CBE vs. Traditional Straw Man School

The folks at KnowledgeWorks are committed personalizing education in a competency-based kind of way, and by "personalizing" I mean "getting rid of teachers so students can be instructed by highly lucrative software programs." A while back they created a lovely graphic that really captures how much better their imaginary version of Competency-Based Learning (aka Competency-Based Education, aka Personalized Learning, aka Outcome-Based Education) than an imaginary version of public education.

This is the sales pitch that these folks are using to stump for the destruction of traditional schools. Let's break it down.

School Culture

In traditional education, they say, learning happens inside a classroom with "little or no accommodation of student interests or learning styles." I don't know-- maybe the comparison is meant to show that CBL in the present would be better than taking a time machine back to a public school classroom in 1935. Because I went to teacher school in the late seventies, and by then the idea of trying to accommodate each individual student in your classroom was already conventional wisdom.

But in CBL students have "a wide range of learning experiences at school, online or in the community." This triumvirate is important, because it allows just about anyone to get in on the education tax dollar money grab, and it renders traditional schools irrelevant. Just go learn from your neighbor, or a software bundle, or a charter school, or a mini-charter (that only teaches one subject) or a church school, or just home school. "Diverse partners" are the key, allowing students to get education from anywhere-- you don't need any special qualifications to edumacate the children.

Learning Continuum

At a public school, "students are expected to master grade level college and career ready standards." But CBL wants them to "master competencies" connected to the standards with "clear, transferable learning objectives." So that's... it's.... I don't know. Students are expected to do something rather than know something. I'll confess-- when you add the checklist education minimalism of CBE to the amateur-hour bad standards of Common Core--er, college and career readiness, you get a kind of nothing soup.

Learning Pace

"Students advance at educator's pace regardless of mastery or needing additional time." Yup. When I set a pace in my classroom, I set it strictly based on my own preferences, and not based on professional expertise and experience from decades of working at my craft. But CBL students "advance upon mastery of learning targets" and not because of some time requirement. Plus they get customized support both in school and out of school "to ensure they stay on track."

Wait a minute. If they meet the learning targets at their own pace in their own way, then what is this "track" we are ensuring they stay on. I thought the whole point was that there is no track? Either some professional educator is setting a pace and set of targets, or the student is just going as she will. Or, I suppose, the targets and pace could be set by amateurs based on whatever they feel like.

Instruction

In public schools, "every classroom has one teacher who designs and delivers instructional program with very little differentiation." But in CBL, "educators" work "collaboratively with community partners and students to develop flexible learning environments, grouping strategies, and extended opportunities to support a unique learning plan for every student."

This is the heart of the CBL pitch-- traditional public schools are run by those professional educators with their fancy "training" and "experience" and they're just so uptight and think they know it all, but if we put some amateur education entrepreneurs together with these students' future employers and just did whatever we thought was cool, school would be awesome. Also, we will replace the "wheel" with a fancy round disc that turns on an axle and helps wagons roll.

The notion that teachers don't differentiate is laughable, and the offhand dismissal of the idea that instructional programs should be designed and delivered by trained professionals is silly. As is the idea that flexible learning environments, grouping, and extra support are cool new ideas that these folks just thought up.

But part of the underlying philosophy is that schools are not turning out properly trained worker bees, and if we would just cooperate with the future employers of these drones, we could come up with a system more carefully focused on vocational training (of course, children of the upper classes will never, ever be subjected to CBE-style education).

Assessment System

Public schools offer assessments "at set times to evaluate and classify students." Well, yes. "One opportunity to take the summative assessment at the end of the year." Well, no. Sort of, in some states.

But CBL offers a "comprehensive assessment system" in which "formative assessments guide daily instruction" and whenever the students wants to, they can take a summative assessment as many times as they want, to show mastery. So, all testing, all the time.

Grading Policies

According to KnowledgeWorks, in traditional public schools, "grades are norm-referenced, reflect course standards, are typically based on weighted quarters and final exam." I don't know whether KnowledgeWorks is ignorant of what happens in a public school, or if they are just making shit up in order to make public schools look bad. I do know that it's incorrect to say that public schools use norm-referenced grades (which would mean that we're all grading on the curve, a practice that went out of educational fashion around 1978). Nor is the use of a final exam universal by any stretch of the imagination.

In CBL "scores reflect the level of mastery within a learning target," which is extraordinarily unlikely. That's because CBL mastery style learning requires students to check off "mastery" of a skill on the big list, and mastery is mastery. One of the problems with a CBE system is that it's basically binary-- you either "passed" the mastery assessment or you didn't, and if the student has done well enough to meet the minimum mastery requirement, there's no real reason for that student to press on to achieve a higher level of mastery. It's pass-fail. Once you've passed, what reason is there to try to pass harder? (That lack of differentiation of achievement is in fact one of the complaints about the CBL system being rolled out in Maine.)

"Course credit is earned when students master identified learning targets." The goal, in other words, is not to see just how excellent you can become, but how quickly you can score a Good Enough To Get By on the assessment. In Maine, students are "graded" on a scale of 1-4. This does not exactly lend itself to a nuanced picture of student achievement.

This is the CBL/CBE/PBL pitch. It depends on a studied vagueness about how it works (because "students sit a computers and take standardized tests and testlets and quizzes every day" doesn't really sing) as well as a careful misrepresentation of what happens in public school. This is not how we make education better.

We don't have to do this, you know

Whether it's policy makers crafting the latest education policy to govern, regulate or otherwise keep teachers in line, or whether it's a school board negotiating a contract, or even a charter operator unilaterally setting the terms of employment for their teaching staff, you sometimes get the feeling that those folks believe that teachers must be teachers.

It's like they think they're a video game boss, standing on a narrow digital bridge over a lake of digital lava, and teachers are the hero game player who have no choice but to cross that bridge to get to the final goal. They park themselves on that bridge, secure in the knowledge that we absolutely must go through them, that some teacher gene decreed at birth that we would have to enroll in a college education program, that we would have to pursue a teaching job, that we would have to stay in that job until retirement, or maybe death, no matter what obstacles they put in our way.

This is confused thinking.

We do not have to do this, you know.

Students attending college can choose from a wide variety of majors, including very many that are not related to teaching.

Grown adults with college degrees can pursue a wide variety of jobs, including jobs that are not teaching.

Not every profession suffers from this problem. Lawyers, business executives, CEOs, athletes-- all benefit from a system in which the People in Charge routinely say, "We'd better make sure he's happy, or else he'll just walk away. Quick-- let's throw piles of money and benefits at him so he'll stay."

But teachers (and nurses and some other choice professions) suffer from the managerial assumption that they will never walk away, that they don't have any other options to consider, that we can squeeze them and squeeze them and squeeze them and it just won't matter.

This is foolish thinking.

We do not have to do this.

I once joined a former student while she was dining out with friends in North Carolina. There were eight people at the table, and I believe five of them were people who had started out as teachers and left the profession. People leave teaching all the time. Young people choose professions other than teaching all the time.

We do not have a teacher shortage. We have a shortage of states and districts willing to make the job attractive enough to recruit and retain teachers.

Teachers do not always help their own case. When we talk about teaching being a "calling" or "all we ever wanted to do" or "what we were born to do," we may be telling the truth, but we are also like the person walking onto a used car lot and introducing ourselves by saying, "Hi there! I'm shopping for a car and I'm going to pay fifty grand for it."

Of course, there are some people in power who kind of understand that people have other choices, that teachers don't have to teach. There are people in power who know all that, and they just don't care. Their disrespect for the work is so great that they believe teachers are as easily replaced as fast food fry cooks, and like fast food fry cooks, teachers don't really have other options. And, of course, teachers are mostly women, anyway, so it's not like they deserve to be paid a professional family-supporting wage.

But no. We do not have to do this. We could be doing something else.

If people designing education policy and negotiating contracts could just absorb that idea. Imagine what policy would look like, what teaching contracts would look like, if our policy movers and shakers were sitting in their office thinking, "We need to really make an effort to make these jobs attractive, because these folks we want to become teachers could choose to do something else, and then we'd lose them, and that would suck. So let's concentrate on keeping recruiting and retaining them."

But no. In places like West Virginia and Oklahoma and too many other places we get, "Well, I'm sure we'll get this whole pay thing fixed in a few years or so. In the meanwhile, we're sure you're not going anywhere, and if we never do pay you a living wage, well, that won't affect your career choices, right?" Well, not just that. We also get this kind of crap:

Because teachers really shouldn't be paid at all. They should just do their jobs just because.

No. We don't have to do this.

Some Tech Reformsters Don't Even Try

You know that a pop music trend is played out when the material starts to sound like a parody of itself. For example, when Eve 6 filled "Inside Out" with lines like "Want to put my tender heart in a blender, watch it spin around to a beautiful oblivion," it became clear that a certain brand of uber-sensitive thrashy pop had played itself out.

I felt the same way reading the New York Times profile of one more tech executive who thinks she knows how to create a new education revolution.

"Why This Tech Executive Says Her Plan to Disrupt Education Is Different," is a well-framed title, as if even the reform-friendly times knows this woman is blowing some serious recycled smoke.

Yes, all the feelings.

Susan Wu, the NYT notes, has been called "one of the most influential women in technology." The NYT does not note that Wu earned that title in 2010 for launching Ohai, a social MMO gaming biz that Wu said would be making money selling "virtual goods" (aka "things that only exist on line and not in the real world"). Wu, a former professional Quake 2 gamer, actually launched the company in 2008. In 2009 Ohai was "the next big thing." By 2011, they were "also-rans," Wu was no longer the CEO, and the company was up for sale. Since then, she's been entrepreneuring about Silicon Valley on things like Stripe, the tech company that lets folks accept payment over the internet.

All of which clearly qualifies her to disrupt education.

She's picked Australia as her launch point, perhaps because one would have to travel to another continent to make any of her rhetoric about the venture sound fresh.

Ms. Wu and her team believe they are starting an education revolution. They say they have created a new model for teaching children, called Luminaria, that promises to prepare them to become the architects of — rather than mere participants in — a future world.

If you are playing Ed Reform Bingo, you'll want to dig out your card, because Wu has mastered every single reform cliché out there.

At the school ("Lumineer"), "there is no homework. There are no classrooms, uniforms or traditional grades," but there are “creator spaces,” “blue-sky thinking” sessions and “pitch decks.” The school is  "furnished like a start-up with whiteboards and beanbag chairs" and of course, this "revolutionary" is needed because "Our current school models were built 100-plus years ago." The school's classrooms have been "rebranded" “studios.” Instead of desks there are "couches, beanbag chairs and tables to stand at while working." They have STEM. They work on emotional intelligence. They are founded on "first principles" a concept borrowed from physics "in which ideas are reduced to their purest form, unencumbered by assumptions, analogies, or biases." Because that's a thing you can do in education when dealing with tiny humans. And teachers will be lured to Lumineer "with a promise of freedom from strict curriculums."

And if you visit the school site, the hits just keep coming. Lifelong learners. Growth mindset. Critical thought. Holistic synthesis. Authentic.

I'll give NYT writer Adam Baidawi bonus points for this simile:

Critics, however, see Lumineer Academy as another in a series of attempts by Silicon Valley to apply the same techniques used to churn out successful apps to instead turn out successful children.

Baidawi also notes that, well, tech entrepreneurs starting revolutionary private schools is not exactly a new thing (though having one of these projects turn out to be a big success would be). He particularly notes the failure to meet expectations of AltSchool, the Zuckerberg backed Silicon Valley wunderskool (though I think we might characterize that as a pivot to a more lucrative business model). But Wu says she's different, because of her model and location and team.

Wu does have some partners with education background. Sophie Fenton is an Australian-- well, she taught at some point, but a lot of her career seems tied up in the bureaucratic side of things. Amanda Tawhai has worked as a teacher at the Australia Department for Education.

But mostly this just seems like the same old, same old. Baidawi gets bonus points for getting a quote from Audrey Watters (Hack Education), who nicely sums up perhaps the only unique feature of Luminaria:

I was kind of impressed with the number of clichés and buzzwords that they packed into a short amount of marketing copy. In the case of Luminaria, they have everything, they have all the buzzwords: social and emotional learning, mind-sets, grit, S.T.E.M., mindfulness, authentic learning, global consciousness. I mean, pick two of those.

The Australian system is a bit different from ours, so I suppose we'll see how Wu's project manages to fit in and/or disrupt things. But despite the repeated insistence that they're shaking things up with bold new revolutionary ideas, it's getting harder not to think that these tech entrepreneurs are all reading from the same dog-eared handbook for revolutionary education amateurs. I look forward to the announcement about the next Tender Heart in a Blender Academy.

ICYMI: Technical Difficulties Edition (3/4)

Technology is great, except when it isn't. All I can say is, the next time I need to replace or upgrade equipment, I think I may finally be ready to convert to a Mac.

Meanwhile, here's some reading for the week.

Palantir Predictive Policing Tool

If you want to take a look at how frighteningly Big Brothery data mining can become, take a look at this predictive system for high-tech profiling and pre-policing (a la Minority Report) that is already here.

Why Hardening Schools Hasn't Stopped School Shootings

Some folks keep talking as if school security still looks like 1965, when in fact, schools have ben "hardening" since Columbine. Here's a look at why it hasn't helped.

Proficiency-Based Education Is Failing Maine Students

Not from an education blogger, but from a mainstream outlet. Maine has ben set up to be an experimental proof of concept for PBE (or CBE or whatever you want to call it this week). It's not working.

Six Things My Students Have Taught Me

It's a good list.

New Report on California Charter Waste

Jan Ressenger with a quick look at a new report on just how bad the charter picture is in California.

WV Teacher Strike

This story just keeps going, as the state legislature decided they would go ahead and trim the deal that the governor made. Keep watching this state.

What's Behind the NY End Run around Teacher Certification?

A deeper look at SUNY's attempt to lower standards for charter teachers.

That Whole Racism Thing

While the education debates rage, those of us backing public education need to remember, even in the midst of out enthusiasm for public education, that as an institution, we have some issues with racism.

Exhibit A: Racist principal in the Bronx. This twenty-six year veteran thought February was called "Don't Teach Black History Month." This principal allegedly instructed an English teacher not to teach a unit about the Harlem Renaissance, which is not just a critical chapter in Black history, but a critical chapter in the history of American arts and music.

Seriously. This is like telling an English teacher to skip stuff about that Shakespeare guy. I don't know how you even talk about American lit without covering it. I don't know how you talk about American music without talking about it. It's like trying to teach 19th century lit without bringing up anyone who knew Ralph Waldo Emerson, except that of course those guys were white.

The teacher involved said she was told not to teach it because she's not a social studies teacher, which is the kind of thing you expect from dim freshmen ("This is English class, not math class-- why do we gotta use numbers?" David Coleman's dopey theories aside, you can't study literature without studying the context in which it existed.

It's one more example of how it's impossible be racist in the education field without being just plain bad at your job and damaged in your understanding of what education means. Racist instruction is always bad instruction, not just because it's immoral and wrong, but because it's dumb and seriously limited in understanding.

Exhibit B: Huffpost uncovered a 25-year-old whit supremacist teaching in Florida. Oh, Florida. The teacher runs (ran) a supremacist podcast, and bragged about lying to her boss about her attempts to spread her vile crap to her students. And then there's this chilling exchange:

Volitich also agreed with her guest’s assertion that more white supremacists need to infiltrate public schools and become teachers. “They don’t have to be vocal about their views, but get in there!” her guest said. “Be more covert and just start taking over those places.”

“Right,” Volitich said. “I’m absolutely one of them.”

Dayanna Volitich is the young woman's name, and I guess we're fortunate that she's one more person who doesn't really understand how the internet works. Local media have picked up the story and the district that hired her in 2016 is now looking at exactly how its ethics rules could be applied here. Volitich deserves to have her teaching career ended, though it would not surprise me if she ended up in a Florida charter school with fewer rules about who can teach.

We are a country that has a problem with racism, so it would be astonishing if our school system did not reflect that problem. But those of us who advocate for public education need to remember that we have some housecleaning of our own to do, and that it's not always a mystery why families of color want an alternative for their children. We have an obligation to watch out for problematic colleagues-- even the ones who try to be sneaky about it. Meanwhile, fans of choice and voucher systems need to remember that in many states, Volitich would be untouchable in a private school, and we wouldn't even be having a conversation about her.

Faux Personalized Teacher Training

Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat has a new profile of a new (sort of) program for personalizing (not exactly) teacher training following the competency-based (allegedly) model.

We can see some of the fundamental problems right off the bat. Barnum opens with a scene from the program. Proto-teachers are being given a scenario-- you hear someone in your classroom slam Black Lives Matter protests, and you're worried about damage to your classroom culture.

“What are you going to do in the exact moment? What do you do in the next month to make sure your classroom is a safe environment?”

Asking those questions is Rupal Jain of the Woodrow Wilson Academy of Teaching and Learning, a soon-to-launch graduate school of education with a new approach to teaching teachers. The Academy’s goal is not just to challenge them with scenarios like that one, but to ensure they master them, with prospective teachers moving at their own pace and graduating when they demonstrate more than 40 specific skills.

Sigh.

So let's unpack some of the assumptions here.

First, we assume that this situation can be "mastered," as if there is one correct way to handle this hypothetical scenario. Except that, of course, there isn't. Because we have to factor in the personality and style of the teacher, then the personal characteristics of the students in the classroom (both the dissers and the listeners), then we have to factor in what outside factors are in play (recent news? community events?) and then we have to factor in the relationship between the teacher and those students.

You can't "master" these scenarios, any more than you can "master" being married or "master" parenthood. For one thing, every situation is different. For another, the ground continuously shifts under your feet as you and your students get older. This sort of thing absolutely falls under one of my own Rules For Life, which is that you must always keep growing and learning, and if you aren't going forward, you're going backwards-- there is no standing still. If a teacher were to tell me, "Well, I've completely mastered that aspect of my classroom practice," I would immediately conclude that I was talking to someone who isn't a very great teacher.

So, no-- you aren't going to teach anybody to "master" this scenario, or any other one.

Second, someone has apparently achieved the magical trick of narrowing the entire rich, complicated teaching profession to a list of (more than) forty specific skills. This belongs on a shelf next to some magazine article entitled "Twelve tricks to being the perfect wife" or "Become a perfect parent in just ten days." It's ridiculous. If someone walked into a teaching job interview and said, "You should hire me. I'm a great teacher, because I have mastered these forty-two skills," my thought would be that nobody should hire this person for a teaching job, ever, because the only person who could say something like that would be a person who does not understand the teaching profession. At all.

But we're only three paragraphs into the article. I've never known Barnum to completely miss the mark when he covers a subject, but hey-- maybe subsequent paragraphs will reveal that he just made these folks look worse than they really are to spice up the opening.

The future of education will “move away from focusing on what you’re being taught to what you’ve actually learned,” said Arthur Levine, the former president of Teachers College and the head of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the organization behind the Academy. “We thought, let’s create an institution that does it and can model it.”

That's good competency-based education boilerplate, and I don't want to take a long side trip on why that's concerning. The short explanation for why CBE is a problem here-- Levine's goal can be read as "Let's just focus on the things that we can test." Now I'll ask you-- as you think back on the important educational experiences and lessons of your life, are the majority of those memories related to the tests you took?

The Academy is getting big bucks from the Chan Zuckerberg Sort-of-philanthropic-but-not-really Initiative. It will focus on science and math teachers, and it will get help from MIT. And if you want another giant red flag to plant in the Academy's front yard, consider this:

It’s unclear if it will work: “Competency-based” teacher education has a thin track record, and though research has been done on the teaching fellowships the Woodrow Wilson Foundation has run for the last decade, the foundation has not released it. But the Academy has the funding, prestige, and handle on the zeitgeist to suggest that its approach will influence teacher education in the years ahead.

Imagine this. Your friend runs into the house with a great new product. "This will totally help your plants grow," your friend yells. "I'll show you." And your friend goes into the next room where the plants are, and you hear some noises, and then your friend comes out, shuts the door, and tells you, "You know what? Don't look in there." Do you deduce that the product worked? No, neither do I.

But hey-- who cares if your idea works, as long as you have money and prestige and the zeitgeist on your side.

So this really isn't looking good so far, but Barnum is still writing, so let's see if anything starts to look better.

What is the Academy?

Well, it's a project going back to 2015 as a partnership between Woodrow Wilson (the foundation, not the dead President) and MIT. It raised $22 million from Chan Zuckerberg, the Gates Foundation and the Bezos Foundation, among others, with their eyeballs on another ten mill. And they've grabbed up ten "design fellows," recent college grads to work out how this program should work.

Alex Trunnell, one of the fellows, recognizes there's no one right way to set up a classroom, so the Academy is setting up a teaching "gym" for practice, with 3d software for designing space and a simulation program from Mursion, a company that promises "customized training simulations for any workplace." Also, the fellows work in after-school programs.

So, unless I've missed something, we've got a program to train people how to be teachers, piloted by people who have never been teachers. Augmented with software written by other non-teachers.

I learned, in part, classroom management by sitting in class with Dr. Robert Schall. While we presented our prepared lessons, Dr. Schall "simulated" the behavior of Bobby, a realistically uninterested student. Those session were invaluable because, as someone who had worked for years in a classroom, Dr. Schall had a good grasp of exactly what that kind of behavior looked like. He was not computerized, but he was in 3D.

One of the features that has emerged as a defining quality of education reform is an absolute ignorance of decades of work by millions of professionals in the field they want to revolutionize. What better exemplifies that than a teacher preparation program that does not involve or consult actual teachers?

The Model's Challenges

To work, the Academy will need to successfully assess the skills it expects prospective teachers to master. That’s a tall order, particularly before teachers actually have their own classrooms.

Indeed, that is the second of two huge hurdles (we'll get back to the first in a second). How will they meet this challenge? The short answer is, they don't know. Or as Pam Grossman of the University of Pennsylvania puts it regarding "context-specific" skills like developing strong relationships with students, "We don't have assessments yet that really assess the quality of those kinds of practices."

The third hurdle is money. The program wants to charge about $25K for an open-ended (you just stay in the program until you've checked off the forty-odd items) program that may or may not make a real teacher out of you.

The first hurdle? Barnum didn't ask a critical question here-- where did the list of forty-some specific skills come from, and what basis is there for believing that the list is correct? This should be the biggest, reddest flag of all....

Particularly because Woodrow Wilson has been pursing away at teaching for a while, and there is zero evidence that any of their attempts to "transform teacher education while preparing future leaders in the teaching profession" have actually yielded useful results. Levine says they have research results and they are totally going to release those some day, but it's worth remembering that the foundation has an ideological axe to grind.

The dream?

The dream is that the program will be hugely successful and then it will become a resource center and the approach will scale up and spread like educational kudzu. They don't want to compete-- they want to become partners with all the other programs whose expertise they're ignoring as they build their new program.

As Barnum notes, Levine makes an odd poster person for this approach, as he has not been a fan of all those future partners (his paper about teacher prep includes chapter titles like "The Pursuit of Irrelevance" "Low Admission Standards," and "Insufficient Quality Control.") But he insists that he's totally not that guy, and wants to be a helpful bud to all the teacher prep programs that he has previously ignored and/or dissed.

I'm thinking we're worrying about the cart when the horse hasn't even been born yet. The program is up and running, missing only a justification for their approach, an effective way to deliver it, and a valid means of measuring its success. They don't know if they're doing the right thing, how they're going to accomplish it, or how they'll know they've accomplished it, and their are red flags waving brightly around all three of those issues. Outside of that, though, they're right on track for some prestigious zeitgeist funding.

Bad Management and Flaming Possums

For Throwback Thursday, here's a piece that I ran in my local newspaper column almost a decade ago. It's still one of the most popular items I ever ran, and it even prompted some fans to create some art to go with it. It's not about education-- except that some of you will absolutely recognize the management problem described here.


One great workplace mystery: why do some people get punished for good work while people who do lousy work are rewarded for their slackness?

Ordinarily, it’s smart to make the most use of your best people. If Pat can build ten types of widgets quickly and Chris can only do two kinds at a moderate tempo, then the smart response to a new complicated rush widget order is to give it to Pat.

But in this scenario, Chris is less spectacular, but still competent. It’s when a weak manager and an incompetent worker enter the picture that the backwards rewards system kicks in.

One major rule of bad management is “Avoid problems.” Bad managers don’t know how to fix problems or deal with crises, so their management style is based on ignoring, waiting, hiding, or sweeping under carpets.

When Mr. Dimbulb [that could be Principal Dimbulb or Superintendent Dimbulb for education purposes] considers his workers, he’s not thinking “How do I get the best work out of this person?” He’s thinking, “How can I get this person to create the fewest problems for me?”

For Mr. Dimbulb, the best workers are the ones who solve their own problems, or at least won’t pass them back up to the front office. If Mr. Dimbulb needs to hand a flaming dead possum to someone, he’ll hand it to the person least likely to squirt it with kerosene and throw it back.

So the best, most responsible workers get the flaming dead possums.

Pat may get tired and frustrated. Pat may go home thinking, “Can’t Dimbulb see that I’m killing myself putting out these dead possums? Can’t he see I’m staying late and starting early and wearing myself out? Can’t he see there’s a problem?”

The answer is, no, he can’t, because those problems aren’t Mr. Dimbulb’s problems. All he knows, all he needs to know, is that there is no flaming dead possum on his desk. And as long as he can make them go away by handing them off to Pat, Pat will be the flaming dead possum specialist.

But for Mr. Dimbulb, Chris is a challenge. If Dimbulb hands Chris so much as a slightly stuporous hamster, he’ll get yelping from Chris, calls from the customer and Chris’s supervisor, and complaints from all quarters about Chris’s mishandling of the little dysfunctional rodent. Not only will he not get rid of the hamster, but Chris will manage to turn it into an angry water buffalo.

From Dimbulb’s standpoint, the best job to give Chris is an assignment along the lines of “Go sit in the shady corner and take a nap.”

So for doing good work, Pat gets dumped on, and for being incompetent, Chris gets a cushy job that demands little.

A better manager than Mr. Dimbulb would follow a simple two-step process.

Step One: Help Chris Improve and Become Competent.

Step Two: If Step One Fails, Fire Chris. [Do not tell me this can't be done to teachers. It absolutely can. It just requires administrators to do their damn jobs.]

A manager can skip step one in certain extreme cases (Chris is late every single day, Chris blows up workplace, Chris shoots colleagues). But generally the first smart move is to see if Chris can be salvaged or turned into something productive. It is, after all, a manager’s job to figure out how to get the best work out of his people.

Mr. Dimbulb will not choose this option. He is pretty sure it would be hard. At the very least it would require him to take on a problem, and this is where his fundamental weakness as a manager lies. You can only solve a problem if A) you acknowledge it exists and B) acknowledge that it’s your problem. And Dimbulb’s first priority is to make sure that he doesn’t have any problems.

And since none of the problems are his, he never solves any of them. He just keeps passing them on to the employees who, as far as he knows, make the problems go away. And he gets angry at the people who keep bringing him more problems.

Under this system, competent employees face a tough decision. They can keep enabling their incompetent boss, like the alcoholic’s wife who keeps telling the kids, “Daddy missed Christmas because the space aliens got him.”

Or they can step back and let the next flaming dead possum burn the place down, thereby running the risk of either getting themselves fired or letting the workplace self-destruct. Option #3 is to send articles like this one to Mr. Dimbulb, but this never helps, because the Dimbulbs of the world will never recognize themselves in this column.