Chan Zuckerberg's Personalized Edu-focus

Jim Shelton would like to put in a plug for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in education. Shelton has been a deputy secretary for USED in addition to logging time at the New Schools Venture fund and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, so he seems like a natural choice to head up the Chan Zuckerberg Adventure in Rich Educational Dilettantism.

Shelton's essay over on Medium is a fine example of how this particular brand of personalized (sic) education is being sold. Personalizing education will make the world more equitable and just, apparently. We'll get back to his pitch in a minute.

You can find Zuckerberg talking about his goals in this Facebook post. He talks about what he's learned since his daughter's birth, though oddly enough, he doesn't mention learning anything in his attempt to fix education in New Jersey by throwing money at it, or at least at various hucksters who claimed to know the Secret of Fixing Education! No, Zuck has learned something else:

The most important lesson we've learned is to focus on problems we have some unique ability to help solve.

This, unfortunately, does not seem to mean "focus on areas in which we actually have knowledge and expertise."

Zuckerberg wants us to know that the CZI is shaped by two aspects-- "a truly long term approach and a technology mindset."  I am not sure this is good news for those of us who work in education.

A lot of today's debates pit district schools against charter schools, or reformers against unions. But over the long term, we need to build tools to empower every teacher at every school to provide personalized instruction and mentorship to every student. Instead of engaging in zero-sum debates, we think we'll help more by building tools to help all teachers everywhere.

So there it is. Computers for everyone. Software for everyone. Mentors for everyone.  Because Zuck believes in the "magic of technology" and its ability to "help social change scale faster." There are teachers and schools doing swell new things, and everybody should be like them.

You know the example he's going to cite-- Summit, which " has helped encode their teaching philosophy in tools that will be used in more than 300 district, charter, and private schools this fall." This is an accurate statement of what is wrong with his idea of "personalized" learning-- it's not personalized at all. When advocates for personalized learning complain that it's not at all about sticking a student in front of some computer software and where did anybody get the idea that's what personalized learning is about-- well, the answer is right here. Zuckerberg has made absolutely clear that he thinks personalized learning is about computer software. And his quote also implicitly acknowledges one other thing-- that software is fully soaked in whatever biases or "philosophies" its creators bring to the table. Final point-- those 300 schools will no longer need actual teachers. Just somebody to make sure the students are paying attention to their software and not woolgathering.

How do you sell what is essentially one more version of Rocketship Academy and other failed "let's chain this student to a computer" models? Well-- you link it to the idea of personalization, even if you have to say nonsense to do it.

Zuckerberg and Shelton both like to hit on one old piece of research. Here's Shelton:

In 1980, a group of graduate students at the University of Chicago began separate studies that called into question the common wisdom of the education world. Working in different schools and different grades, they asked: what kind of progress might students make if they were each given highly favorable conditions in which to learn? Their proxy for such conditions was simple: skilled tutors who aided the students based on their individual needs.

“As the … results began to emerge, we were astonished,” both by the impact and the consistency of the results, wrote their professor, Benjamin Bloom. Nearly every student with the tutoring — 98 percent — out-learned a comparison class, and 90 percent reached levels of achievement that only the top 20 percent of the non-tutored students did.

What does this have to do with a software program?  Here's how Shelton crafts the pivot:

The study proved that the large majority of students had the capacity to learn much more if the experience was well designed and tailored to their needs. 

No, not really. The study proved that students do better if they are motivated and have a tutor.  

This is a leap. A study showed that students do better with human tutors, so software-based "personlization" will work is like saying that a study shows that since vegetable and fruit consumption helps keep children healthy, every child should grow up in a room with a picture of apples on the wall. But the entire pitch for CZI-style personalization depends on conflating entirely different things.

What if our challenges educating children have been the result of our inability or unwillingness to provide the conditions for their success — not the limits of students’ supposed “innate” talent?

Sure. But what evidence is there that a program like Summit-in-a-box provides those conditions?

It is a compelling fact that when teachers have the opportunity to design learning experiences that truly fit students’ needs, extraordinary things are possible...

Playing fast and loose with the definition of "fact" here, but I agree with the sentiment. But this does not describe a program like Summit-in-a-box, which comes pre-encoded with the teaching philosophy of someone who isn't even going to meet the students who will use it.

Shelton leans heavily on the idea that children of privilege are the ones who get this kind of education. He does not mention at all the other obstacles that children of privilege don't face. His implication-- if we provide "the kind of focus on individual needs and support that define privilege and make it available to all " then, well, we've fixed the whole equity problem.

That vision embraces the role of social-emotional and interpersonal skills, mental and physical health, and a child’s confident progress toward a sense of purpose. Indeed, such a sense of purpose is not just inherently vital, but also foundational to academic and professional success.

Well, beyond the scariness of data mining the character qualities, there's a whole other discussion to be had about a sense of purpose and how wealth and poverty affect such a sense. But he wants to get us back to the sales pitch. 

Shelton bats down the criticism that there's no research proof for personalized learning, and I'll give him that one because education "research" is mostly bunk, anyway. But there isn't really any other evidence of any other sort, either. But he's winding up for the pretty part of the pitch.

Personalized learning is totally NOT some sad school in which "a computer screen intermediates or substitutes for a child's relationship with a teacher, and where an academic measure is the only one that matters." 

Our notion of personalized learning, by contrast, is focused on enabling powerful relationships and shared experiences between people — between teachers and students as well as students with their peers, each empowered by learning opportunities with fewer boundaries and much more intensive support. Technology can support great teaching and has the potential to help individualize learning experiences in ways and at a scale that Bloom could not have imagined in the 1980s. But it is still just a tool. The heart and soul of education remains about great practitioners working lovingly and skillfully to create the environments and experiences that truly change lives

And that's all very pretty, but it is simply the wiggly end of a bait and switch routine. Consider what Leonie Haimson found when she visited a Summit charter. It wasn't anything like what  is described in the verdant prose above, but students at screens in a sterile environment where teachers are background players. Consider the uproar Summit's program has created in some quarters. Or consider AltSchool, another Zuckerberg favored Silicon Valley personalized school that has decided to get out of the school biz and into the software biz, even as parents have voiced complaints that it isn't very personalized after all. 

Personalized Education means many things to many people, but the most notable gap in definitions is the gap between what is promised in glowing prose, and what is actually delivered. It's pretty to imagine a school where every child has a personal tutor, a teacher who crafts every lesson to match that student. But nobody is willing to foot that bill, and so what we get is a stripped down version, and that always seems to take us right back to the child-chained-to-computer model which is more cost-effective and gives great ROI.

Personalized Learning cheerleaders like Shelton can talk about how personalized learning will somehow "prepare more students for success and fulfillment," as if a swanky school is the only thing poor children lack. They can make lots of pretty sounds about an idealized personalized learning world, claiming that the promise is so great that research isn't needed. But the rest of us have to always keep our eyes on what is actually delivered, because so far personalized learning has failed to live up to the pretty, pretty hype, and the fact that a really rich guy is paying for that hype doesn't change a thing.

What Common Core Won

I've said often that the Common Core failed in its creators' central goal-- to establish a set of national standards followed "with fidelity" by every school from Maine to Alaska. Every school would follow the exact same set of learning goals so that a child who left Iowa to attend school in Florida could make the switch without missing a step. The standards would be set in cement (remember the rule that a state could only add 15% additional Stuff) and we would all march together in lockstep into a fully-standardized perfect education future.

But the Core was revealed as both political kryptonite and amateur-hour educational junk. It entered the Bad Policy Witness Protection Program and took up residence in many states under an assumed name. Also, states took about five minutes to realize they could go ahead and rewrite, alter and add anything they damn well felt like.

David Coleman's dream of fifty states all yoked to his vision was dead.

But something else was not dead, and is, in regrettable fact, very much alive.

Once upon a time, school districts would plan curriculum, the whole scope and sequence and pedagogical approach as well as the actual content-- they would do all of that by consulting the experts that they had already hired. Maybe a curriculum director if they had one, or some other administrator if they didn't. Certainly an assortment of their actual classroom teachers. Those folks might consult some other reliable sources as well as using their own professional judgment to develop the district's educational plan.

But that was once upon a time.

Now the goal is standards-based curriculum.

Instead of curriculum conversations that begin with "What do we believe a graduate of our school district should know?" we now get conversations that begin with "Let's take a look at the standards." And then schools use them as a checklist. Let's work our way down the list of standards and make sure that we have something written into the curriculum that allows us to check off each one so that we can say it's "covered." And let's be double-certain when it comes to the tested standards.

Here are the questions that are not answered (and sometimes not asked) in attempts to build standards-based curriculum:

Where did these standards come from? Who wrote them, and is there some reason to believe that they know better than our own trained professionals what students in our district should learn? Are the standards based on any sort of research, and is that research valid and trustworthy?

What is not covered by the standards? Are the standards strictly focused on skills while ignoring content (spoiler alert: probably)? Are there areas of our course of study that we, in our considered professional judgment, consider vital, but which the standards do not address? And if there are are, given a finite school year, can we discuss setting aside some of the standards in order to make room for content and material that we consider important?

When the Common Core wave passed, it had swept away the notion that actual teachers and administrators are experts in education. Instead, the standards-based school district now assumes that nobody in the school system actually knows what should be taught, and that the most they can be trusted with is to "unpack" the standards and create a checklist-certified list of education activities that will meet the standards' demands. That's the best-case scenario. In the worst-case scenario, the district doesn't believe that trained education professionals can be trusted with even that much, and should just be handed materials that dictate the teacher's every move, throwing aside their professional judgment and replacing it with the judgment of some bureaucrat or textbook publisher.

Worst of all for the long run, this approach has infected schools of education who prepare their few remaining future teachers to accept this, to envision for themselves a diminished role as content delivery specialists or instructional facilitators or classroom coaches.

Common Core was pitched against a definite enemy-- the teachers who insisted in teaching things in their own classroom just because they thought those things were worth teaching, the teacher who insisted on using her own professional judgment, the teacher who wanted to function as an autonomous individual. Ironically, even though the Common Core did not conquer the nation's school districts as it had hoped, it did manage to deliver a serious defeat to its chosen enemy.  We now understand in (too many) districts that we must adhere to the Standards, which have descended manna-like from some mysterious, magical higher power. They are not to be argued with or contradicted, nor will there be any discussion of the educational wisdom (or lack thereof) behind them. They are to be treated as our compass, our grail, our North Star. Teachers should sit down, shut up, and start aligning.

And that defeat of professional educators, that clampdown on teacher autonomy-- that's the one victory that Common Core State (sic) Standards can claim.

It Makes Business Sense

What's good for General Motors is good for the USA...

That quote is usually attributed to Charles E. Wilson , who served as both head of General Motors and the Secretary of Defense in the 1950s. It's not exactly what he said, but history sometimes edits people's best material.

It's been on my mind lately because I keep hearing "Makes Business Sense" as an ultimate argument in favor of all manner of things. "New Neutrality should be killed because it makes business sense," has been dropped into a couple of conversations. MBS has appeared in discussions of the GOP tax cut. And of course MBS appears in discussions of charters and vouchers and running schools more like a business, so that they will make business sense.

MBS does not appear as an intermediary argument, a structural point that we descend past as we work our way down to foundational ideas. Instead, it is meant as a final clincher, the giant-killer, the point which will brook no further discussion. It is the visible nose of the giant beast that has snaked its way into our national discourse-- the idea that there are no values greater than business values.

I am not enough of a radical to reject business measures and values and sense entirely. I don't imagine a world where money just sort of magically appears and then a wise and benevolent government parcels it out. Business sense has its place. For instance, expecting people to give up all their time and talent for free is a bad deal. If you want your favorite band to keep making music, pay them. If you want your favorite local business to stay open, go there and give them your money in exchange for whatever it is they offer.

In short, MBS is a great way to run a country.

What I object to is making it the guiding ethic of an entire nation.

See, here's my problem.

It makes business sense to let poor people starve to death.

It makes business sense to let poor people die from whatever illnesses they happen to contract.

It makes business sense to understand that some people matter more than other people, and that some other people don't matter at all.

It makes business sense to provide goods or services tiered according to how much particular customers are, or are not, worth your time and bother.

It makes business sense to get rid of the messy noise of democracy and replace with clear, decisive leadership from one all-powerful executive.

It makes business sense to spend some money on maintaining the order and stability of the society within which your business exists-- but no more than the absolute minimum. And if you can get other people to pay those bills, it makes business sense to get them to do it.

It makes business sense to work the market. There is no such thing as a "free" market-- all markets are maintained and regulated by governments, and those regulations determine in whose favor the market will be tilted. There are practical limits to the tilting-- tilt the market too far in the customers' favor and no business will want to provide the goods and services that people need, but tilt it too far in the business's favor and the people will become so impoverished and desperate that the business will have too few people left to serve as customers (and too little stability left to function safely in the country).

But it makes business sense to get government to tilt the market as much in their favor as they possibly can.

Business sense is amoral, as lacking in ethical sense as the laws of physics, with no more moral compass than an actual compass. And that's okay, I think.

But my question is this-- why should business sense become the predominant sense of a civilization?

Why should business sense supersede religious sense, or humanist sense, or a sense of responsibility to fellow humans?

How can the answer to, "Well, we could do that, but it would wrong. It would be immoral. It would unnecessarily damage our fellow citizens"-- how can the answer to that be, "Well, it would make good business sense." Why is the right of some people to make money-- more money, and more money still-- why is that right greater than the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? At what point did America's major guiding virtue become, "Well, it makes good business sense"?

It has infected everything. Business can bring the economy to its knees, but actually, seriously punishing it didn't make good business sense. And sectors like health care and education must be made over, because they have too long been governed by people who are following some compass other than the good business sense, and so, obviously, without discussion, without evidence, without examining the premise of the argument, we must believe those business senseless folks as wrong. And this isn't over. Social security, medicare, other programs that were once proud expressions of a sense of moral and ethical responsibility to and for our fellow citizens? Those must also be beaten bloody with the club of business sense. There is no part of the commons that has not been marked for having its moral sense stripped so that someone can inject it with business sense and squeeze money out of it. It has even infected some churches; where once they could be counted on for some sort of moral sense, we now find that many have replaced moral sense with business sense-- God wants to reward some people who are worthy and He will do it by making rich those who display proper business sense.

It is the cult of Ayn Rand, whose only moral guide is, "If I can't get something out of it, then screw it."

Incidentally, poor Charles E. Wilson has been misquoted. When he was asked to divest his holdings so he could take a cabinet office, he expressed his surprise that there could be a problem "because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa." It's perhaps a not-very-enlightened notion, but compare it to the modern notion which is not that divesture would be bad for the country, but that any official should be able to enrich himself through holding public office because, after all, it's just good business sense.

The free (sic) market and business sense are a lousy way to deliver education and health care, and they are ill-suited for a host of other functions as well, but we currently seem incapable of remembering that there any higher values than providing some people the chance to make a buck. Even education reformsters who have a sincere desire to make education better (and, yes, I do believe such beings exist)often buy into the business sense ethic-- if it makes good business sense, then surely it will make good educational sense as well.

But it's no way to run a country. Good business sense is a lousy moral compass. I don't want to destroy it utterly and remove it from all aspects of life. But I do want to see it subordinate to moral, ethical and democratic values. Yes, I know there are huge differences of opinion about what exactly those are, I don't care. I'd rather have robust arguments about how to best take care of each other, of how best to pay off our debt to God/the universe/what have you then listen to more hollow arguments about whether or not something makes good business sense. That would be good for the USA.

ICYMI: Baby Hangover Edition (12/17)

Baby hangover is what you get when you go to a friends' Christmas party and stay out till 12:30, but your babies still follow their late-night feeding routine. I take no responsibility for any typos this morning.

How the Concept of Effectiveness Has Screwed Nonprofits and the People We Serve

Not about education, except that it's totally about education. How certain business tools of measurement pervert the central mission.

Plain Talk and School Reform

Rick Hess is reformy through and through, but he's always been willing to call out his colleagues when they screw up. This piece would have been welcome about 5-10 years ago, but you'll still agree with chunks of it now, particularly on the subject of who reformsters should be listening to.

Are Private Schools Immoral?

Or, if white progressives actually behaved as if they really believed their rhetoric about diversity and integration, would we still have a segregation problem?

Propoganda Behind Personalized Learning

http://www.longviewoneducation.org/propaganda-behind-personalised-learning/Applying Chomsky and Herman's filters to looking at the74. Less homework-like than it sounds.

Some Arizona Charter Schools Unlawfully Exclude and Deter Students

Yet another piece of evidence that charters do, in fact, cream, skim, and otherwise serve only the students they want to serve.

The Other Tech Bubble

I prefer the other title this piece appears under-- "Silicon Valley Techies Still Think They're the Good Guys. They're Not." This Wired piece doesn't address education directly, but its portrayal of Silicon Valley guys as entitled, arrogant jerks in a toxic culture will be recognizable to everyone who deals with edtech wizards.

Education Reform in Newark-- Facts

Mark Weber (Jersey Jazzman) and Bruce Baker (School Finance 101) have been crunching the Newark numbers, just in case the narrative of reformy triumph is not entirely accurate.Good thing, too.

Why We Need Hygge Classrooms in America

The meme has been all over, so Nancy Flanagan did some research.

Florida CRC One More Step Toward Centralization

Florida does this weird thing where they get out their constitution every so often and fiddle with it. As is often the case in Florida, we can see some examples of how privatizers grab power.

Computers and Television

I'm going to spin off from this piece on Hackernoon, a blog sponsored by mabl, a tech conmpany based in Boston. The piece is written by Erik Vermeulen, a business and financial professor at Tilburg University, who bills himself as "professor, executive, entrepreneur." I picked this article, though there are plenty of others, because he doesn't have anything to say that lots of business-minded technophiles aren't also saying with increasing frequency. And they're all wrong.

Google search result for "computer disruption." Just sayin'

Professor Vermeulen will now demonstrate the standard features of this particular genre.

In "Education Disrupted (Finally!)" Vermeulen wants to argue about how education is being radically disrupted by technology. This, incidentally, is a realization he reached "last week." Welcome to the party, professor.

1) Writer is actually fairly uninformed about the field of education? Check:

And I have to admit that if you are active as a teacher or interested in education, you might think that education hasn’t changed much over the last few decades.

Nope. If you're active as a teacher, you're probably pretty tired of people who think education hasn't changed in the past decades, or century.

Of course, we are all making more use of digital technology. But many people think the “essence” of teaching (transferring knowledge, information and skills) hasn’t dramatically changed.

Nope. That's training, not education. If you think the essence of education is transferring knowledge, you may also believe the essence of music is just making the air vibrate, or the essence of kissing is just mashing your lips together.

2) Belief that education no longer needs to involve Knowing Stuff because we have technology to hold all the knowledge we'll ever need? Check.

In a digital age, education is less about students acquiring knowledge.  

Actually, here in the US we are living through a fairly striking example of what happens when a large number of citizens and nominal leaders decide that Knowing Stuff is really unnecessary. So far, it hasn't been pretty. Pick and choose your "facts," or just make some up, and argue incessantly about which sources are believable or unfake without considering the measure of whether the source presents things that are verifiably correct.

No, we're living through a pretty dramatic demonstration that a solid background of knowledge is fairly critical in navigating the world like a responsible human being.

Instead, the classroom of the future focuses on offering an experience that builds the capacity for living and working in a world of artificial intelligence, connected machines and automation. And such an experience can only be “successful” if it spurs curiosity, unleashes creativity, and demands teamwork

We'll come back to that bit about AI in a minute. For now, note that Vermeulen demonstrates his ignorance of the education world by suggesting that spurring curiosity, unleashing creativity, and demanding teamwork are somehow bold new ideas that teachers haven't been talking about for the last fifty years. Nor is it clear (I didn't cut anything out of the middle of this quote) how we leap from the need to get along with our computer overlords to the demands for these very human qualities.

Vermeulen refers to three events that spurred his epiphany last week.

First, he read an op-ed in a newspaper, which noted that new tech is being introduced not enough and in the wrong way, and we're preparing students for old jobs. "The fact that a rather conventional local newspaper pays attention to the tech makeover of the school curriculum convinces me that the way we are thinking about education has really changed. See #1 above. Vermeulen should probably read a few more articles.

Second, some teachers on a site got upset that students were uploading class materials without permission. "Napster," says Vermeulen, who encourages teachers to join the open-source world, where teachers are no longer authorities on their subject, but just motivators. In fact, in his third event, he attended a conference and realized that the best lectures are like TED talks. So maybe teachers should, you know, do that.

Vermeulen just doesn't get tired of flaunting his lack of knowledge:

If young people aren’t motivated they just lose interest. As educators, we need to think more about how to engage and inspire them.

BAM!!! That thunderclap is the sound of a million teachers whacking palm to forehead. "Motivate students?!" They are crying. "Gosh, we never thought of that!" But it's possible that many of the million never thought of Vermeulen's solution to the problem:

And no doubt this requires more disruption.

What kind of disruption, you ask? Well, it's already here. And that brings us to the third reliable trait of these pieces.

3) Magical thinking and childlike faith in the efficiency, clarity and correctness of anything that comes out of a computer.

Certainly, this change will put more pressure on teachers. They have to adapt materials more often and keep up to date with the latest trends in technology. New technological developments need to be addressed and incorporated into the curriculum. References to online resources have to be constantly reviewed and assignments renewed.

Or, as other writers have suggested, why teach all this knowledge stuff and write your own lesson plans when you can just Google it?

There is this notion that software, computers, and AI can deliver a better educational product, that computers can be the foundation of a perfectly personalized education.

But a computer is not like a God. In fact, I would say it's much more like a television.

The AI's we're being sold these days are not actual independent thinkers-- they're algorithms, collections of long, complex rules, and those rules were written by human beings. Even software that supposedly teaches itself does so by use of human-written rules.

Back in 1979, when I was learning to program in BASIC on punch cards, the first rule of computer work was already GIGO-- Garbage In, Garbage Out. There is nothing that comes out of a computer that is not soaked in the human biases and mistakes of the humans who created it. Khan Academy is lovely, but it's not always right. And if the CDC starts creating educational software tomorrow, how will it be affected by the administration's ban on Seven Naughty Words? And if Net Neutrality is really dead, just how trustworthy and useful will the results that may or may not come to us through the newly-throttled cyberscape?

A computer is like a television-- it is the delivery end of a long conduit, and what comes through that pipe could be anything. The fact that material has come to us through that pipeline does not confer any special status on that material. It does not arrive at the user end scrubbed clean. Turn on FOX and you get the twisted propaganda they fed into it; if some FOX News software arrives to help you "teach" politics, it will be just as trustworthy.

Nor does technology generate scholarship. Vermeulen can exhort teachers to just put their stuff out their on the net, but I'm betting that as an entrepreneur, he does not focus on how to give away products and services for free. Teachers need to eat, too, which means that, as is happening with all sorts of content, they will find ways to protect their rights and their material. That, in turn, means that the whole idea that you can just log on and find top notch stuff is doubtful. The easier it is to find and access, the less likely it is to be worth anyone's time, and the freer it is, the more likely it is to be a ploy to turn you, the user, into a product.

This is one of the mysteries at the heart of some peoples' conception of tech-centered or tech-driven learning-- that quality content will somehow just come into existence by magic, that someone will create these great lessons and materials that will flow out of the computer, even as the technophiles assure us that teachers won't have to create all that stuff anymore, because... well, wait. Where did it come from? 

Education is always being disrupted-- by the teachers who work in the field and who are always looking for ways to do a better job with the students in front of them. But technology, like television, is not a What-- it's a How, and the notion that a better How will somehow magically improve the What survives mostly among people who don't know much about either the How or What that's going on in schools right now. For my final exhibit, consider Vermeulen's closing lines:

Teachers need to become collaborators with the students. It spurs lifelong learning, which can only lead to more creativity and curiosity in the classroom.

BAAMMMM!!!

The Empty Desk

My first long-term sub job was finishing the year for a teacher who had passed away in her sleep. Her school-age daughter went to wake her, and she was just... gone. This was at my old high school, the school where I now work. I knew the woman, her co-workers, many of the families of the students. It was April, and my job was to coax grieving eighth graders into a classroom that would, for them, be haunted.

I have only encountered the death of a still-working teacher a handful of times in my career. Some hit closer to home than others. My friend Susie and I went back to Fourth Grade together. A gifted performer, she went to college to train professionally and spent a few years criss-crossing the country with professional touring companies of major shows. Eventually she decided that was not the life she wanted; she came back home and took a job as a high school chorale director. She enjoyed it; she was good at it. Then she discovered the cancer.

She worked as long as she was able. One door of her choir room opened directly to the side yard of her school; while she was doing chemo, she would step outside between classes, throw up, and then go back to work.

It's hard on students. Of course, it's enormously hard on students when other students die; when you're a teenager, you don't think about the limits of human mortality very often. But the death of a teacher packs a different punch, perhaps because they mostly don't think of us as humans, exactly. They think of us, expect us to be, immovable pieces of the landscape, as intractable as the ground they stand on. When a student dies, they feel a shudder in their own hearts; when a teacher dies, they feel the earth shift under their feet.

So that's where we are today in my building. A colleague I have taught with for over twenty years is gone. He had battled cancer for a few years now, and in fact had left the job a few weeks ago when his doctors told him he was almost out of time. The students didn't know that; they figured he was just getting healthy again, and would be back in his room, at his desk, again.

He was a former marine who returned from service and got a teaching degree. I can't say that he was the greatest teacher who ever set foot in the building-- we taught in adjoining rooms for years and to this day, most of what I know about National Lampoon''s Christmas Vacation I know from hearing the movie blaring through from the other side of the wall. His teaching methods were very different from mine, and not methods I'd endorse for anyone.

But he cared tremendously about the students. He coached runners for his entire career, investing himself in their efforts. He ran with them until he couldn't any more. He hosted the team at his house for big team meals, even after folks told him, "You know, you really shouldn't do that." You could count on him to show up to chaperone every single school dance. This fall, he defied doctor's orders and with his family keeping watchful eye, traveled to states to support one of his runners. He was a quiet, private person, but the students felt real affection for him. Their teacher-radar told them he was all right.

His obituary is in this morning's paper, and at the beginning of the day we will each read an official announcement from the school. His students will understand that the sub they've been with for a few weeks will now finish the year with them; God bless him for handling that gig. Some students will cry; some will go to the guidance office to take a moment. Many will show up for visitation tomorrow, maybe even the funeral. I will set this to auto-post  later, so that I don't get myself all emotioned up before I work with the students.

Years ago they started telling us that when a student dies, we should just leave their seat empty in the classroom, that students find it disrespectful to "erase" the lost person. I suppose an empty teacher's desk is a similar matter. Hard to say. We haven't been through this many times. Teachers usually retire before they pass, fade from the collective memory of the school they served, move on to some other place in their lives. For those who pass while still in the job, it's different. They will never not be teachers, and their place will always be in the classroom, there, at that empty desk.

This is why education is properly about the big things-- how to be more fully yourself, how to be fully human in the world. Because life is short, and people die, often unfairly and almost always before their work is done. Be kind. Be better. Remember, you only have so many chances before the desk is empty.

The Teacher in the Next Room

The Education Week Research Center has released a study of teachers and their political attitudes and actions. If it is even remotely accurate, it has one huge implication for teachers who are advocates for public education-- never mind trying to influence the public but instead, see if you can influence the teacher in the room next to yours.

The sample size was made up of 555 teachers, 266 school leaders, 202 district leaders, and 99
other school or district employees, so that's a little disproportionate. So is the sampling of two-thirds female and one-third male, which doesn't quite match the lopsidedly female makeup of the nation's teaching staff. They did get the 81% white part right. And the sample skewed "experienced, with 51% having over twenty years on the job. They were spread across the country among schools of varying size and poverty level.

The report is easy to page through, with each question given its own page and an easy-to-read graphic to go with it. You should give it a look. But for the moment, let me just walk you through some of the highlights.

In terms of self-assessing location on the political spectrum, teachers are evenly distributed. 43% in the middle, about 23% to either side and about 4% on each extreme. Yet that translates into 41% Dems, 27% GOP, and 30% independent (with 1% left over for a third party). And it translated into 50% of teachers voting for Clinton, 29% going Trump, 13% going third party, and 8% sitting the election out. That puts teacher participation far ahead of the general public (about 45% stayed away from the Clinton-Trump contest).

None of that was news to me-- I knew about a third of teachers voted for Trump. Nor is it surprising to read that education was the number one "very important" issue to teachers in the election (followed by heath care and the economy).

Now we get to the stuff that tells us just how much work public education advocates have left to do.

Of those Trump voters, 30% have a favorable opinion of Betsy DeVos-- and 10% of Clinton voters do, too. Lord only knows what that favorable opinion is based on. Anti-Common Core? General disdain for public education, and some of us are just stuck in a state of self-loathing that responds to her?

When Clinton voters were asked to grade the Democratic Party on education issues, 2% gave it an A, but 29% gave it a B and 42% gave it a C, which I would call generous. Is this why the Democratic party has generally abandoned teachers and public education-- because most teachers haven't noticed them doing it?

Trump voters were less generous with their own party-- 3% gave the GOP an A, 19% gave it a B, and 35% gave it a C. 56% of Clinton voters gave the GOP an F, which tells me that a whole bunch of Democratic teachers have not yet noticed that there is little difference between Democratic and GOP education policies.

48% of teachers have avoided political activities a little or a lot because of a "concern" that such activities might create problems in their job. Boy, I'd love to see how that shakes out depending on whether they live in a right-to-work untenured state or not.  The report also indicates some mixed feelings about unions-- no shock there.

But then we look at how teachers come down on some current issues.

When it comes to forming charter schools, 74% of all teachers oppose them-- that includes a full 64% of Trump voters. Yet 16% think charters are swell. The numbers are similar for "the use of government funding to help pay students' tuition at private schools," which voucher fans will call an unfair framing of the voucher issue. Still, 25% of Trump voters support the idea along with 11% of Clinton voters. Yet when asked about tuition tax credits (another version of vouchers, only half the teachers oppose them, and a third support.

In what I'd call one of the most shocking returns, only 14% of Trump voters think immigration is a good thing in this country. Granted, that's in keeping with Trump voters in general-- but these are teachers. 66% of Trump voters called immigration "mixed." I am concerned for the children of immigrants who are sitting in the classrooms of those teachers. Oh, and 44% of Trump voters-- and a whopping 17% of Clinton voters-- oppose DACA.

Most depressing result? The respondents were asked if they agreed or disagreed that students of color have the same educational opportunities as whites in this country. 76% of Trump voters agreed. 37% of Clinton voters agreed. I don't even know where to begin. In total, a full half of teachers do not see any inequity of opportunity by race in this country. Where are they working? What are they reading? What do they see? And what are they doing with the students of color in their own classrooms?

In happy news for reformsters that we are likely to hear repeated, 72% of all teachers support the idea "that different states should use the same standards to hold public schools accountable in reading and math." Note that they didn't use the words "Common Core," so this is in keeping with some previous surveys. But I'm going to go ahead and find it depressing.

Teachers mirror the general population in that they mostly give their local school district A-B grades and the national school system a C. And almost nobody thinks their school system is well funded.

53% of all teachers want less federal involvement, with a whopping 18% want to see more fed meddling (including a full 10% of Trumpists).

Some of these percentages are admittedly small. But they are teachers. Teachers who believe, apparently, that the drive for equity is pointless because students of color have it just as easy as the white kids. Teachers who think that immigrants may just make America worse. Teachers who think the Democratic Party has their back. Teachers who think Betsy DeVos is a fine choice for Secretary of Education, and Donald Trump is a great President.

People outside the education biz sometimes see us as a monolithic group. This survey is a reminder that we aren't. But it's also a reminder to those of us who feel passionately about public education that it's not only outside our walls that we find people who see things differently. It's a reminder that teachers are not immune to the problem of voters voting against their own interests. And it's a reminder that if we're looking for someone to try to convince and convert, we may not have to look any further than the teacher next door.