a fool's game-- on the one hand, Trump has told us pretty clearly what he's going to do, and on the other hand, this is a man who feels no particular obligation to think about what he says before he speaks or stay true to it once it has been said. Word noises come out of his face and fly off into the ether, to die a sad abandoned orphan's death either sooner or later. As Rick Hess has noted, "There’s no reason to believe that Trump necessarily means what he’s said on any issue. In truth, he seems to regard policy declarations as performance art."

This is particularly true in education, a field about which Trump knows little and apparently cares less. His policy is indeed "murky at best". But it may be worthwhile to look at the predictions. We always knew we were going to have to struggle for public education after the election, no matter how it went. Exactly what struggle might we face?

The wonkisphere has been churning away. In no particular order here are some of their thoughts, and mine.

Secretary of Education

Is it a contradiction to search for a secretary to head the department that you have occasionally promised to get rid of? Probably, but I suspect we will have ample opportunity to get used to contradictions. Don't call it hypocrisy; you can only be a hypocrite if you actually have some convictions.

Ben Carson's name has been tossed around a bunch. Like much of what is about to happen, this falls into the would-be-hilarious-if-it-weren't-going-to-cause-so-much-real-damage category. But if you want to consider some more flat-out scary possibilities, Politico says that Betsy DeVos and Kevin Chavous have been felt out for the job. DeVos is a rich angry edu-diletante with a heavy conservative streak; her father-in-law founded Amway, and her brother founded Blackwater. Chavous helps run her advocacy group, the American Federation for Children, a dark money group dedicated to school privatization.

Other names are out there (Scott Walker??!!), but at this point creationist Ben Carson is most people's favorite.

Transition Team?

This is probably a good moment to note that Trump supporters are about to endure a great deal of disappointment, and that starts now with Trump's abandonment of his pledge to drain the swamp and sweep clean the DC insiders. The New York Times notes that his transition team is loaded with the usual gang of DC lobbyists and influence peddlers.

When you think about it, this is not a surprise. One of Trump's lifelong motivations is to get the respect of the hoity-toity upper-crust insider crowds from DC to Manhattan. Given the chance to make them work for him, call him Mr. Trump, and kiss his ring, what are the odds he will pass that up. He has wanted their admiration and respect his whole life-- it is one prize in this race that his ego cannot pass up. My armchair prediction is that the administration will be a solid mix of sycophantic grifters like Breibart's Steve Bannon and choices from the long list of GOP insiders who jettisoned their personal dignity and principles so they could get on Der Fuhrer's team. Line forms on the left, guys, right behind Christie and Pence.

Because Trump has few convictions, his choices for a team matter. His education transition team includes James Manning, a career bureaucrat who worked in both Bush and Obama administrations; Gerard Robinson, from the free-market-loving American Enterprise Institute; Townsend McNitt, another Bush-era Ed Department suit; and Bill Evers, from the super-conservative Hoover Institute and Margaret Spellings' Ed Department. I have been tweeted enthusiastic endorsements of Evers who has a rep as an anti-Common Core guy, but his career (which includes setting up schools in Iraq back in 2003) is heavily focused on free market schooling.

Policies?

Mike Petrilli (Fordham) does a good full-length shrug over at Education Next that covers most of the recurring themes. The Obama administration got a lot of mileage out of using the Office of Civil Rights to enforce education policy. It seems safe to say that civil rights issues will not generally be on the Trump front burner.

It also seems a safe bet that a Trump Ed department will have some new ideas about implementing ESSA, which will dovetail nicely with the question of just how long the bipartisan agreement that hatched ESSA will survive under the new hot orange sun.

Common Core? I've addressed that and, as many have noted, the new law puts the power to control the standards out of his hands. Of course, the old law said that the feds can't impose things like the Core on states, and we worked around that just fine.

There's really only one clear policy, and Trump has touted it pretty consistently-- choice, choice, and more choice. Scrap the public schools and open up the market to the people who want to make a buck playing the education game. In Trump's America, everyone is free to choose a good school and good health care, just like everyone is free to stay at the top suites in a Trump hotel. If you can't afford any of those things, well, then, you should try not to be such a poor person, such a loser. If you can't afford Trump Tower (because, for instance, you work there) then there are always nice tent cities outside of town for Your Type.

In fact, I can't think of anyone who has more explicitly articulated the underlying principle of free market charter schooling-- in this world there are winners and losers, and Nice Things (like good schools and health care and shiny cars and hot model wives) are for the winners who can afford them.

Debate Realignments

The Education Debates have made strange bedfellows out of a lot of folks, and now some of that will change as soon as, well, yesterday. The anti-common core crowd included a mix of right-wing folks and progressives, and as far as the right-leaning folks are concerned, the fight is over and they just won it. Meanwhile, the pro-reformy crowd is split, much like the rest of the conservative world, between people who are happy to be on a winning team no matter what that team looks like and people who are a little afraid to realize that their allies may be scarier than their enemies.

Meanwhile, allegedly Democratic reformsters may need to stop and reassess. What exactly separates the reformy hedge fund managers of DFER from the Trump administration (spoiler alert- absolutely nothing, except that pre-election they never would have accepted his gauche butt at their country clubs). And if there's no policy difference between DFER and the Trump administration, and Democrats have shown themselves to be the least effective and most powerless party in town-- well, is there any reason for DFER to keep pretending that they're Democrats?

There may be some good to come out of Ed Debates under Trump-- for one thing, it's going to be an awful lot harder for anyone to pretend that race is not an issue when it comes to education in this country. But I think we're going to have a short period of confusion and mess while people try to figure out who their real allies are at this point.And that in itself is a reminder that it really helps to focus on what you want to move toward, and not on what you disapprove of.

We'll know what Trump is going to do when he does it. The best use of this time is not to try to read the tea leaves (I know, right? Just wasted a whole post's worth of your time) but to renew focus on and commitment to the values and goals that you want to move toward. Let's catch our breath, our strength, our focus. Let's remember what and who we love. Let's get ready.

Will Trump Kill the Core

Apparently one more side effect of Trumpocracy will be the revival of half-baked, ill-informed writing and bloviating about Common Core. Let me do my part to add to that.

Trump has, of course, promised to rid the world of Common Core, even though he has no idea what it is, what's in it, how it works, or how it is implemented. This may well actually happen when pigs fly. But this is the perfect cue for writers like, apparently, NPR's Cory Turner to redistribute some of the same misinformation about the Core.

In "Can President Trump Get Rid of Common Core," Turner brings back the old fiction about where the Core came from:

The Common Core standards were developed by governors and state school superintendents and adopted at the state level. They were not created by the Obama Administration or forced on states. Indeed, several states chose not to make the switch. That said, President Obama did use federal dollars, through the Race to the Top program, to encourage (critics prefer "coerce") states to adopt new, more rigorous standards. And, in the throes of a downturn, that extra school money was a powerful enticement.

Actually, I prefer "blackmail" or "extort," but I suppose "coerce" is politer. It's certainly shorter than, "Either you implement my programs or I use your inevitable and unavoidable violation of No Child Left Behind laws to cut off your federal financial support." But the Common Core Standards were most certainly not developed by governors and state school superintendents. They were written by a handful of education amateurs, pushed by Bill Gates and other well-connected amateurs, financed by many of those same folks, and adopted by states under so much political pressure that some states didn't even wait for the standards to be finished.

Turner fails to talk to anyone outside the circle of Gates-funded Core backers (Achieve, the Fordham Foundation) and when he turns to a critic (Neal McClusky, Cato Institute) still stays within the conservative thinky tank sphere.

What Turner gets right is the effect of the Every Student Succeeds Act (the NCLB replacement) which is pretty firm and direct in forbidding federal meddling in state educational issues. Of course, ESSA still comes down hard for "college and career ready standards," a phrase which is to Common Core what "states' rights" is to segregation.

But the real problem, which folks on at least two sides of this hydra-headed debate fail to acknowledge, is that "Common Core" no longer means a damn thing. It is a term that is only slightly less vague than "Education stuff" and is used to refer to a dozen different versions of standards, the completely different standards being tested on Big Standardized Tests, the completely different sets of standards being pushed in "Common Core" textbooks, and the completely different sets of standards being touted by traveling consultants and college professors. Plus, all the versions that are now hiding in plain sight under an assumed name.

At this point you can't drive a stake through Common Core's heart because it is a vague and diaphanous cloud of toxic mist.

And, as Turner reports, Trump is already slinking away from his pledge. Asked about it by EdWeek, transition team education guy Gerard Robinson had this strong, ringing statement to make--

To be determined. But he will expect his secretary of education to have something to say about common core

Something to say!! Hoo boy-- I bet the Common Core is shaking in its invisible boots right now

Common Core needs to be rooted out, stomped flat, and burned with fire. But none of those things will be accomplished by people who don't even know what they're talking about. Perhaps Trump will appoint someone with real education expertise and knowledge to the secretary position. And perhaps pigs will fly out of my butt.

The Racist Dinner Party

Many of my Trump-voting friends are genuinely baffled and upset at being called racist, sexist, bigoted by association. "Really, not about race," they say about their vote. Let me try to explain, as I often do, with a story.

You are an American of Ostrogoth ancestry. You and your wife and children are going to a neighbor's house for Thanksgiving dinner. You're pretty pumped.

Out on the sidewalk you meet this guy. "What do you think you're doing in this neighborhood," he asks, not very nicely. "I don't really think we want your kind around here." He's pretty confrontational, but also kind of clownish. You're uneasy, but not quite worried. Then you notice that there are a bunch of other guys standing behind him, just coming out of the shadows.

"Yeah," says one of them. "How about we just kick your Ostie ass! How about we just send you and your little Ostie spawn back to Ostrogothia, or wherever the hell you people come from." You notice that a couple of the men are holding baseball bats.  ("Ostie" is a crude and vulgar slur against Americans of Ostrogoth ancestry. And your family has lived in this country for six generations.)

The thugs kind of look at the first guy, to see if he's going to let them continue. All he says is, "You know, I miss the old days, when certain people knew their place. We need to make this neighborhood great again, like it was before certain people moved in. Maybe we should get rid of these ones. "

"But maybe not the woman," says one of the thugs. "She looks like a nice piece of ass."

"Yeah," says the first guy, who appears to be their leader. "Yeah, I'd f@#! that."

The rest of the mob starts chanting "String them up" and you are sure it's time to go, so you and your family hurry up the walk, to your neighbor's. Shaken, you go inside and prepare to sit down to dinner. You tell your hosts what happened. Maybe they mumble something about "Oh, that racist fool" or maybe they don't say anything at all. You try to shake it off.

Then you walk into the dining room, and that guy who moments ago had you fearing for the safety of your family, is sitting at the end of the table, holding the carving knife.

You turn to your hosts. "What the hell??!!"

You host shrugs. "We thought he'd be really good at carving and serving the turkey. At least better than Aunt Hillary. You know, that awful bitch."

And as you hustle your family out the front door, hoping the mob isn't still out there waiting for you, and as you put on your coats, your hosts are upset-- "Why are you leaving? Look, we're not racists. We didn't decide to have him over because we agree with his racist stuff. We just, you know, thought he would make a really good carver."

And if you're the host in this story, maybe you did make your choice for what seemed like non-racist reasons. But if you can't understand how your Other citizens feel when they see the man who came at them with racist threats, empowering racist goons-- how they feel when they see him in charge of carving and serving up the turkey at the dinner, well, you need to think it through for a moment, because you invited him, and it is on you to pressure him to behave.

And no, this isn't a perfect analogy. Non-white non-male non-straight citizens of this country are not guests (they're citizens), and there is a lot more history involved than just one ugly encounter on the sidewalk. But the point remains-- if you bring a racist, misogynistic, ugly man into our shared home and seat him at the end of the table, your motives don't absolve you of responsibility for the choice that you've made. You may not have said anything racist yourself, but your actions make it clear that you don't consider his racism all that important and the comfort and safety of your neighbors is not as important to you as a well-carved turkey.

A Lesson from 11/9

I am still crawling out of the festering dung hole that is the 2016 Presidential election. There is an awful lot to unpack and learn and understand going forward. But there are good lessons from last night as well:

* In Massachusetts, the charter school early Christmas bill that was supposed to open the floodgates to endless charter paydays-- well, that bill was squashed like a bug. Gov. Charlie Baker and his hedge fund buddies invested a ton of money and political capital in the bill, and they lost it all.

* In Georgia, Governor Deal wanted Amendment 1 to pass, letting the charter industry scoop up a handful of schools every year, converting public schools to private businesses financed with public tax dollars. That bill was also defeated, and once again, it was not a matter of just a couple of narrow percentage points.

* In Washington, three state supreme court justices suddenly found themselves facing the deep pockets of Bill Gates and his friends for daring to actually enforce the state constitution instead of sweeping it aside so that charter schools could be allowed to feast. Those judges won their battle.

* In Kansas, Governor Brownback was given a stern and unmistakable (to anybody but Brownback himself) rebuke.

To be sure, not all the local news was good. In Oklahoma, voters told teachers to go suck air.

But there is a lesson in here. What all of these initiatives had in common was the mobilization and hard work of local activists. The amount of work put into the #NoOn2 campaign in Massachusetts is mind-boggling-- folks worked their butts off for that win. But there as in Georgia and Washington and Kansas, the story is that billionaires can be beaten by local folks who organize and work to do it.

We have a long hard slog ahead on the national level (and we knew we would, no matter what happened) and making an impression at the federal level is a degree of difficulty somewhere between shaving a flea and emptying the Mediterranean Ocean with a spoon. But we see again and again-- with organization and commitment, people can make a huge difference on the state and local level.

My thanks and a big hats off to all the people who eked out those victories. It is no small thing to beat back millions of dollars with a smile and a handshake and a phone call and some shoe leather (or whatever is on the bottom of shoes these days). A salute to all who served and found victory in this discouraging and disheartening year. May we all take strength from the few victories that were scored for public education, because we're going to need it.

Making the Team

I only recently encountered this article from back in February, but it has really stuck with me. It has nothing at all to do directly with education, but it has everything to do with education. Charles Duhigg's "What Google Learned from Its Quest To Build the Perfect Team" was part of a package of articles about "reimagining the office," but there is of course a whole world of teams, including the team made up of teachers and the students in their classrooms. Yeah, maybe Google is the Evil Empire, but that doesn't mean Googlers can't find useful knowledge. So what did Google learn, and what does it mean to us as teachers?

Google for many years pursued super-groups by using what may seem like common sense-- put the best workers together and you get the best work group. Duhigg also notes that managers tried various types of group folk wisdom-- groups should socialize outside of work, introverts should be teamed with introverts. But as Google set out to figure out what made the best groups the best, researchers realized that many commonly accepted pieces of wisdom had never actually been tested.

Project Aristotle launched in 2012, a group project about group projects. The team examined all sorts of features, from male-female balance to shred hobbies to shared college background. No piece of data seemed to hold a clue. Said Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People Analytics division, ‘‘We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter.’’

Eventually, the researchers shifted their focus from the "who" of group composition to the "how" of group interaction, and that was the key. Norms, the unofficial (or semi-official) rules by which the group operated looked like the most important piece. But how to narrow down the search?

Google’s research had identified dozens of behaviors that seemed important, except that sometimes the norms of one effective team contrasted sharply with those of another equally successful group. Was it better to let everyone speak as much as they wanted, or should strong leaders end meandering debates? Was it more effective for people to openly disagree with one another, or should conflicts be played down? The data didn’t offer clear verdicts. In fact, the data sometimes pointed in opposite directions. The only thing worse than not finding a pattern is finding too many of them. Which norms, Rozovsky and her colleagues wondered, were the ones that successful teams shared?

Eventually the researchers narrowed their focus on two behaviors-- good groups allowed for an balanced amount of sharing and input from all members, and good groups showed emotional sensitivity, what we might call emotional intelligence, to have a sense of how all group members were feeling. And those in turn led to the key:

When Rozovsky and her Google colleagues encountered the concept of psychological safety in academic papers, it was as if everything suddenly fell into place. One engineer, for instance, had told researchers that his team leader was ‘‘direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks.’’ That team, researchers estimated, was among Google’s accomplished groups. 

Groups do well when they establish a psychologically safe environment. And that leads us to this killer paragraph in the article:

What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google is that no one wants to put on a ‘‘work face’’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency. Rather, when we start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers and then send emails to our marketing colleagues and then jump on a conference call, we want to know that those people really hear us. We want to know that work is more than just labor.

As I said-- nothing in this article addresses education, yet the concept of psychological safety is absolutely what we need to establish in a classroom. It allows our students to connect their own humanity to the work of learning, which is one of the most critical connections to make. What purpose could there possibly be in teaching a child that Learning Stuff is a thing you do in school, not in any way connected to who you are and how you live your life.

This also, for me, puts a face and a name on what's so deeply wrong with No Excuses schools, which are all about establishing the exact opposite of a psychologically safe space. Students are instead required to live on High Alert at all times, understanding that they must bring absolutely none of their personality and inner life into the classroom, that they must learn to always wear a mask, and that they are in a space that is most decidedly unsafe.

Or grit, which denies our responsibility to establish a psychologically safe space for our students, instead demanding that they develop the "grit" and "resilience" needed to operate in a deliberately unsafe space.

This article also underlines the foolishness of imagining that there is a single set formula by which classrooms can be operated. In one portion, Duhigg tells the story of a manager who, struggling to get his team to connect, tells a highly personal story about his own health issue, even though there was nothing in the protocol that told him to take that step.

But you can no more script a perfect foolproof way to manage a group of human workers or human students, no, no more than you can hand out a foolproof script to a hundred people, telling them that if they follow the script, they can have a happy marriage.

Yes, there is sad irony here. Google spent a ton of time and money to learn that the best way for humans to work together as a team is for them to act like humans with each other. Well, the best kind of humans-- the supportive, open, messy, honest, listening real kind.

There is no difference between those work groups and a classroom. We have to see the humans, listen to the humans, be open to the humans, love the humans that are in those classrooms with us. Insisting that they strip off their true authentic selves at the door and wear a fake mask-- insisting in fact that the fashioning and wearing of the big fake mask is what education is all about-- that's just wrong. And not just morally or ethically wrong, but it-gets-lousy-results wrong.

And of course now, more than ever, our students need to have a safe place. They need to know that our classroom is a safe place to be who they are, even if it feels like the whole rest of the country is not safe for them.

This is how we make a team. By sitting down as real live humans together, open and listening to each other. And you know it's true, because Google says so.