Raising tiny humans is nuts. It is nuclear space brain science jumping-over-the-Grand-Canyon-on-a-tricycle nuts. And yet I am hopeful.
I come at that hopefulness from a not-entirely-usual perspective. I am, aa of yesterday, the father of two new twin boys, and my wife and I are contemplating the tremendous challenge we have been set. These tiny humans are fraught with all sorts of possibility and promise and potential and somehow we area supposed to unlock all of that without making a hash of things. It's scary.
I'm not whether I have it better or worse than my wife. These are her first kids, but I have been the clown at this rodeo before. My children from my previous marriage are now thirty-something, married, and working on (or about to work on) the parenting thing themselves. I can remember when they were as tiny as the twins are today, But I can also remember the things that I regret, the moments that were serious missteps as a father, the ways large and small that I have failed them over the years. The good news-- despite my shortcomings, they have grown up to become two of the best people I know. How did that happen, exactly? I have no idea.
So I am in the unique position of having a good view of the rough drafts of two future grown humans, and the final product of two others. And I could not claim to have any more than the slightest idea of the exact road from Point A to Point R.
All parents contemplate the long and twisty road. Is there anything more hilarious to a parent than listening some not-yet-a-parent talk about what their child absolutely will or will not do when that child is in the world. It's hilarious because every parent knows that there is no simple cause and effect-- if you want a child to develop Quality A, you simply pull Lever 4. Raising a child involve a million hard-to-read details and factors and moments of unexpected surprise and grace Sitting here in the hospital room, we have no way of knowing what the twins will be like in ten years; heck, we aren't sure how we're going to spend next Wednesday.
These are the kinds of things I think about every time I hear an educational whiz wonk declare that to get kids with Quality A, you just press Buttons 3, 5, and 11. Fat chance. I would love to raise these two boys to be as great as their older brother and sister, but I can't do what I did before, and I wouldn't want to if I could.
So when you tell me that if I just implement your program and keep performing it year after year, I will keep producing row after row of students with the same skills and the same qualities, I'm going to laugh at you, because what you are proposing is patently ridiculous. What you're proposing is silly and wrong. It's a long road, with many turns and corners, and we never travel the same stretch of it twice. Imaging we can standardize our travel plans reveals a limited understanding of education, and of human beings.
This is my short answer to the question. It's my wife and newborn twin sons, now about twenty-seven hours old, and it has been an adventure every step of the way, which is how it goes with childbirth, a process that can unroll gently like the Miracle of Freaking Life, or like a terrifying rush of nurses and doctors and anesthesiologists into the operating room where they cut the mother's body open and yank children out of it, which is still miraculous, but in a much scarier way.
Anyway, when it's all happening to your wife or your self or your children, your first thought is not, "Boy, what I need is an ivy league graduate with a real interest in obstetrics" or "Right now I really want to disrupt the traditional model of infant delivery" or "If only there was an alternate certification program so that my children could be delivered by someone who had a previous career as a plumber" or "or even "I know my doctor is really good, but what I really want is another bunch of doctors to choose from."
No, at that moment you want a trained and experienced professional who knows what she's doing and who can be trusted to take care of my family.
But the last couple of days have reminded me of another reason that we need professionals, a reason beyond the now well-worn argument that nobody wants to hire folks from the five week Surgery for America program.
In the past several days, my wife has been every kind of naked in front of nurses and doctors. Now just physically naked, but pretty emotionally raw, and in these high-pressure times, we have performed couple dynamics in front of staff that people we know don't ordinarily get to see in our home. One of the basic professional skills of these folks is to know how to deal professionally with naked people and the things they reveal. (And there's the extra dimension here that many of these staff members are former students of mine.)
Teachers have the same need for this brand of professionalism. We know so many things about our students and their families, particularly if we've taught long enough to deal with multiple generations of one tribe. Teachers too easily see too many dark, difficult truths revealed not to deal with them professionally. Like medical folks, we are custodians of privileged information.
So when I see a story like the dope who handed out "prizes" to middle school students for things like "most likely to be a terrorist," my knee jerk reaction is that the alleged adult involved was not an actual teacher. (And in fact that "teacher" turns out to have been a former NFL cheerleader and dance instructor, which doesn't mean she couldn't possibly be a real teacher, but still, her work speaks for itself). And of course there are "teachers" who have done all the traditional training to be professionals and still ended up being terrible stewards of their students' information, secrets and lives-- and they should be moved out of the profession
But my point is that there is more to being trained to become a teacher or a nurse than simply learning a series of procedures. Becoming a professional means learning to live by a professional ethic, and yeah, I know, not everyone lives up to that ethic, but if you never acknowledge or preserve that ethic, you'll end up thinking that someone who's learned how to read the script in a canned teaching program has mastered all there is to know about being a profession al, and you will be putting a whole bunch of students who don't know how to cover up their rougher inner lives and who think they can trust their teachers-- those students will be at risk. We need people who are trained to be professionals and who live up to those professional ethics, and who can therefor be trusted around people who are at their most vulnerable.
— 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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."
