Expertise

Do teachers need to be experts in the subjects they teach or ‘just’ experts at teaching? #education #visiblelearning #teaching

— Visible Learning (@VisibleLearning) June 5, 2017

I was not the only person to see this tweet and have the following thought...

One of my college education professors drilled this into me, and my last thirty-some years of teaching have only confirmed it-- half the secret of classroom management is to know what the hell you're talking about. The best leverage for classroom management is neither love nor fear-- it's respect. And the best way to garner respect is to be competent, to display expertise in the content area, to know what the hell you're talking about.

Yes, teaching is both a skill and an art and to do a good job, you have to know the skill and the art of teaching. But just as you can't have waves without water or air, you cannot have "teaching skills" without content knowledge-- and all the teaching skills in the world will not make up for lacking knowledge. You cannot make an awesome lesson about adding two plus two if you do not know that the result is four. You cannot lead your students through an illuminating and inspiring study of Hamlet if you have never read the play yourself. And just as students can smell fear, they can smell uncertainty and lack of knowledge. I don't mean that you must be infallible in the classroom-- but if you don't know your content well, your students will smell it, and they will wonder why it's important for them to learn something if the teacher doesn't even know it.

Can you be an expert in your field and still fail as a teacher because you don't know how to communicate your knowledge to your students? Sure-- most of us have had that teacher. Can you go too far-- way too far-- in trying to impress upon your students how terribly smart you are? Absolutely-- I once spent a very long semester with a student teacher who did not want to be a teacher so much as he wanted to be the smartest student in the room. But content knowledge is still teh foundation for everything else.

This notion of free-floating skills is a plague on our society. Management types believe that they can manage any company with raw management skills, even if they are completely ignorant of what the company does and the specifics of the industry in which they now work. I have watched the major industries in my neck of the woods brought down by people who didn't know anything about the companies they were managing-- but, hey, that's okay because anyone can manage any company as long as he's a super-duper manager.

It infects our government-- you don't need to know anything about an agency or sector of the economy to head a bureau or even hold a cabinet-level position. And education is an "industry" that shouldn't be run by educators, but by business types who have the kind of management experience necessary.

But you cannot develop skills playing a musical instrument without playing something. You can't learn how to "sport" without putting your hands on the specific object used in that specific sport.

And you can't teach without teaching something. And you can't teach something without knowing about that something. And the more you know, the better you will teach.

"Oh, no-- I just pull something out and the students and I just, you know, explore and discover together," you say. "And it works great." Respectfully, I think you're probably wrong on several counts.

First of all, unless you are a sensory deprived bat just emerging from a cave, you can't pull out anything "blind." You may have never tried that physics inquiry before, but you know about physics. You may never have read that Emerson essay before, but you know who he is and what he believed. And those management problems you have in your classes? Those happen because some of your students don't think you know your material.

Whether you believe that learning is about following a carefully proscribed path, or wandering pathlessly through a vast territory hoping to find a teachable moment or a unique insight, you cannot take your students on that journey unless you know the territory like the back of your hand. That leadership skill is important, but you cannot learn the "how" of teaching without it being attached to the "what" of content. You can't just teach-- you have to teach something, and you can't teach that something unless you know about it.

Content knowledge is the foundation of everything else. You cannot be an expert at teaching without being an expert at subject matter. Yes, even teachers of the littles, who in particular need the security of knowing they are in the hands of a grownup who Knows Things.

So the question is bizarre, like asking "Do you need to cook food really well for a good meal, or is it enough just to have a pretty plate on the table." You cannot be a great cook without food. You cannot be a great musician if you don't play a note. And you cannot be a great teacher without knowledge of your content.

NPE and Charter Schools

The Network for Public Education has issued a clear, concise and pointed statement about charter schools in the US, and it's worth your eyeball time.*

The statement is useful if you have been trying to explain to friends or civilians why, exactly modern charter schools are such a contentious concern. It nails some of the fundamental problems of the charter industry:

We believe that taxpayers bear the responsibility for funding those schools and that funding should be ample and equitable to address the needs of the served community. We also believe that taxpayers have the right to examine how schools use tax dollars to educate children.

Most importantly, we believe that such schools should be accountable to the community they serve, and that community residents have the right and responsibility to elect those who govern the school. Citizens also have the right to insist that schooling be done in a manner that best serves the needs of all children.

The NPE statement addresses in simple, clear, non-hyperventilating language, the fact that charter schools simply are not public schools. This does not make charter schools a Terrible Evil Thing, but it gets at the heart of the great charter bait-and-switch. Charters repeated pitch themselves as free public schools, and the public takes them at their word, only to be shocked later when some charters won't take all students, make operators rich, and engage in all manner of bizarre shenanigan. "Wait! How can they do that-- aren't they a school??" Modern charters have worked hard to be seen as public schools, rather than what they are-- private schools funded with public tax dollars.

The NPE statement does not demand that charters be banished from the surface of the earth, but lays out a series of steps that legislators could take to make charter schools a productive and healthy part of the public education landscape-- so this is not just a slam job.

The statement is short and eminently shareable. Follow the link, share the statement, and help push for the conversation about charters that we should be having in this country.




*I am not a board member of NPE, but I am a member of the orgnization

Treating Teachers The Same Way

Marc Tucker and Chester Finn have been having a bit of a conversation about a new report about teacher empowerment. We may get to that another day, but among Finn's complaints was this old standard, explaining why the reports recommendations can't work:

the teacher unions have demanded and not deviated far from an industrial model in which everyone is treated alike.

This is an oft-repeated complaint among reformsters, most completely codified in TNTP endlessly self-promoted Widget Effect, which argues that "school systems treat all teachers as interchangeable parts."

I'm at least a tiny bit sympathetic to these complaints. I'm not a very tribal guy, and when any group starts calling for "unity" or "getting on the same page" my hackles levitate, because that almost always means "shut up and do as you're told."

Anyone who thinks that all teachers in a school are treated the same has never spent more than five minutes in an actual school. A school is a web of personal relationships, and every one is different, and so every person is treated differently, which is as it should be. Any decent manager has to know the difference between people who can be trusted with a great deal of slack and people who need to be kept under watch at all times. There are a hundred factors to be considered, but the bottom line is that no human being on the planet treats all other human beings quite the same way in each daily, specific interaction, and schools are no different.

But all of that happens on an "unofficial" basis. It is precisely because humans tend to treat other humans differently that we have formal and official rules.

For example. In any given classroom, there are students that the teacher really likes, and students the teacher doesn't like quite so much. But no parent expects to say to their child, "Well, since you have a teacher who doesn't like you this year, you'd better suck it up and prepare to get lousy grades. Sorry, kiddo, but that's life." No, we expect the teacher to behave like a professional, and that includes treating everyone in the classroom alike.

Likewise, we expect an institution driven by grown-up professionalism to treat all teachers the same, in the sense that management puts aside its personal concerns or reactions. That doesn't mean differentiation can't happen-- but it has to happen on some sort of professional basis.

Treating everyone alike is not limited to schools. For instance, we expect law enforcement and the legal system to treat everyone the same. We get rightfully angry when we see, for instance, people of color or people of wealth treated differently by the system, because the police and the courts are supposed to treat everyone the same. That doesn't mean that the system can't weigh their actions and respond accordingly. But the process of weighing those actions is supposed to work the same way for everyone, the scales of justice always calibrated evenly and not set differently for everyone who passes through the system.

We struggle with this as a society. We complain about defense attorneys and the time and money spent defending bad actors in court. Likewise, a Top Ten union member complaint is seeing dues go to help defend some fellow member who did something really stupid. Why should the obviously guilty get a fair day in court?

The answer is that the alternative is a system in which we say to those in power, "Anytime you're really sure that somebody did something wrong, you can just go ahead and railroad them on through without any hearing." That's a free pass for broad abuse of power. If we don't defend the apparently guilty, we lose the ability to defend the clearly innocent.

I'm a big believer in letting folks have the freedom to employ their own personal judgment. Most of our worst trends in the world of law, medicine and education have been the attempt to strip people on the ground of their power to use their best judgment.

But exercising professional judgment is like painting a picture-- it generally works best if you paint on a blank canvass.

Yes, teachers (and students and defendants and others) should be treated the same-- they should all be treated with the same amount of fairness, the same amount of professionalism, the same amount of justice, the same amount of empowerment. And yes, we often do a terrible job of this, which is precisely why it should be the ideal-- because it's not our natural inclination to do so.

ICYMI: Graduation Day Edition (6/4)

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.

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."

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.

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.