Here is my neck of the woods, we're just a few hours away from high school graduation. It's definitely that time of year. Here's your assorted pieces of reading from the week. Remember to pass on the ones that speak to you.
These Activists Want Greater Home School Monitoring
In the background, as other education debates rage, is the old set of issues surrounding homeschooling. Here's a look at activists who help the women who were homeschooled to know nothing and be quiet, because, you know, women.
Blaming and Shaming Teachers for Low-Level Tech Practices
From the vaults, Bill Ferriter with a great piece about moving beyond tech and testing and back to actual real educating.
Facts About Newark Charter Schools
Once again, Mark Weber (Jersey Jazzman) breaks down the data to get past the PR baloney and look at the truth of charter schooling.
Is the US Education System Producing a Society of Smart Fools?
In the Scientific American, a psychologist looks at what's wrong with "reformed" education in the US.
Studies That Honor Preschool Rigor Are Not To Be Trusted
About that NYT coverage of that study showing academic rigor is really swell for four year olds...
Building Better Pre-Schools
Russ Walsh on the same subject-- how should we really be prepping the littles?
A Citizen's Encounter with a Charter School
Gene Glass reports on one more specific example of how charter really work to enrich their owners and trample on parents and students.
Sunday, June 4, 2017
Saturday, June 3, 2017
Paperwork
Rick Hess had a good piece this week that called back to one of my favorite films--
Hess noticed that much of the ESSA planning rolling in looks suspiciously like TPS report work.
But you rarely see the paper-shufflers get as much ink or as many pats on the back as you do in schooling. One of the more striking examples of this is the recent fascination with state plans for the Every Student Succeeds Act (especially where they build on decades of paper-driven plans to improve "teacher quality"). For reasons that escape me, ESSA's required federal filings, which have been assembled by hordes of well-meaning state officials and consultants, have been treated not as largely meaningless paper exercises but as something deserving of breathless notice from education advocates and press (including American Idol-style contests and foundation-funded independent review boards).
There is something childishly naive about the bureaucratic belief in the power of paperwork to bend reality. This is not a new feature in education. You may recall that Race To The Top and RttT Lite (More waivers, less money) both featured a required plan for moving high-quality teachers around to districts in need. Nobody ever figured out how such a thing could possibly be achieved-- but everybody had a plan about how to achieve it.
The grandaddy of modern useless paperwork would have to be all the district plans for "aligning" curriculum, the process by which we were all supposed to adapt our curricula to the Common Core State [sic] Standards. In many districts, the process was pretty simple.
1) Wipe dust off old curriculum.
2) Write down standards numbers beside old curriculum items
3) Add new items to curriculum to "bridge gaps."
4) Put curriculum binder back on shelf to gather more dust.
5) Go back to teaching your class as you had intended to in the first place.
Meanwhile, folks on the state level threw giant parties to celebrate how they'd reshaped the face of education.
But paperwork frequently bears absolutely no relationship to reality. Again-- not news. Folks in industry have long understood that the best way to improve a company's safety record is to reduce the number of accident reports, which is way easier to do than, say, making the workplace a safer place where fewer accidents happen.
The most incredible and tragic example of belief in paperwork would be the Great Chinese Famine. In an attempt to transform China's economy from agrarian to industrial overnight (the Great Leap Forward). Farmers were moved into the city and to combat the possibility of a drop in food production, Mao demanded-- regular reports. So in district after district, local leaders simply lied about food production levels. The paperwork that arrived in the capitol looked good-- and millions of Chinese starved to death because you can't eat imaginary food on fake paperwork.
In education we are susceptible to the Cult of Paperwork. I use paperwork to create a picture of what my students know and can do, and then I use more paperwork to create a capsule version of what I think my classroom paperwork shows. I file paperwork with the office to show what I'm doing, and parents get more paperwork to report on their students. We develop Super-Duper Paperwork like the Big Standardized Tests to serve as super-proxies for actual information about student knowledge and skill (well, skill anyway, since knowledge is out of favor as an educational goal).
A couple of decades ago, there was a rising against this approach. Authentic assessment was about saying, "Instead of generating paperwork proxies that may or may not tell us the truth about our students, let's try other things. Instead of creating proxies for learning, let's try to create situations in which we can observe the actual learning." But authentic assessment is expensive and imprecise and doesn't make for nice standardized reports, and before we could finish struggling with ideas like gigantic portfolios that followed students around for years like tangled chains of Jacob Marley, the standards movement erupted with a call for top-to-bottom standardized one-size-fits-all paperwork coast to coast. But you'll notice that today some of the ideas of authentic assessment live on in places like Silicon Valley's miracle AltSchool.
But in Schools for Regular People, paperwork still rules. Policy leaders and bureaucrats still believe that the path to improvement is to get people to fill out some educational TPS report. If you want to explain the growth in school district personnel over the past several decades, go look at how many people have been hired just to fill out government reports. And yet every new education reform ultimate ends up boiling down to "Education will get better is we have schools fill out this new report."
And paperwork also got a new lease on life thanks to computers. We all know that meaningless forms and paperwork are a dead and moribund thing, but if we digitize them and turn them into spreadsheets that we can view on a screen-- well, that's just awesome!! The belief that paperwork and forms and reports can tell you everything you need to know about what's going on has become the new theory of Management by Screen, in which a manager (or principal) just sits in an office and watches the data scroll by, creating digitized picture of What's Happening Out There. Which quickly turns into, "I need you to get your data entered on the TPS program."
It's the end of the year, so like many teachers, I need to wrap up my reporting of my SLO, which will involve logging onto the software we're using to manage our SLOs and entering data which I absolutely swear will be completely authentic and accurate and not at all just made up in order to fulfill a job requirement to get these forms filled out by the end of the year. Also, none of my colleagues are just filling in the blanks to get the paperwork requirement done, either. And somewhere on the state level, some bureaucrat will look at all those forms and data (well, not actually look at them-- I'm pretty sure nobody ever actually looks at them, which is another hallmark of paperwork-- rather they'll look at the fact that they exist) and declare proudly, "Look at what a great job our teachers are doing. I know they're doing a great job because they've filled out all this paperwork."
Hess noticed that much of the ESSA planning rolling in looks suspiciously like TPS report work.
But you rarely see the paper-shufflers get as much ink or as many pats on the back as you do in schooling. One of the more striking examples of this is the recent fascination with state plans for the Every Student Succeeds Act (especially where they build on decades of paper-driven plans to improve "teacher quality"). For reasons that escape me, ESSA's required federal filings, which have been assembled by hordes of well-meaning state officials and consultants, have been treated not as largely meaningless paper exercises but as something deserving of breathless notice from education advocates and press (including American Idol-style contests and foundation-funded independent review boards).
There is something childishly naive about the bureaucratic belief in the power of paperwork to bend reality. This is not a new feature in education. You may recall that Race To The Top and RttT Lite (More waivers, less money) both featured a required plan for moving high-quality teachers around to districts in need. Nobody ever figured out how such a thing could possibly be achieved-- but everybody had a plan about how to achieve it.
The grandaddy of modern useless paperwork would have to be all the district plans for "aligning" curriculum, the process by which we were all supposed to adapt our curricula to the Common Core State [sic] Standards. In many districts, the process was pretty simple.
1) Wipe dust off old curriculum.
2) Write down standards numbers beside old curriculum items
3) Add new items to curriculum to "bridge gaps."
4) Put curriculum binder back on shelf to gather more dust.
5) Go back to teaching your class as you had intended to in the first place.
Meanwhile, folks on the state level threw giant parties to celebrate how they'd reshaped the face of education.
But paperwork frequently bears absolutely no relationship to reality. Again-- not news. Folks in industry have long understood that the best way to improve a company's safety record is to reduce the number of accident reports, which is way easier to do than, say, making the workplace a safer place where fewer accidents happen.
The most incredible and tragic example of belief in paperwork would be the Great Chinese Famine. In an attempt to transform China's economy from agrarian to industrial overnight (the Great Leap Forward). Farmers were moved into the city and to combat the possibility of a drop in food production, Mao demanded-- regular reports. So in district after district, local leaders simply lied about food production levels. The paperwork that arrived in the capitol looked good-- and millions of Chinese starved to death because you can't eat imaginary food on fake paperwork.
In education we are susceptible to the Cult of Paperwork. I use paperwork to create a picture of what my students know and can do, and then I use more paperwork to create a capsule version of what I think my classroom paperwork shows. I file paperwork with the office to show what I'm doing, and parents get more paperwork to report on their students. We develop Super-Duper Paperwork like the Big Standardized Tests to serve as super-proxies for actual information about student knowledge and skill (well, skill anyway, since knowledge is out of favor as an educational goal).
A couple of decades ago, there was a rising against this approach. Authentic assessment was about saying, "Instead of generating paperwork proxies that may or may not tell us the truth about our students, let's try other things. Instead of creating proxies for learning, let's try to create situations in which we can observe the actual learning." But authentic assessment is expensive and imprecise and doesn't make for nice standardized reports, and before we could finish struggling with ideas like gigantic portfolios that followed students around for years like tangled chains of Jacob Marley, the standards movement erupted with a call for top-to-bottom standardized one-size-fits-all paperwork coast to coast. But you'll notice that today some of the ideas of authentic assessment live on in places like Silicon Valley's miracle AltSchool.
But in Schools for Regular People, paperwork still rules. Policy leaders and bureaucrats still believe that the path to improvement is to get people to fill out some educational TPS report. If you want to explain the growth in school district personnel over the past several decades, go look at how many people have been hired just to fill out government reports. And yet every new education reform ultimate ends up boiling down to "Education will get better is we have schools fill out this new report."
And paperwork also got a new lease on life thanks to computers. We all know that meaningless forms and paperwork are a dead and moribund thing, but if we digitize them and turn them into spreadsheets that we can view on a screen-- well, that's just awesome!! The belief that paperwork and forms and reports can tell you everything you need to know about what's going on has become the new theory of Management by Screen, in which a manager (or principal) just sits in an office and watches the data scroll by, creating digitized picture of What's Happening Out There. Which quickly turns into, "I need you to get your data entered on the TPS program."
It's the end of the year, so like many teachers, I need to wrap up my reporting of my SLO, which will involve logging onto the software we're using to manage our SLOs and entering data which I absolutely swear will be completely authentic and accurate and not at all just made up in order to fulfill a job requirement to get these forms filled out by the end of the year. Also, none of my colleagues are just filling in the blanks to get the paperwork requirement done, either. And somewhere on the state level, some bureaucrat will look at all those forms and data (well, not actually look at them-- I'm pretty sure nobody ever actually looks at them, which is another hallmark of paperwork-- rather they'll look at the fact that they exist) and declare proudly, "Look at what a great job our teachers are doing. I know they're doing a great job because they've filled out all this paperwork."
Friday, June 2, 2017
US Department of Climate Education
Trump has taken the odd step of withdrawing from a voluntary agreement; the Paris Accord is non-binding and nations can set their own goals, and Trump's statement had almost nothing to say about the actual climate change concern of the accord, so other than declaring the international equivalent of, "You can't tell me what to do! You're not my real mom!" I'm not sure exactly what Trump was hoping for.
That made it all the more odd when a strong vote of support came from.... the Department of Education.
"The announcement made today by the President is one more example of his commitment to rolling back the unrealistic and overreaching regulatory actions by the previous Administration," said Secretary DeVos. "President Trump is making good on his promise to put America and American workers first."
So, withdrawing is good because it sticks it to Obama, and also because it's selfish. And it's about American workers and not at all about corporate chieftains. Kind of like ed reform is all bout the children.
But why, exactly, is the Secretary of Education issuing a statement about the Paris Accord? Will the Department of Education be issuing directives on how climate science should be taught? And will that mean a reversal of DeVos's stated preference for government inaction?
Of course, here's this-- the Heartland Institute is a right-tilted thinky tank that has recently decided to "educate" teachers across the country on the "controversy" of climate change. Because the Heartland Institute is pretty sure that the whole global warming thing is a leftist plot to raise money and grab political clout.
One of the financial backers of the Heartland Institute? That would be the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation, a foundation with the kind of deep, deep pockets you get when an heir to a fortune marries an heiress to another fortune.
So maybe DeVos was just trying to be a good cheerleader for Beloved Leader. Or maybe she sees her government job as primarily about the power to further push her personal policy ideas, educational or otherwise. Or (my most cynical possibility) we have arrived at the point where the content of every issue is meaningless nothing, and each issue exists only as a means of gaining or losing political advantage. So it doesn't matter what your job is or what the issue is-- just get in their and leverage it for your own tribe.
Whatever the case, it would be great if the Department of Education could go ahead and focus on educational issues. Let's do that, please.
That made it all the more odd when a strong vote of support came from.... the Department of Education.
"The announcement made today by the President is one more example of his commitment to rolling back the unrealistic and overreaching regulatory actions by the previous Administration," said Secretary DeVos. "President Trump is making good on his promise to put America and American workers first."
So, withdrawing is good because it sticks it to Obama, and also because it's selfish. And it's about American workers and not at all about corporate chieftains. Kind of like ed reform is all bout the children.
But why, exactly, is the Secretary of Education issuing a statement about the Paris Accord? Will the Department of Education be issuing directives on how climate science should be taught? And will that mean a reversal of DeVos's stated preference for government inaction?
Of course, here's this-- the Heartland Institute is a right-tilted thinky tank that has recently decided to "educate" teachers across the country on the "controversy" of climate change. Because the Heartland Institute is pretty sure that the whole global warming thing is a leftist plot to raise money and grab political clout.
One of the financial backers of the Heartland Institute? That would be the Dick and Betsy DeVos Foundation, a foundation with the kind of deep, deep pockets you get when an heir to a fortune marries an heiress to another fortune.
So maybe DeVos was just trying to be a good cheerleader for Beloved Leader. Or maybe she sees her government job as primarily about the power to further push her personal policy ideas, educational or otherwise. Or (my most cynical possibility) we have arrived at the point where the content of every issue is meaningless nothing, and each issue exists only as a means of gaining or losing political advantage. So it doesn't matter what your job is or what the issue is-- just get in their and leverage it for your own tribe.
Whatever the case, it would be great if the Department of Education could go ahead and focus on educational issues. Let's do that, please.
Thursday, June 1, 2017
DeVos, Democracy and Vouchers
First came the LA Times op-ed co-authored by Randi Weingarten (AFT) and Jonah Edelman (Stand for Children). This in itself is another troubling move by Weingarten (add it to the list) because astroturfist Edelman is no angel when it comes to support of public schools. The op-ed tweaked a lot of antennae because buried in the condemnation of vouchers was a ringing endorsement of charters.
Almost instantly, a response came back from the American Federation for Children, a group founded and financed by Betsy DeVos. Kevin Chavous, the legal mouthpiece for the group broke out the high dudgeon.
But I want to skip past all of that for the moment and focus on one statement from the AFC response:
It is school choice–directly empowering parents to choose the best educational environment for their child–that is the most democratic of ideas.
Nope. Nope nope nopity nope. There are arguments to be made for parent choice, but "it's the essence of democracy" is not one of them.
Democracy, even the sort-of-democracy practiced by the USA, is not about saying, "I want to make this personal choice, and I want everyone else to pay for it."
Democracy is not saying you want a six-lane highway to run back the lane where only your house sits, so you get the rest of the taxpayers in your state to pay for it.
Democracy is not saying that since I want to have a police force that patrols my own house 24/7, I should have that police coverage and all local taxpayers should foot the bill.
Democracy is not "My fellow taxpayers have to pay for whatever I decide on my own that I want."
Choice fans often like to talk about the money following the child because "that money doesn't belong to the school system." And they have a point-- it is not the school's money. It is also not the family's money. It is the taxpayers' money, and the taxpayers have given it to support a system that will educate all students in the community through an institution managed by elected representatives of those taxpayers (when was the last time you saw a school board requirement that only parents can be elected).
Democracy is about coming together as a group to discuss, debate, (hopefully) compromise, and elect folks who will decide how best to manage our resources. Our version of democracy has some built-in protections so that the minority can be protected from a the majority.
But the "most democratic of ideas" is not that each individual gets to live in the Land of Do As You Please at public expense. Vouchers may be many things, but they are not remotely democratic.
Almost instantly, a response came back from the American Federation for Children, a group founded and financed by Betsy DeVos. Kevin Chavous, the legal mouthpiece for the group broke out the high dudgeon.
But I want to skip past all of that for the moment and focus on one statement from the AFC response:
It is school choice–directly empowering parents to choose the best educational environment for their child–that is the most democratic of ideas.
Nope. Nope nope nopity nope. There are arguments to be made for parent choice, but "it's the essence of democracy" is not one of them.
Democracy, even the sort-of-democracy practiced by the USA, is not about saying, "I want to make this personal choice, and I want everyone else to pay for it."
Democracy is not saying you want a six-lane highway to run back the lane where only your house sits, so you get the rest of the taxpayers in your state to pay for it.
Democracy is not saying that since I want to have a police force that patrols my own house 24/7, I should have that police coverage and all local taxpayers should foot the bill.
Democracy is not "My fellow taxpayers have to pay for whatever I decide on my own that I want."
Choice fans often like to talk about the money following the child because "that money doesn't belong to the school system." And they have a point-- it is not the school's money. It is also not the family's money. It is the taxpayers' money, and the taxpayers have given it to support a system that will educate all students in the community through an institution managed by elected representatives of those taxpayers (when was the last time you saw a school board requirement that only parents can be elected).
Democracy is about coming together as a group to discuss, debate, (hopefully) compromise, and elect folks who will decide how best to manage our resources. Our version of democracy has some built-in protections so that the minority can be protected from a the majority.
But the "most democratic of ideas" is not that each individual gets to live in the Land of Do As You Please at public expense. Vouchers may be many things, but they are not remotely democratic.
Wednesday, May 31, 2017
Angry (tl;dr)
It's important to remember that America has seen angry, agitated times before. The Civil War, when politicians became so angry they left the country and raised armies to kill each other-- that was a fairly angry time. We've had Presidential campaigns that were hugely vicious and libelous, Hell, as we've all been musically reminded, once upon a time the Vice President of the United States killed a prominent political leader in a duel.
And yet, something feels different now. My stock explanation is that while we've always had anger and viciousness as part of our public and political life, we've at least agreed that civility was the ideal, the norm to be pursued, and now we don't. I'm not sure that's true, but it feels true. We have become outrage junkies; we are sold policy and products based on the outrage it will cause. "The Secret That [fill in the blank] Doesn't Want You To Know" which translates roughly to "This will really piss those bastards off." The GOP policy position on the ground has been largely reduced to "Do things that will enrage liberals" and political coverage in the second-hand full-bias media is usually framed in terms of who will be outraged. And damn-- progressives and liberals and anti-Trump's really have to stop publishing versions of "Trump has now done something that will totally end his run!" Sorry, but 2,437th time is not a charm.
Telling truth to power is important, hugely important. But truth is not measured by how enraged you can imagine somebody being about what's been written. And when you start steering by imagined outrage rather than truth, understanding and accuracy, you are headed for the weeds. Sometimes I find Samantha Bee funny; sometimes I think maybe we've found a progressive Ann Coulter.
I was talking about this on twitter (to the extent that anybody can talk about anything on twitter) and was called out for my own contributions to incivility in the education debates. Well, sir, that's just...um... fair. But I like to think I've made a bit of a journey in this regard, and I think it tells us a little something about the shape of these debates.
When I started blogging, my defining characteristic was anger. It had been growing for a few years. Having stupid policies, anti-education and anti-student policies, inflicted on my classroom was nothing new, but I was noticing that I was increasingly losing my power to defend my students from them. The idea of national standards backed up by a national standardized test that would be enforced by making it part of student grades all seemed like self-evident educational malpractice, and yet policy makers were talking about it, taking steps to inflict it. So I went to learn more, and I fell through a door into a world where I found all sorts of people whose policy ideas struck me as wildly insane and rather abusive-- and who seemed absolutely uninterested in paying any attention to what actual teachers had to say.
My colleagues at school were, by and large, not interested. They complained when we were gored by the tip of the iceberg that passed by us, but they had no particular interest in finding out what the tip was attached to, or how big and wide the iceberg really was. And I was turning into the staff crank. So I turned to the outlet that has always served me in the past-- writing-- and for a number of reasons (mostly admiration of the bloggers already out there) I turned to blogging.
It did not occur to me that anybody would read my stuff. My goal was to vent, to rail about policies and articles that struck me as foolish, destructive, blind, ignorant. And so I regularly broke Rule #1. I called people names-- some of them kind of mean. I broke one of my big rules of online discourse-- I said things about people online that I never would have said to their faces.
I was angry. And the more I read, the angrier I became. Not just the anger of seeing destructive and dangerous policies pushed, but the anger of seeing my own profession and the institution to which I devoted my adult life both under attack. And the anger that comes with being under attack and not being heard-- not just being unheard, but seeing no avenue whatsoever to say a word. Was it effective? Well, yes, in two ways. It was effective in giving me an outlet for what I was thinking and feeling, and it was effective in letting other people who felt angry and upset and isolated know that they weren't the only ones, that they weren't crazy, that somebody else could see what they saw. We teachers are a terribly isolated tribe, and in troubled times, that does not serve us well.
What has surprised me most about social media is the avenues of conversation that have opened up, not just with fellow teachers and supporters of public ed, but with thinky tankers and policy wonks on the other side of the debates. The mere fact of being actually able to be heard in, as they say, some of these spaces has made me more careful and less ragey over the past couple of years. That's not a bad thing.
In times like these, it behooves all of us to pay a little more attention to our rhetoric. There may be times when rhetorical flourishes like "I'd like to punch him in the face" or "She should just go die somewhere" may be harmless hyperbole; these are not those times. We have a civility problem these days, and every time you put out some words, you are either helping or hurting. It's no good arguing you are in the righteous right, so it's okay-- everyone thinks they're in the right.
At the same time, I believe firmly that you feel what you feel. Telling somebody, "Hey, you should have different feelings" is a waste of everyone's time. You feel what you feel.
And I still firmly believe that some people can be taken seriously, and some can not. Some people are using words in good faith, and some are just using words as a tool for leveraging whatever goal they have, and still some others in high office use words like magical incantations, intended to conjure lies into reality. There are good grown-up arguments for charter schools that I disagree with, but can recognize as serious arguments; there are also pro-charter arguments rooted in deliberate skewing of the facts and denial of reality. I am absolutely opposed to national standards, but I understand how people of sound mind and good faith can like the idea. On the other hand, there isn't a serious argument in the world for the retention of third graders who passed their classes but failed one standardized reading test. Civility does not mean letting someone piss on you and tell you it's raining while you cheerfully agree with their weather assessment.
In other words, during times of conflict and stress, it is hard to chart a path between civility and honesty, and anger can make a lousy GPS system.
People want to be heard, and if they can't be heard when they speak, they will keep raising their voice until they think they are heard. I've survived many tough meetings and tense classroom situations by holding onto that truth. But the flip side of it is that if you scream at people like they're stupid and evil, it's really hard to get them to hear you. Which doesn't mean that you couldn't be dealing with someone who is, in fact, stupid and evil.
On the one hand. On the other hand. But. So. However. You see the problem-- balancing the line between civility and honesty in contentious times defies easy answers. It's not as simple as "Everyone on that side of this line is an evil beast" or "Everyone on this side of the line is fully trustworthy" or even "People on both sides of the line are equally culpable." In fact, there is never a clear place to draw a line.
That may be the disease of our age-- not incivility or meanness or anger or viciousness, but just a fervent belief in easy answers that can divide everyone up into simply delineated tribes. Twisting our map of the world to accommodate our simplified view of the world is distorting everything, and the strain of doing the twisting is making most of us extra cranky. And while our leaders seem unwilling to engage in thoughtful introspection and reflection, that also means that "Just follow some leader I trust" is off the table as an operating procedure. It may be that we just have to be big boys and girls and think for ourselves.
And yet, something feels different now. My stock explanation is that while we've always had anger and viciousness as part of our public and political life, we've at least agreed that civility was the ideal, the norm to be pursued, and now we don't. I'm not sure that's true, but it feels true. We have become outrage junkies; we are sold policy and products based on the outrage it will cause. "The Secret That [fill in the blank] Doesn't Want You To Know" which translates roughly to "This will really piss those bastards off." The GOP policy position on the ground has been largely reduced to "Do things that will enrage liberals" and political coverage in the second-hand full-bias media is usually framed in terms of who will be outraged. And damn-- progressives and liberals and anti-Trump's really have to stop publishing versions of "Trump has now done something that will totally end his run!" Sorry, but 2,437th time is not a charm.
Telling truth to power is important, hugely important. But truth is not measured by how enraged you can imagine somebody being about what's been written. And when you start steering by imagined outrage rather than truth, understanding and accuracy, you are headed for the weeds. Sometimes I find Samantha Bee funny; sometimes I think maybe we've found a progressive Ann Coulter.
I was talking about this on twitter (to the extent that anybody can talk about anything on twitter) and was called out for my own contributions to incivility in the education debates. Well, sir, that's just...um... fair. But I like to think I've made a bit of a journey in this regard, and I think it tells us a little something about the shape of these debates.
When I started blogging, my defining characteristic was anger. It had been growing for a few years. Having stupid policies, anti-education and anti-student policies, inflicted on my classroom was nothing new, but I was noticing that I was increasingly losing my power to defend my students from them. The idea of national standards backed up by a national standardized test that would be enforced by making it part of student grades all seemed like self-evident educational malpractice, and yet policy makers were talking about it, taking steps to inflict it. So I went to learn more, and I fell through a door into a world where I found all sorts of people whose policy ideas struck me as wildly insane and rather abusive-- and who seemed absolutely uninterested in paying any attention to what actual teachers had to say.
My colleagues at school were, by and large, not interested. They complained when we were gored by the tip of the iceberg that passed by us, but they had no particular interest in finding out what the tip was attached to, or how big and wide the iceberg really was. And I was turning into the staff crank. So I turned to the outlet that has always served me in the past-- writing-- and for a number of reasons (mostly admiration of the bloggers already out there) I turned to blogging.
It did not occur to me that anybody would read my stuff. My goal was to vent, to rail about policies and articles that struck me as foolish, destructive, blind, ignorant. And so I regularly broke Rule #1. I called people names-- some of them kind of mean. I broke one of my big rules of online discourse-- I said things about people online that I never would have said to their faces.
I was angry. And the more I read, the angrier I became. Not just the anger of seeing destructive and dangerous policies pushed, but the anger of seeing my own profession and the institution to which I devoted my adult life both under attack. And the anger that comes with being under attack and not being heard-- not just being unheard, but seeing no avenue whatsoever to say a word. Was it effective? Well, yes, in two ways. It was effective in giving me an outlet for what I was thinking and feeling, and it was effective in letting other people who felt angry and upset and isolated know that they weren't the only ones, that they weren't crazy, that somebody else could see what they saw. We teachers are a terribly isolated tribe, and in troubled times, that does not serve us well.
What has surprised me most about social media is the avenues of conversation that have opened up, not just with fellow teachers and supporters of public ed, but with thinky tankers and policy wonks on the other side of the debates. The mere fact of being actually able to be heard in, as they say, some of these spaces has made me more careful and less ragey over the past couple of years. That's not a bad thing.
In times like these, it behooves all of us to pay a little more attention to our rhetoric. There may be times when rhetorical flourishes like "I'd like to punch him in the face" or "She should just go die somewhere" may be harmless hyperbole; these are not those times. We have a civility problem these days, and every time you put out some words, you are either helping or hurting. It's no good arguing you are in the righteous right, so it's okay-- everyone thinks they're in the right.
At the same time, I believe firmly that you feel what you feel. Telling somebody, "Hey, you should have different feelings" is a waste of everyone's time. You feel what you feel.
And I still firmly believe that some people can be taken seriously, and some can not. Some people are using words in good faith, and some are just using words as a tool for leveraging whatever goal they have, and still some others in high office use words like magical incantations, intended to conjure lies into reality. There are good grown-up arguments for charter schools that I disagree with, but can recognize as serious arguments; there are also pro-charter arguments rooted in deliberate skewing of the facts and denial of reality. I am absolutely opposed to national standards, but I understand how people of sound mind and good faith can like the idea. On the other hand, there isn't a serious argument in the world for the retention of third graders who passed their classes but failed one standardized reading test. Civility does not mean letting someone piss on you and tell you it's raining while you cheerfully agree with their weather assessment.
In other words, during times of conflict and stress, it is hard to chart a path between civility and honesty, and anger can make a lousy GPS system.
People want to be heard, and if they can't be heard when they speak, they will keep raising their voice until they think they are heard. I've survived many tough meetings and tense classroom situations by holding onto that truth. But the flip side of it is that if you scream at people like they're stupid and evil, it's really hard to get them to hear you. Which doesn't mean that you couldn't be dealing with someone who is, in fact, stupid and evil.
On the one hand. On the other hand. But. So. However. You see the problem-- balancing the line between civility and honesty in contentious times defies easy answers. It's not as simple as "Everyone on that side of this line is an evil beast" or "Everyone on this side of the line is fully trustworthy" or even "People on both sides of the line are equally culpable." In fact, there is never a clear place to draw a line.
That may be the disease of our age-- not incivility or meanness or anger or viciousness, but just a fervent belief in easy answers that can divide everyone up into simply delineated tribes. Twisting our map of the world to accommodate our simplified view of the world is distorting everything, and the strain of doing the twisting is making most of us extra cranky. And while our leaders seem unwilling to engage in thoughtful introspection and reflection, that also means that "Just follow some leader I trust" is off the table as an operating procedure. It may be that we just have to be big boys and girls and think for ourselves.
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
5 Reasons I Oppose Vouchers
Honestly, I had thought that vouchers were pretty much dead and gone and living only in the hearts and minds of determined free market cult members. But since it looks like DeVouchers are on the fast track to Policytown, I want to just list, without a lot of fanfare or my usual gumflappery, the reasons I believe that vouchers are Really Bad Policy. So here's a quick list of five reasons to oppose the policy.
1. Church and State
Turns out that in practice, vouchers have mostly been a subsidy for people who send their children to private religious school. I think separation of church and state is a hugely good idea, and I think it's a good idea both for the state and for the church. Using public tax dollars to finance private religious schools violates that tremendously. That should bother those schools more than it bothers taxpayers, because in the long run it can't lead anywhere except to government oversight of religious practices. I don't want to pay tax dollars so some Religious Academy can teach the Bible as factual history and flat earth as science, and I also don't want to see the Federal Bureau of Religious Education set up to decide which religious schools pass muster (including the faux religious schools set up by profiteering oportunists.
2. School for All
If your school wants my tax dollars to pay for student tuition, you had damn well better take every student who applies and fits. No turning away students just because you don't want to be bothered with them or because they're the wrong race or the wrong creed or not properly abled or they just might cost too much to educate. That is one mighty messed-up part of voucher programs-- my tax dollars go to finance the same school that refused to admit my child.
3. Disenfranchised Taxpayers
A voucher system is taxation without representation. The idea is that the marketplace is supposed to sort these schools out or pressure them to do develop a good aquatics program or tiddly winks team. But that means only parents have a say. If you are an employer or a neighbor or a fellow voter and taxpayer or a citizen depending on educated professionals to take care of you later-- well, you have no say in a voucher system. You still get to pay taxes, but you have no say.
4. Accountability
It's not just the question of what is being taught in the schools. As a taxpayer, I'd like to know what my money is being spent on. So voucher schools had better be just as accountable as public schools. Public board meetings by known school directors. Transparent and fully open and available budgets and financial records.
5. Tell the Truth about Costs
It is amazing to me how rarely discussions and proposals about vouchers actually address the amount. Because that is everything. If the government announced that it was giving everybody automobile vouchers, folks would want to know whether the voucher was enough for a new Lexus or just a used Kia. It's pointless to discuss vouchers without discussing the dollar amount. If the voucher is one third the cost of tuition at a participating private school, it's pretty much useless as anything but a partial rebate to people who already send their students there. If it's a full-on, cover-the-cost-of-any-good-private-school voucher, then taxpayers might want to know how that voucher is going to be paid for.
A real voucher system would be expensive. Right off the bat, the day vouchers go into effect, a whole bunch of money moves even though not a single student leaves the public school. Where did that money come from? Did the public school just lose it, even though their expenses didn't change? Did the taxpayers just cough up a bunch of extra school tax money to pay for sending students to private school? Will the taxpayers pay more to fill the new gap in the public budget, or will they just be taxed for the vouchers directly? Were the vouchers underwritten by corporations who took a corresponding tax break, and now, because LexCorp directed a half million of its tax payment to voucher schools, taxpayers have to make up the difference in, say, road maintenance?
Vouchers, especially vouchers that are big enough to actually pay for some school, increase the total system cost for education. Where is that money coming from?
There's more to all this argument, most especially dealing with all the issues involved in privatizing one of our most important public institutions (yeah-- other than that, Mrs. Lincoln) but I promised myself I'd put up a short, clear listicle, so here it is. Vouchers are a huge mistake, even if they're being pushed at the federal level. Push back.
The End of May
My Memorial Day weekend generally contains two major features. One feature is the actual honoring of Memorial Day. Here's how I finished up my morning yesterday.
This is the park in my small town. On the left is a the Civil War Monument, one of the first couple put up in Pennsylvania. The large building in the back is our County Courthouse. And on the right, our band stand, where I have played summer concerts with our 161-year-old town band for almost fifty years. That band of course marched in the parade today; you can see a few members in our faux Union Army uniforms in this shot. Some are people I graduated from high school with, and others are former students. When I say I live and teach ins some of postcard small town, I am not kidding.
My other activity for the weekend is grading papers. This year finals were last week, and this weekend I graded all the final papers, final essays, final tests, and final Hey-Mr-Greene-is-it-too-late-to-turn-this-in? work. It's a big deal for me, partly because it's just a big mountain of paperwork and grading, but also because in reading through those last major efforts, I see who really pulled some things together, and who I perhaps failed to open up.
On the list of Things They Don't Really Tell You About Teaching, or the list of Ways This Job Is Different From Many Others is the part that is driven home this time of year, every year-- that every year of teaching has an end. We meet a new batch of students, we pick apart their strengths and weaknesses, figure out what makes them tick (the better to motivate them), we work to build them up, and then, hopefully, we look to see what strides and changes and growth they have developed by the end of the year.
And then we say goodbye.
It's like working in an office where every year every person who works there is fired or promoted or leaves to work at a new company. Every person except you.
These last weeks are often like school redux, gathering together stripped of the notion that we'll be at this for a while, that we have lots of time left to figure some things out. Routines fall away, culminating projects consume time, and the necessities of paperwork and report card processing dictate that "this could affect your grade" is no longer part of the landscape.The moment when they will no longer be your students is close enough to touch.
This can be an awesome time of year, or a terrible one. It's the time when as a teacher you either realize that you managed to craft a beautiful roomful of learning this year, and you and your students can all feel pretty good about it. It can also be the time when it comes slamming home just how much you came up short. It's point where your students sprint across the finish line powered by sheer glowing joy, or they drag across it, barely scraping forward.
And no matter what, it's a time when it's all over.
You've done what you can do. They are who they are, and in these last great days you can hope to see some of that. It's times like the end of May that make me laugh at the folks who try to measure Days of Learning. I don't know how you would ever measure a May 30th, and I really don't know how you would stack that up beside a September 4th. They're just different days.
Graduation for my school is coming up this Sunday. Weather permitting, the students will walk across that same stage in the picture above, surrounded by 150 years of history and under a canopy of cool green. After they get their diplomas, they'll disperse, run to their families, walk out into the world. They will never be together like this again. I will never see some of them ever again. And in three months or so, I'll start over again from scratch.
The park is about five blocks away from my house, so after Memorial Day programs and band concerts and graduation, I walk home, through tree-lined sidewalks like this one. In the fall, they'll be a range of golds and browns, and that will start a new year as well. But for right now, it's the last days of May.
This is the park in my small town. On the left is a the Civil War Monument, one of the first couple put up in Pennsylvania. The large building in the back is our County Courthouse. And on the right, our band stand, where I have played summer concerts with our 161-year-old town band for almost fifty years. That band of course marched in the parade today; you can see a few members in our faux Union Army uniforms in this shot. Some are people I graduated from high school with, and others are former students. When I say I live and teach ins some of postcard small town, I am not kidding.
My other activity for the weekend is grading papers. This year finals were last week, and this weekend I graded all the final papers, final essays, final tests, and final Hey-Mr-Greene-is-it-too-late-to-turn-this-in? work. It's a big deal for me, partly because it's just a big mountain of paperwork and grading, but also because in reading through those last major efforts, I see who really pulled some things together, and who I perhaps failed to open up.
On the list of Things They Don't Really Tell You About Teaching, or the list of Ways This Job Is Different From Many Others is the part that is driven home this time of year, every year-- that every year of teaching has an end. We meet a new batch of students, we pick apart their strengths and weaknesses, figure out what makes them tick (the better to motivate them), we work to build them up, and then, hopefully, we look to see what strides and changes and growth they have developed by the end of the year.
And then we say goodbye.
It's like working in an office where every year every person who works there is fired or promoted or leaves to work at a new company. Every person except you.
These last weeks are often like school redux, gathering together stripped of the notion that we'll be at this for a while, that we have lots of time left to figure some things out. Routines fall away, culminating projects consume time, and the necessities of paperwork and report card processing dictate that "this could affect your grade" is no longer part of the landscape.The moment when they will no longer be your students is close enough to touch.
This can be an awesome time of year, or a terrible one. It's the time when as a teacher you either realize that you managed to craft a beautiful roomful of learning this year, and you and your students can all feel pretty good about it. It can also be the time when it comes slamming home just how much you came up short. It's point where your students sprint across the finish line powered by sheer glowing joy, or they drag across it, barely scraping forward.
And no matter what, it's a time when it's all over.
You've done what you can do. They are who they are, and in these last great days you can hope to see some of that. It's times like the end of May that make me laugh at the folks who try to measure Days of Learning. I don't know how you would ever measure a May 30th, and I really don't know how you would stack that up beside a September 4th. They're just different days.
Graduation for my school is coming up this Sunday. Weather permitting, the students will walk across that same stage in the picture above, surrounded by 150 years of history and under a canopy of cool green. After they get their diplomas, they'll disperse, run to their families, walk out into the world. They will never be together like this again. I will never see some of them ever again. And in three months or so, I'll start over again from scratch.
The park is about five blocks away from my house, so after Memorial Day programs and band concerts and graduation, I walk home, through tree-lined sidewalks like this one. In the fall, they'll be a range of golds and browns, and that will start a new year as well. But for right now, it's the last days of May.
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