NEA Whiffs Again

Back in the day, NEA leadership should have picked up a clue that they'd backed the wrong horse when they published this article in 2013. "10 Things You Should Know About the Common Core" included such notable observations as "Most NEA Members Support the Common Core," and while you might get a chuckle out of the rest of the list, the real harbinger is in the long, blistering comments section. The average NEA Today article does not exactly draw large or lively response, but this piece drew 325 rather angry comments asking what, exactly, that author was smoking. NEA was either ignorant of or deliberately trying to rope in the large number of anti-Core members.

The author was Tim Walker, and last week he offered a look at personalized learning, and once again NEA either doesn't get it or is trying to stick it to members.

As with NEA support for the Core, Walker starts the article by implicitly accepting that current schools (you know-- the ones where NEA members work) pretty much suck. Too many students sitting in regimented rows memorizing things and listening to teacher lecture. It's a simplistic and reality-impaired view of what's actually going on in classrooms, and it raises more questions than it addresses (e.g. If the classrooms are too full, why aren't we calling for smaller classrooms? Also, if Common Core was going to fix exactly these problems, why aren't they fixed?) He visits a happy personalizing school at East Pennsboro Area Middle School in Enola, PA.

Best of all, the lifeless classroom setups are gone, and learning spaces have been reconfigured with moveable furniture and walls so that when classroom subjects overlap, teachers can combine lessons. Students rotate through these areas, which fosters a more collaborative learning space.

Because only with personalized learning could you accomplish these things? Somehow?

Walker does give a quick look at the dark side, visiting teacher Paul Barnwell, whose Language Arts class now gets their reading instruction from the canned ReadingPlus program:

His students begin each class period by logging onto the program. They remain there for 20 minutes while Barnwell makes himself available for any questions or troubleshooting. But usually he finds himself—at least during this part of the class—feeling slightly marginalized. On one hand, ReadingPlus seems to be working—some struggling students are catching up to grade level. Still, Barnwell can’t shake the one nagging question that is likely on the minds of many educators minds: What comes next?

Walker's point is that "personalized learning" has a lot of different meanings, but if you think he's going to look at what those different meanings tell us about the huge corporate money-seeking drivers behind the rise of personalized learning-- well, not so much. He notes that PL is a rejection of the notion of fixed seat time, which is a fair characterization, then shifts unannounced to the idea that it is student-directed learning, which is not a fair characterization at all. But Walker quotes the National Education Technology Plan issued in 2010 which says that PL puts “students at the center and empowers them to take control of their own learning by providing flexibility on several dimensions.” This manner of framing personalized learning is a bit of a red flag because this "student-centered" (and institution degrading) model is a rhetorical favorite of Betsy DeVos.

Walker lets us know that there are big forces behind personalized learning, Zuckerberg-sized forces, though Walker offers a Zuckerberg quote that is reminiscent of Bill Gates in his Common Core salad days:

“We think personalized learning makes sense,” Zuckerberg told Education Week shortly after the announcement. “ We don’t know for certain that it’s going to work."

And Walker shows us a bad case scenario with Carpe Diem Collegiate High School and Middle School, a charter school in Yuma, AZ that uses the corporate cubicle model. But as he does throughout the piece, Walker shows the contrary side only so he can reassure us that things aren't really that bad.

Carpe Diem isn’t a typical model...

And then Walker ends the piece by circling back to the folks at East Pennsboro, using the last third of the article to talk about how awesome their experience has been, putting heavy emphasis on how their model is teacher-led, student-centered, and without so much as mentioning a software vendor benefiting. Nor mentioning any drawbacks or issues.

There's a way to construct an article so that it looks fair and balanced. Let's consider the controversial issue of cheese-straightening. Here's my pitch outline:

1) Open with vignette about successful, happy cheese-straighteners, then after creating the happy picture, note that some have misgivings.

2) Here are some concerns (though they could be nothing). Here's a critic (though his concerns are with little solid basis).

3) Here are some of the powerful drivers behind cheese-straightening (hard to resist).

4) Here's a bad example-- but it's an anomaly.

5) Let's go back to that happy picture and all the magical-- really, just magical-- details that go with it.

Missing from the piece- any substantive and detailed critique of the policy. In this case, Walker doesn't talk about any of the corporate connections to personalized learning or any of ways in which it fits in with and advances the privatization agenda. Walker barely acknowledges the ways in which personalized learning reduces teachers to computer program overseers.

Missing most of all-- the question of whether or not we should even be doing this. It is again reminiscent of NEA's Common Core stance under Dennis Van Roekel, which was "What is the alternative? What do you want?" In other words, "Of course we have to do this. That's a given, because we have terrible problems and this is a solution."

The several moments of Common Core nostalgia fit. I have the same sour feeling reading this piece that I had back when DVR and Tim Walker were telling us that Common Core was super duper. What I want from my union, from my professional association, is someone who will stand up for me, for my professional brethren and sistern and call threats to public education by their name. There are important, serious, even critical conversations to be had about personalized learning, and US teachers ought to be involved in those discussions. This piece, unfortunately, shows NEA trying to postpone and avoid the conversation instead of leading it. Feel free to stop by the website and add to another robust comments section.

ICYMI: Baby baby edition

I'm a little behind on reading and writing this week, but on the plus side, I'm way ahead on babies. Here's some reading from the week behind us. Read and pass it on.

Some Unpopular Thoughts on Teacher Evaluation

Mitchell Robinson with some interesting thoughts about how teacher evaluation ought to work.

Linking Graduation to High Stakes Testing Was a Mistake

An op-ed in the Seattle Times makes a strong case for not making diplomas dependent on the Big Standardized Test (PA legislators please note5).

Picturing Trump As the School Choice Guy

Rick Hess has some fun imagining what might happen if Trump puts his "adroit political skills, powerful rhetorical chops, and 39% approval to work" on school choice with an imaginary Trumpian speech on the policy.

The Histories of Personalization

Audrey Watters takes a long, detailed look at the history of the school personalization movement and the many ways in which it is not what it's cracked up to be.

Nothing Abstract about the Lessons of Play

Wendy Lecker offers a great response to the NYT piece about rigorous pre-school.

New Jersey's Screwd up Charter System

Jersey Jazzman looks at why New Jersey's charter system is fundamentally flawed.

When Philanthropists Rule

John Thompson offers a thoughtful review-in-parts of the Givers, the new book about the new kinmd of philanthropists.

School Readiness Fearmongering

Is your child behind? You don't know, and you don't need to care

You'll Never Be a Writer

This is a line often included in one of those self-reported stories that people feel compelled to share when they discover they are talking to an English teacher. It's not quite as popular as those standards "I Always Hated English Class in High School" or "I Hate To Read" or the super-popular "I Guess I'll Have To Watch My Grammar When I'm Around You." Just today, someone once again summed up her experience by citing what someone, years ago, told her. "You'll Never Be a Writer."

"You'll Never Be a Writer" is different story because, first, it has nothing to do with feelings you had when you were younger, which are perhaps something adult you might want to keep to yourself (nobody of my age need proudly share that classic tale "The Year I Memorized the Shape of Farrah Fawcett's Right Breast in a Red Swimsuit"), nor does the story "You'll Never Be a Writer" include a thinly veiled prediction/criticism of someone's poor social behavior

Yeah, we had a lot to learn

"You'll Never Be a Writer" is a sad story of crushed dreams and truncated aspirations. But it's also wrong. Sometimes it's just meant as conversational filler, so I would hate to be that guy and correct someone who's just trying to make pleasantries (on the other hand, I am an English teacher and it's possible that I take great joy in correcting others at inappropriate moments). But here's the basic drift of what I have to say about this.

Now, YNBAW is sometimes a pronouncement on economic realties. "Writing," folks say,  "is not a real with which you can support a single grown human, let alone a whole family of them." I always assumed that I would write when I grew up, and I always assumed that I would never make enough to support myself, which was fine because I wanted to teach. I didn't care that I would never make serious money (anyone who wants to prove me wrong by giving me a lucrative book deal or syndication gig is welcome to contact me here). "Writing's very nice and all, " many a student and parent have said to me, "but you can't really make a living at it, can you?"

Well, yes and no. Writing the Great American Novel is not terribly lucrative, and creating the next Highly Profitable Property doesn't necessarily require great writing chops (looking at you, Stephenie Meyer and Dan Brown).

But if your goal is not to become a rich and famous fiction writer, other writing jobs exist. Virtually every specialized field in the world is primarily populated by people who know the field, but cannot communicate effectively about it. I have former students who became technical writers, nature writers, and sports writers. Being able to write is important to the writing life, but having a topic that you are knowledgeable and passionate about-- that's huge, too. When a student says, "Well, I'd really like to be a writer, but I really want to work in the widget industry, too," that student's solution is right in front of her.

"You'll Never Be a Writer" is wrong for other reasons as well, the most notable of which is that we are living in a text-based world. Thanks to the internet, we communicate more than ever via the written (typed) word. In both our work and personal worlds, it's now hugely important to be able to say just what you mean, and equally important to be able to read hat others write critically and carefully.

In the years ahead, you will write reports for your job. You will communicate with friends and family via text. You may very well court and couple with the use of text. If you enter politics, you will have to explain yourself through text. If you are an activist for a cause, some of your communication will be through text. Whatever it is you want to say, and whatever audience you want to say it to, you are likely to write it.

It may not bring fortune or fame. But it remains the best ways to communicate and store ideas and feelings across space and time. Much of human history has been spent searching for ways to record, transmit and store our various languages; digitizing it represents a new step forward in that process, meaning that the composing and arranging of that language has become even more important.

Regardless of what someone told you in some misguided attempt to crush your dreams or slap you upside the head with a cold, fishy slab or reality, they were wrong. Good or bad, inspired or flat, enthusiastic or grudging, because you are alive today, you are a writer. You will always be a  writer. Make the best of it you can, because you will always be a writer. Search for your voice and find your way, because like it or not-

You will always be a writer.

The Federal Regs Voucher Workaround

Betsy DeVos is having some trouble making up her mind on whether it's OK for private schools to discriminate. pic.twitter.com/JF97GkrASq

— AJ+ (@ajplus) June 9, 2017

After Betsy DeVos's last round of Congressional obfuscation testimony, many folks are asking the same question as EdWeek-- "When Do Voucher Programs Allow Private Schools To Discriminate Against Students?" As you can see in the clip above, DeVos answered variations on the question with repetitions of one answer:

Schools that receive federal funds must follow federal law, period.

I don't have a direct line to DeVos's brain,  so I can't discern for certain what she's thinking, but I do know a way to keep funneling tax dollars to voucher programs and let those voucher schools discriminate in any and all ways they wish to, all without violating the above quote.

In Pennsylvania, we call them Educational Improvement Tax Credits, and they work like this (Beware: oversimplification in the service of clarity dead ahead). My corporation has a tax bill of $1,000 in taxes that would ordinarily go to public education. But instead of sending the taxes to the state capital, I send $900 to Nifty Educational Privatey Organization. I get credit for paying $900 of my taxes, and those dollars go straight to NEPO, a group that distributes "scholarships" to students who want to attend private schools. Meanwhile, the local public school system receives $900 fewer taxpayer dollars.

But notice-- the $900 from GreeneCorps never touched the government's hands, so technically, those are not "government" funds.

In Arizona this dodge is called a "tax credit voucher" program, and it has provided new ways for folks to grift and graft their way to personal riches. The tuition tax credit idea has been around for a while, but like many previously-dead reform ideas, it's enjoying a resurgence. And tuition tax credits can be particularly tasty in states where you can get a rebate from the state for dollars that you contributed to a voucher school program; if you're shameless enough, you can turn a profit.

This all deserves closer examination, but its importance here is simple-- if the feds implement a federal tuition tax credits program, DeVos will able to look at private schools that benefit from the program while engaging in all sorts of discrimination and say, "Well, they aren't taking any federal dollars, so federal laws don't apply." While charters have hitched their wagons to the public school funding mechanism, tuition tax credit voucher programs create a money funnel that bypasses the government (and all its dumb rules and stuff). While charters are designed to attach themselves to a restaurant diner and drain his blood as he eats his meal, tax tuition voucher credit programs just steal the food from the waiter on his way from the kitchen the diner (which may explain why charter fans are often opposed to vouchers).

If such a system were installed by the Trump-DeVos administration, it would exist outside of any federal regulations (and many state ones). All that debate about giving public dollars to religious institutions would be moot-- silly old separation of church and state is no longer a problem. Voucher schools could trample civil rights every day and twice on Saturday while DeVos protested that they didn't receive any federal money and parents were free to choose whatever they wanted to choose. It would be a corporate oligarch's dream, free of any regulation or other government interference. And it would mean that Betsy DeVos spoke something that was truly the letter of the law, even if in her heart she wanted to kill the spirit of the law dead, dead, dead.

Data Overload

The last nine months have brought a shift in my view of data.

Despite my long and vocal opposition to the gathering in data in schools, to the use of standardized tests to generate data that is in turn used for everything from judging students tons of it every day in my classroom-- in fact, one of my criticisms of many reformer data programs is they involve far too little data. On top of that, you need to collect good data (the Big Standardized Tests generate crappy data) and you need to run it through something that produces useful, legitimate analysis (not something like the opaque, crappy VAM models).

But one thing I'd always felt is that you can't have too much data. Now I'm rethinking that position.

Twin pregnancies are considered high risk, and when the twins share one placenta there's a risk of something called Twin-Twin Transfusion Syndrome (if you are pregnant with twins, I recommend the advice of one of our doctors which was "Whatever you do, don't look this up on the internet")-- all of that put together gets you a ticket to a veritable testapalooza. Ultrasound after ultrasound, with measurements and pictures; my wife's uterus was more thoroughly explored than the surface of the moon after the first telescope.

Measurements indicated a difference in size of 21%, and protocol called for anything over 20% to trigger a new series of tests, even though none of our doctors thought any of these tests would discover anything important. One wonky heart measurement triggered a trip to Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh (where we took the grape elevator to the Hippo Ward) for some super-ultrasound; he confirmed what everyone already said, which is that there was nothing to care about. We had our regular doctors at home and a specialist in Erie watching over us. And all of our doctors agreed on one thing-- if you use all of the equipment available to modern medicine to gather tons and tons of data, you will manage to capture little human variations that will alarm you a lot and actually mean very little.

Part of the problem is that the protocols aren't really complex enough. It's like a protocol that says that if your shoes are wet you need to be checked out for wound but actually it' only a major concern if your shoes keep getting wet even when you dry them off and they're actually wet with blood and there's a piece of rebar protruding from your torso. But you stepped in a puddle and now policy says you need to see the surgeon. And yes-- I would rather be safe than sorry and will go to crazy extremes to do so, but reflecting on the past nine months of constant test and peek and prod that 1) we have spent an awful lot of extra time worrying about things it wouldn't have occurred to us to worry about and 2) I can't imagine how someone who was uninsured or under-insured would have ever dealt with this.

So the extra data, because it lacked context and lacked complexity and because our doctors weren't entirely free to follow their own judgment, didn't really make things better, and may even have made things marginally worse in terms of worry and expense.

The kind of data we get from Big Standardized Tests and other standardized tools has a similar problem-- it's incomplete, lacking context, and is cut off from teacher's professional judgement (in many cases e aren't even allowed to view the instrument that generated the data. But when some of us scofflaws go ahead and peek anyway, what we see is that a question really hinged on a student knowing one or two vocabulary words (let's say the test manufacturer fave, "plethora"). So a student who doesn't know "plethora" misses a question that is interpreted as "student is below basic at understanding words through context clues" which in turn becomes "student is not ready for college or a career." Because the student didn't know what "plethora" means.

I have always believed that more data is better, but more bad data is just more bad data, and more data that's not thoughtfully collected can just add a bunch of noise, and the noise causes confusion and worry and expense and responses to problems that aren't even there.

The Long Run

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.

Why Do We Need Professionals

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.