CT: Steve Perry Fizzles

Once upon a time, Dr. Steve Perry was an education reform rock star. In 2005, he launched and led Capital Preparatory Magnet School, a Hartford charter school that was a prototype of sorts for many charters that would follow. No excuses, strict dress code, and a mission to elevate black students in Connecticut, the school embodied every controversy we've come to associate with modern charters. The claim of 100% college attendance, without any figures about how many students gad been shed since 9th grade to get there. The excessive control of students. The financial support from friendly billionaires (including the Koch Brothers). The careful curating of a student body selected to make the school look good. The bashing of the teachers union and the high staff turnover.

This guy

But beyond all that, there is Perry himself. Perry has worked hard to market himself as "America's most talked-about educator" and there was a time when you couldn't turn on the tv without seeing him-- so often, in fact, that many questioned just how much time he spent in the building where he was supposed to be principal. He was a reform spokesperson out there with She Who Will Not Be Named (former DC school chief). Meanwhile, he set up a private company to handle charter school management (a classic profiting from your no-profit charter school). Perry has been a commentator on CNN, MSNBC and Essence, plus Fox, and he is not shy about promoting himself as a major voice in education. AEI lists him in their speakers bureau. Perhaps you caught him this summer on his World Wide Education Truth Tour. And his bio captures as well as anything his skill at self-promotion:

Dr. Steve Perry is one of most educators in America. Widely respected by grassroots community members and internationally renowned leaders, his charismatic and compelling voice is an inspiration

He is the educator Oprah Winfrey, Sean "P-Diddy" Combs, Bishop TD Jakes and Steve Harvey call on to offer insight to parents and children. A diverse array of politicians and groups, from the Urban League to ALEC, even President Donald Trump, have reached out to Dr. Perry to better understand what matters to parents.

Not that everybody loves him. A one-star review at Yelp from 2013 says:

Don't send your kids here. You will regret it and it's not worth the trauma to your kids. We need to stop allowing these fame-seeking, fake reformers to ruin our kids and schools! This principal is worse than the teachers and unions he complains about!

Yes, he's the guy who helped P-Diddy get into the charter school racket. He's also the guy who caused a kerfluffle by taking rejection of one of his ideas poorly, tweeting "All this did is piss me off. It's so on. Strap up, there will be head injuries."

So given his prolific and lucrative career, it's a little surprising to find him attached to a misfire of a reform idea. H/t to some Connecticut peeps for spotting "My Child My Choice." Perry is the lead name of six board members for this group who are "united in the belief that the education crisis facing children of color is a tragedy that demands a crisis response from our elected leaders." The other board member include Dr. Charlene Reid (CEO of a charter management organization), Pastor William McCullough (Faith ACTS for Education), State Senator Douglas McCrory, George Parker (StudentsFirst, education consultant, and the DC teacher union president who worked with She Who Will Not Be Named to set up their disastrous accountability system, professional school choice expert witness), Ruben Felipe (campaign consultant).

Those are the players. It looks like a mighty reform group.

Now, somebody forgot the first rule of naming a new enterprise, because a quick google would have told them that "My Child My Choice" is a favorite slogan of the anti-vaccination movement. It takes a little extra effort to find this new reform group on line because Anti-Vaxxers have already snapped up a lot of the related real estate.

That may not matter because My Child My Choice has been mighty quiet. On the website on their blog are two posts, both from May 25, 2018.

The video plugs the slogan "It's only right that the money should follow the child" and pushes for more funding for charter schools.

“What Do You See” is dedicated to all the moms who fight this battle every day. Some of us have been lucky – we’ve found great public charter schools for our kids, schools that we CHOSE. But these schools aren’t available to everybody, and charter schools are still deeply underfunded.

If we parents going to get a world where our children are funded equally – no matter what public school they attend – then we need to get active.

As we see in many regions these days, charters have shifted their pitch from "Throwing more money at public schools won't help. We can do more with less." to "Please throw more money at us." Other standard hits include "charter schools are public schools," and the video also throws in "zip code."

The other post announces the launch of the campaign and encourages people to sign up for the mailing list and contribute money. You can also like their Facebook page which is filed under MChildMChoice because My Child My Choice is already occupied by the anti-vaxxers. Perry's group has 162 likes. The Facebok page does have some maintenance going on, with posts as recent as this morning (they are particularly fond of posting pieces from Education Post and The 74-- so, the usual corporate reform sources). The web page, despite promising "in the coming weeks and months, we'll share more ways you can help," hasn't put up anything new since those posts in May.

Hey. Not every reformster-sponsored initiative can get traction, and perhaps this one is more visible on the ground in Connecticut. Maybe they should have done their branding research more carefully (because being confused with a bunch of science-deniers is probably not helpful). But from out here in the cheap seats it looks as if Dr. Perry has fizzled this time.

Buying Local

When I was put in charge of the yearbook all those years ago, one of the first things I did was change photography vendors. There was nothing particularly wrong with the studio we were using, but they were headquartered several counties away. If we were going to steer several thousand dollars of lucrative school picture money somewhere, was my thinking, why not steer it back to a business within the school district. So I found somebody who could handle the work and brought the contract back to our area.

The move had the advantage of making service smoother (if there's a problem with an picture, the office is two minutes away), but that wasn't the point.

The point is that every school district, and everybody who works in that school district, is in a financial partnership with the local community-- particularly the taxpayers there. And they all have a responsibility to be good partners.

I live and work in a small town rural area; when money leaves our region, that's a big deal. If I have work to do, or goods and services to purchase, and I hire someone out of the area, that represents a chunk of money that leaves the area and stops helping the local economy work. Think of money as water and the local economy as a water wheel-- the more I direct water toward the wheel, the better it turns and the more power it generates. The more water directed away from it, the harder it is to keep the wheel turning and driving.

I have long argued that, whenever possible, teachers and school administrators should live within the communities that they serve. I recognize there are lots of practical issues here, starting with two-wage families where it's simply impossible for both to live in their district. But I have zero patience for teachers (and I know they exist because I've met them) who declare that they want to live far enough away that they don't have to run into students or parents in their off hours. No. You owe it to the community that supports you to support it.

I eat at local restaurants. I shop at local stores. I volunteer in groups that I enjoy but which I believe also enhance the community in which I live. Because every cent I've ever been paid came to me through the sacrifice of some local taxpayer.

There is no hypocrisy like economic hypocrisy. Everyone who knows me has heard my rant about people who bitch about how Bob's Widget Store is closing, but who always drive to the Big City to buy their widgets, or order their widgets on line. It's not complicated, folks-- if you want a business to survive, you need to feed it money.

It's not always easy or simple. The so-called retail apocalypse is less about people shopping on line than it is about hedtge fund managers gutting viable businesses for their own dun and profit-- Sears, ToysRUs, and the newspapers of Tronc did not have to die, but I'm not sure that local consumers could have saved them.

This is one of the problems of privatization. In the wake of the "let Amazon replace libraries" flap, Jeremy Mohler pointed out that there's a company-- Library Systems and Services-- that has been snatching up public libraries across six states, operating them with an eye on the bottom line. That represents a variety of problems (including crappy employment conditions for library employees), but one of those problems is the pipeline that now shoots taxpayer dollars straight out of the area.

Charter schools likewise often take local tax dollars and funnel them not just away from local public schools, but away from the entire local community. And so do some large public school systems that collect up big piles of tax dollars and decide that some folks will benefit from them, and some other folks won't get jack. Don't just follow the money to see who gets paid; pay attention to where the money doesn't go, too.

EdWeek notes that Amazon just scored a multi-billion dollar contract with a consortium of school districts, draining a huge pile of money away from the communities that contributed it. It's a coup for Amazon, but a loss for those communities. (It also raises the question-- if the Jobs of the Future are as packers in an Amazon plant, what does "college and career ready" really look like? A full day of phys ed class building physical endurance?)

Yes, the things we need are not always available close to home. But the closer to home we can be, the more we help the water wheels turn. And yes, it can sometimes be cheaper to buy distant-- but there are always hidden costs, and they take the form of the damage done to your local economy. And yes, you can say that none of that is your problem, whether you're a teacher cashing your check or an administrator placing an order. But if we want students to understand that they are part of a community, their fates tied to the fates of others, than we should model it. In this country, we have far too many safeguards in place to protect our delicate economic sensibilities, so that we never have to, say, confront the working conditions of the people who make all our Cheap Stuff. And given the nature of our world, sometimes we are simply parsing the least evils. But. But but but but but. Economic choices have consequences, and it does not make the world a better place for us to pretend that they don't.

Ignore Wallet Hub

There are several outlets that have made named for themselves by playing the ranking game. These rankings may, I suppose, be used by folks trying to make a decision, but some days I think their primary uses are A) PR for the winners and B) shortcuts for writers who want to be able to toss in a quick "Pootwaddle High School is highly ranked" into an article.

US News is the granddaddy of school ranking publications with their annual listing of the tippy toppest high schools in the US. It's a list that I would recommend that we all ignore, based on the methodology by which the list is built. They depend heavily on the widely debunked VAM sauce, and-- well, I'm saying the system can be gamed, but in recent years US News gave the #4 spot to a NYC school that doesn't actually exist.

Another prodigious Ranker of Stuff is WalletHub, a site that focuses mainly on credit, but somehow got itself into the listicle biz. That includes ranking the 50 states (plus DC) for education. It's a list I've seen referenced several times in the past few days, but I think it can be safely ignored.

The problems, again, are with methodology. Ranking all the states according to educational quality seems like a pretty complicated and complex business, the kind that almost nobody actually wants to bother with, so has whipped up a list of proxies for quality, and they aren't great ones.

Out of 100 points, 20 are assigned for Safety, and that score is based on reported rates of various naughty behaviors like bullying and "participating in violence." There is also this sort-of-hilarious category: High School Students With Access to Illegal Drugs. Vague enough to be 100% for everyone, and based on self-reported numbers from students, this seems likely to be data noise. Looking at these categories ("Incarceration rate") also highlights the problems of lumping state systems together. There are around 500 school districts in PA. Some schools are located in big cities; some are located in corn fields. Lumping these together creates the same problems as averaging. As one wag noted on Twitter this week, Betsy DeVos and I own an average of five yachts each, but we could also say that among education workers of our generation (Betsy and I are about the same age), we've collectively accumulated ten yachts.

When we get to the actual quality measures which make up the other 80/100 points, we find more problems.

WalletHub counts the number of schools in US News top 700. Will that include the imaginary schools, or just real ones? WalletHub also counts Blue Ribbon schools. It counts the high school graduation rate for low income students, but as DC has dramatically shown us, you can graduate a whole bunch of students without even making them show up. The dropout rate counts. And of course, they count math and reading scores on the Big Standardized Tests, because everyone loves BS Test scores as proxies for academic success, even if there's no reason to believe they actually represent real academic success. Never mind-- they're nice neat numbers, so we'll make do.

Then we throw in AP exam results (how many scored 3 or higher) and median scores for SAT and ACT, plus the share of graduates who took the test as well as "division of results by percentile." So the pricy BS Tests count for a lot.

Finally, the pupil-teacher ratio and the share of licensed public K-12 teachers.

WalletHub also reports some of the top and bottom states for some of the specific measures, so there's that. But mostly your state is a great for education if your students are good test takers.

So remember-- when you see a WalletHub ranking of states education quality, just keep walking on by. We'll talk about their ranking of states teacher-friendliness another time.

 

7 Requirements To Launch Personalized Learning Program

So you've decided that you want to get in on the Next Big Thing in education and launch a computer-based personalized learning program. Now you just need to line up the following items.

1. A huge library of materials.

You need teaching materials to suit every single student who logs on, every day, based on the individual student's strengths and weaknesses. After all, you're replacing the old system where some mass produced materials were intended to roughly hit the area mostly occupied by the majority of students. One size mostly fit most. If your instructional program is going to be custom tailored to each student, you will need a massive library of materials that can cover every possible occurrence. And that library will also have to reflect a deep, wide, and rich understanding of the content material (not just the understanding of a programming guy).

2. Really smart Artificial Intelligence software.

We've gotten pretty sloppy with the term "artificial intelligence," slapping it on every algorithm created, no matter how simple that algorithm is. But to run your personalized learning program, you will need the real thing. It will need to be able to analyze student strengths and weaknesses across a broad spectrum of domains and standards, and then it will need to be able to dip into that massive library of materials to select the next activity for that student. Perhaps, if you have a super-duper AI, you can have it actually generate new custom materials so that you don't need the library referenced in #1. But if you have an AI that is really that smart, there are probably places you can be making way more money than in education.

3. An honest-to-God text assessment system.

Companies keep claiming to have software that can grade essays. They have not been correct yet. Measuring the educational progress of the student cannot be accurately accomplished only through objective assessments such as multiple choice questions. There must be open-ended questions that require sentences and paragraphs to answer. That, in turn, requires assessment software that can not just analyze structure, but can tell whether or not the content is accurate and sensible.

4. A good interface.

Students who deal with computer-centered personalized programs invariably talk about the problems of dealing with the interface. Design that is ugly. Windows for typing long answers that don't let you see all of what you've typed. Questions that allow only for certain narrow views of the problem presented. And all this is outside the challenge of expecting six-year-olds to be proficient in the use of a mouse and a screen (heck, today you can find plenty of tech-savvy teens who have never worked with a mouse). You must ensure that your students are learning the content, and not just learning your software.

5. A data collection system.

The simple version of this is to simply use each assignment as a data source to figure out the next assignment. But in boutique personalized education schools like Silicon Valley's AltSchool, you find a whole staff of teachers, techs, and other personnel who are busily capturing and processing data daily. To really personalize education, you need to collect, enter and process a ton of data. It's going to be time-consuming and costly.

6. A data security system.

Once we've collected all that data, we are a rich target for hackers who would like to steal it and for entrepreneurs who would like to rent it. Collecting and storing this much data about children poses some practical concerns, some legal concerns, and certainly some ethical concerns. But once we get past the question of whether we should even have it in the first place, we have to deal with the question of how we will keep it secure.

7. Nerves of steel (and special corner-cutting scissors).

From Rocketship to Summit to the above-mentioned AltSchool, providers of personalized learning have discovered that really doing it is hard and expensive (and therefore marketable to a narrow group of people). They instead switched to a business model in which a scaled-down version of their program can be purchased by any school district. It reminds me of the Project Runway episodes where the designers are supposed to create a fabulous runway look, and then also create a cheaper, simpler knockoff for the ready-to-wear market.

When the costs of your personalized learning program get too great (and your investors get antsy), where will you cut corners? Which of the necessities that you either can't afford or which don't actually exist, will you scale down? And will you have the nerve to market the idealized complete personalized package while you are actually selling something less spectacular? Will you have the guts to sell your vaporware as if it's as solid and real as the leather seats in your Lexus?

Originally posted at Forbes. Check it out: I'm now a regular there on Mondays and Thursdays.     

Dammit, Arne: Duncan Has Learned Nothing

Never mind a Secretary of Education who has ever taught anything; I'm beginning to think it would be a step forward if we had a Secretary of Education who has ever learned anything.

Arne Duncan was interviewed for the pages of US News, and the resulting piece reminds us, first, that there's not nearly as much difference between Duncan and DeVos as some Democrats would like to believe, and second, that Duncan remain unrepentant and unenlightened about anything that happened under his watch. So join me in yelling fruitlessly at the computer screen as we walk through this trip down Delusion Lane.

Chicken Little's History of School

Count Duncan as a member of the Century Club-- that special group of reformsters that is certain schools haven't changed in 100 years. Arne would also like to beat the expired equine about how "other nations out-educating, out-investing, out-innovating us." Because, you know, we're competing with India and China and Singapore for jobs. That's certainly true, but at no point is it going to occur to Duncan that those countries compete by offering little or no regulation and workers who will do the job for pennies. In all the times I've heard the "we must change education to compete with China" refrain, not once have I heard an explanation of how education will help American workers better compete with people working under conditions we wouldn't accept for wages we couldn't live on. Arne wants us to now that our kids-- his kids-- are going to grow up in that world. And if you think Arne's kids, raised in privilege and comfort, are going to be competing with some Chinese smartphone assembler for work, well-- I have a bridge over a swamp to sell you.

This guy. This frickin' guy.

Oh, and we are not in the top 10 internationally. Which-- first, what does that even mean? Top 10 ranked by what? Because if, as I would guess, he means test scores, let me repeat for the gazzillionth time that we have never, ever been in the Top 10 for international test scores. Nor has Duncan ever offered a shred of evidence that being in the Top 10 of test scores translates into any sort of national achievement like higher GDP or higher standard of living or happier citizens or military might or best frozen desserts!

Duncan's Diagnosis and That Damned Status Quo

Having failed to effectively define the problem, Duncan now goes on to offer his idea about the cause.

This is not a cure for cancer, this is not rocket science. It's total lack of political will. And I think the politics of the left and the right stand in the way of what's best for kids.

Well, actually, it is too rocket science. Duncan's thesis is that fixing schools is actually quite easy; we're just not willing to do it, because after all this time, he still doesn't realize how complex and complicated it is to run an entire educational system. And Duncan doesn't seem to know what he's trying to change because he also notes "There's a small number of  political leaders willing to challenge the status quo."

Dammit, Arne.

First, the status quo in education right now is the status quo you help make. Common Core, in its various bastardized forms and under its various assumed names, is the status freakin' quo, and an ugly obnoxious one it is, too. Schools and teachers being evaluated based on bad uses of bad data generated by bad tests-- that's status quo, too. As is the draining of resources from public schools by private charterized schools. These are all problems, these are all status quo, and these are all a legacy in part of your administration.

Second, the idea that you need political leaders to change the educational system shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the education system (and, for that matter, the political system) works. You need teachers and education leaders and actual trained professional educators to change an educational system, yet another fact we can put on the list of Things You Don't Understand. All these years, and you still treat teachers like the hired help, certain that your amateur insights are more important than anything they might have to say.

Duncan also thinks we need Republicans to challenge their base, and I'm not sure where he's coming from here, because other than a deadly aversion to the words "common core," the GOP base is in tune with most of the Duncan program. Duncan offers Obama's championing of merit pay as a profil;e in courage because "that's very hard to do" and well, yes, it's hard to do because we have lots of evidence that merit pay doesn't work. There's nothing courageous about standing up for a bad idea.

Advice for Future Administrations

This is a generous question to ask, and an honest answer would be, "It doesn't matter, because my name is mud in DC. I mean, did you see ESSA pass? I personally created a consensus that me, my department, and my successors should have little or no say in all future education policy."

But Duncan still takes the pass and drives for the basket. And he has some goals that he thinks transcend party politics.

First, more "high quality" pre-K, which unfortunately is usually code for imposing the mistakes of K-12 policy on very small children. Because what the US needs is more four-year-olds sitting in seats to complete worksheets so they're ready for their standardized tests.

Second, let's get the graduation rate up. Duncan is proud of the 84% his administration hit, and I guess that pride precludes any discussion of how much fraud went into that figure, including the fraud right in DC itself. But that has always been a hallmark of the Duncan approach-- go for good numbers, but never ask what the numbers actually mean.

Third, 100% of graduates should be college ready. Gahh! [Takes moment to wipe spittle off screen]. "College ready" is a meaningless phrase-- ready for what college? what field of study? in the hopes of what job? And in the meantime, who is going to weld stuff? (Note that US News also has a great article about "25 Jobs That Don't Require a College Degree").

Fourth, we should lead world in college completion. See above rant.

Those are goals that keep high-wage, high-skill jobs in our country. Those are jobs that grow the middle class, those are jobs that keep our civic democracy healthy.

That's not how it works. These are goals that give businesses the luxury of having a deeper pool to choose from (and consequently pay less for), but business does not say, "Look, there are a hundred graduates in Computer Wafflery! We'd better come up with 100 jobs for them! And pay them super-well." I have no idea what he thinks these have to do with a healthy civic democracy.

Duncan argues for vigorous discussion and lots of different local solutions, because no one has a monopoly on good ideas. True. Hell, some people don't even have a piece of good idea market at all.

What About The Feds?

What role should the feds play? Duncan ducks this question so hard I think his chin scraped some carpet off the floor. He mentions the i3 fund, a couple hundred million to "scale what works" in innovation (defining what works of course as what makes test score numbers go up). The feds are supposed to be backing innovation, he says.

Here are some things he doesn't say:

That his administration had the School Improvement Grants that turned out to be a complete bust. That part of the problem was most likely that rather than saying "Go forth and innovate," the administration said "Here's a list of the handful of acceptable ways to spend this money." As with Race to the Top and the waiver program, the Duncan approach was always to prescribe what schools should do to Fix Things. All this talk about innovation and local flexibility is swell, but Duncan never, ever backed that up on a policy level. Instead, it was always, "We know what you need to do, and we will give you funds only if you do things our way." And that approach failed. Failed, failed, failed.

Bad Teachers

Gabrielle Levy asks a loaded question that presumes we're awash in bad teachers and nobody is doing anything about it.  Duncan runs his old one-two of "We should respect teaching but currently most teachers start out sucking." We should train them like professionals and compensate them like professionals, he says in one breath, before qualifying it with "great teachers," as if professional doctors and lawyers live on merit pay. Fine. Whatever. He likes the residency model, and I won't beef with that, but then he's back to the Century Club, as if education only just changed recently and teachers haven't caught on yet.

Can You Explain the Big Teacher Walkouts in Oklahoma and West Virginia and Arizona?

Short answer: Not really. Long answer: those damned Republicans are starving education in their states, cutting funding over and over, which doesn't serve anyone. And that's not wrong, but I have to point out that the guy saying it is the same guy that presided over programs where only the "best" states got money and those lagging just had to try harder. This is the same guy who believes that marketplace competition will spur schools to greatness. So these red state austerity programs are just the logical extension of his policies-- the less you give people, the more they will strive for excellence to win the zero-sum game. This is how it works. First, some people lose. Eventually everybody loses.

Also, this: "Jobs will go where knowledge workers are." No. Jobs will go where workers are good enough and costs are lower than elsewhere.

Why Doesn't It Seem As If Education Is A Priority In This Country?

"The challenge is that no one votes based upon education." So nobody values it because nobody values it? South Korea, he says, kicks our education butt because people care so much. Here in the US, politicians can do lip service and photo ops, but nothing else.

Guns?

Hey, Duncan did learn something. Like many of us, he learned the Sandy Hook lesson, which is that if we can let twenty white babies and five teachers be killed, there really isn't anything that will create enough outrage for us to do anything about guns. We care about guns more than children, and that's who we are.

So In The End...

Duncan is of course out promoting his book, which means we'll likely be subjected to more of this.

I'll go ahead and accept the oft-painted picture of Duncan as a nice guy. But man-- I cannot think of a single moment in the last decade when he has said anything remotely like, "You know, I've look at the actual results and listened to some of my critics and examined some data and talked to actual teachers, and I've concluded that I made a mistake with this policy or that statement." He is like a guy who douses the porch in kerosene, throws a match, and then stands in the street and says, "Well, this house is on fire! That's a real problem-- somebody needs to do something about that." Then later he starts telling the fire department how best to fight the fire. And while Disney's brain is rumored to frozen in a chest somewhere, Duncan's brain is frozen but still wired up in his head, its views and ideas unchanged and unalterable, every experience or detail that might cause cognitive dissonance bouncing off the solid surface.

I won't read the book; I can't support selling one more copy of the damned thing. Duncan is not only an educational amateur, but one who has had experiences from which he could have learned-- but he didn't. He may be a nice guy, but the sooner he just gets the hell away from education, the better it will be for all of us.

ICYMI: Almost August Already Edition (7/29)

Summer is slipping away, but there's still plenty to read about education. Here are a few things from this week that you might want to catch up with. And remember-- amplifying important voices is how those voices become important.

End of Public Schools in Milwaukee

Thomas Ultican explains what's going wrong there.

Charter Schools Have Done More Harm Than Good in Michigan

Mitchell Robinson with a guest op-ed that lays out the sad, destructive history of charter schools in Betsy DeVos's home state

What Does TFA Tell the New Recruits about the Janus Decision?

Gary Rubinstein with another interesting perspective on the Janus decision

The Problem with Fear Based Reform

Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider on the Have You Heard podcast talking to Andrea Gabor about her new book and how education has learned lessons from the business world-- just all the wrong ones.

No, Private Schools Aren't Better At Educating Kids  

I'd like this better if we weren't depending on tests as a measure, but it's still worth a quick look.

Calvin, Hobbes, and the Limts of Time

One gift that I finally got to crack open this summer was my copy of the Complete Calvin and Hobbes. And I just finished it.

It's done. I've looked at every panel, every sequence, every extra piece of artwork. That's all there is. There is no more.

You know the feeling. You love the book, or the book series, and you turn the last page, and you're done. That's it. There is no more.

My father is a bit of a Glenn Miller scholar, and he has amassed over the years pretty much every recording, including many that exist only as reel-to-reel copies of transcripts, and he can chart them all against the complete list made by other scholars of every gig Miller ever played. And maybe a few more will turn up, but basically, that's all there is. There is no more.

It's the same for Beatles fans and Tolkein enthusiasts. It's why J. K. Rowling will never have a moment's peace even as fans shell out money for recreations of Harry Potter's ear wax, and why there will always be a cottage industry in writing "new" Sherlock Holmes and James Bond stories. We don't want to get to the end.

We humans love to mask the finite nature of earthly life. We talk about things that "always" happen as if they don't have a limit. But there are limits. I can't talk about what I always did on the first day of school because in the end, as a teacher, I only had thirty-nine first days of school. Thirty-nine. Not that many really, but that's all there is now.

Schools exist in an oddly exaggerated time bubble. I often joked about the lifespan of a new policy idea, whether it was a grading scale or a special carpet for prom:

1st year: It's a radical new idea.
2nd year: It's that new thing we did last year.
3rd year: Oh, we always do this.
4th year: It's an inviolable tradition!

By February, our students talk about our classes like they've been going on forever. We were strange and new in the fall; now we're as familiar as the coffee stain on Grandma's couch.

But teachers grapple with the finite all the time. There are 180 student days in the school year. In Pennsylvania, that may actually mean 178 days; if you are a high school teacher, that's less than an hour with each class on each of those days. That's it. Every thing that gets added costs part of that time. And every hour lost is gone forever; this is not like a private sector office job where you can end a meeting with, "Well, we'll get back that tomorrow." In school, fairly quickly, you reach the moment where there is no tomorrow. That's all there is. There is no more.

This is undoubtedly part of why schools tend to be conservative institutions. Every new thing, every added thing, costs us part of our finite resources. It is the question that staff asks (or wants to ask but is afraid to) every time a new initiative is proposed-- "This is great, Sir. What do you want me to stop teaching to make room for it?"

There's a moment in the fourth Indiana Jones movie where a character says to Jones, "We've reached the point where life stops giving us things and starts taking things away from us." (It's striking for me because Jones in that film is supposed to be fifty-eight-- three years younger than I am. Oh, so old!) Teaching can get to feel like that. Well, not the teaching itself. For most of my career I worked hard at finding ways to do more and more with the resources I had; for the last decade it felt more like I was trying to keep doing as much as I used to with fewer and fewer resources. Every test, every practice test, every new initiative add-on just meant my teaching year had gotten shorter.

It's good for us to bump up against the finite limits of existence. It reminds us to make good use of every class period, every day. From my current vantage point, I can say this to younger teachers-- it may feel like you'll do this forever, but you won't. You'll have only so many first days, last days, 133rd days, only so many years, only so many different students. A teacher's body of work is finite, just like any other artist's.

Don't wait. Don't save it for later. Don't imagine you have forever to work things out. Don't panic-- but don't postpone, either.

The end of Calvin and Hobbes is a lovely gracious note, particularly for a feature in which a child has remained six years old for ten years, suggesting that the story, filled with possibilities, will continue long after we've stopped reading about it. That's a gentle way to let us down, but the fact is, that time is over. Even if the story continues elsewhere, in it, Calvin will age and live through every year of his life only once and then, yes, eventually he will grow old and die.

Things end. That's normal and it says something about us a earthly creatures that the statement generally prompts a bit of a pang. It needn't. In the classroom, in our professional lives, in our personal lives, we should feed the impulse to say yes, to grow, most of all to help others and not, as Simon Stimson bitterly observes in Our Town, "to spend and waste time as though you had a million years." In each other we find a million different living stories, any one of which could turn a final page tomorrow. We can do better. We should do better.

In life, we never know how much time is left. In school, generally, we know exactly how much is left-- and it's never enough. If teachers seem touchy about giving up some of it, it's because they can see the calendar and hear the clocking ticking down the minutes until we have to say that's all there is. There isn't any more.