Tampio: Common Core vs. Democracy

So I have another reading recommendation for you. This time it's from Nicholas Tampio, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University and friend of this blog. Common Core: National education Standards and the Threat to Democracy approaches the Common Core territory from a slightly different angle-- does such a system belong in a democratic(ish) country? The title telegraphs Tampio's conclusion, but it's still worth your time to read this book.

Another addition to your read-me stack

Tampio is impressively fair and measured, and his book lays out multiple sides of the issue clearly (well, except for some of the really crazy ones); this book is not merely an argument for one side of the Common Core debate, but a well-sourced explication of many sides. In doing so, Tampio shows an intellectual honesty and even-handedness that I appreciate-- it's not generally useful to assume that people on The Other Side of an issue disagree with you because they are evil and/or stupid. If you've been trying to understand where some Core fans are coming from, Tampio's book covers that nicely.

Tampio considers the arguments for and against any nationals stanrdas at all, and then spends a chapter each considering specific standards (ELA, math, science, history and, yes, even sexuality standards) looking in each case at the specific problems with each set of standards.

Tampio's explanation of the standards is quite good. By connecting ELA standards to David Coleman's anti-classic essay "Cultivating Wonder," showing how Coleman's idea of "thinking" is really a specialized kind of quoting and regurgitation. He breaks down how Coleman-style "close reading" is really about selecting and presenting the "correct" quotes from an excerpt-- not a critical thinking exercise at all. Quoting Dewey:

"Democracy cannot flourish where the chief influences in selecting subject matter of instruction are utilitarian ends narrowly conceived for the masses, and for the higher education of the few, the traditions of a specialized cultivated class. The notion that the 'essentials' of elementary education are the three R's mechanically treated, is based upon ignorance of the essential needed for realization of democratic ideals." We have seen that Common Core curricula and testing require studnets to repeat verbatim passages from a text. Quoting accurately is not thinking; thinking is a more complicated and fluid process that requires experimenting to solve the problem.

Tampio's chapter on math standards shows how Core math is heavily dependent on Core-style reading, and that the requirement to explain does not, in this narrow testing environment, prove that students understand anything:

Beales and Garelick argue that writing explanations sometimes turns routine problems into "unnecessary and tedious" assignments. They observe that many students first solve the problems in their heads and then write a narrative using "verbalism" they have been taught. It is not that the students now understand how their mathematical minds work; it is that they can sufficiently repeat the words that the teacher has told them they need to do if they want a good grade.

Step by step, Tampio leads us through the various standards (some more controversial than others)to a conclusion. National standards fans may argue that we can certainly agree on a minimum set of national standards that all students need to be ready for college and career. Except that, of course, we can't. "Reasonable people disagree over how to teach literacy, numeracy, science, history and sexual health." 

What Tampio provides here is the capstone to the argument that many of us make, only when education guys like moi argue against national standards, we end up conclude with sputterings about, "Well, that's just not how education is supposed to work. That's not what it's supposed to be." Which I believe with all my heart and soul, but also recognize as a fuzzy conclusion to the argument. But Tampio brings us back the threat to democracy(ish) that such standards represent.

In our country, we are witnessing powerful people granting themselves the right to decide how nearly all American children are educated. And many parents, teachers, and educators, including those in historically disadvantaged communities, are saying no to top-down, standards-based reform. People want a say in what and how the local schools teach children.

The book is brief, pithy, to-the-point and well-focused, making it a great gift for your civilian friend who wants a quick, accessible explanation of what all the fuss is about. Since it's a fuss, you may disagree with some of it (I'm solidly in the anti-national standards camp, but I know reasonable people who aren't). For those of us who are already familiar with the fuss, it's a good exercise in organizing and explaining what exactly is wrong with the national standards movement and why it's not just a bad way to run an education system, but a bad way to run a democratic(ish) society. 

Another Bad Personalized Pitch

I am running out of clever titles for this sort of piece, but the sheer number of investor pitches for personalized [sic] education require me to stretch. While these may seem a bit redundant, I think it's important that we see just how many versions of this same bad pitch are out there. This is why bad policy persists-- because a whole bunch of people have convinced themselves the bad policy will make them rich.

Say hello to EVC Ventures, a $50 million Chicago-based Venture Capital fund focused globally on early-stage startups. Or, as their website listing puts it, "where start-ups become unicorns." One of their portfolios is Ed Tech, which explains why managing partner Anjil Jain is in Entrepreneur today, pitching Personalized [sic] Learning as the next bit of awesomeness. She graduated from the Horace Mann school and has a BA in Anthropology from Columbia University. She's an investment person, not an educator.

The headline is "Are You Integrating Personalized Learning Into Your Curriculum?" which seems to assume that school superintendents and curriculum planners are big readers of Entrepreneur India. But the subheading makes big, important promises-- "Personalized learning with the help of Artificial Intelligence will change the Education System." It's possible that we're trying to sell education to companies' in house training programs.

Here's the very first paragraph:

Well, a school is a place we all hold as a dear memory; however, there were also days when school seemed redundant with the same old classroom instructions, lectures, books, and other such activities. With each new day, education is taking an extra step to kill that redundancy and promote a more personalized experience for their students.

Ah, yes. Books and other such activities. And redundancy. And one more critique of public school classrooms as they were in 1962. Do we want to kill redundancy? Because repetition is a really useful learning tool. But let's not tarry too long at this first graph, because Jain is just getting warmed up.

As the old school routine became more superfluous, education needed a change for accessibility through transformative technology and personalized learning secures a good place for the same.

It is, as one colleague, observed, as if Betsy DeVos was being translated by an AI.

What else can be more fitting than the ideal blend of technological betterments and the need for educational advancements? Where traditional tactics take a step back in the progressive world, advancements like AI and data analytics take the lead and stay up front to show the demanded growth.

What is the ideal blend? That's one of the many specific areas that Anjl is not going to approach at all. She will, however,  quote "a report" that 16% of jobs will be lost to AI and tech over the next decade (she appears to be quoting a market research report from Forrester). AI and data analyrtics "are all set to show miracles to the world" and "prove their mettle in the education industry." And the hits just keep on coming:

Helping students at their own pace is one of the prerequisites an educational institution must focus on. Notwithstanding, the very task is not as simple as it sounds. Howbeit, AI comes to the rescue in this scenario by personalizing the learning experience for every student. This all is possible with the combined help of data analytics and AI. Where data analytics helps in gathering and presenting the behavioral as well as learning curves of the students, AI helps the students by putting emphasis on the topics they need help with. Teachers can work as a helping hand to guide the students whenever they feel the need of the additional support.

Slog through the tortured prose (yes, "howbeit" is a word, albeit an archaic one) and you see the usual promises. Students learn at their own pace. Data is collected for both academic and behavioral analysis. Teachers are sidelined. How does any of this work? Well, you know-- AI and data and magical fairy dust.

But there's good news for teachers as well.

Grading every individual is not a sweat task for the teachers anymore.

Well, thank goodness, because I have all the sweat tasks I can handle. But AI and data analytics will grade the tests. In fact, they will even generate "performance-based tests" (check one more item off the buzzword list).

The world is changing and I believe, no student is ready for an average learning experience. Every business, be it the one leading in the industry or the one, which just started talking business, is trying to lure the students around the world with their provision of enhanced learning experiences.

Want some explanation of how this could actually work? Too bad-- the end of the article is almost here, and we still have some buzzwords to work in:

Students of today won't be satisfied if you provide them with the traditional learning setups, like a classroom and a teacher reading through the notes. They want the incorporation of techniques like adaptive learning, digital courseware, and almost any technology that can help them learn as per their learning curve.

Yes, who wants learning in a stupid classroom with some teacher just, you know, teaching stuff. Hey, I can scratch off "adaptive learning" and "digital courseware" now! Let's wind up for the big finish:

Every student is unique and has a different pace of learning, personalized learning will allow students to accelerate at their own pace. The main reason why personalized learning has become such as important part of the higher education system is because of its assessment-driven features, showcasing academic advancements from time spent in a classroom to competencies mastered with experiences. There's no one size fits all in the education space. Now the question is; have you implemented this yet?

A nod to micro-competencies and the not-one-size-fits-all of what is most likely a one-size-fits-all software solution.

"Data analytics" appears eight times in this piece; "AI" appears fifteen times. An explanation of exactly what those are purported to be, or exactly how they would help anyone learn anything-- that appears zero times. Just a repetition of these and other buzzwords like a magic incantation intended to conjure up.... well, what? Investor money, I suppose. What hasn't happened here, of course, is any attempt by the investment firm to actually study up on education  history, the background or application of personalized [sic] learning, or the actual practical wisdom of employing (or defining) such a system. What hasn't happened here is any attempt to acquire understanding any deeper than a shallow pile of buzzwords. I guess all of that would have been too much of a sweat task.                                                                                                                                                                
                                         

Public

Recently Education Secretary Betsy DeVos met with the cadre of Teachers of the Year. Most of what came out of the meeting was predictable, but a special insight award goes to the TOTY from my own state:

“One of the things that was so stark and memorable in that exchange was. … Secretary DeVos trying to redefine what the word ‘public’ is,” said Michael Soskil Sr., Pennsylvania’s teacher of the year. “It was almost like Orwellian doublespeak to me.”

The charter sector has been trying to redefine "public" for years. Identifying charters as public schools solves a variety of marketing problems by giving the impression that charters include features that people expect from their public school. "Oh, a public school," the customers say. "That must mean that the school will be open forever (certainly all of this year), it is staffed with qualified professionals, and is required to meet any special needs that my child might have. Oh, and as a public school, I'm sure it must be accountable to the public as well."

Of course, none of these things are true, but the use of the word "public" is a buffer against having the questions even come up. I mean, who even thinks to ask a public school to guarantee that it will stay open all year?

"Public" when it comes to schools has been taken to mean "operated by the public, paid for by the public, serving the public, and accountable to the public." Charter fans would like it to mean "paid for by the public" and nothing else. They would like voters and taxpayers not to think of charter schools as private schools that are paid for with public money. They would like voters and taxpayers absolutely not to think of charters as businesses that allow private people and companies to make money by billing the taxpayer. They would definitely not like the voters and taxpayers to think of charters as schools that are "accessible" to all, but which only serve a select few (like a Lexus dealership). They would certainly not like the voters and taxpayers to think of charters as businesses that are accountable only to their owners and operators-- and not transparently accountable to the public. The word "public" is a handy fig leaf to cover all of that.

But DeVos would like to twist the meaning of "public" even further.

DeVos envision an education system that includes charter and private and voucher schools, with perhaps a few public schools thrown in so we have a place to put the children of Those People, the ones that the charters and private schools don't want. Her idea of public accessibility is that any member of the public can have the chance to be accepted or rejected by the school. Her idea of public accountability is that "customers" are free to choose (though the ultimate choice rests with the charter and voucher schools). By this reasoning, all businesses are public-- except that we know that's not true.

What does "public" mean in the DeVosian world? Certainly not "controlled, owned, accountable to, regulated by, and open to all of the public." Again, the public has no role except to pay. Or possibly, if they have the power and connections, members of the public are free to try to score a piece of the unprotected tax dollar pie.

Edupreneurs have long complained about the "government monopoly," about the restrictions that keep them from being able to score some of that sweet government money. Maybe that's the key to the DeVosian idea of "public"-- "public" schools are schools that give entrepreneurs and businesses the chance to funnel a bunch of public tax dollars into their private bank account."

That definition would fit the current administration, where the President and cabinet members operate their offices for their private benefit and are accountable to nobody. In their universe, "public" means "not walled off by a bunch of regulations that keep tax dollars away from enterprising businessmen." Or to shorten it, "public" means "able to be privatized."

It's not quite an Orwellian reversal. "Private" means "it's mine and you can't take any of it" and "public" means "I'm able to take a piece of it for myself." Which means we have no word left for describing something that is part of the commons, held and protected transparently by representative government for the good of all citizens. It would be nice to have a word for that, but in the world our leaders have in mind, we may not need aby such word.

CA: A Misguided Attack on Teachers' Union

Jay Matthews is an education columnist for the Washington Post, so he should know better. "I've been around," he says. Well, yes. Mathews was not always tough on Shee Who Will Not Be Named, but he did catch the echoes of the DCPS graduation scandal on the national level, even as the Washington Post completely failed to catch that story.

But last week Mathews' Been Aroundiness failed him in a wrong-headed rebuke of the California Teachers Association. He's responding to a new CTA radio ad. Here's the whole script for that ad:

They’re lining up against our local public schools. One after another, out-of-state billionaires are trying to buy our politicians. Following the lead of Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos, billionaires like Koch brothers allies Jim and Alice Walton have their own narrow education agenda to divert money out of our public schools and into their corporate charter schools. It’s true. Out-of-state billionaires investing millions into politicians who will protect corporate-run charter schools that lack accountability.

So as California chooses its next generation of leaders this election we must stand up to politicians who divert money out of our neighborhood public schools and say yes to leaders who value the promise of quality public education for all students no matter where they live. And leaders who always put kids before profits. Learn more at kidsnotprofits.com. Paid for by the California Teachers Association.

First of all, Mathews wants to trot out that old charter distinction without a difference. The spot, he says, implies that charters are all profit machines when in fact, he points out, 97% of California charters are non-profit.

This is a tired, tired talking point. It's true that for-profit charters, like cyber-school giant K-12, have committed their own sort of offenses against the state of California. But to imagine that non-profits are somehow less interested in the grubbing of money is simply counterfactual. Nonprofit charters are still businesses and are still focused on making money. True, since that money will be distributed as big fat wages or paid to for-profit contractors and not issued to shareholders, we're not strictly talking about profits. But it's a meaningless distinction. There are so many ways for non-profit charter schools to make private individuals and companies wealthy, and because California barely regulates its charters, California's charter sector is particularly vulnerable.

Take for instance the now decade-old case of California Charter Academy, a once-huge charter chain founded by Charles Steven Cox, a former insurance executive. Cox was founder and CEO the charter chain, and he hired a company to provide "management services" to the school. That company was a for-profit business, and its CEO was Charles Steven Cox.

That's the same self-dealing personal enrichment scheme used by Kendra Onkonkwo for her Wisdom Academy for Young Scientists in Watts. Or this Bay Area charter chain that used its right hand to pay its left hand.

You can find other classic examples of California charter-based profiteering in this report from In the Public Interest. These are not hard examples to find-- the techniques for using a supposedly non-profit charter to feed directly into a for-profit business (or a private pocket) are well-known and not particularly new at this point. And that's before we even get to issues like, say, increased segregation in California charters.

Mathews avows his dislike for for-profit charters, because "the best teachers I know want to help kids, not investors." He's an education reporter-- surely he understands that many non-profit charters are simply a protective layer between tax dollars and for-profit companies that collect the rent on the building, provide the educational services, and contract for other management functions. You know who's published some good pieces about this web of non-profit and for-profit companies? The Washington Post.

But Mathews is offended-- personally offended-- that CTA is spreading the scurrilous lie that charters are often in it for the money.

He'll throw around some more baloney in support of his point. For instance, charter schools are public schools. He's an education reporter, and as such, should well know that the best thing one can say about that assertion is that it's a highly-debated claim, and the worst thing you can say about is that it's a lie. Charters are privately run businesses that are paid with public dollars. He's also going to make the claim that charters cannot pick the applicants they want-- which is another careful construction. Charters can't pick who applies, though they can certainly use advertising-- paid for with public tax dollars-- to affect which families choose to apply. And they can (and do) influence who stays. He also wants to tell us that some research shows that African Americans and Hispanic students are doing better in charters; he does not discuss how that may simply show that charters have creamed successfully, nor does he discuss that "better" just means "scored higher on a single narrow standardized test."

Mathews angrily characterizes the CTA spot as "rubbish," but where's the rubbishy part? Billionaires want to divert public dollars to corporate coffers? Well, yes, they do-- surely he didn't miss the story about Eli Broad's plan to grab half the LA education "market" for charter schools. Do outside billionaires spend a bunch of money trying to influence local politics? Well, yesh-- surely he didn't miss the story about outside rich folks trying to crush the charter cap in Massachusetts and getting caught and spanked for cheating.  And what will Mathews make of the appointment of Austin Beutner, a Wall Street money guy with no education background at all (but lots of money) and limited LA ties as Superintendent of LAUSD?

Charter do divert money away from public schools. Charters do put money ahead of students, as witnessed by the number of times charters close down during the year for financial reasons. Charters are businesses; that does not make them inherently evil or destructive, but it does mean that financial concerns come first.

Yes, the CTA is guilty of some rhetorical corner cutting by using "profits" as shorthand for the various financial aspects of the charter business. But their spot is not rubbish and it's not counter to the truth. Mathews has used arguments that I would expect from someone who never reads anything on the subject but charter promotional materials. I expect better from an education reporter who has been around.

Happy Frickin' Birthday, Nation At Risk

Lots of folks are offering up word salad to commemorate the 35th anniversary of "A Nation at Risk," the high profile educational chicken-littling that laid the foundation for all the disaster capitalistic attacks on education ever since.

On this occasion, here's the article you must not miss.

None of the information in Anya Kamenetz's piece is new; some is from interviews she conducted years ago for her 2015 book The Test. There are critical points to remember here.

Results Decided First

But what I learned in talking to two of the original authors of “A Nation At Risk” was that they never set out to undertake an objective inquiry into the state of the nation’s schools.

The most common interpretation of the report is something along the lines of "back in 1983, a bunch of folks decided to do a big old study of public education and see how it was doing, and golly bob howdy-- didn't they discover that US education was a giant suckfest!"

That interpretation, Kamenetz's interviews make clear, is incorrect. Actual story? Some folks in the Reagan administration had already decided that there was some sort of crisis in education, so they went looking for proof of the conclusion they had already reached. This indicates, if nothing else, that Crisis #1 was that these people had never learned the Scientific Method when they were in school.

It also indicates that the report cherry-picked data to match the conclusion it wanted to draw.

Cherry Picking the Data

The report skimmed over the highest-ever graduation numbers. And it focused on the decline of average SAT scores over the previous twenty years. And while that data point was not exactly a lie, it was also not the truth.

Kamenetz brings back the follow-up report, done by the Department of Energy in 1990-- a report that found "To our surprise, on nearly every measure, we found steady or slightly improving trends." For instance, average SAT scores were dropping-- because more and more students were taking the test. Each subgroup was actually improving, but adding more of the lower-scoring subgroups to the mix dropped the average.

ANAR Repeatedly Debunked

If you want more articles poking holes in the 1983 report, they're out there. Kamenetz highlights a 2004 scholarly article by James Guthrie who concludes simply "The idea that American schools were worse just wasn't true."

But If You Really Want To Evaluate ANAR, Just Check the Sky

The report concluded, among other things "The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people."

In 1983, they told us that the sky is falling. It's falling any day now. If we don't act right away, America is doomed! Any day now. And yet, since 1983, two things have not happened.

First, nobody from DC has ever announced, "Yeah, you can relax. We totally fixed it." No, instead, our leader types still routinely announce that, as our Secretary of Education announced at the Reagan Institute's anniversary party, "Our nation is still at risk." And yet--

Second, in thirty-five years, the sky has not fallen. The nation has not collapsed. The supposed decline in education has not led to a disastrous disintegration of the Republic.

Critics of public education have had 35 years to back up these pre-fabricated cries of a concocted crisis, and yet 35 years later, there's no evidence that the authors of the report were correct.

So Why Do We Still Wave This Bloody Shirt?

The answer is also in Kamenetz's article, because although I do love her work, she is one more member of the education press who has apparently signed a pledge to never run an article that doesn't include a quote from Michael Petrelli. I'm not sure why right-tilted thinky tanks are always represented in ed pieces but working educators and public ed supporters are not (lord knows there are plenty of us out here willing to talk), but on this occasion, Petrilli's quote is pretty illuminating. [Correction: Kamenetz has correctly pointed out that this is her first Petrilli quote in an article.]

Although there has been some progress, “the reason that we continue to mark the anniversary is that [the worry] still rings true,” says Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He calls the report “a touchstone”; it’s in the mission statement of the Institute, which promotes school choice, testing and accountability.

There you have it. First, we keep bringing it up because it "rings true," which is not at all the same as "is supported by actual data and facts." It just, you know, feels truthy. And it a "touchstone" for reformsters, a key brick in the foundation of all education reform that says public schools are in terrible trouble and we must fix/disrupt/change/replace them right away.

A Nation At Risk remains what it has always been-- someone who wants to tear down a school and replace it with a business, so he pulls the school fire alarm to get everyone to run out of the building. But after 35 years, there's still no fire, still little smoke, and ironically the smoke at this point all comes from the various fires that reformsters have built to help clear the place out. 

Despite the lack of solid evidence to back it up, "A Nation at Risk" will continue to live on because it is useful for the people who want to dismantle and privatize public education. It was created as a tool for that purpose in the first place, and as long as it can still serve that purpose, we'll continue to throw it birthday parties and trot it out whenever we want to get the sirens wailing again. Those are the moments when the rest of us will need to step up and remind people what the report really is, how it was really written, how much the sky hasn't fallen yet, and why it's not nice to yell "fire" in a crowded school. In other words, after you read the Kamenetz article, you probably need to bookmark it. 

Making Trouble (or "Other Lessons of West Virginia, Arizona, et. al.")

"Can you just handle this but leave my name out of it?"

I'll bet most union local presidents have heard some version of that phrase at least once. Teachers tend to be non-confrontational authority-respecters, so when the People In Charge do us wrong, we want the problem to go away without us having to make any trouble.

The thing is, at that point, the trouble is already made. The only question is how we are going to handle the trouble.

Some of the worst administrators in the country are enabled by their staffs. I don't that they're enabled by toadying co-conspirators, like the hyenas in the Lion King-- though those types certainly exist. No, I mean the teachers who simply do nothing, record nothing, report nothing. I mean the teachers who call their union leaders and say, "My principal said this highly unprofessional thing to me and too this abusive action against me, and I want to make him stop, but I don't want my name attached to it and don't mention the specifics or he'll know it was me." Which means the union leader is left going to the district with a complaint of, "Somebody did something wrong to somebody sometime in one of the buildings." Not surprisingly, this gets few results.

It's not my intent to blame victims here. There are states and districts and schools where the power balance is way out of wack and teachers can't voice the slightest complaint without risking their job (this is, of course, true at almost all charter schools). I don't envy anyone who has to make a choice between calling out unethical behavior and putting food on their family table. 

But there are also situations in which the teacher in question wants to keep things quiet because "he'll be mean to me" or "he'll yell at me." There are schools where teachers volunteer hundreds or thousands of hours of work for free, complain bitterly about it to each other-- but then keep doing it, hoping somehow that administration will see that this makes the teachers sad, and so will be moved to stop making such requests.

Here's a rule you can absolutely count on-- if you say nothing and do nothing, nothing will change.

Every time Principal Asshat is abusive to staff and nobody says or does anything, he gets the message that he is free to be just as abusive as he wants to be. If you think silence, appeasement and avoidance will lead to a morning when he wakes up and says, "You know, I think I should stop being an abusive asshat today," I have aa bridge over some swampland to sell you.

The teachers or West Virginia, Colorado, Arizona, Oklahoma and Kentucky waited for a long time for their legislatures to stop being abusive asshats. It didn't work. Walking out and calling them out seems to be producing better results than suffering (or quitting). 

I know, I know. You don't want to get all political. You just want to close the door to your room and teach. You don't want to provoke Principal Asshat into new paroxysms of asshattery. But there are two things to remember--

1) You've already got a cancer in your building, and it will not improve on its own. You didn'r ask for it,; you didn't create it-- but it's there. You have only two choices-- you can either make things better or make things worse. Doing nothing just lets the cancer grow. Things will get worse.

2) Never underestimate your ability to be a counter-friction to the machine. The old playground rules about standing up to bullies still apply.

True story: In one district, a principal decided to flex her boss muscles over her two buildings, so she started calling nuisance staff meetings at the end of the day, so that between student dismissal and teacher dismissal, teachers couldn't get work done. At School A, the teachers showed up for the every-other-day meetings, sat politely but sadly, complained to each other afterwards, and a couple asked the union to "do something but leave my name out of it." At School B, the teachers showed up for the meetings with their stacks of papers from the day, and as Principal Asshat rambled on about nothing, the teachers all had their heads down grading papers. Guess where the principal decided to stop having meetings first? Yes, School B.

I'm sure there are other stories (feel free to share them in the comments) all the way up to teachers who have had to stand up to their bosses in court. Other teachers look at these sorts of things and say, "I just don't want that kind of trouble. I don't want to stir things up."

But sometimes trouble finds you. It may well be that your preferred choice would be for there to be no trouble, but sometimes that choice isn't available. You can only chose from among the options that you have, and it is sadly true that administrators and politicians can remove all the desirable options in a situation. 

If you're still reluctant to stand up, this is the time to remember that your working conditions are students' learning conditions. One of the things students learn at school is how grownups function in the workplace. And everything else they learn is colored by the atmosphere of that workplace. What do you want your students to learn? And what kind of atmosphere do you want them to do their learning in? 

Look-- I'm not saying to get yourself fired over a policy about how many copies you're allowed. And I'm not saying you should raise a giant stink every time you don 't get your favorite parking space or the cafeteria runs out of your favorite flavor of ice cream. That really is making trouble. You have to be smart about how you pick your battles and how you fight them. 

When things are really wrong, doing nothing doesn't help. And we have an obligation to our students to speak out and stand up. 

ICYMI: April Showers Edition (4/29)

My new desktop is in the shop, again, so we're struggling here, but I still have some good reads for you from this week.

Bill Gates Is the Latest Billionaire Funders of Cunningham's EdPost

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider is just as prolific as I am, and she does valuable research, as in this piece that peels back the financial covers on Education Post, the operation into which reformsters are pouring millions of dollars.

The Soul Crushing Student Essay

Yep. This is still a thing.

Personalized Learning and Why Not To

One more look at the problems with this emerging trend

Dispelling Three Teacher Myths

From Arizona, three responses to some of the baloney leveled against teachers.

The GOP Must Hate Public Schools.

A blistering op-ed about the GOP assault on public ed

Teaching Machines, or How the Automation of Education Became Personalized Learning.

Nobody draws lines between history and the present like Audrey Watters. Here's some critical background on the emergence of personalized [sic] learning