The Night Before

T'was the night before students, and all through my noggin
My thoughts were all stirring, like a drunken toboggan.
My artwork was hung on the corkboard with care
In hopes that my students would soon ‘nough be there.
The textbooks are nestled all snug on the shelves
It took me six hours—what? You think I have elves?
Yeah, my wife in her classroom and I in my cap
Just hoped by October we’ll get just one nap,
But up in my brainpan there rose such a clatter
I tossed and I turned thinking “What's still the matter?"
In my head I kept wondering what might ail my plans--
Did I skip a main point? Did I use comic sans?
My brain , so wrapped up in the things I can’t know
Gives a lustre of panic to my gut far below.

Would some jolly old man come, my classroom to save?
No, my admin’s a ma’m who expects I’ll behave.
So we’ll skip the poem section with deux ex Santa,
And go straight to the—crap! What the hell rhymes with Santa?
I’ve had this day many times—over three dozen
And still, night before, you’ll find me sucking lozen--
ges made to help fight nervous heartburn
As I wonder—will I see this year’s student crop learn?
Will I get them to scale the great education wall?
Or will they dash away, dash away, dash away all
Will they spark to the classics? Will my team hear me whistle?
Or will I chow down on failure tough as dried thistle?
Oh, I know it’s just jitters, those pre-curtain nerves.
When the curtain goes up, I’ll feel power and lerves.
But until then I’ll lie here with mares of the night.
Happy first day tomorrow! There’s no sleep tonight.

Tomorrow is the first day back for students, which means it's one night I'm guaranteed the Teacher Nightmare. Ordinary people have night mares about showing up in church without pants. Teachers have night mares about showing up for class without plans and the students are out of control or you can't even find your own classroom. Basically a complete professional collapse.

Tonight, despite all the preparation, despite all the experience, there's a million things we can't know until we meet the students, see what they know, see how they tick, see who will come running to meet us and who will stay back throwing rocks in our general direction. We've rehearsed many times (for some of us many, many, many times) and yet that rehearsal was only to be ready for the unexpected, not to lock everything into immutable place.

Our success will depend on our preparation, our knowledge of the material, and-- scariest of all-- our willingness to be present, to be really there with our students. Which of course means we have to be vulnerable. And so, when the fear and uncertainty hit, the most natural impulse in the world is to protect ourselves, to cover up. And yet to do that is to wall ourselves off from our students, to deny a teacher-student relationship with them, to be rigid, guarded, even defensive. All of which only gets in the way of the work.

And newbies-- here's one of the secrets they never tell you-- you will never be absolutely certain, never believe that you have everything under control, never reach a point where you are certain you have nothing left to learn or perfect or grow. (This is why I'm certain that some charter operators and school leaders like Eva Moskowitz don't know what they're talking about-- because they're 100% certain they know what they're talking about, and if you're 100% certain, then you don't understand the situation).

This year comes with extra nervousness at our house. For the first time in twelve weeks, for a few hours, we will be parting company with these guys:

I did this thirty-ish years ago, and it was hard then. To take two tiny humans that you have cared for and in whom you've invested your whole heart, and turn them over to somebody else while you go off to work. I can't tell you how many times I got all weepy over leaving my first two, and I don't expect it's going to be any better this time.

But it's a reminder-- every student who sits in my classroom was somebody's baby. I teach high school students, so they're not very babylike now, and yeah, I know not all parents are fully invested in their kids. But still. These were somebody's babies, and those somebodies mostly trust us with that precious cargo. They deserve the best I can give them, and they deserve someone who shows up 100%, and they deserve someone who watches out for them and helps them discover what it means for them to be fully human, fully themselves in the world. And when I'm in my room and they're walking it, it will hit me like a bathtub full of warm water and the nerves and the worry will just slough off.

But for right now I am going to finish up and probably not sleep, because I think I need to rewrite a couple of questions on the quiz tomorrow, and I didn't get papers set out for third period and I think I need to re-arrange the desks a little. And I never got around to picking out a shirt today. And to all a good night.

Read This Book: P. L. Thomas and Trumplandia

One of the first bloggers I stumbled across when I fell down the internet edublogs rabbit hole was P. L. Thomas. I found his writing engaging and interesting, but challenging. Thomas can write about big ideas and keep them anchored to the nuts and bolts at the same time. I've always said I like to read hist stuff because it always makes me feel smarter. We also traded some messages about classic seventies comic books, and I admire (without attempting to imitate) his biking prowess.

So it was a real pleasure to have a book by Thomas on my reading pile this summer. Trumplandia: Unmasking Post-Truth America is another hard-hitting book from the folks at Garn Press, a publishing start-up focusing on social justice.

Thomas is good at making connections, and while many of us are getting caught down in the sheer volume of post-truth muck in Trump's America, Thomas has a real gift for staying above personal arguments and focusing on ideas. Democracy, race, class, education, poetry, and the very bending of Truth itself as we've watched it be hammered on for the past few years. Thomas is ridiculously well-read, but he is also a winner of the NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Honesty and Clarity in Public Language, so he never leaves you feeling like you've been buried in a hail of erudition, lost in a scholarly fog. He's clear and smart, but he writes with a transparency that opens doors for the reader rather than leaving them stranded in the foyer, thinking they don't know enough to enter. Like I said-- reading his work makes me feel smarter.

Thomas does the best of what any of us can hope for in these times-- see clearly the Kafkaesque mess that is engulfing our country (some of it new, and some of it not so new) while still seeing the virtues, the better qualities that can guide us through this mess, if we'll just embrace our natures. That makes this book a great back-to-school read. Click right now and buy a copy.

Hiring Big Brother

Data mining? Constant surveillance? That's just unacceptable for our students. Hell, rich parents would never stand for it!

Well, about that...

From the What Crazy Crap People Will Sign Up For file (cross indexed with the Overton Window on Civil Liberties) comes this article by Kim Brooks at NY Magazine.

It's about a company named Cognition Builders, a company founded in 2006 and dedicated to helping your family deal with problem children.  How do they help? By providing complete surveillance of your family, 24/7. They place video cameras throughout your home. They send employees-- family architects-- to stay with the family. Both the employees and the cameras provide real time coaching, telling you (and correcting you) how to properly interact with your children.

"Well, that's just nuts," you say. "Who would sign up for that?"

The answer is, plenty of folks.

"Well, these must be really good counselor types, with years of training and important new techniques."

Nope. Those family architects are generally fresh-out-of-college twenty-somethings. The actual techniques pushed by the company looks like a slightly tweaked Applied Behavior Analysis, a technique used with autistic children. It's the newer name for "behavior modification," a name that was generally dropped when people started to catch on to how creepy it was. Stressing strictness and consistency, their approach smells a lot like Nanny 911.

The company was founded by Ilana Kukoff, who has a Ph.D. in Behavioral Psychology, bills herself as an "educational entrepreneur" and who has started some other businesses, including Rethink Autism. Cognition Builders bills itself as an education service. Less prominently featured in her bios are her stint as Behavioral Psychologist and Powerful New Lifestyle Consultant for Kaman Music (a major distributor of instruments) and Golden Bridge Yoga. (Note: I did not make up that job title).

"So, it's really affordable? The marketing sells it?"

This is a program for rich folks. Really rich folks. Many clients report bills in the six-figure zone. And the company doesn't advertise. Just word of mouth and recommendations from counselors who specialize in Diseases of the Rich (h/t Tom Lehrer). People are really signing up for this. Read the article.

The moral of this story is, I guess, that some folks-- even very privileged folks-- are not only willing to put up with Big Brother, but will pay to hire him, even under the flimsiest of pretenses. A good thing to remember for those of us believe this kind of thing is self-evidently Very Bad.

Minority Schools More Likely To Be Closed

The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) has released a study on school closure with a look to how school closure affects the students who are then displaced.

"Lights Out: Practice and Impact of Closing Low-Performing Schools" reveals several findings, most of which are not terribly surprising. Closing schools doesn't really help the students who are displaced; if they are moved to a better school, they might do better, but otherwise, probably worse. Almost like being displaced and sent to a whole new school is distressing or something.

So no big surprises there, other than the fact that this is pro-reform CREDO talking. But amidst their other findings, we get this:

Closures of low-performing schools were not blind to socioeconomic status or race/ethnicity of the students who were enrolled. In both the charter and TPS sectors, and particularly in the lowest ventile of achievement, low-performing schools with a larger share of black and Hispanic students were more likely to be closed than similarly performing schools with a smaller share of disadvantaged minority students. Moreover, the closure rates for higher-poverty low-performing TPS in the bottom two ventiles surpassed the rates for lower-poverty TPS of similarly low performance. These observed inequivalent tendencies raise the issue of equity in decision-making about school closures. 

To repeat-- all performance markers being equal, schools with more brown, black or poor are more likely to be closed down. And just in case that didn't see clear enough, they added in their implications section:

...our evidence suggests that closures of low-performing schools were biased by non-academic factors. In particular, closures were tilted toward the most disadvantaged schools such as the ones with higher concentrations of students in poverty and higher shares of black and Hispanic students, which raises the issue of equity in the practice of closures. 

They continued that districts and administrators were "exposed" in this regard and might want to look at their procedures. In other words, shape up before someone kicks your ass in court.

Matt Barnum looked at the study and noted that it didn't answer four questions, including the question of why the inequity in school closures. What could it be?

One explanation is simple: racism and lack of political power.  

Well, yeah. The head of the national association of charter authorizers admits that could be a problem:


“We are especially troubled by the report’s observation of different school closure patterns based on race, ethnicity, and poverty,” president Greg Richmond said in a statement. “These differences were present among both charter schools and traditional public schools and serve as a wake-up call to examine our practices to ensure all schools and students are being treated equitably.”

Barnum offers one other theory-- the opening of many charters near these schools puts more financial pressure on them by stripping resources and enrollment. But here we have a chicken-egg thing. And it replaces our old question with a new one-- why do charters focus on brown, black and poor communities.

But the staggering bottom line here remains-- we are closing schools that serve black, brown and poor students because they serve black, brown and poor students. How is that even remotely okay?

  

Flexibility, School Discipline, and Choice

Robert Pondiscio and I have been having a conversation (a statemennt which is true on almost any given day) that started in the comments section of this post, and then continued in this post. You can go back and read the full thing, or you can settle for my somewhat glib abbreviated version:

Me: School disciplinary codes are codified versions of someone's values system.

Pondiscio: Exactly! That's why we need school choice.

This is another version of a conversation I've had with well-intentioned people within the reformster world (yes, I believe there are such folks." Basically, we agree on problems, but disagree on solutions. Pondiscio writes:

When we seek to establish, valorize, or impose one set of beliefs about student discipline as the “right” one, we are functionally communicating that all others are “wrong.” Greene’s recognition of the values-laden nature of discipline systems all but begs for choice: Parents should be able to weigh, as one factor among many, schools whose philosophy about behavior management, classroom culture, and approach to student discipline most closely mirror their own beliefs and practices.

I'm with him for one sentence-- then we part ways. As with many features and problems of schools, I think public schools are better positioned to respond to the problem. Here's why:

First, the "one factor among many" issue means that parents will not be perfectly happy with a choice school, because "traditional disciplinary method with strong science program and a good band with friendly teachers and a good location and..." gets to be a tough order to fill. So compromises will be made.

But two-- a private/charter/choice school generally offers less flexibility and less opportunity to negotiate. If you like certain aspects of Catholic school education, but you don't want your children exposed to all the Catholic Jesus stuff, there's no board member to call, no administrator to talk to, no accommodations to be called for, no hope in hell that you'll get what you want. Likewise, many charter schools can afford to be completely unresponsive-- they have no government mandate to serve all students and as I've outlined elsewhere, their bus8iness model means they are largely insulated from the "market pressures" that are supposed to force them to change. They don't have to make everyone happy-- they just need to fill a certain number of seats.

So if, for instance, you are a parent who wants to put your child in a charter that has been sold as a high-achieving, send-your-child-to-college academic powerhouse, but once you get there, you discover a no excuses atmosphere that is soul-killing for your child, you can try to contact a board member, or talk to an administrator-- but they aren't going to change a thing for you or your child. Don't like it? There's the door.

Reform fans talk about parent choice. But parents only ever get to choose from the offerings made available to them. It's the people who set up charters and private schools that get to exercise their choices. 

Are there public schools where the values are rigid and inflexible? Sure, and that's often inexcusable, but just as citizens of Phoenix could mobilize to oust a racist, lawbreaking sheriff, voters can replace their school board members with those who represent a different philosophy. Public schools always have available avenues for change and growth and reconciling multiple viewpoints. Charter and choice schools mostly do not.

There are always going to be values that are nearly impossible to have coexist-- most notably it's hard to reconcile the value of a pluralistic community that allows for different views and the value that says "there is one right path and everyone must follow it." And if we did charters right (which currently we absolutely don't, but that's a hundred other posts) this is one area in which they would be useful. Maybe. I have misgivings still.

I have misgivings because a rigid winner-take-all approach just mirrors the similar hardening of political lines in our society, and I don't notice that really making the country a better place. But in the end, while I think I understand Pondiscio's point, I believe that public schools ultimately offer more choice under their sloppy, messy, many-faceted roof than charter/choice schools which are brittle and inflexible.

ICYMI: New Year Edition (8/27)

This coming Tuesday, the kids are back in our local schools. In the meantime, here's some Sunday reading for you. Remember pass along what speaks to you. Everyone can amplify voices.

Dear Teachers Who Teach My Black Child

More good practical advice for the white teacher of black children

Can We Talk about How Many White Women There Are in School

Yes, here I am linking to Education Post. But this is a thought-provoking article, even if you disagree.

Who Is the Ideal Teaching Candidate

You really should be reading Nancy Flanagan every week. But just in case you missed this week, here's a dead-on look at selecting teachers.

Educational Malpractice

John Warner checks out one more canned writing program. It's not good.

The Worst Argument for Charter Schools

Jersey Jazzman with another look at bad ways to cheer for charters


Why Aren't We Talking about This

Emily Talmadge started her teaching career in the New York charter scene, and she reminds us just how bad that is/

Back to School Once More

Mary Holden has some thoughts about how to hold on to teachers.

What Happened To All the Teachers

Jeff Bryant notes that this mystery has been cropping up again lately-- and it's really not a mystery at all.

Be Glad for Our Failure To Catch China in Education

From Psychology Today, a look at China's disastrous education system, and why we should be glad we've failed to imitate it.


The Biggest Difference Between Private, Charter and Public Schools Is Not Test Scores-- It's Marketing



Jack Schneider has a new book out about measuring school quality, and here's an excerpt.

Lessons in Local History

Warning: This is not so much one of my rants about education policy as it is a look at an actual piece of teaching that I use in my own classroom. It's an example of how to use the unique and specific materials at hand to create what I believe is a valuable piece of learning.

For a couple of decades now, I have assigned my 11th grade Honors English class a major paper focused on local history (lovingly named by generations of students "the research project from hell"). Originally they drew a set of years out of a hat. Nowadays I have them select their own topic.Their goal-- to create a written work of local history, based on primary research.

It was the primary source part I was initially after. I had tired of traditional shake and bake research projects in which we basically asked students to plagiarize while being sure to make it look as if they hadn't. And research from published books and articles skips one of the most important parts of research writing-- sifting through a large pile of details to decide what is important and what is not. In a traditional research project, students get their facts pre-selected and pre-attached to a pre-written thesis. I wanted to get past that.

To do that, I needed a topic for which primary sources, or at least unsifted source material, was readily available. My first thought was local history. We have a fairly rich local history, much of it linked to the beginnings of the oil industry. And I was already familiar with the resources available, because I had been wading through them for many years myself. I belong to a local traditional town band with the concerts in the park and the whole nine yards, and I worked on their history for decades, poring through old newspapers, interviews, documents, scraps, anything I could find, tracking the lives of hundreds of members as well as the community, other arts groups, and whatever seemed to me to fit. If the idea of reading several hundred pages of me talking about small town history and the history of town bands appeals to you, just follow this link. Bottom line-- I knew the territory I was sending them out to explore,and I had the contacts and connections to get them into the places they needed to go to explore it.

The process is long and involved. They pick partners in December, begin the work, and hand in a final product in May. There are orientation sessions at the room in the library where materials are stored, and I often take a few Saturdays to go down and open the room up for them. There are check-in dates along the way, because I learned very early that procrastinators could dig themselves into a hole too deep to escape. And lots of discussion along the way of how to do such a thing.

The results have not always been stellar, but I believe there are some real benefits.

* You don't find the answer-- you make it. This is a revelation and a struggle for many of them, who assume that for any question a teacher asks, there is one correct answer and their job is to retrieve it. No, I tell them, you are deciding what the answer, the main idea, is here. You are in control of the outcome of this project-- and only you.

* No borders. In the typical shake and bake project, the teacher tells students where they may not look and what they may not use (to avoid cheating or cutting corners or making things to easy). For this project, there are no restrictions. If you can think of a place or person to consult, do it.

* For follows function. How you organize your materials depends on what you want to say, and that's up to you, so the organization is yours to set, too. But make it make sense. Follow the ideas and stop looking for an answer key.

* Create something. If you have done this really well, I tell them, there will be a piece of knowledge in the world on paper that did not exist before. You will have created something new.

*Learn about your community. "This place is dumb and boring," is where we usually start, and it's true that nothing ever blew up real good here, but they can learn to understand real history on a human scale. At least a little. And anything that connects people to their own communities is a win.

And we have almost always published. I used to run off copies, punch holes, bind the whole mess together. Each student gets a copy, and there are copies in the school and city library. More recently, I've been using Amazon's Createspace (the link is at the bottom of every amazon page) which both creates a decent print copy, but lists it on amazon (so Mom and Grampa and the rest can order copies too). I buy copies for the students and libraries, and as the "author," I get them for under $5 each.

I won't pretend for a second that every project in every year has been a triumph, or that every project has been a work of eleventh-grade genius. But I think the project is valuable, and has mostly worked. It is certainly one of the things my students remember for years and years after they've left me.

Should every teacher run out and pilot this same project? No, no no no, nope. But the larger point I want to make is that when we focus on some worthwhile goals and pull out the skills and knowledge that we personally have, tap into our own expertise, we can come up with useful and unique learning projects. We can design things that we are passionate about, and that passion will infect (some of) our students.

Standards? Pshaw. I handle that like all good teachers do. I designed the project using my best professional judgment and a constant feedback loop that helps me tweak it each year. The standards alignment is just paperwork that can be filled out after the fact.

So as you approach this year, look for your own projects from hell, your own ideas that your expertise and passion can bring to life while taking your students out of the more ordinary assignments. Anyone can do it. My 12th grade AP teaching colleague finishes her year with Paradise Lost, a work she loves, culminating in a trial in which two sides argue in front of local attorneys whether or not Milton successfully justified the ways of God to man. I wouldn't touch that project with a ten-foot pole (can't get excited about Milton, don't have lawyerly expertise to tap), but it is not only highly anticipated by each year's class, but it draws a huge audience. Really. Milton.

The lesson for us is, actually, the same lesson I try to deliver to my students. The answers are not outside us, waiting for us to dig them up. They are inside us, waiting to be brought to life, to be created by us. Do something really cool this year (understanding that you may well make some terrible mistakes first time out, but that itself is a learning opportunity and next year it'll be better) and make your classroom a unique window on the world.