PA: Trying To Fix The Pipeline

Pennsylvania's teacher pipeline is busted.

You can see it in the numbers. In 2009-10, the state issued 14,247 teaching certificates. In 2016-17, it issued 4,412. You can see it in the health of college ed departments and the cuts to some ed majors that have been occurring. And much of that is a reasonable reaction to plummeting numbers of students enrolling in education programs. 

There are plenty of cause for the drop in interest. Some like the idea that people stop heading into teaching when the economy blossoms and better alternatives appear. It also seems clear that teaching has not exactly been showered with prestige and respect for the last twenty years, aka the entire life of people who would now consider college. The emphasis on testing and test prep certainly hasn't been attractive. These have helped bust the teacher pipeline all across the country.

And in Pennsylvania there's one other factor-- under the previous governor we had a period in which education spending shrank pretty dramatically. Now, this was not entirely Tom Corbett's fault-- his predecessor used stimulus money as a bandaid for education cuts, so that when the stimulus money ended, suddenly a giant fiscal sinkhole opened up. None of that really matters at this point. What matters is that for several years, Pennsylvania school districts dealt with the cuts by slashing positions. For a while that created the illusion that we weren't having a teacher shortage here (outside of the usual suspects like special ed), but at the same time, a generation of students grew up seeing no new hires and no new job openings in their school district. Many of my own students told me, "I might like teaching, but there aren't any jobs around here and I don't want to leave the state to get a job." And indeed, my students who did pursue teaching ended up leaving the state-- and their younger peers saw that, too.

So here we sit, our teacher pipeline broken and moldy.

Governor Tom Wolf has proposed a solution-- a two million dollar bet on residency programs.

Eight universities will be getting a chunk of the grant to develop and implement residency programs in which proto-teachers have a full year of clinical experience on their way to their own classroom.

The eight schools-- Drexel, Indiana, Robert Morris, Cabrini, Lehigh, Millersville, Penn State Harrisburg and University of Pennsylvania-- do not touch the entire northwest corner of the state (my neighborhood), so that's a bummer. 

Part of the grant requires the school to partner with one high-need local education agency. The money will come from the state's Title II funding. A few of universities already have a residency program; the grant wil help maintain and expand it.

There's some debate over the effectiveness of residency programs. My judgment-- residency will be like student teaching, only more so. If your mentor teacher is great, a full year of support will be great. If your mentor teacher is less than stellar, well... good luck to you. Personally, I'm inclined to like the residency idea in part because it somewhat resembles the non-traditional program that trained me. 

The extra level of support and preparation may keep some proto-teachers in the pipeline and make them less likely to bail on teaching within a few years. What's not clear is how the programs will help get more proto-teachers in the pipeline to begin with. 

The same problems will remain-- the lack of respect, the low pay, the de-professionalizing of the work, the test-centered schools, the lack of jobs, which often goes hand in hand with increasingly lousy work conditions (the last is still an issue-- when I retired last June, my district chose not to replace me). Wolf could address some of that. In particular, he could move PA further away from test-based assessment of teachers and schools that currently pushes administrators to run test-prep factories instead of actual schools. On top of the many flaws of the test itself, we still use PVAAS (brother of the VAAS system that lost in court in Texas). On top of that, we are also a state where if you don't teach a tested subject, a chunk of your evaluation still comes from the building score, and the building score comes from the test score. "I want a job where my evaluation is based on things I can't control," said no person ever. "I want to grow up to spend my days convincing children that bubbling correct answers is cool and worthwhile," said the same no person.

Governor Wolf's grant probably isn't going to hurt anything, but if the goal here is to increase the number of new teachers coming out of the pipeline, I don't think residency programs will be a silver bullet. You can't retain what you don't recruit in the first place, and the recruitment piece is where the PA pipeline is busted.

PA: Democrats MIA On Education

So, the Pennsylvania Democrats have a survey out, because they want to like listen and stuff, asking what folks think are the most important issues. If you take a look at it, you might notice that something didn't make the list-- not the "which issues are most important list" and not the "what issue do you wish Democrats talked more about" list. And that would be education.

Sigh.

"I'm sorry. What?"

Meanwhile, this morning Caitlin Emma reports that DFER (Democrats [sic] fort Education Reform) plans to pump $4 million dollars into races in support of Democrats who support education reform (or who support public school, but whose support is judged malleable enough to suit DFER). DFER, you may recall, is the ultimate "in name only" package of hedge funders who want to privatize education. Their resemblance to actual Democrats is suspect enough that Colorado Democrats asked DFER to get the D out of their name. Now DFER is planning to dump some money into the Colorado gubernatorial race to back the candidate that education supporters tried to beat in the primaries. They also plan to back NY's Andrew Cuomo and the supposed successor to Governor Malloy in Connecticut. And they want to push Marshall Tuck as state school superintendent in California; Tuck is an excellent example of how Democrats can end up as darlings of the right wing by supporting the privatization of public education.

If all of that seems to conflict with the agenda of education progressives, DFER has a solution-- just redefine what "education progressive" means. Charter schools are about civil rights, and if you strand in their way, you're just like George Wallace. DFER, on the other hand, sides with Obama and Duncan and King and Rosa Parks.

Meanwhile, later this week ALEC is getting together for one of its lobbyist, profiteer and legislator shmoozefests. Highlights will include a Thursday keynote by lawsuit façade Janus and a session on "Ed Choice In a Challenging Environment."(Part of the track "Restoring the Balance of Government") The session will be hosted by Romy Drucker, CEO of The 74 (just in case you still wondered whether they had picked a side or not) with EdChoice CEO Robert Enlow discussing how you can "deflect the mistruths and correct the myths" when this "awkward water cooler topic" comes up.

So lots of folks have their sights set on education. There are individual Democrats who are supporting public education, but the party itself seems MIA. Folks who prefer to defend and improve public education, folks who intend to demand that all public education be properly funded and supported-- those folks should make it a point to speak up.

In Praise of Inputs

One continuing thread throughout modern education reform has been the focus on outputs. Let's direct our attention to outputs, preferably measurable ones, has been the refrain again and again.

The argument is not entirely without merit. It's not enough to account for your work in the classroom by saying, "Well, I threw a unit about adjectives at them, and hopefully something will stick." We have to do better than that.

But the complete rejection of inputs in education leads to the old drunk under the streetlight problem. That would be the classic story where a man is found searching for her car keys at night under a streetlight. "Why did you lose them so far from your car," asks a bemused bystander. "Oh, I didn't." Replied the man. "I lost them over there somewhere. But the light's much better here."

The problem with education-- and this has always been the problem with education-- is that the most important outputs are nearly impossible to measure. Has an education helped make this person wise, insightful, thoughtful, capable, kind and knowledgeable, in that critical thinking way that goes beyond mere factual recall and the performance of simple tasks? We don't know. We can't know, and sometimes when we can know, we don't know for years afterwards. Like any teacher who's been at it for a while, I have dozens-- hundreds, even-- of stories from students who, years later, told me that X turned out to be useful or that Y has helped them their entire life. Sometimes it's an academic insight, and sometimes it's something more personal. And as is true for most teachers, I can't think of many of these stories where the student thanks me for something that would have been a measurable outcome when they were a high school senior.

Sometimes there's an educational moment that dramatically changes a student's direction, but mostly it's nudges, a shift that is barely perceptible at the time. Right now, their path has only changed a quarter of an inch from its original trajectory. But once you extend that path out for years and years, the difference expands to become huge.

So it's not that outcomes don't matter. They matter tremendously. It's just that most of the really important ones are unknowable, sometimes for decades, sometimes forever.

And though I'm here to praise inputs, I have to point out that their nature is also shrouded and obscure. Human beings are not machines. There is no predictable science that tells us, "If you do X to a small person, that small person will grow up to be an adult who values Y." Human beings are not programable. This is the problem of an output-focused approach; the mistaken belief that if we know what outputs we want, we just select the inputs that get us those outputs. That is not how human beings work. There is real formula, for instance, that says, "Do these ten things and the person you desire will fall in love with you." The dream is that if I know exactly what outputs I want, it will tell me exactly what inputs to select. This only works with vending machines. Human beings are not vending machines.

Among those "You made a difference in my life" stories that every teacher saves and treasures are stories in which the teacher, years ago, did something that was really important to the student, but which that teacher remembers as some quick off-the-cuff nothing burger (or, once you reach a certain point, the teacher doesn't remember at all).

There are two important truths that every teacher can tell herself at the beginning of every day:

1) Something that you do today will make a huge difference in a person's life.

2) You will have no idea ahead of time what that thing might be.

There's only one way to manage this puzzle-- we must do our best to make sure all our inputs are good ones. Make sure each lesson is rich in quality content. Make sure we treat each child with kindness and consideration. Make sure we set a good example. Make sure we visibly live out the best principles. Make sure that everything we do in our classroom is built around the ideal of becoming our best selves and building our understanding of what it means to be human in the world. Make sure we behave in ways designed to foster growth in learning and skills.

We have a problem these days because of all of the items I just listed, only that last one gets anything like support. At the rest, our reform leaders will cock and eyebrow and ask, "But will that raise test scores?"

This is our problem. We have accepted cheap, small, simply measured outputs in place of larger, more global, more human-centered but hard-to-measure outputs. And in doing so, we have savagely chopped up our inputs, narrowing the whole range and depth of human experience and learning to the narrow sliver of "Will this raise the output test scores?"

Let's feed our children well. But instead of worrying about how we can choose food to create a certain physical form, let's just feed them healthy food, the healthiest and richest and best food we can find, and let the growing take care of itself. Yes, we will have huge and endless arguments about what exactly a healthy meal will look like, and yes, we will have students who really challenge our ability to feed them well. But focusing on outputs (like, say, deciding there's a specific size, shape and color of poop that we expect from each person) just gives us the illusion of mastery of a big, beautiful, chaotic, artful and often mysterious human process that we cannot control. In trying to control it, we just damage it.

Yes, there are specific things we could do (for instance, I'll bet interviewing every grad when they hit 35 will tell us far more about our system than their teen-aged test scores). But mostly we need to commit to making the best inputs we know how. We should not ignore outputs, but as long as we focus too carefully there,. we will never find the keys.

ICYMI: My Nephew's Wedding Edition (8/5)

My family gathered from all over creation this week to help celebrate my nephew's wedding yesterday. It's been a lot of busy family fun, but I have still had time to collect some pieces of reading for you. Remember to pass them along.

Why Some Parents Turn Their Backs on Public School and What Can Be Done About It

Great piece from Nancy Bailey that deals with some difficult issues.

What New Orleans Tells Us About the Dangers of Putting Schools on the Free Market

From the New Yorker, one more lok at the truth of what "miraculouis" NOLA tells us about using market forces to "fix" schools.

Federal Court Rules Lawsuit Against Success Can Proceed

The folks trying to sue Success Academy just cleared one more hurdle, and in the process, gave the court a chance to make note of many of SA's less admirable practices.

A Classroom Library

An impassioned and solid argument for replacing Accelerated Reading programs with a good classroom library. Like maybe we could get kids to enjoy reading rather than hating it.

College Board Botches the Scoring of June 2018 SAT

You may have heard the story-- a few students are put out that their number of correctly answered questions went up, but their SAT score went down. Only it turns out there are more than a few, and they've been doing their homework. Mercedes Schneider rounds up the story.

How We Define Teaching Makes All the Difference

Jan Resseger with some great thoughts about the profession (along with some thoughts about Arne Duncan's swell new book).

DeVos Money Is All Over The News Right Now  

Sigh.

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.