Lazy Reporting

Kids are doing short tutorials under teacher supervision. If you don't like it, tell admin. your preference or change schools.

— Bridgett Ellison (@BridgettNews6) October 23, 2017

The above came in response to criticism of the use of ipads in a pre-K classroom. It did not come from a teacher or administrator-- it came from the reporter who covered the story. 

The story itself is a puff piece about the injection of ipads into some pre-K classrooms in (where else) Florida, Orange County.

It runs under the heading "Getting Results in Our Schools," a spot sponsored by Crayola Experience, a "family attraction" with four locations around the country. Crayola took plenty of flack years ago for becoming Common Core partners.

The spot devotes less than two whole minutes to looking at the idea of putting ipads in the hands of four year olds, and not a second of that is remotely critical.

Rationale? Well, you know how Kids These Days are already so tech savvy (there's an idea that needs examination) and you know they'll all be using computers some day, so let's get some computers in front of the littlest littles.

These are recycled ipads. Everything on them, reports Ellison, is "curriculum based." The story emphasizes that this is reinforcement, and "not a replacement" for pen and paper or chalk and chalkboard. What the story doesn't do is question why we are trying to stuff four-year-olds full of academic instruction.

"The curriculum doesn't change, we want our 4-year-olds learning their alphabet, to be learning sounds, learning sight words, quite frankly, we want them to start reading as early as possible," Superintendent Barbara Jenkins said.

Quite frankly, what the hell for? There are so many layers of unquestioned bad educational practice here. Academic instruction for pre-K? Not a good idea. Try play instead. Screen time for small children? The research is admittedly mixed, but some authorities recommend as little as 30 minutes per week.

Ellison simply reports that the school thinks that students will get instruction in ways that will be more "fun" because of the computers, which is such a digital non-native thing to say.

Is it the most terrible story ever run? No, but it thoughtlessly amplifies a whole assortment of dangerous assumptions. It's glorified PR work, the kind of thing that can be done by just running a news release from the people you're covering, with no attempt to locate or give voice to other views. And when presented with those views, Ellison fluffed off all responsibility. Have another view or conflicting information? Not her problem. Call your administration or withdraw your child, but don't suggest that she do an actual reporters job.

I kind of get it. Ellison's is certainly not the only reporter guilty of this lazy reportage. School stories were, once upon a time, easy lay-ups, like covering an apple pie factory or pictures of smiling babies. That is no longer the case, and responsible reporters can't just fluff their way through any more. Education is a tough field, filled with lots of bad, unproven, and damaging ideas. Especially in Florida.

PA: Urgent! Vouchers Are Back

Tomorrow morning, the Senate Education Committee will be once again considering a bill to promote vouchers across the state of Pennsylvania, and to pay for them by stripping money from public schools. If you're in Pennsylvania, drop what you're doing and call your Senator today.

SB 2, Education Savings Accounts for Students in Underperforming Schools, sets up vouchers with  no oversight and an extremely broad criterion for how the vouchers can be spent. According to the official summary, voucher money may be spent on

1) Tuition and fees at a participating private school; 
2) Payment for a licensed or accredited tutor; 
3) Fees for nationally norm-referenced tests and similar exams; 
4) Industry certifications; 
5) Curriculum and textbooks; and 
6) Services to special education students such as occupational, speech, and behavioral therapies.

So anything from private school tuition to buying books for home schooling to sending a child to massage therapist school.

Money can be carried over from one year to the next, and if there's still some left at graduation time, the money may be used for higher education costs.

The amount placed in each child's Education Savings Account will be the per-pupil amount of state money spent in the district, with corresponding funds subtracted from the district's state subsidy payment (this is all, of course, assuming that the state legislature can get its act together and actually make those payments).  This amount varies wildly by district, but in no district is way up there as Pennsylvania has one of the nation's lowest rates of state support for public schools. That means local districts make up the difference, which means the poorest districts can least afford to lose state money to a voucher bill.  In the meantime, a few thousand dollars will not get your child into a top private school-- but it will let you buy some nice books for homeschooling.

This bill is also a potential windfall for parochial schools. As we've seen in other voucher states like Indiana and Wisconsin, the vast majority of voucher money ends up in private religious schools, supporting students who were never in public school to begin with.

But hey-- it only applies to schools on the Pennsylvania naughty list, right? Have you seen the Pennsylvania naughty list? It is just under 800 schools long. Take a look. In my county, two school districts are on it, including the district where my wife works. If this bill became law today, tomorrow a whole bunch of money would move from those districts' state support to the local Catholic school, the local private Christian school, and local homeschoolers-- even though not a single student changed enrollment.

The Pennsylvania Association of School Business Officials already has an action alert up, if you want a quick and easy way to send word to Harrisburg. They also note some other features of the bill. For instance, once a child is enrolled, even if the school district of origin improves, or the child moves away entirely, the child keeps the voucher/savings account. And as an extra bonus kick in the teeth, the public school district must provide the student with transportation within  a 10 mile radius.

This bill is bad news, and would have an immediate and damaging effect on school finances across the state. It is an attack on public education. And conservatives really shouldn't be fans, either-- this bill provides zero accountability, and our tax dollars disappear down a black hole where we have no say and no knowledge of how they are spent. A family could decide that it would be educational for Junior to go to Disney World, and your tax dollars would pay for it.

You can check here to see if your senator is on the Senate Education Committee, which will be considering this bill tomorrow. Since the bill is sponsored by committee members, its chances look good and the press will be on for the full senate. The bill's main sponsor is John DiSanto (R), who unseated a Democratic incumbent last fall and who has been announcing his intent to bring vouchers to Pennsylvania.

This is not the first time someone has tried to push a voucher bill, and it won't be the last. But it is time, once again, for defenders of public education to hit the phones. Even if your senator is not among those who will act on the bill tomorrow, chances are good that he'll be looking at it a bit later. Let him know that stripping funds from public schools in order to fund unregulated oversight-free vouchers is not okay.

About That Zip Code

Your education shouldn't be determined by your zip code.

If we've heard that once, we've heard it a zillion times, but almost never does it lead to a discussion of the bigger question behind that statement:

What determines your zip code?

I cannot recommend hard enough that you go listen to (or, if you must, read the available transcript) for a previous episode of the podcast Have You Heard, in which Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider talk to Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.

Rothstein's point is simple but profound. We tend to assume that people just sorted themselves out into all these neighborhoods and zip codes, that the sorting is the result of "millions of accidental, private decisions" and therefor really hard to fix. But Rothstein argues that segregation was in fact the result of specific government policy (like the federal rules that said Levittown couldn't sell units to black families), and that these policies created a systemic poverty that stretches over generations. In fact, according to Rothstein, government policy created segregation in cities where it had never existed.

I probably need to read Rothstein's book now (because I need one more tome on that stack) because I have questions. In particular, I wonder about the degree to which government policy expressed a hard-to-repress will of the people, like the folks in North Carolina re-segregating themselves by flying to white charter schools. Rothstein says we have to educate everyone about how this happened; I'm not sure how optimistic I am about the results of such a project, just as I'm not sure how we'd approach his idea that good schools must be rooted in neighborhoods that are integrated by class.

Still, it's an intriguing vision-- integrate the communities, and the schools will follow. We hear a lot about how students are trapped in their school because of their zip code, but it might be more useful to talk about what keeps people trapped in that zip code in the first place, or how government can prevent the hollowing out of a neighborhood through gentrification.

Interesting stuff. Go give a listen.

Another Faux Teacher Memoir

It takes two reviewers at the Atlantic-- James Forman Jr. and Arthur Evenchik-- to gush over Michelle Kuo's Reading with Patrick, with their review ending with the observation that
"in all of the literature addressing education, race, poverty, and criminal justice, there has been nothing quite like Reading With Patrick."

I'm not really sure what part of the book exactly that judgment is based on.

Is it the part where an ivy league grad signs up for Teach for America and discovers that her degree and a few weeks of training don't make her effective in the classroom?

Is it the part where the students in the classroom turn out to be complex and deep human beings who experience a (apparently surprising) full range of emotions and are capable of deeply touching moments of humanity? 

Is it the part where she puts in her two years and then leaves for her "real" profession (in this case, lawyer and memoirist)?

Is it the part where she discovers that the effects of poverty are deep and wide and complicated and not easily cast aside in just nine months, no matter how shiny your ivy league degree is?

Is it the part where despite the fact that she has not earned the title either by training or experience, she goes ahead and calls herself a teacher anyway?

Or is the "hard won wisdom" that allows her to realize that to matter in other peoples' lives requires more than a drive by?

Because, I have to tell you guys, I've seen all of these stories hundreds of times. The fact that Kuo tells a tale more nuanced than the infamous Onion TFA pieces doesn't mean she isn't working the same old territory. And while Kuo seems to be a decent writer, she doesn't appear to have gleaned any insights that aren't already possessed by millions of actual teachers (the majority of whom stuck around long enough to actually get good at the job).

Kuo's decision to tutor a student who had been in her classroom but later found himself in jail for murder-- that's an admirable impulse, and makes up the large part of the book. And Kuo has since devoted her professional career to some social issues, and now teaches at the American University of Paris on issues related to race, punishment, immigration, and the law. So I'm inclined to assume that she is a decent person with her heart in the right place.

But only in teaching do we get this. Students who drop out of their medical internship don't get to write memoirs hailed for genius insights into health care. Guys who once wrote an article for the local paper don't draw plaudits for their book of wisdom about journalism and the media.   But somehow education must be repeatedly Columbusized, as some new tourist is lionized for "discovering" a land where millions of folks all live rich and fully realized lives.

It's possible that I am simply reacting to my own biased, inflamed nerve. Had this been pitched as a book about a lawyer, or a Harvard grad (twice), or at least not one more uncritical TFA tale. But the book that the Atlantic pitches is, despite the reviewers' insistence to the contrary, a story that I do know already, and have no desire to read again. 



Addendum:

The authors of the original review were kind enough to submit a response. I was going to run it in the comments section, but it turns out there's an upper limits to characters in a comment. Who knew? So instead, I'm simply going to add their comment here.

Thank you for offering us the chance to respond to your post about our review of Reading With Patrick. When I consulted James about your invitation, he wrote back with an essential point, drawing on his own recent experience as an author.

This past spring, James published his first book: Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. The book was widely praised, and reviewers were especially impressed by James's stories about clients he represented during his six years as a public defender in Washington, D.C. Eventually, James left the Public Defender Service to become a law professor, but his experience there has deeply influenced his subsequent career and his scholarship.

With this in mind, James wrote (regarding your post):

How many years is enough for you to be allowed to write? Nobody attacks me for only having 6 years as a PD. Matthew Desmond [the author of Evicted] won a Pulitzer and he was never homeless. I'd rather consider writing for what it says.

This way of thinking ought to appeal to you. On the "About" page of your blog, you write, "I never automatically rule anything out or in just because of the source." But you haven’t followed this principle in your response to our review. You rule out Reading With Patrick because Michelle Kuo is a former Teach for America recruit who left the classroom after two years. She has no right, you insist, even to call herself a teacher, let alone to write about teaching. Nothing she says will come as news to genuine teachers -- the only ones who deserve to be heard. And "The fact that Kuo tells a tale more nuanced than the infamous Onion TFA pieces doesn't mean she isn't working the same old territory."

To James's point, I would add these thoughts:

1.    As our review indicated, the heart of Kuo’s book concerns the seven months she spent tutoring an incarcerated former student, well after she had left TFA. (At this stage in her narrative, she also acknowledges the dismal fates of other students whose lives she manifestly failed to change.) Her portrait of Patrick is astonishingly perceptive and multifaceted; she never reduces him to a mere object of her solicitude. As James and I read her account of their sessions together, it resonated with our own memories of our work with students at the Maya Angelou Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., which James co-founded. These are some of the reasons we felt motivated to praise her book so highly. We thought that anyone who got beyond the opening pages of Reading with Patrick, or the first few paragraphs of our review, would recognize that she wasn’t merely “working the same old territory.”

2.    One of the great challenges we faced as reviewers was selecting passages to quote. There is one scene in particular that we couldn't make space for, but that speaks to some of your misgivings about the book you imagine Reading With Patrick to be.

Here's the context. The reader learns, early on, that while Kuo was teaching at the alternative school, she and Patrick appeared in a PBS documentary. After she returns to Helena, she encounters a man in a grocery store aisle -- an educational consultant from out of town, accompanied by two friends -- who recognizes her from the film. He says:

     "I showed it to teachers in a workshop and used it as an example of the key of keys -- care. The student in the movie, he used that word to talk about you, to explain why you made an impact on him. I told them a teacher's care could change someone."
     At this, his friends nodded gravely, as if this were an original thought. I nervously guessed at what was to come next: What kind of consultant session involves showing some film and telling teachers to care? Few teachers like to be told that other teachers care more than they do. And I didn't care more; I had left.
     "So then one teacher got offended; she thought I was saying something about her." Now the man grew agitated, the conflict surging in his memory. "She said that kid didn't change at all. She said he murdered someone and is in jail now. Then she got up and left the room."
     Expectantly, the three faces turned to look at me. They were waiting, I realized, for me to confirm or deny that disgruntled teacher's account. This is what it came down to -- true or false. Patrick had either killed someone or he hadn't. Caring could change a person or it couldn't. I thought they were naive, but maybe I was no different.
     I had not intended to talk or even think about anything that mattered to me this morning. Now, in my gym shorts and silly headband, I had been ambushed in a fluorescent aisle of Food Giant by a stranger who wanted to know what happened. What happened was just facts; it was nothing of the inner life, nothing of a person's complex regrets or intentions. But for them, what happened was a shorthand for understanding who he was.

I hope you can tell from this passage that Kuo is not presuming to speak to or for the teaching profession. She doesn’t set herself up as a representative figure or as a role model (“I didn’t care more; I had left”). She scorns the consultant’s sentimentality but doesn’t claim to have always been immune to it herself. She does, however, insist on the value of caring about and building a relationship with Patrick. In this way, she counters the reductiveness of those visitors in the grocery aisle who know nothing of his inner life, nothing of his “complex regrets or intentions.”

Even though James and I didn’t write about it directly, this passage and others like it shaped our response to Reading With Patrick. We think it transcends a cliché that you identify in your post: the novice teacher discovering that students are “complex and deep human beings who experience a (apparently surprising) full range of emotions and are capable of deeply touching moments of humanity." In our view, there can't be too many books that affirm the humanity of devalued young people like the ones Kuo taught in the Delta.

We did not praise Reading With Patrick because we are indifferent to the experience and testimony of seasoned teachers. We weren't taking sides with TFA against its critics, some of whose concerns we share. We were just (in James’s words) considering the writing for what it said.

- Arthur Evenchik

 

 

ICYMI: After A Week Off Edition (10/22)

So a week ago I was in a  Phoenix hospital. This week I'm at home. Home is better. Here's some reading for you. Remember to amplify the stuff that speaks to you. You are how the word is spread.

The end of VAM for teacher termination in Houston

Audrey Amrein-Beardsley on the final outcome of the Houston anti-VAAS suit, and the news is great.

Eclectablog Needs Your Help

Eclectablog provides in valuable news coverage for Michigan progressives, but Chris Savage can't keep footing the bill alone.

School Improvement Tips for Civic and Community Leaders

Among reformsters. Rick Hess is one of the best for honest self-evaluation. This list of five mistakes reformsters take is great. Quibble about whether Hess and his friends take the advice or not-- the advice itself is on point.

Why Rule by the People Is Better Than Rule by Experts

Nicholas Tampio in praise of democracy.

Florida School Voucher Investigation

How bad is voucher fraud and corruption in Florida? The Orlando Sentinel gives us a three part series that answers the question (and it's not pretty)

In Pursuit of Woozles

Some Winnie-the-Pooh

Newark Schools Chief Tells Union to Stuff It

This bit of reporting from Bob Braun is short, but if you don't read it, you won't believe it. The teachers union offered to help start a new day in Newark. The response they got was... well, not very welcoming.

The Great Tennessee Achievement School District Experiment Finally Comes to an End

Gary Rubinstein revisits the Tennessee ASD, the ASD that launched a bunch of other ASDs, now that it has reached its sell-by date, to ask how it did. (Spoiler alert- not so well)

12 Tech Takeover Concerns

Nancy Bailey with a handy list of issues to be concerned about when facing an ed tech juggernaut.

Michigan Steals Public School Money for Charters

If you read here, you probably read Ravitch, but this one's too important to miss in the sheer volume of her blog.

Secret Group Wants To Take Over Your School

Set the Wayback machine to May of 2015, when Sarah Lahm warned about a threat to public schools. Let's see if she was onto something.

Kansas Takes the Lead

Kansas has found a way to leap to the head of the pack in the race to dismantle public education.

Mind you, Kansas has been working on the problem for a while. You may recall that Governor Brownback and a GOP legislature tried to turn Kansas into a free market laboratory, with "business friendly" tax cuts that have put the state's finances in free fall. The attempt to implement a full-on super-GOP model left the state broke. Tax cuts for the wealthy didn't trickle down, and the state is now in a mess (while Brownback runs the standard playbook of throwing attention to social issues, as if gay marriage is somehow responsible for Kansas poverty). It is no wonder that education is underfunded in the state using a formula that the state supreme court says is unconstitutional.

And that's not all. Kansas has voted to allow unlicensed persons to teach in the classroom. They voted to strip teachers of all job protections in a bizarre fracas that featured the Koch Brothers coming to Topeka to extort votes out of moderate GOP members (Nice re-election prospects you have there. Shame if anything happened to them). They have suggested that teacher evaluation could be handled by the school janitor. And they have been watching a steady exodus of teachers from the state. All that on top of the purposeful and deliberate underfunding of education, which is where the state supreme court shows up to tell them they are violating the state's own constitution. And they responded to that issue by trying to rewrite the rules for getting rid of obnoxious judges. Most recently, the state handled its ESSA plan comment period so very quietly that only about 20 citizens commented on the plan (Ed chief Randy Watson says that's because the citizens are "attuned to where the board is heading" and not because they were kept in the dark).

So here comes the Kansas Can School Redesign project. Seven school districts have been selected (each given, for because this is their "moonshot", the name of one of the seven original Mercury astronauts-- the folks in Kansas do know that we actually made it to the moon already, right?)

The redesign is supposed to highlight several principles--  developing individual study plans, measuring social and economic growth, improving graduation rates and post-secondary completion and addressing kindergarten readiness, and the original press was pretty vague about how that would happen, exactly. The buzz has included many of the usual reformy vocabulary (this will be all about "hard data" and being ready for "real life").

But last Wednesday, Kansas State Board of Education members were given a more specific briefing about what is in the wind. And it's... ambitious.

Brad Neuenswander, the deputy commissioner who seems to be taking point on this, suggested that the entire delivery system for education is going to change:

"I would speculate that if you walked into one of those districts, you’re not going to see a traditional setting," he told the state board Wednesday. "I think you’re going to walk in there and maybe see a group of kids not based on age, but based on experience and where they’re at. You may see 30 kids in a room with three adults supporting that. The whole structure of it, it’s hard to define."  

Meanwhile, the state has changed the rules on how accreditation works (now it's districts, not schools, that are certified).

Students need no longer be organized by grades, nor do school years have to be defined by hours in the classroom. The primary concern is "individualized education, focusing on the unique needs of each student." All of which suggests that Kansas just convinced seven school districts to go all in on competency-based education. Certifying a district instead of schools makes a lot of sense if you aren't really going to have schools any more-- just students who can plug in to the computerized "personalized" learning system from wherever. And you'll notice that Neuenswander expects to see three "adults," not necessarily teachers (though that point is moot, since Kansas has already scrubbed most professional requirements to be a teacher).

Another red flag? Kansas has apparently devoted around $0.00 to back this change. Which would be insane-- unless you think businesses will step in to do the heavy lifting. This supremely vague plan is supposed to be ready to launch in the fall of 2018. How any district would completely redesign itself in less than a year is a mystery-- unless, of course, they just hire somebody to plug in a pre-made CBE program. Just call Summit.

Meanwhile, there is one huge red flag for the program's survival. Many discussions of it stress the idea of non-academics, the need to teach "character development, citizenship and work ethics." Back in the nineties, when CBE was called Outcome-Based Education, this is exactly what killed it dead. As soon as it became clear that the idea was for schools to teach students to have the Right Values and live the Right Way, conservatives rose up and stomped the whole initiative (I remember it well because Pennsylvania was Ground Zero for much of the stomping).

So it will be interesting to see how Kansans react to discovering that not only will the school be teaching their child values and proper attitudes, but that software will be evaluating those qualities-- and recording the data to go in the child's permanent, corporate-owned record. I have to believe that at least a few folks will sqawk.

It's true that a pre-requirement to become a Mercury school was to get the cheerful cooperation of staff and community. But one wonders just how clear and specific the early information released to build buy-in was.

Twenty-two more districts are scheduled to launch in 2019-2020. Kansas looks on track to land on a planet where they barely have to provide public education at all. Congratulations?

8 Rules for Writing

Every October 20, the National Council of Teachers of English celebrates the National Day on Writing. I'll admit I have misgivings-- it reminds me too much of the teachers who teach a "writing unit" for two weeks in April and ignore writing the rest of the year-- but this year I thought I'd recognize the day with a list.

Here are the things that I believe are true, that form the foundation of my writing and my writing instruction:










1) There are no writing prodigies.

Mozart started playing piano at age three and composed his first piece at age eight. Pascal wrote a mathematical paper at age nine. Piaget published a paper at age eleven.

But there are no writing prodigies. There are no classic poems or timeless novels or important essays written by six-year-olds. And what that tells me is that all writers started out in exactly the same place-- downtown Suckville. Some people are better equipped to climb to the top of Mount Awesome faster than others, but when I encounter a student who is not very good at writing, I have to assume that they aren't very good yet. Students get where they're going in their own way in their own time. My job is to help them in their journey, but if they aren't very far along yet, that doesn't mean they can't still make great progress.

2) Writing is craft.

Too many people rule themselves out as writers because they don't experience blinding flashes of transportive inspiration. But when you call a carpenter, they don't say, "Well, I'd like to fix your cabinets, but I just don't feel inspired today." Writing is hammering and framing and laying planks and re-building and altering and fiddling endlessly to get it right. Hammer away and bang it out.

3) Ideas are the basic building blocks

There are still folks out there claiming that the building blocks of writing are sentences. Don't believe it. The basic building blocks of writing are ideas. All good writing begins with a person who has something they want to say, an idea or concept or feeling or image they want to convey. Everything else is the business of getting that Something through the pipeline. The mechanics and the grammatical nuts and bolts and the usage rules are all about making sure that the pipeline doesn't get clogged, that technical issues don't interfere with the audiemce's ability to get what the writer is putting out there. 

4) Form follows function

Do what you need to do to best convey your Something. There are no right and wrong choices-- there are only choices that work and choices that don't, and your measure is always "Does this serve the material? Does this support my Something?"

5) Avoiding mistakes is a mistake

A musician can play every note exactly as written, and be absolutely mediocre. A sports team can make zero mistakes and still get thoroughly beaten. In writing, concentrating on avoiding mistakes is a fool's game. It's not good enough to not do anything wrong-- you have to do something right. Be bold. Don't focus on what you're not going to do-- focus on what you are going to do.

6) You do you

Idea webs. Classical outlines. Free-writing to generate ideas. Discussion. Thinking in isolation. Pulling it out of your butt at the last minute. These pre-writing techniques all work for somebody (and not for some others). Pen or typewriter or computer screen. You have to know what works for you. There is no "correct" or "incorrect" way to write-- there are only the ways that work for you and the ways that don't work for you.

Here's the catch-- you have to be brutally honest with yourself about what does and doesn't work. You may want to be the "pull it out your butt at the last minute" person, but you have to take a hard, honest look at your product and ask yourself if it really represents your best work.

7) Testing is not writing

Never, ever mistake the kind of word tofu product required by standardized tests for actual writing. We live in a golden age of bad writing instruction, almost all of it aimed at standardized test writing-flavored behavioral products. That is not actual writing; it's mindless idea-free hoop-jumping. Never mistake it for anything else.

8) Write

Yes, read about writing. Talk about writing. Read, read, read, read, read, read-- and do it like a writer. But at the end of the day, there is only one way to perfect your craft, and that is to write. Write every day. Write about whatever is passing through your head. When Something scratches and bangs and hollers against the inside of your head and demands to be released, release it. Write. Write during your lunch hour. Stay up an extra hour. Get up an hour early. But write.

Today is the National Day on Writing. Let's go ahead and proclaim 363 more Days on Writing to follow it up.