By now you've heard about the story of the Turpins, the California couple that kept thirteen children held captive in the basement, some in shackles, all horrifyingly undernourished. Several of the children are, at this point, actually adults, having lived like this for years.
How could such a thing happen? Read this paragraph from further down the page in the New York Times coverage of the story:
California records show that Mr. Turpin had received state approval to run a private school, the Sandcastle Day School, at the family’s home, a one-story stucco house in a subdivision built in recent years. The school enrolled six students this year, in grades six through 12, and Mr. Turpin was listed as the principal.
And as of this afternoon, the "school" is still listed on the state's directory! (h/t Wendy Hirschegger)
This is a worst-case scenario, and I would not attempt to paint other private schools with the Turpin brush because, please God, this is a rare and terrible outlier.
But it is also a reminder of just how bad things can conceivably get when your state exercises no oversight over non-public schools. Does abuse happen in public schools? Sure. Do most private schools operate without horrifying abuse of this sort? Sure. But it's hard to imagine something remotely like this happening in a public school, subject to considerable oversight. And it's hard to imagine how a state like California, where private and charter schools are allowed to function with little or more state oversight, could have caught this.
This is why focusing only on the interests of the family and dismantling public institutions is a bad idea-- because some families are horrible, and if there are no government institutions watching out for the rights of the children, those rights will be buried in a home-built dungeon. This is why a stance of "We don't want to impose any government rules or oversight on private education providers" is an unacceptable stance.
Monsters thrive in the dark and shrink in the sun. Expecting monsters to illuminate themselves is simply abandoning their victims, and that is not okay.
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Robot Overlords Due in Decade
This piece is from last year, but it's a reminder of just how bone-numbing stupid some education "experts" are. Sir Anthony Seldon is a vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham, and the author of over 35 books about history, politics and education. He's a big-time teacher and commentator on education in Britain, and yet here he is saying things like this:
Robots will begin replacing teachers in the classroom within the next ten years as part of a revolution in one-to-one learning
Programmes currently developed in Silicon Valley will learn to read the brains and facial expressions of pupils, adapting the method of communication to what works best for them.
It will open up the possibility of an Eton or Wellignton-style education for all.
Will it? Will it really. Will we be reading news from Eton in 2027 in which they announce that they are closing their doors because students prefer learning from a computer terminal to learning from the distinguished human scholars of Eton. Will students from the very best families be abandoning private education with their peers because they would rather sit at a computer in isolation?
Because I don't think that's going to happen.
Everyone can have the very best teacher and it's completely personalized; the software you're working with will be with you throughout your educational journey.
Seriously? Because that would be eighteen years, give or take a bit. Raise your hand right now if you are using any piece of software that you were using eighteen years ago. Nobody? That's what I thought.
Teachers would be replaced with human "overseers" who would monitor progress of pupils (the one thing I think software could actually do), leading non-academic activities (what, no robot football coach?) and-- my favorite-- providing pastoral support. You mean religious activities can't be programmed into software?
But Seldon insists that "inspiration" for intellectual excitement will come from "the lighting-up of the brain which the machines will be superbly well-geared for."
Sir Anthony is far too old to have such a childlike belief in computer software and far too well-educated to engage in such magical thinking, yet here we are, with Seldon coming out with a book this year that will lay out his whole fabulist vision of education. And he believes that this has already arrived on the west coast on the US, which would indicate that he's not all that well-informed on the subject of failed software-based schools that end up being beta-testers for low-scale algorithm-driven mass-produced edu-software.
For all the investor-baiting hype, there's still no sign that computers can do this, and no evidence that they should, and no support for the notion that it's what families would choose if they could. And "the children will be excited about it because it's on a computer" is the kind of thing that only someone over 60 (with no grandchildren) believes. Teaching machines remain one of the most long-standing failed dreams of education entrepreneurs. I don't believe that's going to change in the next ten years.
Robots will begin replacing teachers in the classroom within the next ten years as part of a revolution in one-to-one learning
Programmes currently developed in Silicon Valley will learn to read the brains and facial expressions of pupils, adapting the method of communication to what works best for them.
It will open up the possibility of an Eton or Wellignton-style education for all.
Because I don't think that's going to happen.
Everyone can have the very best teacher and it's completely personalized; the software you're working with will be with you throughout your educational journey.
Seriously? Because that would be eighteen years, give or take a bit. Raise your hand right now if you are using any piece of software that you were using eighteen years ago. Nobody? That's what I thought.
Teachers would be replaced with human "overseers" who would monitor progress of pupils (the one thing I think software could actually do), leading non-academic activities (what, no robot football coach?) and-- my favorite-- providing pastoral support. You mean religious activities can't be programmed into software?
But Seldon insists that "inspiration" for intellectual excitement will come from "the lighting-up of the brain which the machines will be superbly well-geared for."
Sir Anthony is far too old to have such a childlike belief in computer software and far too well-educated to engage in such magical thinking, yet here we are, with Seldon coming out with a book this year that will lay out his whole fabulist vision of education. And he believes that this has already arrived on the west coast on the US, which would indicate that he's not all that well-informed on the subject of failed software-based schools that end up being beta-testers for low-scale algorithm-driven mass-produced edu-software.
For all the investor-baiting hype, there's still no sign that computers can do this, and no evidence that they should, and no support for the notion that it's what families would choose if they could. And "the children will be excited about it because it's on a computer" is the kind of thing that only someone over 60 (with no grandchildren) believes. Teaching machines remain one of the most long-standing failed dreams of education entrepreneurs. I don't believe that's going to change in the next ten years.
Monday, January 15, 2018
The Ed Tech Revolution Is Late
Tom Vander Ark, king of tech-powered reformsterism, has a curious point to make over at EdWeek. The short summary would be something like this:
A bunch of ed tech was predicted to revolutionize education in 2017. None of that happened. Nevertheless, here are predictions for Big Ed Tech things sure to revolutionize education in 2018.
As is often the case with ed tech, we seem to have a triumph of hope over experience (and I can say that as someone on marriage #2). So what was supposed to be the Next Big Thing last year, and yet wasn't?
AR/VR didn't catch on. Gamification also failed to set the ed world on fire. Could it be that neither of these things offered any particular educational value-- at least not compared to the expense involved for districts?
Vander Ark is also disappointed in various platform systems:
Learning platforms continue to serve the schools we have not the schools we need. Most platforms support whole group learning, don't help personalized learning, can't make smart recommendations for what to do next, and don't support mastery-based progressions.
Well, the schools we have are, in fact, the schools we have. Creating a product for imaginary future schools that may or may not ever exist, despite what reformsters say we "need," strikes me as a bad business plan, like trying to sell me the electric plastic internet-linked violins that my seven-month-old boys may someday "need." The violins would actually be a better bet, since the things Vander Ark wants platforms to do-- help personalized learning, make pedagogical recommendations, and support mastery-based progression (aka competency based learning)-- are things that nobody knows how to make software do well and/or at all yet. Might as well complain that platforms also fail to synthesize muffins out of atmospheric trace molecules.
In other words, there was a bunch of stuff that tech gurus said they'd have ready to use any minute now, which turns out to be a promise on par with your contractor's pledge that your house will be done in just two more weeks.
Something that did happen was the continued spread of chromebooks, which could be a lesson for the rest of the tech world because, regardless of all the reasons not to googlify your school, chromebooks make modest promises, do a petty good job of keeping them, and don't cost a ton of money. Utility and affordability still tend to beat flash and shiny (expensive unkept) promises. That's my analysis, not his. Vander Ark offers this advice to his primary audience (which, spoiler alert, is not actual educato
After almost a decade of venture investment, it's clear that EdTech is quite different than consumer internet. Few products go viral and freemium business models (free stuff with the hope that you'll upgrade to a premium version) doesn't produce sustainable businesses. With few exits, investors are more risk averse than five years ago.
What does Vander Ark think will happen this year (after all these things that didn't happen last year)? He sees three opportunities tocash in revolutionize education.
Broader aims. Schools are adopting some new learning goals, like social and emotional learning. So maybe someone can whip up some software topretend to teach that! Also, project-based learning might be an opening for tech, somehow.
Personalized learning. Yeah, that AI powered personalized software will be coming along any day now. Though since we're trying to launch software, not so much personalized as depersonalized algorithm driven mass-produced custom education. Maybe students will find it engaging because it's on a computer, and I hear the children really dig the computers along with twitters and the rap music these days?? No, that ship is still not looking very seaworthy.
Platform plays. By which he means the various companies that keep buying up various platform things, like PowerSchool that was sold off by Pearson and now the new owners are buying up other companies to extend their brand. Or Aesop, the program that let subs and teachers connect Match.com style, which was bought by Frontline, which has great data ambitions but has since been bought. Or education-in-a-box charter school/beta tester Summit, which has also been bought. And all of these companies are going to buy other companies. And add features, and stuff!! This actually seems the most plausible of his predictions, as many of these companies have a foot in the schoolhouse door by virtue of having started out doing something useful, or at least shiny and attractive.
So these are things that are totally going to happen, unlike the last batch of things that were totally going to happen, and then didn't so much happen.
Vander Ark also identifies two areas that Need More Attention from public-private partnerships. Is "attention" a code word for "money"
One is interoperability, the capacity for all these great shiny programs to share and talk to each other. Which shouldn't be any problem at all, because tech companies are known for their willingness to share across platform lines. And the public won't find it at all creepy or objectionable that all these data collecting monsters are passing student data around with wild abandon.
The other is (are?) AI and blockchain. These both need millions of attentions because they still aren't ready for prime time. AI is complicated and hard and not really what most vendors are working on. And blockchain, well, mysterious and not always inspiring trust. Don't place your bets on paperless credentials just yet.
So there you go. Big things were going to happen in 2017. They didn't. But now they totally will. They're just running a little late. While we wait, can I interest you in a bridge?
A bunch of ed tech was predicted to revolutionize education in 2017. None of that happened. Nevertheless, here are predictions for Big Ed Tech things sure to revolutionize education in 2018.
As is often the case with ed tech, we seem to have a triumph of hope over experience (and I can say that as someone on marriage #2). So what was supposed to be the Next Big Thing last year, and yet wasn't?
AR/VR didn't catch on. Gamification also failed to set the ed world on fire. Could it be that neither of these things offered any particular educational value-- at least not compared to the expense involved for districts?
Vander Ark is also disappointed in various platform systems:
Learning platforms continue to serve the schools we have not the schools we need. Most platforms support whole group learning, don't help personalized learning, can't make smart recommendations for what to do next, and don't support mastery-based progressions.
 |
| Would you like to buy this bridge? |
Well, the schools we have are, in fact, the schools we have. Creating a product for imaginary future schools that may or may not ever exist, despite what reformsters say we "need," strikes me as a bad business plan, like trying to sell me the electric plastic internet-linked violins that my seven-month-old boys may someday "need." The violins would actually be a better bet, since the things Vander Ark wants platforms to do-- help personalized learning, make pedagogical recommendations, and support mastery-based progression (aka competency based learning)-- are things that nobody knows how to make software do well and/or at all yet. Might as well complain that platforms also fail to synthesize muffins out of atmospheric trace molecules.
In other words, there was a bunch of stuff that tech gurus said they'd have ready to use any minute now, which turns out to be a promise on par with your contractor's pledge that your house will be done in just two more weeks.
Something that did happen was the continued spread of chromebooks, which could be a lesson for the rest of the tech world because, regardless of all the reasons not to googlify your school, chromebooks make modest promises, do a petty good job of keeping them, and don't cost a ton of money. Utility and affordability still tend to beat flash and shiny (expensive unkept) promises. That's my analysis, not his. Vander Ark offers this advice to his primary audience (which, spoiler alert, is not actual educato
After almost a decade of venture investment, it's clear that EdTech is quite different than consumer internet. Few products go viral and freemium business models (free stuff with the hope that you'll upgrade to a premium version) doesn't produce sustainable businesses. With few exits, investors are more risk averse than five years ago.
What does Vander Ark think will happen this year (after all these things that didn't happen last year)? He sees three opportunities to
Broader aims. Schools are adopting some new learning goals, like social and emotional learning. So maybe someone can whip up some software to
Personalized learning. Yeah, that AI powered personalized software will be coming along any day now. Though since we're trying to launch software, not so much personalized as depersonalized algorithm driven mass-produced custom education. Maybe students will find it engaging because it's on a computer, and I hear the children really dig the computers along with twitters and the rap music these days?? No, that ship is still not looking very seaworthy.
Platform plays. By which he means the various companies that keep buying up various platform things, like PowerSchool that was sold off by Pearson and now the new owners are buying up other companies to extend their brand. Or Aesop, the program that let subs and teachers connect Match.com style, which was bought by Frontline, which has great data ambitions but has since been bought. Or education-in-a-box charter school/beta tester Summit, which has also been bought. And all of these companies are going to buy other companies. And add features, and stuff!! This actually seems the most plausible of his predictions, as many of these companies have a foot in the schoolhouse door by virtue of having started out doing something useful, or at least shiny and attractive.
So these are things that are totally going to happen, unlike the last batch of things that were totally going to happen, and then didn't so much happen.
Vander Ark also identifies two areas that Need More Attention from public-private partnerships. Is "attention" a code word for "money"
One is interoperability, the capacity for all these great shiny programs to share and talk to each other. Which shouldn't be any problem at all, because tech companies are known for their willingness to share across platform lines. And the public won't find it at all creepy or objectionable that all these data collecting monsters are passing student data around with wild abandon.
The other is (are?) AI and blockchain. These both need millions of attentions because they still aren't ready for prime time. AI is complicated and hard and not really what most vendors are working on. And blockchain, well, mysterious and not always inspiring trust. Don't place your bets on paperless credentials just yet.
So there you go. Big things were going to happen in 2017. They didn't. But now they totally will. They're just running a little late. While we wait, can I interest you in a bridge?
Sunday, January 14, 2018
ICYMI: End of Semester Edition (1/14)
We're on to the end of the grading period in my neighborhood, which means I've been spending more time grading papers and less time reading stuff. But I still have a few nuggets for you this week. Remember-- only you can amplify the voices that you think should be heard.
School Segregation Gerrymander Map
The same principles that go into political gerrymandering can be harnessed to segregate (or desegregate) schools. Here's how it works.
Wall Street's New Way of Making Money from Public Education
Folks have been talking about social impact bonds for a while now (yours truly included) but this piece from Valerie Strauss makes this financial legerdemain more understandable for the layperson.
Betsy DeVos harms Higher Ed More Than K12
Surprise. We were all worried about what DeVos would do to K-12 education, but she's been far more destructive for the higher ed world.
Calling Vouchers Sinful
School Segregation Gerrymander Map
The same principles that go into political gerrymandering can be harnessed to segregate (or desegregate) schools. Here's how it works.
Wall Street's New Way of Making Money from Public Education
Folks have been talking about social impact bonds for a while now (yours truly included) but this piece from Valerie Strauss makes this financial legerdemain more understandable for the layperson.
Betsy DeVos harms Higher Ed More Than K12
Surprise. We were all worried about what DeVos would do to K-12 education, but she's been far more destructive for the higher ed world.
Calling Vouchers Sinful
A Baptist preacher in Texas is really annoying the GOP pro-voucher politicians there.
Robert Pondiscio asks a valid question -- are we painting a picture for our children of a terrifying world?
Courtesy of Blue Cereal education, some edu-bingo cards you can use to pass the time at your next education-flavored meeting.
Nancy Flanagan asks some important questions about who gets to be labeled "gifted"
Jersey Jazzman, again, looks at what journalists get wrong about education
Saturday, January 13, 2018
Data-Driven Excitement! Yay!
Is there anything more exciting than being driven by data? The thrill of spreadsheets! The martial joy numbers regimented in rows! The deep-dish digitalization of all human exploration! I'm just getting all sweaty thinking about it.
Okay, not really. But there are people like this, and some even become teachers and some of those teachers decide to evangelize the gospel of data to their students. And then, lo and behold, they write articles about it. And that brings us to todays entry in the For the Love of God files.
The piece is "Exciting and Engaging Students around Data," by Molly Leger on the CenterPoint Education Solutions website, and it sits at the intersection of several reform factors.
CenterPoint is an educational consulting group, and its reformy bench is deep. CEO is Laura Slover, who spent 16 years with Achieve, including helping them launch the Common Core before she hopped over to PARCC, where she ran the outfit pushing one of the Big Standardized Tests for the Core. And look-- here's Tony Bennett, chief of state services for CenterPoint despite his scandal filled past as a charter-favoring book-cooker in Indiana schools-- behavior so egregious he had to resign his next job. Chairman of the board is Paul Pasternek, who did his best to dismantle and privatize education in Louisiana.
Ms. Leger is a fellow with TeachPlus, a group set up to be an alternative to teacher unions. It was founded and is led by a woman with ties o Mind Trust, a Midwestern reformster group. Leger is teaching in Lawrence, MA, public schools and is in the middle of her second year in the classroom. She describes her work like this
• Accelerate student learning through the development and delivery of standards-aligned curricula for both an English and composition class
• Drive performance improvements and related systems by seeking out, gathering, and effectively using a wide variety of feedback
So that's where we are. Let's take as look at how she proposes to sow the datafied excitement.
Data is everywhere. As an adult, it weaves itself throughout my personal life and my professional career, and informs the thousands of decisions I make daily. I use data to decide what I eat, when I sleep, and which commute to take home. As a teacher, it drives my lesson plans, determines my performance evaluations, and offers insights on how to better my practice.
Oh boy. If by "data," she means "information I take in with my senses and brain," then okay. If you decide when to eat by responding to feelings of hunger, and you want to call that feeling of hunger "data," then we have no problem. I've long maintained that all teachers take in data a million times a day and use that to make their professional judgments-- we just don't frame that data as numbers and charts and spreadsheets. If you want to say that "following your gut" or "using your best judgment" is about internally processing a whole lot of observation and experience and insight and information, and you want to call that "data," then you and I are just having a difference of semantics. Also, I do not think that word means what you think it means.
But if you're consulting spreadsheet-style digitized data to help you decide when to eat and sleep, then I weep for the younger generation.
Yet, for all its importance in adult life, very rarely does the word “data” feature in our conversations with children. With so much to teach in so little time, we often neglect one of the most important life-skills: data-driven decision-making.
Again, our problem here may be that Ms. Leger is trying to stretch "data" to cover a broad range of ideas not usually included in the definition, like trying to spread a child's sleeping bag enough to cover the Grand Canyon.
On the other hand, if she seriously means to suggest that data-driven decision-masking is an important life skill, well.... no. When my babies cry at night, I don't consult the data o figure out what's happening or what I should do. When my older children were considering marriage, it did not occur to me to suggest that they consult the data. Number crunching, bean counting, and spreadsheet surfing are not useless skills, but they are not among the "most important life skills.
When I started to use the data from assessments in my conversations with kids, the tone of my classroom completely changed. Once students were excited about data, I no longer needed to offer prizes or pizza parties. Students were using data from assessment to make goals, monitor their progress, and demonstrate their achievement. They were more bought into assessments when they understood we would be using and celebrating that data in class.
I'm on record as being adamantly opposed to being jerks to young teachers. But Ms. Leger is working from a sample of 1.5 years here, and at the beginning of her career. She can barely have established a "tone" to be changed. And I blame her supervisers/mentors-- she should never, ever, have "needed" to offer prizes or pizza, and in fact we know that this sort of bribery is a bad idea. And for the rest, I have to ask.... what data? Because if she's talking about test scores and grades, then I suspect two things are happening here
1) She has rediscovered the power of harnessing students' desire for competitive grade grubbing
2) Her students appreciate explicit instructions on how exactly to game the system. Because data systems (like, say, PARCC tests) are invariably meant to be proxies for hard-to-measure elements, but are actually easy to manipulate numbers. EG the classic example of the company bonus for zero accidents. Since it's really measuring how many accident reports are turned in, you don't need to make the workplace safer-- just keep people from turning in accident reports. Tell students exactly what hoops they have to jump through to score points, and they will jump through those hoops-- and do nothing else.
But we've arrived at last at the six tricks to getting students all wired up about data! Here we go--
1) Never let assessment go un-discussed.
So, tell students why you're giving the test, go over the results with them, and let them know how the results will be used to design the work going forward. This strikes me as a basic teaching fundamental, known to millions of teachers. I'm not sure how exciting students find it.
2) For data to be helpful, it must be timely.
So don't turn work back weeks and weeks after it's been done. Again, I'm not sure that this is news to anybody (except, you know, test companies like the PARCC folks).
3) Use data to make and monitor class goals
Again, teaching 101. Ms. Leger wants to discuss this element with the students. Fine. Will it make them more excited?
4) Go visual.
Put up a progress poster! Yikes!! Data walls are problematic for so many reasons, and Ms. Leger makes matters worse by suggesting this technique for ELL and students with special needs. This is a lousy idea.
5) Use conferences to establish individual goals.
Ms. Leger suggests we do this during independent work time. She uses terms like "actionable goals." Yuck.
6) Celebrate progress.
"I frequently stop the class" she says, for "celebratory rituals around data-driven goal setting and achievement."
So.
So this what I find curious about the piece. There is absolutely nothing new, not even new-ish, about any of the teaching behaviors she's suggesting. There are no new insights here about how to handle a classroom (and in the case of #4, at least one technique that is long since discredited). What's new is the attempt to take the business-style language of data-drivenness to it all.
Why? Why tack new language onto what is already known? Is it to create the illusion of change when no actual change or innovation is present? Is it another way to "disrupt" traditional public education, by disrupting the language we use to talk about what we do? Is it a method of co-opting old teaching insights by making them seem to line up with the new ways; are we trying to make data-driven decisions seem less like baloney by attaching them to old-school teaching methods?
Or this just what college teacher programs are up to these days? I recognize that it's old farty of me, but pieces like this awaken one of my great fears-- that a generation brought up with NCLB and RttT and BS Testing out the wazoo will emerge into the teaching profession with no real idea of what being a teacher used to mean. A younger generation that grew up swimming in Kool-Aid, so they don't even know it's toxic.
I don't mean to be a huge jerk to Ms. Leger. It's great that she's young and enthusiastic and time in the classroom has a way, after five or seven years, of knocking some of the foolishness out of you, but if you've got enthusiasm to withstand that, your career can be great. She may well turn out to be an awesome teacher with a great career. But the various reform groups sending her out to peddle this data-driven baloney in public know exactly what they're doing, and shame on them for using a young teacher to push their reformy baloney into the world.
Nobody needs to be excited about data-driven decision making. I'd rather we got excited about using our best judgment, paying attention, listening and looking and becoming better people so that we can make better choices. Being fully human in the world is complicated and complex and, on some days, just plain hard, and suggesting that we can gather up some data points, feed them into a decisionmaker (soon to be an AI software program near you) and the One Correct Decision will pop out, hiding the whole process in business-speak argle-bargle-- well, that's all bullshit. And taking the wheel and not even bothering to reinvent it, but just renaming it so that it appears to support our rickety vehicle-- well, that's just lazy.
The best decisions are not driven by data-- they are made by human beings, and that's worth modeling and discussing in our classrooms, excited or not.
Okay, not really. But there are people like this, and some even become teachers and some of those teachers decide to evangelize the gospel of data to their students. And then, lo and behold, they write articles about it. And that brings us to todays entry in the For the Love of God files.
The piece is "Exciting and Engaging Students around Data," by Molly Leger on the CenterPoint Education Solutions website, and it sits at the intersection of several reform factors.
CenterPoint is an educational consulting group, and its reformy bench is deep. CEO is Laura Slover, who spent 16 years with Achieve, including helping them launch the Common Core before she hopped over to PARCC, where she ran the outfit pushing one of the Big Standardized Tests for the Core. And look-- here's Tony Bennett, chief of state services for CenterPoint despite his scandal filled past as a charter-favoring book-cooker in Indiana schools-- behavior so egregious he had to resign his next job. Chairman of the board is Paul Pasternek, who did his best to dismantle and privatize education in Louisiana.
Ms. Leger is a fellow with TeachPlus, a group set up to be an alternative to teacher unions. It was founded and is led by a woman with ties o Mind Trust, a Midwestern reformster group. Leger is teaching in Lawrence, MA, public schools and is in the middle of her second year in the classroom. She describes her work like this
• Accelerate student learning through the development and delivery of standards-aligned curricula for both an English and composition class
• Drive performance improvements and related systems by seeking out, gathering, and effectively using a wide variety of feedback
So that's where we are. Let's take as look at how she proposes to sow the datafied excitement.
Data is everywhere. As an adult, it weaves itself throughout my personal life and my professional career, and informs the thousands of decisions I make daily. I use data to decide what I eat, when I sleep, and which commute to take home. As a teacher, it drives my lesson plans, determines my performance evaluations, and offers insights on how to better my practice.
Oh boy. If by "data," she means "information I take in with my senses and brain," then okay. If you decide when to eat by responding to feelings of hunger, and you want to call that feeling of hunger "data," then we have no problem. I've long maintained that all teachers take in data a million times a day and use that to make their professional judgments-- we just don't frame that data as numbers and charts and spreadsheets. If you want to say that "following your gut" or "using your best judgment" is about internally processing a whole lot of observation and experience and insight and information, and you want to call that "data," then you and I are just having a difference of semantics. Also, I do not think that word means what you think it means.
But if you're consulting spreadsheet-style digitized data to help you decide when to eat and sleep, then I weep for the younger generation.
Yet, for all its importance in adult life, very rarely does the word “data” feature in our conversations with children. With so much to teach in so little time, we often neglect one of the most important life-skills: data-driven decision-making.
Again, our problem here may be that Ms. Leger is trying to stretch "data" to cover a broad range of ideas not usually included in the definition, like trying to spread a child's sleeping bag enough to cover the Grand Canyon.
On the other hand, if she seriously means to suggest that data-driven decision-masking is an important life skill, well.... no. When my babies cry at night, I don't consult the data o figure out what's happening or what I should do. When my older children were considering marriage, it did not occur to me to suggest that they consult the data. Number crunching, bean counting, and spreadsheet surfing are not useless skills, but they are not among the "most important life skills.
When I started to use the data from assessments in my conversations with kids, the tone of my classroom completely changed. Once students were excited about data, I no longer needed to offer prizes or pizza parties. Students were using data from assessment to make goals, monitor their progress, and demonstrate their achievement. They were more bought into assessments when they understood we would be using and celebrating that data in class.
I'm on record as being adamantly opposed to being jerks to young teachers. But Ms. Leger is working from a sample of 1.5 years here, and at the beginning of her career. She can barely have established a "tone" to be changed. And I blame her supervisers/mentors-- she should never, ever, have "needed" to offer prizes or pizza, and in fact we know that this sort of bribery is a bad idea. And for the rest, I have to ask.... what data? Because if she's talking about test scores and grades, then I suspect two things are happening here
1) She has rediscovered the power of harnessing students' desire for competitive grade grubbing
2) Her students appreciate explicit instructions on how exactly to game the system. Because data systems (like, say, PARCC tests) are invariably meant to be proxies for hard-to-measure elements, but are actually easy to manipulate numbers. EG the classic example of the company bonus for zero accidents. Since it's really measuring how many accident reports are turned in, you don't need to make the workplace safer-- just keep people from turning in accident reports. Tell students exactly what hoops they have to jump through to score points, and they will jump through those hoops-- and do nothing else.
But we've arrived at last at the six tricks to getting students all wired up about data! Here we go--
1) Never let assessment go un-discussed.
So, tell students why you're giving the test, go over the results with them, and let them know how the results will be used to design the work going forward. This strikes me as a basic teaching fundamental, known to millions of teachers. I'm not sure how exciting students find it.
2) For data to be helpful, it must be timely.
So don't turn work back weeks and weeks after it's been done. Again, I'm not sure that this is news to anybody (except, you know, test companies like the PARCC folks).
3) Use data to make and monitor class goals
Again, teaching 101. Ms. Leger wants to discuss this element with the students. Fine. Will it make them more excited?
4) Go visual.
Put up a progress poster! Yikes!! Data walls are problematic for so many reasons, and Ms. Leger makes matters worse by suggesting this technique for ELL and students with special needs. This is a lousy idea.
5) Use conferences to establish individual goals.
Ms. Leger suggests we do this during independent work time. She uses terms like "actionable goals." Yuck.
6) Celebrate progress.
"I frequently stop the class" she says, for "celebratory rituals around data-driven goal setting and achievement."
So.
So this what I find curious about the piece. There is absolutely nothing new, not even new-ish, about any of the teaching behaviors she's suggesting. There are no new insights here about how to handle a classroom (and in the case of #4, at least one technique that is long since discredited). What's new is the attempt to take the business-style language of data-drivenness to it all.
Why? Why tack new language onto what is already known? Is it to create the illusion of change when no actual change or innovation is present? Is it another way to "disrupt" traditional public education, by disrupting the language we use to talk about what we do? Is it a method of co-opting old teaching insights by making them seem to line up with the new ways; are we trying to make data-driven decisions seem less like baloney by attaching them to old-school teaching methods?
Or this just what college teacher programs are up to these days? I recognize that it's old farty of me, but pieces like this awaken one of my great fears-- that a generation brought up with NCLB and RttT and BS Testing out the wazoo will emerge into the teaching profession with no real idea of what being a teacher used to mean. A younger generation that grew up swimming in Kool-Aid, so they don't even know it's toxic.
I don't mean to be a huge jerk to Ms. Leger. It's great that she's young and enthusiastic and time in the classroom has a way, after five or seven years, of knocking some of the foolishness out of you, but if you've got enthusiasm to withstand that, your career can be great. She may well turn out to be an awesome teacher with a great career. But the various reform groups sending her out to peddle this data-driven baloney in public know exactly what they're doing, and shame on them for using a young teacher to push their reformy baloney into the world.
Nobody needs to be excited about data-driven decision making. I'd rather we got excited about using our best judgment, paying attention, listening and looking and becoming better people so that we can make better choices. Being fully human in the world is complicated and complex and, on some days, just plain hard, and suggesting that we can gather up some data points, feed them into a decisionmaker (soon to be an AI software program near you) and the One Correct Decision will pop out, hiding the whole process in business-speak argle-bargle-- well, that's all bullshit. And taking the wheel and not even bothering to reinvent it, but just renaming it so that it appears to support our rickety vehicle-- well, that's just lazy.
The best decisions are not driven by data-- they are made by human beings, and that's worth modeling and discussing in our classrooms, excited or not.
Steve Nelson: First Do No Harm
We hear the term "progressive education" thrown around a great deal, but what does it actually mean?
Steve Nelson, a teacher with decades of experience, has a pretty good idea, and in his book First Do No Harm, he lays out what progressive education is, and is not. (It's not that loose hippie thing from the 60s). He opens with eleven statements about education that he plans to debunk ("School choice will motivate improvements in education and give poor families the same opportunities that rich folks have") and he offers his own idea about the primary purposes of education:
1. To stir in each child a continuous commitment to be thoughtfully engaged in the ongoing evolution of our democratic republic and to exercise his/her individual and collective responsibilities within the global community.
2. To allow all children to learn and grow into deeply satisfying and ethical lives.
From there, Nelson goes on to put the ideas of education and the fallacies of reform into the context of the pursuit of a true progressive education. This is one of those books where you won't necessarily encounter new ideas, but you will get to see a larger picture of how those ideas-- both good and bad-- connect to the greater whole.
There are some specific items that are fascinating on their own (for instance, an explanation of how all students can improve on a test and the test result average can then go down). You may not agree with every specific that Nelson brings up (he's a big fan of the multiple intelligences model), but the big pay-off here is the larger picture of progressive education, and why that picture does not fit with the various grand designs of education reformers. So if you are trying to understand what is going on as well as trying to grasp what it all means, and if you are trying to grasp exactly why ed reform seems like an existential threat to progressive public education, this is a book for you.
Steve Nelson, a teacher with decades of experience, has a pretty good idea, and in his book First Do No Harm, he lays out what progressive education is, and is not. (It's not that loose hippie thing from the 60s). He opens with eleven statements about education that he plans to debunk ("School choice will motivate improvements in education and give poor families the same opportunities that rich folks have") and he offers his own idea about the primary purposes of education:
1. To stir in each child a continuous commitment to be thoughtfully engaged in the ongoing evolution of our democratic republic and to exercise his/her individual and collective responsibilities within the global community.
2. To allow all children to learn and grow into deeply satisfying and ethical lives.
From there, Nelson goes on to put the ideas of education and the fallacies of reform into the context of the pursuit of a true progressive education. This is one of those books where you won't necessarily encounter new ideas, but you will get to see a larger picture of how those ideas-- both good and bad-- connect to the greater whole.
There are some specific items that are fascinating on their own (for instance, an explanation of how all students can improve on a test and the test result average can then go down). You may not agree with every specific that Nelson brings up (he's a big fan of the multiple intelligences model), but the big pay-off here is the larger picture of progressive education, and why that picture does not fit with the various grand designs of education reformers. So if you are trying to understand what is going on as well as trying to grasp what it all means, and if you are trying to grasp exactly why ed reform seems like an existential threat to progressive public education, this is a book for you.
Singer's Book Worth Your Time
Steven Singer is one of those rare creatures- an edublogger who is actually a working public school teacher. And Garn Press has done us all the favor of publishing a collection of Singer's best work.
I'm a fan of books-by-bloggers. The thing about blogging is that each of us has certain themes and ideas that run through our work. But the act of blogging becomes a sort of thematic pointillism, each big idea being built over weeks and months and even years, like a strange attractor that emerges as a fuzzy, half-perceived shape. But when you take those bits and pieces and rearrange them, suddenly those big ideas pop right out.
Singer has four big topics to address-- racism, school choice, testing and teaching-- and he runs at them with passion and commitment. On the bac cover of the Gadfly on the Wall book, you'll find the blurb I wrote for it:
"In these troubled and troubling times, there is no one who writes more passionately about public education, teachers, and the struggle for justice and equity than Steven Singer."
Singer writes about the attacks of cut budgets and deprofessionalization of teaching and the bad ideas in the ed reform world (including the neoliberal outposts of the Democratic Party). He's willing to look at his own stuff (Chapter 1 is entitled "I am racist") and he does a good job of connecting the dots between policy discussions and the students in his own classroom.
And he is an uncompromising advocate for teachers, our unions, and our public school students. If you are a public school teacher and you want to read a book about education by someone who is unashamedly in your corner, this is the book for you.
I'm a fan of books-by-bloggers. The thing about blogging is that each of us has certain themes and ideas that run through our work. But the act of blogging becomes a sort of thematic pointillism, each big idea being built over weeks and months and even years, like a strange attractor that emerges as a fuzzy, half-perceived shape. But when you take those bits and pieces and rearrange them, suddenly those big ideas pop right out.
Singer has four big topics to address-- racism, school choice, testing and teaching-- and he runs at them with passion and commitment. On the bac cover of the Gadfly on the Wall book, you'll find the blurb I wrote for it:
"In these troubled and troubling times, there is no one who writes more passionately about public education, teachers, and the struggle for justice and equity than Steven Singer."
Singer writes about the attacks of cut budgets and deprofessionalization of teaching and the bad ideas in the ed reform world (including the neoliberal outposts of the Democratic Party). He's willing to look at his own stuff (Chapter 1 is entitled "I am racist") and he does a good job of connecting the dots between policy discussions and the students in his own classroom.
And he is an uncompromising advocate for teachers, our unions, and our public school students. If you are a public school teacher and you want to read a book about education by someone who is unashamedly in your corner, this is the book for you.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)