Alternative Pathways

You will not find me among the staunch defenders of traditional teacher education programs.

I'm not the product of one myself (you can read more about that here), but I have sent many students into such programs, as well as hosting a bevy of student teachers from such places. There can be no doubt-- some teacher preparation programs should be completely overhauled. Slavish attention to unimportant details, theory too divorced from actual practice, lack of support for fledgling teachers and, nowadays, far too much emphasis on standards-tilted and test-centered education.

And yet, the only alternatives tossed out there in recent years are worse. Teach for America's theory that an ivy league degree and five weeks of "training" are all you need to stand in a classroom? Nope. Shortage-suffering states that lower the bar to "You must have a pulse to ride this teacher desk"? Double nope. And where do we turn for help on the subject-- to the ridiculous National Council on Teacher Quality and their bogus "research"? Nopity nope nope.

I can think of better ways (just waiting for the phone to ring so I can start my lucrative consulting biz), though I think the most basic problem is that unlike doctors, nurses or physical therapists, teachers are not allowed to be in charge of our own profession. If college programs needed the certification of a board of actual working teachers in order to run their programs, we'd see a new world within just a couple of years.

But of all the things about teacher training that need to be fixed, the biggest gap may be the matter of alternative pathways for late bloomers.

Read this story from a guest poster at Dad Gone Wild. This is the tale of Mary Jo Cramb, a teacher who entered the profession later in life, entering through the back door of TNTP (formerly The New Teacher Project). TNTP is a quieter sibling of TFA, built on the idea of giving somewhat riper individuals an alternative pathway to the teaching profession. While I have some bones to pick with some of TNTP's emphasis on data and testing and other reformy nonsense, I agree with their basic concept. There should be a pathway for grown-ass men and women who decide they want to leave their old profession and enter teaching.

There are such programs here and there. In PA, we allow "guest teachers" to become substitute teachers, and by "allow" I mean we grab them happily, give them about five minutes of training, and drop them into a classroom. This goes about as well as you might expect. Some are surprised that a whole day of teaching is a lot like work. There are the ex-executives or ex-military who are shocked to discover that they actually can't automatically command a room full of teenagers as easily as a room full of underlings. And there are some who show a real knack for it. But most guest teachers evaporate quickly (sometimes by the end of their first day).

What are adults who want to go into teaching supposed to do?

Going back to college for years of undergraduate work is insanely not doable. And some grown ups who have worked in the Real World are extremely likely to look at the content of college education classes and think (or say) "This is a bunch of baloney."Nor do I think it's useful to look at somebody in her thirties or forties or beyond who really wants to get into teaching and say, "Well, you'll have to just hop in your time machine and go back to change your college major."

Grown up late-entry proto-teachers need different education than the young'uns. A grown adult who has held down a job for years probably won't need the parts of the training that are basically there to help the new proto-teacher look and act like a professional. And while student teaching is just one more semester of school for a college student, for an adult it's fifteen weeks of work without pay, and what person with adult responsibilities can easily manage that? On the other hand, a fresh proto-teacher who only left a classroom behind a few years ago may be less prone to shock and surprise and disorientation than someone who hasn't set foot in school in a decade. But with the exception of some city-based programs, nobody is really looking at how to create an alternative pathway that will actually serve both the aspiring teacher and the school system. And while TNTP may be wrong about what such a program should look like, they are not wrong about the need for that alternative path.

Can such a thing be designed to be both accessible and thorough? It wouldn't be easy-- after all, it's not easy to become a real nurse or real lawyer in your forties. But it is possible (I have friends who have done it-- the lawyer and nurse part). There's no reason it couldn't become possible for teachers as well-- provided it's set up as a way to provide the new teacher with all the professional background and training they need, and not set up as a way for someone to slap a fresh, warm body into a classroom ASAP. As Cramb writes:

TFA is a poor answer to these problems, but progressive education advocates have not yet proposed their own solution either. I wish I’d been able to join the teaching profession without associating with a group steeped in an ideology I now oppose, but I’ll always be grateful they gave me an opportunity that only they were able to provide.

There's a need not being met. We can do better.

MI: A Blueprint for Education?

First announced in Governor Rick Snyder's January 2016 State of the State address, the 21st Century Commission has been working diligently at an educational blueprint for Michigan. The final report on charting the edu-journey for Betsy Devos's home state is a hefty 146 pages. I've read it so that you don't have to. Buckle up, boys and girls.

Who Created This Thing?

The commission was headed up by Dr. Thomas Haas, President of Grand Valley University. Members included some folks from industry and business, some school superintendents (including the Grand Rapids super), some charter school folks, some state board of education members, representatives from AFT Michigan and the Michigan Education Association, and some assorted bureaucrats. Oh, and one lone classroom teacher (Matt Oney from Escanaba Area Public Schools).

Part of the process was, apparently, a listening tour. The breakdown of that is not encouraging; the thank you section mentions thirteen hosts from Northern Michigan, six hosts from the Upper Peninsula, eleven hosts from West Michigan, and from Southeast Michigan, a single stop on the "tour"-- a virtual visit to Voyageur Academy, a charter school in Detroit. (That visit was virtual, says the notes, "due to weather, so I guess Detroit has been socked in for the last year).

Introduction and Call To Action

The introduction hits several familiar notes. The economy has changed (and now it's hard to get work). Education improves opportunity (education and employment correlate, and we'll lazily accept causation there). Education is a public good (Michigan would probably work better with educated citizens). We need to act now (we have just noticed that Michigan is at the bottom of the national education barrel-- oops!).

So let's rebuild the system. Let's address K-12 performance. Let's get the graduation rate up. Let's transform, not tinker. Let's set some big goals (Michigan will be a top-ten state on NAEP, and beat Ontario on PISA-- really, I'm not making these up).

And let's do all of this without questioning any assumptions about testing, education, or poverty. Let's grossly oversimplify everything and fail to consider anything beyond surface fixes. Okay-- this last paragraph is me, not the commission.

More assumptions about lessons learned

We'll also talk about what we've learned from other states and nations-- well, not so much what we've actually learned about education, but what we've learned about marketing oversimplified amateur-hour education reformy baloney. So let's tick off some superficial, vague, obvious, and in some cases unsubstantiated ideas that we've strung together. Oh, and let's claim all of these ideas come from "high-performing systems" without ever identifying those supposed systems.

Let's build a comprehensive, aligned strategy. Let's have a shared vision of the future and shared strategies, because fixing a system by using central planning has never gone wrong before. Let's develop excellent educators, even though we don't really know what "excellent educator" actually means. Let's set rigorous academic standards for students-- in fact, let's call them "internationally benchmarked" even though no such thing exists. Create multiple pathways, aka let's put back some vocational training. Invest early; start intruding on children's lives at, or even before, birth. Recognize and fight inequity-- well, not actually either, because we'll talk about how poor kids don't get put in high-level classes and they get worse teachers and they get suspended a lot, but we will not consider any systemic issues involved. In other words, we 'll deal with poor kids by treating them as if they aren't poor. Let's set clear goals and measure what matters; let's collect lots of data and take lots of tests.

Essential Cultural Elements

I'm not sure that we didn't just take a right turn into the vaguely racist notion that non-wealthy non-white kids do poorly because they are culturally impaired. But here's what values the commission says we need to install:

Value postsecondary education. So let's get everyone excited about more school. Be honest about current performance; the old reformster standard that schools and teachers are just lying liars who lie about student performance. Do not accept excuses. Seriously-- the commission is putting "No excuses" right here in their plan. "We cannot tolerate excuses for poor performance." Stop whining about your poverty, you little snowflake. And, of course, persevere. I thought maybe they were going to say that students needed more grit, but by persevere they mean that for state leaders, this will be a marathon, not a sprint, and they had better plan on a long haul.

And now that we have all of that out of the way, it's time for the main event.

Nine Principles of World-Class Education

This is the frame work the commission is going to work with, with the nine principles that we have gleaned from, well, somewhere, organized into three main thrusts-- focus on learning, create a strong culture of success and build a coherent, connected education system from prenatal to career. And here we go.

Principle 1: Elevate the profession

Michigan needs to develop, recruit and retain top teaching talent. The commission sees four ways to accomplish this goal. Spoiler alert: none of these involve improving teacher pay or job security. But we are pushing out new teachers and only half of new principals last more than three years. And teacher education programs are down a third over just seven years ago. Whatever could it be? How shall we fix the causes we won't identify?

First, let's make it harder to become a teacher by raising requirements for college programs, including a year-long residency and "evidence of skills in their subject matter, social-emotional intelligence, and pedagogy." Yes, that would seem to mean, essentially a maturity test for proto-teachers. Also, let's "look for strategic opportunities to attract diverse candidates."

Second, let's create new career pathways so that we can reward teachers for achieving new "ranks" of awesomeness (and withhold rewards from less-awesome teachers, and also avoid giving teachers more pay just for seniority, because years dedicated to teaching should not be rewarded with either job security or pay-- do you feel strategically attracted to teaching in Michigan yet?)

Third, professional development should be individualized in reaction to teacher evaluations. And PLCs-- we hear those are cool.

Fourth, "to improve student outcomes, Michigan should implement a performance-based leadership development system that will ensure that building-level leaders are invested in student outcomes." In other words, any advancement up the career ladder should be tied to student test scores. Because the only measure of teaching that matters is student test scores (good luck to those of you who don't teach reading or math).

Principle 2: Build Capacity To Do What Works

The state should decide what good teaching means and disseminate those principles throughout the state.

The commission does allow that the state should provide the funding to match its mandates, but the commission would also like to see the state "amplify evidence-based practices and coordinate efforts to deploy them." Because nothing elevates the profession like having bureaucrats tell you how to teach. As with many of these strategies, one of our measurements for success is "Are student outcomes [aka test scores] improving?" Because one of the unstated recommendations here is that Michigan's entire school system be test-centered.

Principle 3: Invest in an Efficient and Effective System of Public Funding

We need to actually fund the system. That includes recognizing that some students need additional funds.

Okay, actually, this part is nuts, borrowed directly from efficiency experts and time-study work in industry. The commission would like the state first to make sure they've gotten rid of all the wasteful slack in education spending by having the governor and legislature (educational spending experts all) decide what money is being wasted.

Then they should figure out "base funding" built on "a transparent calculation of what it costs to meet performance standards." In other words, the state should be able to say, "It should cost $5,000 to get a fifth grader to score 255 on the Big Standardized Reading test, and if we want an additional 25 points on that score, it should cost us an additional $500." Then figure out how much extra it costs for students with "greater educational needs" (like, you know, figuring out the cost of cup holders and seat warmers in a new car). Add in some "foundational allowances" for other school costs, and figuring out funding is just a simple math problem. Piece of cake.

Principle 4: Increase Access to Postsecondary Education

Everybody needs one, so how do we make one available to everybody?

First, figure out the "proper funding level" for higher education. Then consider some strategies like direct funding and performance-based funding "as well as other methods to incent best practices, tuition restraint, and spending efficiency." Colleges can also earn more money by coining and copyrighting new words like "incent."

Next-- and this is novel-- turn P-12 systems into P-14 systems. Provide universal access to community college. It sure looks like the commission is recommending free community college for all, but it avoids any word remotely resembling "free."

Also, let's award merit scholarships to four-year schools. And let's put good guidance counselors in every high school.

Principle 5: Partner with Parents

"Our system must clearly recognize that parents are children’s first and most important teachers."

Embed human services in schools as well as connecting them to homes. "Nurture" parent-educator collaboration-- "Michigan must be more intentional about nurturing parent engagement."

Annnnd create user-friendly online tools with which to "navigate educational options." Like, alllll the choices, from preschool providers to postsecondary job training. Also, somebody should be overseeing this to make sure it's not passing along marketing baloney instead of facts. This all actually seems kind of noble, but practically speaking it seems like a very high mountain to climb and maintain.

The rest of our principles are related to the cradle-to-career pipeline building.

Principle 6: Enhance Accountability

Michigan's assessment system should be enhanced to better align and measure 21st century learning skills known to prepare our students in becoming both career and college ready and should also disseminate useful data that informs instructional practice in the classroom and measures the performance of our schools for the general public and policymakers.

Emphasis mine, because there are no such skills. Also, college and career ready. But this one gets worse.

Hold the right people accountable-- find out who's to blame for a low score and hunt them down. "All actors in the system, from pre-K providers to teacher preparation institutes, should be held accountable for student achievement outcomes." Notice who's not on that list? How about "legislators who failed to properly fund the school."

"Michigan must collect, analyze, and share quality data to hold all stakeholders accountable for performance outcomes." Everybody is supposed to be making "data-driven decisions," based on crappy BS Test scores. But wait-- could we come up with something worse? Sure we could:

Over the next decade, Michigan should move its P–20 education system toward a competency-based learning model, an approach that focuses on the student’s demonstration of desired learning outcomes as central to the learning process. The focus of learning should be shifted toward a student’s progression through curriculum at their own pace, depth, etc. As competencies are proven, students will advance academically.

Yes, the commission wants to go full CBE, the current Big Mack Daddy of unproven bad ideas. Also, note the P-20-- the commission repeatedly assumes that's the way to go. Cradle to career, baby-- all the way.

Principle 7: Ensure Access To High-Quality Learning Environments

That means, of course, loaded with tech. And as we noted with the CBE love above, a learning environment doesn't really need to be a school. Because with CBE, all you'll need is a comfy spot to curl up with your computer screen.

The commission shares a fun fact-- Michigan is one of 11 states that provides no support to local districts for capital outlay. Hmmm-- I'll bet that makes it really hard for poor districts to get nice buildings. The commission bets that, too. Does that seem generous? Here's the other shoe-- the state should also help pay for Public School Academies (aka charter schools). In other words, let's spend public tax dollars to buy buildings for private education businesses.

Principle 8: Invest Early

The commission would like to see universal preschool for four-year-olds, because the little slackers are just sitting at home and playing and generally acting like children. But if Michigan is going to get top-quality teachers for such a program, then it will have to start paying them better, so the commission would like to see some financial help thrown that direction.

Alas, this support for early childhood development comes with a goal to "enhance early learning outcome measurement and tracking." So we need to tag each child early on and start gathering child-specific data and outcome stuff. Not, the commission assures us, standardized tests. Just, you know, observational tools. That will be attached to your child's data backpack and stay there forever. Your potty habits as a four year old will follow you into your job application when you're twenty. Is that cool, or what?

Principle 9: K-12 Governance

Do you remember when the GOP was the party of small government and local control? Boy, those were some good times, huh. This set of recommendations definitely makes me nostalgic. The commission wants to develop "a coherent P–20 governance structure that ensures the public education and higher education marketplace produces high levels of learner outcomes, equity, efficiency, innovation, and collaboration." Doesn't that sound swell. Just watch.

First, we "reform" the state board of education. Specifically, we "reform" it by giving the governor more control over it. Currently members are elected by voters for eight year terms. The commission suggests that three options be brought to a constitution-amending vote. 1) Let the government appoint all the board members. 2) Let the governor appoint the state superintendent and then abolish the board entirely. 3) Make the board bigger by adding governor-appointed members. Any one of these will help by keeping those damn voters from sending people to the capitol that the governor just doesn't want to work with.

Next, we "enhance" the Michigan Department of Education. We will make them more helpy because we will "situate education functions that are currently performed by a range of state agencies within the department." This is not all foolishness-- some of those agency functions exist because governors created them to get certain functions away from the department. But combined with the previous recommendation, this puts everything back under governor control, which is good because reasons. Or because education works best when controlled by venal politicians.

Then, we "reconceptualize the structure and function" of the intermediate school districts. Yikes. We should also "support" local efforts to consolidate school districts. We might even incent it.

Finally, we must make sure all students have access to high quality options, whether those options are public or charter or voucher-choicey or charter or online charters or, you know, charters. In other words, we should expand choice a whole lot. And yes, this recommendation comes under the same heading as "we need to combine school districts because we have too many empty seats." The rationale is that Michigan has too many empty seats, but not enough quality seat. Also, Michigan's "expansion of school has improved outcomes for some students," which is yet another assertion for which I'd love to see some evidence.

Invest in the Future

We're getting close to the end, so I'll make this simple-- doing all these things would be really, really expensive.

Where to start

This is a thirty year plan. The commission offers a chart putting all these ideas in order. CBE and district consolidation is long term. Everything else is medium or short term.

What do we have here?

This is a plan that enshrines testing. It promotes charters, choice, CBE, and other methods preferred by privatizers and profiteers. It offers a system that keeps teacher pay and job-security low and tries to mask these as great benefits. It consolidates the governor's power over the school system and takes it away from voters. It extends the government's grubby data-sniffing nose from cradle to grave. It even holds onto those Common Core dog-whistle-words "college- and career-ready."

It is, in short, a plan that doubles down on every lousy reformer idea of the past fifteen years. The only good news is that is expensive, and if Michigan's leaders were willing to actually spend money on education, they wouldn't need a commission to spend a year telling them how to dig themselves out of the hole they put themselves in (and offer up the answer "dig harder").

If anyone imagined there would be something in the report that would actually offer support or assistance to beleaguered Michigan public education, they can let go of that faint hope. This is the same old reformsters Bible, writ long and large. Betsy DeVos must be happy to know she left her home state in good hands.

The best we can say about this report is that it's has some honest parts about how bad a hole Michigan has dug for its education system. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a clue about how to get out of that hole.

FL: Court Rules in Favor of Stupid

Florida, land of more stupid education rules than you can shake a dead alligator at, embarked on a new level of stupid last year when it fought to keep some third graders from moving on to fourth grade.

As you may recall, Florida is one of the states with a third grader retention law, declaring that third graders cannot move on unless they pass the Big Standardized Test for reading. This is a dumb law, without a lick of evidence to support it, and several licks to suggest that it's actually counter-productive. However, the legislature, in one of its rare lucid moments, opened the door to local districts substituting a portfolio display of reading skills in place of a BS Test score, and sixty-ish Florida county districts walked through that door into a land of sense and clarity.

A few other districts, however, decided to be dopes about the whole thing.

Mind you, I generally try to be semi-respectful here and remember that the people I disagree with are still human beings with families and lives. But what the hell is there to say about a grown adult who declares that an eight year old child must be held back a year, even if that child got straight A's and demonstrated exemplary reading ability? That grown adult, even if she is a professional superintendent of schools, should be ashamed. She should be ashamed of visiting such abuse on any of her young charges, and she should be ashamed that she has so blatantly announced that she is not really concern3ed about that child's reading skills at all, but is only interested in forcing that child to comply and take the Holy BS Test. (Or at least "participate," which in Florida means breaking the seal and signing their names, which at least some of the plaintiffs did.)

But it just got worse. Initially, the state ed department threw the local districts under the bus, saying, "Well, it's their choice." But by summer's end, the education department lawyers were arguing in court that the grades given by teachers on student report cards didn't really mean anything.

And so about a dozen opt-out students were dragged into the Florida public square to be made an example of. Because nothing makes school superintendents and state lawyers and departments of education feel more validated than putting a beat-down on some third graders.

But just in time for September to roll in, Florida Judge Karen Gievers not only ruled in favor of the opt out kids, but used some pointed-yet-judgely language to point out that the state was acting like a giant asshat.

That should have been the end of things. Properly slapped, education officials should have come to their senses and exclaimed, "Holy smokes! We got so caught up in this we were more concerned in making sure that opt out families obeyed us than finding ways to see if students are really learning." Instead, some local districts decided to keep being jerks to the children, and the case went back into the next level of court on appeal. "Dare to sue us for the right to advance a grade just because you have straight A's," they said. "We will not rest till we can put some hurt on your tiny ten year old frame." I don't want to know what the children are going to learn about being a responsible adult from this whole sorry mess.

And now, the appeal court judges have ruled on the side of stupid.

The purpose of the state test is to “assess whether the student has a reading deficiency and needs additional reading instruction before [and after] being promoted to fourth grade,” they wrote.

“The test can only achieve that laudable purpose if the student meaningfully takes part in the test by attempting to answer all of its questions to the best of the student’s ability. Anything less is a disservice to the student — and the public.”

How? How how how how?And what is "less" about demonstrating the skills in question through the yearlong activities and work as evaluated by the trained professional educator. And do any of these judges have experience or training that would allow them to know whether or not the BS Test can achieve its alleged purpose?

The ruling, which threw out all of the August court decisions, raises so many questions. Since this buttresses the state argument that report cards don't matter, does this mean a child who flunks every class but gets satisfactory scores on the BS Test is legally entitled to advance to the next grade? Does this mean that Florida schools should abandon report cards entirely? Will Florida state troopers be sent into the sixty-ish other counties and force them to ignore portfolios and hold test scofflaws back in third grade? Will families with young children avoid these counties like the plague? Has Florida just found one more clever way to undermine public schools and drive families toward charters?

These districts, the state, and the court had a chance and a choice. They could show that they were most concerned about the child's ability to read, show that they cared, as they claimed, about the need to show reading skills as a foundation for future success-- or they could show that what they most cared about was forcing obedience to the state, forcing opt out families to do as they were told by the government whether it made sense or not. The districts, the state, and the court chose the latter-- a choice all the more obnoxious because there is not a shred of evidence that the test measures reading skills or that third grade retention helps the child succeed in school or life.

Florida, in short, had a chance to show whether it was on the side of education or on the side of stupid. It picked stupid. Shame on the court. Shame on the districts. Shame on the state.

Frontline: Your Large Brotherly Data Service

I recently covered the launching of The Line, a new website helmed by Disgraced LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy and dedicated to the proposition that Chiefs for Change should have an avenue to keep pumping out warmed-over education reform baloney.

As soon as I started digging, I realized I already knew about Frontline, the company behind the website. That familiar logo had started popping up on our screens at school this year because Frontline just bought out Aesop, the software service that has been managing our teacher absences.

Like many districts, a few years ago we shifted our substitute system from the traditional Harried Secretary On The Phone from 5 AM until Two Minutes Before School Starts System to an on-line service that lets teachers enter absences and substitutes pick them up, all on line, like a scholastic match.com. It's a vastly superior system to the Frantic Phone Call system. But, boy-- if one company was doing that for many school districts, wouldn't they collect a ton of data.

Well, yes. Yes they would.

Part of Frontline's pitch is just having all sorts of data at your fingertips to run your school efficiently-- their promotional video shows an administrator walking through the halls of a school carrying a table and looking at numbers on a display that must mean something helpful because data! Their main platform promises that you can manage people without paper, handle recruiting and hiring, watch over absences, do great professional development, and work on your special ed stuff (some of this represents an expansion of Frontline's work-- Aesop is not the only company they've acquired recently-- since January of 2016, Frontline has acquired at least four companies, including some that work tracking special ed data).

Frontline likes a lot of trendy things. Their picture of professional development includes personalized targeted development, which sounds a lot like badges and micro-competencies (log on and do a fifteen minute video-plus-test about Wait Time and voila! you're now better!)

All of this means running everything through the computers, and everything that is run through the computers can be strained for data.

Meet Frontline Learning and Research Institute!

FLRI is headed up by Elizabeth Combs, previously the chief of My Learning Plan. Frontline notes that she "brings a passion for leveraging technology to support educator growth" and, yes, leveraging technology is a great source of passion for so many of us. Other backgrounds represented in the advisory board include human resources, consulting, human capital, consulting, consulting-- oh, and one Teach for America alumnus. FLRI has also entered into a collaboration with Johns Hopkins, a university leading in the field of Renting Out a Respected Name in Academia To Make Your Business Look More Legit.

FLRI offers reports like its end-of-the-year teacher absence and substitute busyness report. Frontline has crunched numbers from 2.7 million employees at 4,900 "educational organizations." The report is not exactly filled with shocking reveals (teacher absences are harder to fill on Fridays and with less lead time; the most common reason for absence is illness). But I find it just a little bit sobering to realize that every time I miss a day, I'm participating in a giant research project that is collecting my data.

There's also a two-part report about professional development, predicated on the idea that the Every Student Succeeds Act gives the "most prescriptive federal definition" of quality PD ever. FLRI determines that the definition centers on PD that is "sustained, intensive, collaborative, job-embedded, data-driven and classroom-focused." Based on that definition, it turns out that most PD currently sucks, a finding that is even less surprising than the discovery that it's harder to get subs on a Friday in May. This is even with FLRI's sort-of-silly definitions of these terms-- "sustained" means "meets at least three times" and "intensive" means "takes at least 4.5 hours." The good news is that only 8% of PD activities were "data-driven," which is probably 8% too many until such time as we can come up with some kind of data that deserves to drive anything more important than a miniature clown car (spoiler alert: Big Standardized Tests and their sad siblings like MAP will not provide that data).

So Frontline aspires to be a multi-tasking major player, offering "research" that proves how much you need their products, and the products that you so desperately need. All of it cleverly resting on a giant foundation built on the data-mining performed on the services you're already buying from them. It's a forward-thinking business model in keeping with many tech giants, except that Facebook and Google data-mine you and treat you as the product without getting you to pay for the privilege. 

ICYMI: Endless Winter Edition (3/12)

As always, I encourage you to share and boost the signal of anything you read here. 

It's Testing Season. Ethics, Anyone?

Sarah Lahm highlights just two of the jaw-dropping abuses done in the name of the Big Standardized Test this year (so far).

Out There

Annie Tan with a short, simple, powerful meditation on putting yourself out there.

Dismantling Public Education: Turning Ideology into Gold

Alex Molnar at the Institute for New Economics takes a look at the big picture in the school privatization movement.

Charter Schools Do Not Equal Education Reform

Guest op-ed from David Hornbeck, who was the head of Philly schools when they first got themselves in deep trouble. The lede tells you why you want to read this:

As Philadelphia's Superintendent of Schools, I recommended the approval of more than 30 charter schools because I thought it would improve educational opportunity for our 215,000 students. The last 20 years make it clear I was wrong.

White Choice

Well, this is kind of depressing. Jennifer Berkshire looks at how segregation academies (private schools started so that white children wouldn't have to go to school with black classmates) are still alive and thriving in the South.

Betsy DeVos' Holy War

So this is where we are now-- Rolling Stone decides to go ahead and cover the Secretary of Education. Much of this will be familiar to those of us who have been studying up on DeVos, but Janet Reitman's piece connects all the dots and lays out the bigger, scarier picture.

A Tale of Two Betsy DeVoses

Between the Stone piece and this one in the Atlantic, it seems that journalists are finally ready to wrestle with he big questions-- how do you make "DeVos" plural or possessive? This profile focuses on the odd discontinuity between Betsy, the sweet-as-pie hometown girl making West Michigan a better place, and DeVos, the hard-knuckle, ball-busting political operative.

Inconceivable Conversations

Blue Cereal Education with a great piece about testing, and why not.

Why Can't Teachers Make Decisions on Their Own

And now for something else entirely-- Peter DeWitt provides a more formal framework for discussing how schools are set up to make sure that teachers can't make decisions.

Can You Afford To Become a Teacher?

For the past few years, there's been regular conversation about the sad discovery that many professions are only accessible to the wealthy. If you want to enter the world of Hollywood, Wall Street or many writing gigs, the path is through an unpaid internship which is, you know, unpaid. Other areas may attract the non-wealthy, but there entry-level "jobs" are still unpaid. If you want to break in, you need a second job, supportive and well-heeled parents, or someone willing to foot your bills.
 

But a conversation with an aspiring teacher last week led me to wonder-- is teaching suffering from the same problem?

I'm not just talking about how, once you land a job, you discover that the lay is low and that you are going to have to pump some of that income back into your own classroom. The first financial obstacle, however, appears before you even start your first job. Depending on where you decide you want to teach, getting a job straight out of college may well be possible. But for many proto-teachers, that is not going to happen.

Instead, many teachers have to work their way into a district by substituting. My wife and I both spent years doing day-to-day subbing and covering leaves before finally landing our own job.

But I worked on this path during the early eighties. Subbing in my region paid $50-$60 per day. I was living in a mobile home and paying $75/month for rent, so my sub pay, while unspectacular, was sufficient to support me (along with the help in extra-dire moments from my well-heeled parental units). I could hang in there until I got my big break.

But substitutes in the new millennium face a tougher challenge. In thirty years, our sub pay crept up to $85. We just this year decided to respond to the substitute teacher shortage by raising our pay to $100 a day. This is shockingly close to substitute pay in Philadelphia, a city that's far more expensive to live in (and where there's a substitute teacher shortage).

My wife entered the profession in the new millennium. She also paid her dues in the sub world; it required a second job, a period of moving back in with her parents, and marrying a filthy rich high school English teacher. Without extra resources to fall back on, she would have to give up dreams of teaching (which would have been a shame, because she is damn good at her job).

Substitute teaching is the barely-paid internship of education, and not everyone can afford to hang on for a year or ten of subsistence living. I have no idea of what the actual figures are for people who graduate with teaching certificates who give up on the classroom and pick another profession because they haven't got the financial resources to hang on until they can get work. But my sense, anecdotally, is that it's a not-insignificant number of proto-teachers who are being lost.

Worse yet, this means that teaching is particularly difficult to enter for folks from low-income families who have limited financial resources, which means that staffing classrooms in low-income communities face an extra challenge in coaxing back new teachers who are from the neighborhood or one like it. The corollary is that non-wealthy students are increasingly in danger of being taught by teachers who don't really know what growing poor means.

Are there solutions? Well, there's the old Pay Substitutes Real Money solution, but nobody seems to like that one. Or we could create some sort of entry-level career step-ladder so that a person could work her way into a teaching job by climbing a career ladder that let her actually live. The problem with such solutions is that they involve money, and we're currently pretty deeply committed to not throwing money at schools or people who work in them.

Nevertheless, the profession has a (nother) problem if aspiring teachers don't just need to answer questions like do you have the drive to teach or o you love kids or do you know your stuff or can you handle the students-- we're in trouble if teachers must answer can you afford to become a teacher? It's nothing good for American education if teaching becomes a job only for the privileged few.

Noble Teachers Forming Largest Charter Union

The 800 teachers and staff of Chicago's Noble charter school chain is working to form the largest charter teacher union in the country.

 They would not become the first charter union in the country, or even in Chicago. In fact, the Aspire network of charter schools just averted a strike by their own teachers' union by agreeing to wage increases, shorter workdays, and, apparently, occasionally listening to their staff. Like the proposed Noble union, the Aspire teachers belong to the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (ACTS), a group affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers.

The Noble chain is one of Chicago's most prominent, founded in 1999. Its investors include Governor Bruce Rauner, the billionaire Pritzker family and Chicago Board of Education President Frank Clark. It's marketing literature makes plain where Noble's focus lies:

At Noble, success is the only option. 
 No excuses. We believe that no matter how far behind a student is when they enter ninth grade, they will succeed. No matter what their family’s income or education level is, they will succeed. No matter if their neighborhoods are plagued with violence or their peers are involved in gangs, they will succeed. At Noble, we hold everyone—students, teachers, and leadership—to the highest possible standards and accept no excuses for failure. 

The brochure also notes that "The Noble Way" is "discipline, data and deliverables."

A Chicago Reporter profile about Noble from a year ago included this characterization of the chain:

Critics often imagine the Noble Network of Charter Schools as a monolith that steals “good” students from neighborhood schools and pushes out the “bad” ones. A place where students walk silently in hallways and teachers are obsessed with test prep.

There is some truth to that stereotype, as higher-achieving students are more likely to choose Noble to start with, while many who can’t handle the strict system of demerits leave.

The profile argues that things are "more complicated." Nobles own figures on retention are not great, but not shocking (and also not easily verified by any outside source.

Noble has run into other issues. In 2013, news reports publicized Noble's "disciplinary fees," a fine assessed against students for infractions like "unkempt appearance and not making eye contact." In the worst cases, students would not only pay fines for infractions, but be assigned a "summer behavioral session" with a corresponding tuition fee. One student's family racked up almost $2,000 in fees for a ninth grade son, just to keep him in the school. Noble has also become a school associated with the "grit" movement, with the attempts to turn joy into a school chore. It's not a pretty picture.

Noble also got in trouble last fall when they used Chicago Pubic School student home addresses for promotional mailers. And like many charter chains, they are hard on their teaching staff-- the school runs a long school day. In their book A Fight for the Soul of Public Education, Steven Ashby and Robert Bruno report that a beginning teacher at Noble in 2012 made roughly half of their public school counterparts. Noble does not have a set pay scale, and teachers who want a raise must ask for one, or hope that they can score a test score bonus based on student results (up to $5,500).

The Noble staff is much whiter than Chicago Public School staff. It's also about 40% Teach for America. Noble's own exit interviews tell them that about 40% of the departing teachers feel they were underpaid. But Noble teachers, while given some autonomy and a generous classroom budget, gave as their Number One reason for leaving "unreasonable job expectations." As one former teacher told the now-departed magazine Chicago Catalyst,

If we expect teachers to be martyrs forever, we’ll never retain talent.

But if a charter is based on demanding a culture of compliance from its students, it seems likely that they will extend that sort of firm, commanding hand to their staff. If your whole school is based on an atmosphere of obedience, of shaping your appearance and behavior to the demands of your superiors-- well, it would be hard to institute that approach only to students, and not also to the teaching staff. If your school's motto is "People got to know their place," it's hard to see how that wouldn't not have a long-term toxic effect on your relationship with your staff.

In a letter calling for the union, organizers wrote

We want a voice in decisions, stability in our schools and, most importantly, the best possible future for our students. Under current local and national conditions, educators labor to remain in their classrooms while our value is diminished, our capacity drained, and our power constrained.

Some teachers are quick to note that they do not see this as an "us versus them" situation, but believe that the chain has some issues that need to be addressed. In a WBEZ report, teachers noted the high staff turn over rate at Noble-- about a third of the staff leaves every year, according to the state. This is not unusual for Illinois charters; for many of them, it is a feature and not a bug, because teachers who leave within a year or two cost far less than teachers who stick around. But some teachers see it as a problem for the students and the school community:

Spanish teacher Christina Verdos-Petrou said she got involved in the union effort after the return of a former student opened her eyes to the impact of teacher turnover.

“I was the only one he recognized,” said Verdos-Petrou, who works at Noble’s Golder College Prep campus in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood. “It is truly heartbreaking when I see our students come back and they do not recognize the majority of staff in the building.”

Management, meanwhile, does not want to sacrifice the "flexibility" that comes with an non-union staff. Noble principals are free to pay each teacher whatever the principal thinks that teacher is worth, within the financial limits of the chain. Noble leaders say that they could pay better if they got more money from the public system. But it's hard to see why they need more money from the public system in order to stop demanding that teachers work twelve-to-fourteen hour days. 

Whatever its strengths and weaknesses, Noble is a textbook example of how quickly teachers can get beat up and burned out when they have no employment protections, no clearly set job requirements, plus low and uncertain pay. Noble's yet another example of a charter chain that uses "flexibility" as code for "profitable instability that works in management's favor." 

If the teachers and staff can pull this off and manage to unionize the chain, they'll be doing the management of Noble a favor, and doing the students of Noble an even huger favor, but it remains to be seen if Noble management understands that, or whether they put a greater value on the freedom to run their schools without having to answer to anybody. If Noble does become home to the largest charter union in the country, that will send a message to other overworked, underpaid charter teachers who don't know their place. On the other hand, it will help to legitimize charter schools. This is a story worth watching.