Leaders, Character, and Policy

Many of us spend huge amounts of time discussing and debating education policy. But where the synthetic rubber meets the recycled asphalt, policy is not the most important thing. In every school, in every district, what really matters is the character of the leadership.

In the same way that workers do not quit workplaces so much as they quit a boss, teachers are influenced by the administrators in their building. District administrators are influential primarily in how they affect building administrators. Policy decisions on the state and federal level are most influential to the extent that they influence the behavior of actual educators in actual leadership positions.

Put another way, a sudden implementation of actual good education policies by state and federal governments (boy, what a dream that is) would not suddenly transform a bad building principal who makes staff miserable into a great principal with a happy staff.

In fact, a good principal, given the chance by her superintendent, can seriously blunt the impact of bad policy choices. In Florida, a state that is a champion producer of bad education policy, there are schools where principals actually find reasonable, humane, decent solutions to problems created by stupid policies.

A good manager in any business or institution really has just one job-- to create conditions in which her people can do their best work. If it's raining, a good manager is out there holding an umbrella over the front-line worker; not yelling at that worker for being wet.

It's important to have an administrator who has classroom experience, who knows the regulations, who has a broad understanding of education, and all the other things search committees look for. But one of the most critical issues is character.

At this point in my career, I've worked for many administrators, and I don't remember the various policy decisions and implementations nearly as well as I remember whether they were decent people or not.

A principal might not be the brightest bulb in the chandelier, might not be on the cutting edge of education, might not even have a clear picture of what's going on in the classroom, but if he's a decent person who treats his teachers with respect, listens to what they have to say, and puts the needs of the students first, I can be happy working for him. Even if he wants to implement or support policies I disagree with, we can work things out. I can advocate for my students without having to watch my back. On the other hand, if he is mean, vindictive, selfish, distrustful, and spiteful, it doesn't matter what policies he supports-- every day is going to be miserable, and I am going to use up a chunk of my energy just deciding which battles to fight and how to fight them and what to do when I lose.

Of course a leader-staff relationship is a two-way street, and teachers can make things better or worse by their own choices. But administrators decide what rules we'll play by and will ultimately decide whether to share power or grab onto it with both hands. Administrators have a huge hand in setting the tone, in creating an atmosphere for their schools.

I write all this to remind myself-- I read and read about schools where things really suck, and often the administration is an invisible hand in that picture-- because I'm privileged to work for a principal who's a decent guy, and while he's not perfect and we don't always agree and I've worked for some pretty not-good examples of the breed in my career, it is easy to forget just how grindingly rough it is to work in some school buildings in this country. It's easy to forget how hard it is to work for a powerful jerk every day when you aren't living it.

Bad policy certainly arms and enables bad administrators, but one of the great undiscussed questions of both ed reform and resistance to it is the question of how to get good people in those front offices. Certainly some reformsters have some cool ideas about how to make a buck putting any warm body in there, as long as it shares their same bad values (looking at you, Relay GSE and Broad Academy), but all of us need to remember that without a decent person in the administrator's seat, it's really hard to drive the education bus anywhere productive and useful. And while we're talking about all the big picture issues, all across this country there are schools whose Number One issue is that they've got a dysfunctional jerk behind the steering wheel.

Can this be addressed on the policy level? Sure-- some. Being a principal and superintendent kind of sucks these days, in that you have all the responsibility for everything short of the weather, and very little power to control any of the outcomes you're responsible for. We talk about the teacher shortage, but mostly smart and capable people in education know better than to get into administration, and so a vast pool of people who could be good at it avoid it like the plague because what ethical decent educator wants to be responsible for implementing state and federal mandated malpractice? So we end up with a handful of good, decent folks, some others who figured they'd like a raise, another handful who just don't understand what the job is, and a bunch of peripatetic egos wandering the country collecting big bucks before they end their three-year local dance.

In the meantime, it takes local action to find local solutions for the problems of bad administrators. It is perhaps a conversation that more people should get involved in.

The Attack on Charter Schools

Nashville Charter School parents complain that they are under attack and disrespected. Charter advocates have long panel discussions about how to fight back against the attacks on charters and choice. Every 9-12 months, a new website is launched because reformy fans of charter and choice believe that they are under attack and need to get their story Out There.

Even the newly-minted teacher of the year, who works at a charter school, is concerned that public and charter schools are seen as "in conflict."

So why do charter schools feel so attacked and put upon?

Part of it may be an illusion of privilege. When you are an rich old white guy who has always gotten his way, it can be shocking and destabilizing when people say "No" to you. If you are a money-soaked hedge-funder surrounded by compliant underlings, it may be upsetting when people who should know their place start getting uppity. When you live soaked in privilege, any denial of your God-given right to get your own way might well feel like an attack. But that doesn't describe everyone who has thrown their support behind charters and choice.

Some of it is certainly karma, history coming around. Many charter choice fans seem to have forgotten that they spent years pitching charters and choice by chicken littling about Failing Public Schools and how much the public schools suck and how trained educators were awful, better replaced by lightly trained best-and-brightests from some ivy-covered hall.They are like the bully who, having finally pushed the kid with the glasses too far so that he takes boxing lessons and starts to punch back at their bullying but, says, "What are you doing! You're supposed to be too nice to fight back!" But that doesn't cover all the possibilities, either.

No, the necessity of a public vs. charter cage match is baked right into the charter laws of most states, courtesy of one of the central lies of the modern charter movement.

The Big Lie of modern charters is that we can have multiple parallel school systems for the same money we spent on one. Sure. When you're having trouble with your family budget and maintaining one home, the solution is to move half your family into a hotel. If it's hard to pay the bills for one car, buy a second or third or fourth one.

Charter choice fans sell us charters as free private school. It won't cost a penny more. And this lie guarantees conflict.

Because pubic schools and charters are trapped by that lie in a zero sum game. Every taxpayer dollar that goes to a charter school doesn't go to a pubic school. Every taxpayer dollar that a public school hangs onto is a dollar that charters don't get. For one to survive, the other must get beaten up. Even a well-meaning mild-mannered friendly charter school cannot avoid attacking public schools. Under current charter laws, it is impossible for charter and public schools NOT to be in a state of constant conflict.

It doesn't have to be this way. Charter choice supporters in the legislatures could say, "We think the idea of free access to private school for some students is a good idea, and so we are going to raise taxes and allocate the money it will take to do this right. We will fully fund public schools and we will fully fund charter schools and they will be able to work together for the benefit of the larger community because they will no longer be battling to the death for an inadequately small pool of funding."

Of course, charter choice supporters do not want to talk about charter choice systems as a new entitlement to free private school, and they do not want to talk about raising taxes. And so where charter choice is the Way To Go, we have multiple parallel school systems, mostly underfunded except for those that are able to draw extra funding from well-to-do parents or friendly philanthropists.

And, of course, we have those choice supporters for whom a fight to the death is the point. Their hope is that charter schools will finish off public systems, leaving only privatized schools that function "properly," aka "through market forces." Meanwhile, the "government schools" that run on the tax dollars stolen from hard-working rich folks and used to educate Those People can be properly starved to death.

And so charter schools and their fans, even the well-meaning decently parental ones, must live with the feeling of being under attack, because the system is currently constructed so that charter schools must be a threat to the health and continued existence of public schools, and public school supporters can either fight back or lie down and die.

It doesn't have to be this way. It would probably be better for everyone if it wasn't. But until we address the Big Lie at the heart of current charter choice policy, this is how it will stay.

Are Charters a Rural Solution

In a piece that has circulated a bit, Karen Eppley, an associate professor of curriculum and instruction at Pennsylvania State University suggests that charter schools might be the solution to many rural education problems.

While the article is not as gung-ho about charters as the title suggests (I know-- writers rarely get to pick their own headline), it still misses some critical points.

According to this 2013-2014 report from the Rural School and Community Trust, about a third of our schools are rural, and about one in five students attend a rural school. So this is worth discussing. Eppley wryly notes that Betsy DeVos brought attention to rural education with her observation about bear protection in Wapiti, Wyoming, but her policy goals might have a more far-reaching effect. Fair enough.

Eppley touts her rural bona fides and notes that rural education has been an important part of rural American life. She's got that right-- my own children attended little Utica Elementary, a school that, along with the volunteer fire department hall, served as a community center. On the night that the school held its talent show, art show, and ice cream social, everyone in the village would be there, whether they had a child in the school or not.

Despite the positive impacts of schools on rural communities, 150,000 rural schools have been eliminated through closure or consolidation since 1930. Rural schools are closed primarily in response to budget cuts and low enrollment.

Eppley's correct, though by going back to 1930 she oversells her case. As she should already know, numerous rural schools were eliminated in Pennsylvania in the 1960s. Previously, every township in PA had a school district, but the state did some serious arm-twisting to encourage consolidation. My current school district is the result of combining the city school district with several surrounding small districts, including Utica, which originally had its own tiny high school. The 1960s consolidations were not about money or enrollment so much as a policy change about what a school district should look like (and the emergence of dependable transportation options.)

Eppley then moves to a capsule history of the charter school movement, offering her own theory about what is happening right now--

The increasingly charter-friendly environment can be traced to an ideological shift: While public education was once seen as a key to democracy, it is increasingly seen as a tool of efficiency and economic competitiveness. This change has created prime conditions for the school choice movement — and for the creation and expansion of charter schools.

But rural charters are a different animal. Eppley notes that while urban charters are often chain operations (eg KIPP), rural charters are more likely to be community-based mom-and-pop operations, sometimes as a delaying action against the loss of a local school. I have seen this as well-- just up the road a community's elementary school was closed; a community group formed to resurrect it as a charter. The idea here is to resist consolidation and keep those community ties alive and thriving. And so far I'm with her. But I think she's missing a couple of points.

First, while it's true that school closings are often driven by financial issues, budget issues are themselves often driven by charter funding. Charter chains-- with one exception-- are not descending on rural areas because that's not where the money is. But the exception is huge-- in Pennsylvania, cyber charters are draining rural districts of hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars.

My own district is a fine example. A few years ago, we closed two elementary schools in hopes of saving about $800K. Our cyber charter bill that year? About $800K. The huge loss of public tax dollars to profiteering cyber schools is doubly galling because these cybers can't even do the job. Study after study has concluded that cyber schools fail to educate their students, many of whom return to us in the public schools, or simply never graduate at all.

Eppley correctly notes that rural charters will not unleash the power of free market competition because there is no competition there-- there are few choices for rural schools. And she makes the observation that unlike the case with urban charters, rural charters can actually be a tool for establishing local parental control. For that reason, they are often inefficient and can be dogged by financial problems if for no other reason than they are being run by amateurs.

But then there's this:

Until educational, social and economic policies are implemented with rural communities in mind, rural citizens should continue to work to break down barriers for more socially just rural schools and communities — in the same way that urban citizens have.

Given the amount of research that shows urban charters fostering more segregation, I'm not sure exactly what she's talking about. Nor is it clear what barriers need to broken down in rural schools where, precisely because there are few choices, all students are squooshed together into the same facility.

Eppley does early in the article note the "emerging research suggesting that charter schools may have lower academic performance and negatively affect the finances of the home district." But then she moves on, arriving somehow at the notion that rural schools can be helped by charters. However, the negative effects, particularly the financial ones, are strongly felt in rural areas. One of the great central inefficiencies, the foundational lie of modern charter systems-- that we can somehow fund two or three or more parallel education systems with the same money that barely supported one system-- is magnified in rural settings where money and resources and student populations are already stretched thin.

A couple of years ago, Utica's elementary school joined the other two in being closed down by my district. In  less than a decade, we have gone from six elementary schools to three, partly due to declining enrollment, and in a larger part due to financial pressures. Now small communities have been hollowed out a bit more, and we are still struggling to stay ahead of the financial squeeze. It is hard to imagine how having to stretch taxpayer dollars to run a few more schools in the district would be helpful in any way, particularly when sending tax dollars to charter operators is one of the reasons we're under this pressure in the first place. There's a reason that financially strapped school districts close schools rather than open more-- you don't save money by paying for more schools. Charter schools are not a solution-- they are a huge part of the problem.

Personalization and the Outliers

Henry Ford was an early proponent of personalization. "Any customer can have a car pained any color that he wants," said Ford in 1909, "so long as it is black."

There have always been limits to personalization. I like to wear hats, but my head is some sort of extra-large melon, so while hat manufacturers may offer choices to fit the personal size preferences of many customers, I'm an outlier. Many times I'm just SOL on a particular hat.

Imagine that all your potential customers are like a big bell curve. Aim too narrow, meeting the personal preferences of the fat part at the peak, and you will not capture as much of the market as you'd like. Or if you're up for it, imagine a line plot-- the sweet spot is in covering the cluster at the center while ignoring the outliers who are off in their own little corner. You can predict what the majority of your customers probably want-- to be sure of hitting the outliers, you would have to cover the entire charter, including areas that were completely empty. Spread out to offer every option that every customer on the diagram wants, and on the thin ends you'll be losing money. Burger King could offer pineapple and bananas as burger toppings, and somebody might even order it, but they would never sell enough to cover the cost of stocking those ingredients. Maybe nobody would ever choose banana at all, and BK would be out the money. They could advertise they were offering perfectly personalized burgers, but they'd be losing money to do it.

Personalization as a marketing strategy has to aim for the sweet spot where you are hitting maximum customers for minimum. You can only do that by recognizing that some customers have personal preferences that it will cost you too much to meet, and so those outliers must be cut loose. The only choice they get is "Buy what we offer, or do without."

Any system, any product that is going to marketed to any kind of scale, is going to have this built-in limitation.

And that includes personalized education.

Putting together banks of questions and drills and instructional activities is expensive for companies-- remember how aggressively the major test manufacturers guard their question, because it would be prohibitively expensive to have to replace a set of 50 or 70 questions. So creating the giant bank of possible modules for personalized learning programs would presumably be hugely expensive. Therefor, the module manufacturers will need to control costs and maximize return by ignoring the outliers.

There's no money to be made in creating a module bank that meets every conceivable educational need that could appear, particularly if we are talking about a program meant to serve hundreds of thousands of students.

Likewise, the artificial intelligence that is allegedly sorting out the students based on their performance cannot afford to be too precise in its sorting. If it analyzes student achievement and ability based on dozens of factors, then it will need to sort the students into hundreds of separate "bins," each with its own set of instructional modules, each of which will in turn sort students into another hundred separate bins. This system would be complicated and, more importantly, expensive as hell.

Instead, it would be easier and cheaper to collect only a couple of data points and sort the students into a half-dozen large bins that encompass a broad spectrum of students. Details of their personal educational needs will be discarded, and outliers will just be jammed into whatever bin they come "close enough" to matching.

In short, a profitable system will be no more personalized than giving all students a ten-question pre-test, then sorting-- students who get an A or B move on to Worksheet #1, students who get a C move on to Worksheet #2, and Ds and Fs move on to Worksheet #3.

And this is before we even start to work in other factors like the student's interests (a critical factor in choosing reading assignments) or the style of exercise they work best with (picture-based? long story problems? puzzles?).

To be marketable, personalized education systems have to promise that they will provide an educational program perfectly suited to each and every child. But to be manageable and profitable, they have to provide a system that discards outliers among students and just jams them in with everyone else.

You know what's good at personalized learning for outliers? Carbon based life-forms animated with non-artificial intelligence, with professional training and experience in the education of young humans. Collect a bunch of those, give them several individual small humans to instruct, and you can have all the personalized instruction you want-- and it won't even create a permanent data file. Best of all-- these carbon-based life forms can even provide personalized instruction for the outliers.

PA: Let's Arm Teachers?

Apparently it's education crazy season in Harrisburg, with one ill-advised ed bill after another. But fear not-- at least one PA legislator wants some of us to start packing heat in school.

Senate Bill 383 intends to amend the school code, with the intent of "providing for protection and defense of pupils.

Sponsor Donald C White, who was an insurance salesman back before his 2001 election, explains the reasoning here:

In the aftermath of a number of tragic school shootings, the debate continues across the country on how we can better protect our children. While most of this discussion surrounds whether or not more gun control measures are needed, I believe we must look at all options when it comes to improving the safety and security of our children, teachers and school staff....

My bill would allow school personnel to have access to firearms in school safety zones if they receive authorization from the school board of directors, are licensed to carry a concealed firearm and have met certain training requirements in the use and handling of firearms (as outlined in my proposal)...

As we weigh our options, I believe we need to consider providing school employees with more choices than just locking a door, hiding in a closet or diving in front of bullets to protect students. With the legal authority, licensing and proper training, I believe allowing school administrators, teachers or other staff to carry firearms on the school premises is an option worth exploring. 

No. No, it's not. Here's why I don't think it's an idea worth considering.

1) The window of opportunity is tiny. 

From start to finish, active shooter events are short, short things. Chances are mighty slim that a teacher will have a chance to do a thing. An FBI study of active shooter incidents found the vast majority were over in less than five minutes.

2) Shooting in high stress situations is hard.

Military personnel and police train with their firearms a lot. A lot. Because when you are all of a sudden in a life or death situation and you have to pull out your gun and use it, there are many problems. Your hands are shaking. Your perceptions are flooded in adrenaline. You have to make a split-second critical decision when you were teaching verbs thirty seconds ago. Shooting a gun at a target when you have time to prep and aim and think is plenty hard enough. Under "combat" conditions, it's infinitely harder, unless you are a highly-trained individual.

Using a gun requires a professional. Amateurs with guns are bad news.

3) Collateral damage.

You may think that picking off the shooter while children are running past you in screaming chaos will be just like picking off bad guy bosses in Call of Duty, in which case you are exactly the person I don't want to be packing in my building. You're an amateur with a gun. There's one shooter and a hundred children; I figure the odds that a child is going to be hit by friendly fire are somewhere between "unacceptable" and "horrifying."

4) Confusion on the scene.

Let's say that law enforcement manages to arrive before the scene has played out. They walk in the door and see four people wielding guns. What do you think they should do at that moment? Last summer in Dallas, when a sniper was picking off police officers, a crowd full of Rambo wannabe's just created more confusion for law enforcement. If you were a shooter, you could not concoct a better scenario to give yourself cover than to have a bunch of civilians with guns running around while police were trying to find you.

5) Guns in schools. Where there are also children.

Here's a fun story. A third grade teacher at a private school in Chambersburg,, PA went to the bathroom, took off her holstered and loaded sidearm to do her business, and left it there on top of the toilet tank in the same restroom that the students used. For at least three hours. It was, in fact, children who brought the event to the authorities' attention.

There are so many nightmare scenarios that come from trying to keep a firearm secure in a building filled with children-- particularly when the firearm is being kept secure by someone whose main business every day is a hundred things other than keeping a firearm secure.

For the vast majority of schools, an active shooter event is something that will never, ever happen. But we're going to start putting firearms inside those buildings, watched over and operated by sort-of-kind-of-trained amateurs? Reasonable people can disagree about gun control (though unreasonable people often dominate the conversation), but this is just a bad idea. This is not how to make my students safer.

If you're in Pennsylvania, contact your Senator and tell him to vote no on SB 383.

EdTech To Teachers: Who Needs You?

If you want to see a fully-refined expression of edtech disdain for actual teachers, check out this article by Dr. Karen Beerer, "Greatest Lesson: Teacher Buy-in Is Overrated."

Beerer is VP of Professional Development for Discovery Education. She's held that job since 2012-- before that she was Asst. Super at Boyertown School District  for seven years, and before that an "educator" at Quakertown Community School District for twenty years (that apparently breaks down to stints as principal and teacher). She was hired by Discovery to handle things like their Common Core Academies. Presumably their mission statement was not "Learn from professional development or don't-- we couldn't care less."

And yet, here she is to explain how implementing ed tech can be done via a big bus that just drives over your professional staff.

The stock photo for the piece is a woman at a desk, eyes closed, hand to forehead. One must assume it's a superintendent thinking, "OMFG those damn teachers." The subhead notes that while collaboration is nice and all, waiting for teacher buy-in can be "paralyzing to innovation." And we are off and running.

Almost immediately, Beerer hedges her bets and adds a "sometimes" because, she says, there is a time and place for it.

She notes that teachers have a right to feel innovation fatigue as fads like Madeline Hunter come and go (but she would like you to know, parenthetically, that she still loves Hunter-- are you getting a picture of Beerer now?). But as she travels the country as a sales rep with a fancy title VP of Learning and Development for Discovery Education, she gets a lot of pushback on the transition from actual books to digital content, from "we're not ready" to "we can't afford it" to "students don't need any more tech in their lives." Apparently she hasn't talked to anyone who says things like "your digital content isn't very good" or "we're already using another product."

Never mind. Here are three reasons that administrators should ignore those pesky teachers when it comes to launching technological innovation.

1. The Real World Isn’t Dependent on Teacher Buy-In

The teachers may have legit concerns, but hey-- teachers don't live in the real world, and the real world is totally digital. So get with it, students. There's no need to get teachers into that "real world"-- just send students on ahead with no guidance at all. What could possibly go wrong?

2. Students Are Ready, Whether or Not Teachers Are Ready

No matter our concerns, we need to recognize that our students are ready—they want to engage with textbooks that are replete with immersive and interactive experiences. 

I wish. As I've noted in the past, I'm a fairly tech forward teacher. As a literature teacher, it's easy for me to assign almost any text simply by pushing out the link to it. And do you know what the majority of my students do first when they get such an assignment? That's right-- they print it out, so they can read it on paper and not on a screen.  

My students are ready to use instagram and snapchat and whatever game is cool this week. Expecting them to be inspired by a screen and software is like expecting students of my generation to be inspired by a pencil. Yes, some are, but mostly they take their tech tools for granted and are no more inspired by them than they are inspired by air.

This is a typical arc of technology. When automobiles first arrived, everyone who owned one was a well-versed mechanic who could work on every part and function. But growing the market requires reducing the amount of tech knowledge required, and now the vast majority of car-owners can't do anything more than change a tire. Fifteen years ago, I always had students around who could code. Today, I have none.

Part of my job is to show them what they can do with the tech, to try to light a spark, to give them a push, even if it''s just toward doing a presentation with slides that aren't totally boring. I don't just have to buy in-- I have to sell, too.

3. Digital will be Used By Students Daily and the Classroom Won’t Change That

Beerer says she hears worries about the impact of technology, and I get that such feelings are out there. I'm more worried about the impact of tech's capacity for data mining and surveillance all the flippin' time, and the great lengths that tech companies go to smother those concerns instead of having serious conversations about them. And-- surprise-- Beerer isn't going to address that here.

But her actual point is not clear. Students are going to get sucked in anyway, so just go ahead and buy in, Gramps?

In fact all three seem a little bit like arguments for why teachers should buy in and not why their buy-in just isn't necessary. But she is now going to outline briefly how to just go ahead and do it anyway.

Enhance the instructional experience by integrating digital strategies and content with “traditional” teaching strategies.

Add a dollop of digital to whatever you're doing. Here's a super example: "ask students to write a five-paragraph essay, and then have them summarize their work Twitter-style in 140 characters or less." Because....? Does this have any value other than incorporating the digital element for the digital element's sake? She says this will be a catalyst for increasing student engagement, but if that's the case, she's already in trouble because my students think that Twitter is for people my age. And although Beerer was an elementary teacher, she doesn't address whether she thinks this is a great strategy for second graders.

Let the content support differentiation.

Digital resources make it easy to differentiate, like assigning reading by lexile levels (if you think lexiles aren't junk which-- spoiler alert-- I do). She says digital resources can help "scale" our "good instructional practices" somehow. Digital magic?

Use technology to teach students how to learn.

Because there's like Siri and virtual reality and new apps and those new apps might help them learn, somehow.  So, you know, explore that.

Hey, wait a minute

Yeah, those are not actual ways to implement digital resources so much as they are the broad outlines of pitches that a sales rep would use to push digital products out to the superintendents and business managers and IT directors who will never actually use them.

And here's how she brings it home.

The key is for all teachers who have not yet begun making the digital transition to get started on making that shift today.

And

Even if you don’t fully buy-in, as one of my colleagues says, at least “be” in.

In other words, district leaders, buy this stuff, stick it in the classroom and tell your teachers, "Use the damn stuff. I don't care if you have any use for it-- use it anyway. Explore and let the digital inspiration sweep you away because, God help me, I let that woman from the company convince me to drop a couple hundred thou on this stuff and now it's up to you to find a way to make it work."

I like tech, and some of her thinking mirrors some of the reasons I use it. But the utter disregard for teachers here is staggering. The notion that teachers don't need to be active or willing participants in the programs used in their classrooms is the same sort of teacher contempt that got us winning ideas like Common Core. It is one more version of the corporate sales mindset that gives us "teacher proof" programs in a box with a promise that it doesn't matter who you hire-- just hand them this and students will do super great.

Part of our function is as gatekeepers, charged with making sure that our students aren't bombarded with a lot of damn fool nonsense. Our gatekeeping capabilities have been sorely tested for the past decade and, sadly, many colleges and pretend teacher programs are cranking out grads who have been deliberately led to believe that gatekeeping is not their job at all, that there are somewhere wiser minds who will take care of that.

This is one of the great drivers of teacher de-professionalization. The desire for sales and the desire to circumvent teacher professional judgment. Never mind what they think. What do they know? Their buy-in and cooperation and professional agreement that this program or tool has value-- completely unnecessary. Ignore them and buy today!

Why the Attack on Sarah Chambers Matters

Every day, from all over the country, we hear stories of teachers whose jobs are, for one reason or another, are on the line. Sometimes we hang back, correctly assuming that we don't have the whole story, that there are local issues that we don't know about. But sometimes these local stories deserve all the attention we can give them because they are an early warning of kinds of problems we could all face. So that's why I think you should keep reading when I tell you--

Sarah Chambers is under attack.

Chambers is a special ed teacher in the Chicago Public School system, serving students at the Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy for the last eight years. She has been rated "distinguished" by six different principals. And as recent events have shown, she is much-beloved by her students and their parents, not because she's all warm and fluffy, but because she is a fierce advocate for those students.

CPS just suspended Chambers, and has served notice that they want to take her job.

Here's why we should all care.

Testing before teachers.

According to Chambers, the stated reason for her suspension was that she was accused of encouraging students to opt out of taking the PARCC (a charge that she denies).

Let that sink in-- of all the possible kinds of professional misconduct that a teacher could be guilty of, the one that the district was willing to move quickly and forcefully on was not a matter that touched on student rights or mistreatment, not even allegations of pedagogical misconduct. No, the thing that would cause CPS to spring into action, the one line they absolutely won't tolerate being crossed is failing to support the Big Standardized Test.

Mind you, Chambers has been on CPS radar over testing before. In her chapter of More Than a Score
(which you can read here, but you should really get a copy of the book), Chambers talks about how the school's teachers organized a successful boycott of the old Illinois Standards Achievement Test. The full staff voted not to administer the test at all, and CPR pushed back with threats of disciplinatry action, firing, and even stripping of licenses. Some of this was aimed at Chambers herself:

The interrogators tried to scare teachers into naming other teachers leading the opt-out movement. They asked one of my colleagues, “Was this led by a Ms. Lambers [meaning Ms. Chambers, my name]?” They used this strategy to get teachers to correct the absurd name they created, and say that “Ms. Chambers” led the campaign. 

Many staff members ultimately folded under the pressure, but Chambers had clearly made a name for herself in some offices.

Silencing Teacher Voices

Is this really all about protecting the sacred test? Doubtful. What seems far more likely is that CPS has decided to silence a strong and committed activist. Here's what fellow Chicago teacher-acitivist Michelle Gunderson thinks is behind the whole business:

Fear.

Fear of the truth Sarah tells. Fear of the power of her leadership. And fear of the crumbling of the neo-liberal design for schools: underfund the schools, watch them starve, and blame the failure of the schools on the children, teachers, and the communities. Once our schools are deemed unfit they are ripe for privatization by our mayor, Rahm Emanuel, and his friends. Sarah’s work interrupts these plans.

Chambers had been part of a bunch of noise that thwarted a CPS to cut programs at Saucedo. She has been absolutely fierce in speaking out for her students, whose special needs make them special targets. Remember, we're talking Chicago, home of Arne Duncan and his idea that all students with special needs require nothing more but teachers with high expectations.

Gunderson lays out just a few of the other times that Chambers has been a leader in resisting decisions that were bad for students, bad for schools. CPS has been slashing support and programs like Michael Myers on speed, and Chambers has repeatedly stepped up and spoken out. And Chicago where, remember, the school system is run out of the mayor's office, is particularly sensitive to uppity educators-- only a brain tumor kept union president Karen Lewis from handing Rahm Emanuel a huge political thwacking, and principal Troy LaRaviere had to be run out of his job before he drew too large a crowd.

And Chicago stands as an example for the rest of us, out there consistently in the forefront of standing up for student rights, for equity, for quality education, and for the rights of teachers.

Even if you are not a big unionist, you must recognize that teachers must be free to speak out and stand up for students, and that means that we have to be free to disagree, strongly, when the folks in charge make decisions we believe are wrong. If we can't speak up without losing our jobs, or the fear of losing our jobs, how are we to do our jobs in the first place? Teachers have to be a voice in an effective education system. Sometimes a union is an important part of establishing and protecting that voice, sometimes not-- but the notion that a teacher should lose her job for disagreeing with her bosses, even if her bosses include major political figures with national aspirations.

P.S. Tenure

I can't talk about this story without noting it's the umpty-millionth example of why we need tenure. Without any sort of job protections, Chambers could have been quietly fired over Easter and it would have all been done before anyone could even draw a complaining breath.

Bottom Line?

You may not have ever used the advice, but you've surely heard it-- if you have a class that's exceptionally unruly, pick out one of the worst kids and make an example of him. Stomp on him so thoroughly that the rest of the class will be afraid to breathe.

That sure looks like what we've got here. Pick out a teacher who's more vocal, more uppity, more annoying, and squash her both to end her particular irritations, and as a message to all her little friends to think twice before they step out of place and start messing with the big boys.

I could have reached out to Chambers like a real journalist, but first, I'm pretty sure she's got her hands full at the moment and second, I don't need to know about her background or her educational philosophy or whether or not I find her likeable to know that what CPS is trying to do to her is wrong. It's wrong. The official cover reason for trying to can her is wrong, and the unofficial apparent reason for wanting to can her is wrong-- especially because there seems to be widespread agreement that she is good at her job, who has been called a "tireless advocate for children.".

Chambers' hearing has not yet been scheduled. Meanwhile, Saucedo already has two openings in special ed. There is still plenty of time to make noise. The point of this business is to make teachers be silent. Don't be silent.

There's a petition here you can sign. You can spread the word (I recommend this piece by Gunderson). And pay attention, because this case is a message to us all.