Experience, Expertise, Ed Reform and Existential Dread

Kathleen Porter-Magee offered up an interesting piece at Fordham's Flypaper blog last week, but before we even get into the article itself, let's look at the quote she used to open it, because I would like that quote on a t-shirt, or large poster:

“An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.” 

—Werner Heisenberg

Hmm. Does this seem like an insight that could have been applied to the world of education reform over the past few decades of policies imposed by non-teacher policy mavens who ignored the advice and insight and expertise of teachers (and then, years later, announced the very problems teachers had warned them about in tones usually reserved for the discovery of fire)? 

Is that where this article is going? Is this going to be a reformy acknowledgement that, "Yeah, we should have involved teachers and listened to what they had to say about education before we started trying to remake the whole institution?" Spoiler alert-- no.

So what is it about?

Porter-Magee starts out with a tale of starting out teaching science at a parochial school, where she was given a room and a closet full of books and told, "Have at it." This, she observes, was probably not the best way to get her started in the classroom. 

Porter-Magee, we should note, is a fellow at the ever-reformy Fordham, and the superintendent of the Partnership for Inner City Education, a sort of charter-style management organization that runs some Catholic schools in New York City. (At least one former employee is not a fan, but that's a small sample). She has also worked for the Archdiocese of DC, the College Board, and Achievement First.

She refers us to Tom Nichols's new book, The Death of Expertise, from which she pulls this quote:

[W]e cannot function without acknowledging the limits of our knowledge and trusting the expertise of others. We sometimes resist this conclusion because it undermines our sense of independence and autonomy. We want to believe we are capable of making all kinds of decisions, and we chafe at the person who corrects us or tells us we’re wrong.

So here's where we're going. In Porter-Magee's model, "proven" curriculum is the expertise, and teachers are the ones who need to learn trust. Some more quotes from her article:

We valorize teacher “freedom” and “creativity” over things like proven curricula, which are too frequently perceived as a constraint on teacher autonomy.

In education we have been conditioned to believe that mandating curriculum is akin to micromanaging an artist. That’s not only wrong, it’s dangerous.

So, teachers should suck it up and defer to curriculum that is research based and proven effective.

On the one hand, she absolutely has a point. Having good materials is half of the battle in a classroom, and it gives me an absolute pain in the gut to see some teacher do a quick google search and download their materials from God-knows-where. I have also had the experience of teaching with a bad textbook, and it is far easier to just park such a text in the closet and build all your materials yourself.

On the other hand, there are some real issues with her point.

First, who decides and selects the "effective" materials. She seems to be suggesting that such selections be made by someone other than the classroom teacher, perhaps based on some hard and fast criteria. But "effective" these days too often means "research links it to higher test scores" and that's a problem because A) test scores are a lousy measure of effective education and B) test scores only exist for reading and math.

She's distressed at a RAND study that shows teachers getting materials from Google and Pinterest. But both, as well as the various teacher-to-teacher sites, are excellent places to find materials that are tested, proven and endorsed by other teachers who use them. Porter-Magee stops just sort of saying so, but she seems to be from the camp that believes that teachers lack the expertise to make curriculum and materials choices. I can't dismiss that out of hand-- it has become a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy as more ed schools concentrate on training proto-teachers to align to the standards and teach to the test. But for the most part, I believe she's wrong. I am the number one expert on teaching my subject in my classroom. Nobody else knows the content, the students, and my own strengths and weaknesses, as well as how all those things intersect and interplay-- nobody knows that better than I do. Does that mean I ignore other experts and fail to consult other sources of expertise? Of course not-- that's part of how I got to be an expert in the first place.

Freeing me up from curriculum decisions-- don't do me any favors. Like every other teacher on the planet, I will rewrite whatever curriculum you hand me on the fly in the classroom every day as my professional expertise sees fit. The ongoing attempts to teacher-proof classrooms, to create a seamless system in which it doesn't really matter which teacher you get-- these do far more harm than good.  Framing them as concern trolling ("We just want to save you from having to do all this hard work") do not make them any more helpful.

Porter-Magee says, "We owe it to our teachers to give them the tools they need to succeed" and I don't disagree. But among those tools we will find teacher autonomy and the freedom to use our expert judgment in our classrooms. Porter-Magee has here once again repeated the classic reformer mistake, even as she seemed to understand it-- she has assumed that the experts on education are to be found somewhere other than standing in a classroom. 

We are educational experts. Not the only ones, not infallible ones. But any system that ignores our level of expertise is making a mistake that experts should know enough to avoid.

Don't Be Batman

Well, here's a piece of research you might not have expected.

The sexy headline reductive title is the Batman Effect (published almost a year ago), but the idea being tested here was a little broader than "Always Be Batman." From the abstract:

This study investigated the benefits of self-distancing (i.e., taking an outsider's view of one's own situation) on young children's perseverance. Four- and 6-year-old children (N = 180) were asked to complete a repetitive task for 10 min while having the option to take breaks by playing an extremely attractive video game. Six-year-olds persevered longer than 4-year-olds. Nonetheless, across both ages, children who impersonated an exemplar other—in this case a character, such as Batman—spent the most time working, followed by children who took a third-person perspective on the self, or finally, a first-person perspective.

While I generally support the idea of Being Batman, there are some hugely troubling implications of this study (and I'm not even counting that Queen of Grit Angela Duckworth is one of the co-authors). One problem is captured by this review of the study at Big Think:

With the onset of early childhood and attending preschool, increased demands are placed on the self-regulatory skills of kids.  

This underlines the problem we see with more and more or what passes for early childhood education these days-- we're not worried about whether the school is ready to appropriately handle the students, but instead are busy trying to beat three-, four- and five-year-olds into developmentally inappropriate states to get them "ready" for their early years of education. It is precisely and absolutely backwards. I can't say this hard enough-- if early childhood programs are requiring "increased demands" on the self-regulatory skills of kids, it is the programs that are wrong, not the kids. Full stop. 

What this study offers is a solution that is more damning than the "problem" that it addresses. If a four-year-old child has to disassociate, to pretend that she is someone else, in order to cope with the demands of your program, your program needs to stop, today. 

Because you know where else you hear this kind of behavior described? In accounts of victims of intense, repeated trauma. In victims of torture who talk about dealing by just pretending they aren't even there, that someone else is occupying their body while they float away from the horror. 

That should not be a description of How To Cope With Preschool. 

Nor should the primary lesson of early childhood education be, "You can't really cut it as yourself. You'll need to be somebody else to get ahead in life." I cannot even begin to wrap my head around what a destructive message that is for a small child. 

The researchers minimize this effect as just role play. The kids, they say, simply imitated someone they thought had the qualities needed to deal with the task. And hey-- role play is fun. But it's appropriate that Duckworth is in this pack, because we are just talking about other ways to grow grit:

Perseverance can pave the pathway to success. The current research suggests that perseverance can be taught through role play, a skill that is accessible to even very young children.

No.  I mean, I'm not a psychologist, nor do I play one on tv, but I have to believe that the root of grit or perseverance is the certainty that whatever happens, you'll deal with it. When my high school students are anxious or afraid, it's because when they imagine what's coming, they don't imagine themselves being enough to deal with it. I can't imagine ever telling them, "Well, you probably aren't, but maybe you can pretend to be somebody else." Because the "you probably aren't" part drowns out everything else. The most useful message for them is "You can handle this. You will be okay."

With my high schoolers, we're talking about challenging schoolwork, but we're also talking about real-life challenges that the world has put in their way. In Preschool, it's different.

Let's be clear what the study is suggesting as a process for four year old tiny humans:

1) Set standards and goals that the students are not equipped to meet.

2) Tell the students that they arn't able to handle the challenge, so they'd better pretend to be someone else.

I am thinking the solution to all the problems here lies in Step 1. Let's give small children tasks to perform that are developmentally appropriate. Let's set them up for success, and not for failure. Then when they someday discover on their own that you should, in fact, always be Batman, it will be so that they can have some fun with their friends, and not so that they can survive in school.

Horace Mann and Selfishness

My parents still bring us things when they come back from vacation, and on their last trip, my mother found me a copy of Thoughts Selected from the Writing of Horace Mann.  The book is copyrighted 1867 by his then-widow Mary, and it's an interesting read. I'm not going to pretend that the Massachusetts Whig got everything right in creating a progressive (for the time) secular public universal education system, but he certainly put more that into it than some folks almost 200 years later.

Here's the very first excerpt in the book:

If ever there was a cause, if ever there can be a cause, worthy to be upheld by all of toil and sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of Education. It has intrinsic and indestructible merits. It holds the welfare of mankind in its embrace, as the protecting arms of a mother hold her infant to her bosom. The very ignorance and selfishness which obstruct its path are the strongest arguments for its promotion, for it furnishes the only adequate means for their removal. It is worthy, therefore, to be urged forward over the dead obstacles of listlessness and apathy, and against the living hostility of those sordid men who oppose its advancement for no higher reason than that of the silversmiths who trafficked in the shrines of the goddess Diana, and who would have quenched the holy light of Christianity for all mankind  rather than forgo their profits upon idol worship.
 
Let's skip past the 19th century male-centric and Christian-centric language for a moment. There are a couple of insights here that I find noteworthy.

Seeing ignorance as an obstacle to education is pretty obvious; seeing selfishness as an equal-billing obstacle is not. Certainly simple selfishness on the order of "I want schools to produce more workers for my business so I can make more money" has become an obstacle for education. But an unwillingness to see any point of view beyond the ones we already have, the kind of selfishness that says the universe must fit itself to our conception-- that is selfishness of a high order, and an absolute barrier to learning anything. But education can also open us up to understanding that there are other people in the world, and their understanding and experience is often different from our own. I often describe education with the phrase "learning what it means to be fully human in the world," and that, to me, means understanding there is a depth and breadth and complexity to humanity greater than what is contained within our own skin.

And of course in our century we still confront those "sordid men" who obstruct the path of education because they are intent on profiteering instead. And while I might not have laid on the "living hostility" of these persons, it is true that many of them seem awfully angry about teachers unions, money spent, rules that get in the way of commerce, and just generally the whole business of public education. So maybe the hostility shoe fits.

Mann may not have had a perfect crystal ball, but reading him reminds me that many of our current issues are not new ones. It also reminds me that it's nice to read the words of someone from any century who takes public education seriously and doesn't want to reduce it to something narrow and meager like test prep or college-and-career-ready training. Which is a little selfish of me, but I can live with that.

ICYMI: Leftovers Edition (11/26)

It's a shortish list this week, but then you're probably napping more this weekend. 

Software Is a Long Con

"Computer systems are poorly built, badly maintained, and often locked in a maze of vendor contracts and outdated spaghetti code that amounts to a death spiral. This is true of nothing else we buy."

Not specifically about education, but given the heavy attempt to turn education into a software product, boy is this about education.

Indiana Survey Issues

Indiana was the scene of a big study about how parents choose in a "robust" choice environment. Now here comes the National Education Policy Center to explain how chock-full of holes the Indiana study is.

A Rule That Stands Above the Golden One

Teacher Tom provides yet another useful lesson form the littles.

New Standards, Old Thinking

Enjoy the work of Charles Sampson, a New Jersey superintendent who is not afraid to call baloney by its name.

How To Get Your Mind To Read

Why content knowledge matters (and so, why the "reading is just a skill" approach of ed reform is wrong).

A Google, A Plan, A Canal

Business is a bad metaphor for education, and the failure of that brand of ed reform is reminiscent of the problems of building the Erie Canal (I love a good historical parallel). This piece comes with a challenge-- what is the correct metaphor for education?

Faking the Grade

The most brutal take-down yet of the imaginary reformy "success" of New Orleans. When some starts yammering how great things went in NOLA, send them straight to this piece. Caveat: it uses test scores in part to prove its point, and I'm no fan of using test scores to prove anything-- but they are the game that reformsters said they would win.

CCSSO Has Some Thoughts on Teacher Pipeline

The Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), the same fine group of state-level ed bosses that brought us all the Common Core State [sic] Standards, have noticed that the teacher pipeline is looking a little busticated, and helpful folks that they are, they are offering six swell ideas about how to get that pipeline buzzing again. What could they be/ And are they as awesome as that CCSsS idea?

Let's take a look.

1) Elevate the Teacher Profession.

Hmm. This seems a bit ironic from the folks who brought us a whole standards system premised on the idea that teachers in this country don't know what the hell they're doing, so someone had better lay out standards for them. Oh, and to write the standards, let's hire a bunch of people who aren't teachers. The Common Core remains Exhibit A in how to use political policy to devalue the teaching profession.

Ah-- but we can cancel the irony alert, because CCSSO isn't actually proposing that we elevate the teaching profession at all:

State chiefs can change this narrative by making it a priority to share positive examples of the teaching profession, including through social media channels and public speaking engagements. In addition, states can conduct marketing and communications campaigns, highlighting how the state is creating new roles for teachers and innovative methods of teaching, such as personalized learning, 
blended learning or career education.

In other words, don't actually elevate the teaching profession-- just start cranking out more effective PR releases.

2) Make Teaching a Financially Appealing Career

Teaching is rewarding and all, but having to take a second job to feed your family is a huge pain. "States and local school districts can take action to alleviate financial pressures on teachers." This is not a bad thought. I'm just wondering-- you guys are all chief school officers in your home states, so I'm wondering how hard you're working on this one with your own legislators.

3) Expand Pathways To Enter Teaching

Dammit, guys-- you forgot Strategy 1 already. Only three strategies are mentioned here-- recruit students and aids, recruit ex-military, and make licenses good across state lines. They don't mention the states where Any Warm Body laws are in effect. But if you treat teaching as a job just anybody can do, that deprofessionalizes and devalues the profession and utimately makes it far less appealing to people who would be good at it. Of course, if your goal is to do for teaching what fast food did for cheffing, then this is all perfect.

4) Bring More Diversity to the Teaching Workforce

Absolutely a valuable goal, though many studies suggest that the retention problem is greater than the recruitment problem. The suggestions here aren't terrible, but they don't seem to include ideas like "talk to actual teachers of color." There are plenty of teachers of color out there talking about the issues, but the education establishment seems to want to focus on any solution other than, "deal with issues of systemic racism within the school system and the teacher pipeline."

Bring more diversity is a great goal, but like "raise all student test scores" or "make my wardrobe better looking," it's meaningless until you start talking details.

5) Set Reasonable Expectations for Retaining Teachers

One in five Americans born between 1980 and 1996—“the Millennial generation”—said in a Gallup survey that they had quit their jobs in the past year to do something else. That rate was three times higher than for other generations. Millennials are also much more likely to say that opportunities to learn, grow and advance on the job are important to them. Given these trends, states are assessing how long they can reasonably expect teachers to stay in the classroom and are rethinking policies to align with the career expectations of today’s workforce.

Or, in shorter terms, give up.

I don't know how accurate this information is-- there are plenty of millennials in my family and this doesn't sound like any of them. Or rather, many of them quit their jobs because their jobs sucked-- low pay, low autonomy, low respect, low support. The picture of millennials as flighty job-hopping wanderers feels, frankly, like an excuse that the older generation tells itself to excuse the shitty condition in which it has left the working world for the younger generation.

The rest of this is just some combination of wishful thinking and lying. Yes, there are lots of folks who are trying to fix it so that McTeachers come and go quickly, leaving before they require raises or pensions-- in other words, turn teaching into the same kind crappy job that millennials are unhappy about in other sectors. But folks who are into the profiteering side of the ed biz would like very much to cut their labor costs, to replace skilled lifelong professionals with churn-and-burn low-skill low-cost workers. Saying, "Well, that's just how those darn millennials want it to be" is disingenuous at best and weaselly at worst.

6) Use Data To Target Strategies Where Shortages Exist

Teacher shortages can be statewide, or more often, they are specific to particular districts, regions, subject areas or grade levels. States must analyze data to determine where the need is most critical, examining subjects and grades taught, expertise with specific student populations such as special education and English learners, and geographic regions.

Seriously? You mean that schools were currently using ouija boards and casting runes?  Or just guessing blindly and assuming that teachers are interchangeable widgets? Okay, now that I type it, that second one does seem possible. So sure-- "use less stupid ways to identify your problem" is good advice on any day.


This whole things is an odd exercise to begin with. It is presented as "advice to the states" but CCSSO is composed of all the top education people in each state, so why exactly is that conversation, which they could have amongst themselves, being expanded to include all the people who aren't chief education officers of states?

It doesn't really matter. As pipeline-fixing advice, this is exceptionally uninspiring. Perhaps we all need to look at how to repair the pipeline advice pipeline.

Gratitude

Thanksgiving is a problematic holiday, like virtually all holidays aimed at celebrating versions of our nation's history. But it is also centered on the subject of gratitude, and for that reason, I honor the holiday every year. Because gratitude is hugely important.

Whether it's a busy moment with family

Or a quiet moment with family

We Americans are not great at gratitude. When we do attempt it, it comes out as some stranger version of "I'm grateful that I deserve all the good things in my life" or "I'm grateful that I'm just naturally better than everyone else." When Barack Obama suggested that successful people owed a debt to all the other folks that helped make that success possible, you would have thought he had suggested that successful people ate puppies in Satanic rituals.

My life is good. Really good. But my parents, my genetic gifts, my emergence from the womb in this particular place and time, the government that has kept my country of residence relatively stable, the diseases that I have never contracted, the catastrophic accidents that never happened to me, the consequences I haven't suffered for my more awful life choices-- I'm not responsible for any of that. I can't take credit for any of it. In fact, all of that represents a debt I owe the universe or God or fate or whatever Larger Power you prefer. Sure, I placed some good bets with the chips I was given, but that initial stake didn't come from me.

The only rational response to that is gratitude.

And that's important, because an absence of gratitude leads to a hardness of heart.

If I look at whatever success I have and declare, "I earned all of this. I am a success because I deserve to be a success," my sense of entitlement must lead me to condemn people who struggle for success. "If they're poor," I can confidently 'splain, "it's because they made bad choices, or are bad people. They deserve what they've gotten, and if they want something better, it's on them to make better choices. And none of that is my problem." This foolish self-importance is what leads people to say, "I shouldn't have to buy insurance because I am a righteous person who makes good choices and will never need insurance. People who need insurance are bad people-- why should I pay for their bad choices?"

The absence of gratitude flows from a false sense of indestructible rightness. I have it all figured out, therefor nothing bad will ever happen to me. This is the reasoning of a child, and not a very smart child at that, and lots of people have been taught a hard lesson in the school of life. Others, when something bad does happen to them, learn nothing, but blame it on the universe, or on a bunch of damned liberals in the gummint who have upended nature's law by mandating rewards for people who should be reaping punishment for their awful choices.

This hardened lack of gratitude is as old as the Pharisees saying, "I thank God I am not like [aka "better"] other men." And it remains toxic.

You can't have gratitude without humility. Sure, you can feel pride in good work done well, and you should. But doing good work is part of our responsibility. Humility is not self-flagellation, declaring we are but unworthy worms. If you've been given a gift, you have a responsibility to take good care of it, to use it well and to the benefit of others, who may well be just as deserving as you are, but for whatever reason didn't receive the same gifts-- or are supposed to receive those gifts via you.

Lack of gratitude ends in selfishness-- this is mine, I earned it, I don't owe anyone anything, and so I can use it for my own childish, selfish purposes, even destroying it in the process.

The sense of gratitude and obligation applies to gifts we didn't ask for and may have never wanted. It also and especially applies to gifts that have come down to us through less than honorable means.

So I'd argue that Thanksgiving may be one of the most important holidays we celebrate as a nation-- or would be, if we celebrated properly.

It has been a great day for me, celebrating with family, sharing some quiet quality time together. And it wouldn't have felt complete if I didn't check in with you folks as well. I hope it has been a great holiday and that you have had the chance to really feel thankfulness and gratitude. For my part, I continue to be grateful to be able to talk to you here and have you follow me as an audience. May the rest of this holiday weekend be a great one for you and yours.

Stop Asking Kids "What Do You Want for Christmas"

My daughter is a pretty terrific green mom blogger, but one of her recent pieces has, I think, a lot to say to those of us who spend a lot of our time with other peoples' children. I'm going to start the piece here, and encourage you to follow the link over to her blog for the rest:

My grandsons in a quieter moment

This week at the store, the person checking us out asked my son what he wanted for Christmas. I think that he said something about Santa coming.  It bugged me, but I couldn't figure out why.

The most annoying part of this question is how often we hear it. It comes up all the time, from family, from neighbors, and even from people we don't know. Santa is a scapegoat, but people cannot stop asking.

 It is used as an ice breaker with little kids all the time, even if they don't have much answer to the question (he just told everyone at checkout about lightning mcqueen wrapping paper).

Honestly, it's a terrible question. 

Why do people think this is an interesting thing to ask?

I don't want my kids to build a deep mental link between celebrating and getting stuff. I don't think getting things or having things is an accomplishment. In fact, I think our society of debt is based on this pressure to look like we have things, because that is what success means. I don't think these are useful values for my kids. My goal as a parent is that they have less and do more.

Even if you aren't out to live a more minimalist lifestyle, you still have to see there is something screwed up by constantly asking kids what they want to receive. As if they are passive vessels to pour toys into instead of interesting people who are already doing activities, thinking about the world (not just the toys in it), and planning adventures. They have more interesting things to tell you, and the constant question just minimizes them.

So just stop. Please stop. Stop. Seriously, it's so easy. Just stop.

Click here to continue reading...