Are You Ready for the First Day

This week will see the first day for the school year in many communities. Time to ask teachers this question:

Do you feel prepared?

Periodically we get a survey of teachers about this question, and typically a fairly large number of teachers say, "No, I don't-- or didn't-- feel prepared when I first stepped into a class room."

This is most typically offered as evidence that teacher preparation programs are stinky and need to be overhauled or replaced. I'm never going to declare that no teacher preparation programs are stinky (a few, in fact, are extraordinarily stinky), but I do think the survey results have an alternate meaning.

I had 39 first days of school in my career, and I never felt fully prepared for any of them.

There are plenty of reasons for that. For one, even if you've taught in the same school for your whole career, even if you know some of your incoming students by reputation or even previous contact, you never know what a class is going to be like until you are dealing with them, and even then it will take a few weeks, minimum, to lock things in. You can have big plans for your content, your pace, your scope and sequence, even things like how you're going to organize the room this year. But your students will be deciding which parts of the wish list you call a plan are actually going to happen. And you won't know until you know. This does not change, ever. You just develop a clearer picture of what range your classes are most likely (but not certain) to fall within.

Another reason to feel less than fully prepared is because you're not a dope. Seriously. If you walk toward your first day of school (whether it's your first or your twentieth) thinking, "I have nothing to worry about because I have a total lock on this and I'm prepared for everything," then you simply don't understand the situation. Nor do you understand yourself.

A good teacher can tell you the list of things she needs to work on. One of the surest signs that someone is a lousy teacher is anything along the lines of, "I've got this class down to a science now and I can just breeze through like a well-oiled machine. There's nothing I really need to work on-- I've got this down pat." Those are the words of a lousy teacher.

A good teacher is always working on getting better, because a good teacher always feels, acutely, where she is coming up short. It's what many teachers focus on, perhaps excessively. Teachers have a tendency to be humble, and that may be part of the professional ethic, but teachers are often focused on the very things they need to be humble about, and not their areas of mighty excellence.

My first choice for a teacher will always be one who answers, "I'm not sure. There's so much more I want to do before that first day, so many things I'm not positive about" over a teacher who answers, "Totally prepared. Haven't even thought about the first day because I'm so totally ready."

Teaching is a profession of limits. There's never enough. Never enough time, never enough resources, never enough of you as a teacher. You spend your whole career bumping up against those limits and figuring how to push them back or move around them. The preparation you get from your college just sort of plunks you down in the middle of that space, but it takes a lifetime to find the barriers, push the barriers, figure out how to stretch and simplify your practices so that you can get a little more accomplished.

So, no, you're not fully prepared. You're never fully prepared. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. Your training is not to get you to the destination-- your training is to help you understand how to make the journey, a journey that you will never actually complete. And that's as ready as you're ever going to get.

How Deep the Data Mine

My health care provider is a little bit terrifying.

I live in Northwestern PA, which means my health care all occurs under the shadow of one of the most giant "on-profits" on the planet. Pittsburgh's main industry might once have been steel; now it's health care.

The behemoth is digitized to the max. I can get on line and order prescription refills, set up a doctor's appointment, and do all that annoying paperwork that you usually do on a clipboard balanced on your knee while sitting in the waiting room. But to do all that, you need an account. So I went on line to set one up and now I feel... queasy.

Since the account is tied to my health care records and my various drug prescriptions, I needed to answer some security questions on the way in, and they were... well. Creepy.

What city is [my daughter's name] associated with? How much land does my house sit on? And something about my wife.

Mind you, these were multiple choice questions, and not questions I had previously provided the answers to. The system already knew where my daughter lives and how big my property is. This is a system that has already collected all my medical information; it knows that I had my appendix out fifty years ago, and it knows that I was once on valium (but not why-- I had hiccups for three days straight, which is not nearly as funny as it sounds).

It's a deep thorough data mine, and I will confess that I have mixed feelings about it. I'd just as soon that, should a medical emergency occur, my health care provider knows something about my history. I appreciate the convenience of not having to call the doctor's office for little things like prescription refills.

But there is so much data there.

Honestly, part of how I deal with the reality of data mining is age-- I'm old enough that it's already too late to collect data on my third grade achievement tests and the time I got paddled in sixth grade and the time I split open my knee. I can almost-- almost-- make my peace with giant data mine because I've mostly-- mostly-- escaped.

But my twins are not even two years old yet, and I worry about the giant assortment of data-gathering machinery arrayed against them, the many fights going on to hold it back. I worry about a huge unelected system that is unaccountable to anyone and yet is far from dependable (click here to read the story of how my ex-wife's mail gets delivered to me). I worry about who will have access, who will be sold access, and what sort of decisions will be made about my children and grandchildren's lives based on that giant pile of sort-of-accurate, previously-considered-nobody's-business data.

We mostly live with this without thinking about it, and then every once in a while something comes along to remind you just how much your digital record knows about you.

My health care provider, just like my twins' future schools, has the opportunity to collect deep and deeply personal data. There are so many dangers that go with that, from misuse of the data to theft of the data to use of the data against my own best interests. And my health care provider is a super-rich behemoth, which is in a way comforting because what would happen if my data was held by a poor-struggling institution looking for any kind of revenue-generating scheme to survive?

I don't think there's a more critical issue in our world about which there has been less discussion-- which is just how our Data Overlords like it. The mines have been dug really deep, and we continue to dance around on the surface, happily oblivious to just how much ground has been dug out from under us.

Opportunity Costs Are Shot

Transcript of school staff meeting.

Principal: We've been handed a small pile of money, and I thought we'd meet to discuss what best to do with it.

Ms. Wattlestop: Well, we haven't replaced the textbooks in the science department for a decade. It might be time to get the students some books that aren't falling apart. And maybe we could get enough of them so that all students can have them.

Miss Bowenflava: The heat in my room doesn't work. The faucets in the student restrooms don't turn all the way on or off. There's a leak in the roof over the west hall. We need to get some repairs done around the building.

Mr. Jones: How big a pile are we talking? Because we could add a couple of staff people, we could get class sizes down below thirty, and that would be a huge help to the students.

Mrs. McSmith: We haven't put a new book in the library in fifteen years. Let's buy books.

Mrs. Galumpke: There are so many cool new programs out there that would really be exciting and helpful for our students. Maybe we could get one of those...?

Mr. O'Plenty: Our computer system is dependent on servers that are held together with duct tape and bubble. Let's strengthen our tech system

Ms. Stengle: Hiring some to run an after-school intervention program would really help our students who are behind.

Ms. Flex: You want to help me out with some of the $1,200 I'm spending to get my classroom necessary resources?

Miss Fleagle: There are only two certified people who will even think about substituting here. Maybe we could raise sub pay.

Miss Arbuckle: We could pilot an home and school visiting program, to help give at risk students a little more support.

Ms. Swayne: We could hire a counselor.

Mr. Flurgle: I don't want to sound selfish, but we don't even pay teachers a living wage any more, and I think it's beginning to affect the hiring possibilities[indicates the forty-three empty chairs at the meeting]. Maybe it's time to look at that.

Ms. Teanuttle: Really, it's the whole package. Our students are dealing with a wide variety of traumas and issues that they bring into the building, and we need to be doing more to help them both academically and emotionally. The building is falling down around our ears, and we desperately need more and better resources. The staff is being eroded by the lack of support and the absence of resources. And we are consistently underfunded because the state doesn't even want to give us enough money to keep up with providing the basics for our students. I hope you've been given enough money to do all of this, but if you haven't-- well, I really don't envy you this difficult decision.

Principal: Those are all very good ideas, and after careful consideration, I've decided we need to spend the money to buy some guns.

Staff: What?

Principal: Yup. Of all the things we could do, I think arm a couple of you guys would be the best possible use of the money. Thanks for coming.

Mr. Flurgle: Money for training us, too?

Principal. No. No, just the guns. Just point and shoot. How hard can it be?

Ms. Flex: But what about all these other ideas?

Principal: Trust me. Once you've got that gun in your hand, you won't even care about the rest of this stuff.

Mr. Jones: The opportunity cost here is just so tremendous!

Principal: The what now?

Mr. Jones: Never mind, Principal DeVos.

ICYMI: New School Year Edition (8/26)

In my neck of the woods it's that time again, and my wife is all set and ready to go. But in the meantime, here's some reading for you today.

Mission Accomplished

Privileged policies to privilege the already privileged. An important read.

Vouchers Are a Failed Experiment

I always appreciate it when someone outside the education debates world figures it out.

Success Academy Slashes Special Needs Classes

Oh, those pesky students with special needs. Leonie Haimson spots Eva Moskowitz cutting corners again

How Newarks Former Schools Chief Used a Victory Lap and Paid Consultants To Secure His Legacy

From Chalkbeat, a look at how a reformster used a pile of money to do PR for himself.

Mainstream Journalism Can't Handle the Truth

Paul Thomas explains how journalism is doomed to fail in covering education.

Response To Intervention's Role in the Texas Special Education Scandal

I definitely don't say it often enough-- you should read Nancy Bailey regularly. Here she drills down and looks at some of the detail behind the Texas plan to cut special ed costs by just not giving services to students who need them.

Beware Rich People Who Say They Want To Change the World

From the New York Times, a blistering look at the modern world of fauxlanthropy-- and yes, that includes education.

   

Can Scott Wagner Buy PA?

We'll be talking about Scott Wagner often in the months ahead, because he's running for Governor of Pennsylvania, and it would really be better for the Commonwealth if he did not succeed.

There are many things to know about Scott Wagner. People like to note that he has explained global warming-- it's either that the earth is moving closer to the sun, or possibly all those humans giving off body heat. He's a wealthy business man who has launched several businesses, but it's the trash biz that really made him wealthy. He's anti-union, and pretty sure that poor people are poor because they're lazy.

This frickin' guy

He recently made it clear that he would not be releasing his financials. His reason is simple-- he doesn't want his employees to know how much he makes because they might get the crazy idea that they should be paid more.

Wagner is a Cinderella story of sorts-- he made it to the PA Senate by beating both the GOP and Democratic candidate with write in votes. Granted, the voter turnout no more than 17%, but the GOP went from trying to box him out of the race to embracing him as a powerful new voice, and he quickly acquired clout in Harrisburg.

Some folks attribute that to a "no-nonsense style" with pronouncements like:

I'm gonna be sitting in the back of the room with a baseball bat. And leadership is gonna start doing things for [sic] Pennsylvania needs done.

Comments like that strike me as all-nonsense, but Wagner is one more millionaire who sells his common touch. It's part of his package, along with his multiple marriages and rocky personal history that his opponents have tried-- and failed-- to use against him (e.g. Wagner once had a protection abuse order brought against him by a daughter for choking her-- they are now tight and she works on his campaign).

But Wagner has another not-so-common touch feature-- he throws around a lot of money.

Wagner may seem like a political novice, but he was in the game well before he ran for Senator. The York Daily Record (his home town paper) figured in 2016 that since 2007, Wagner had spent more than $3.2 million dollars on political races. The 49th state Senate race in Erie County resulted in a seat flipped from Democratic to Republican; Wagner was the single largest contributor with a whopping $595,250 spent on the race. And he has spent aggressively on primary races, to make sure that the Right Kind of Republican is elected.

Wagner has spent more than $100,000 on several causes, including individual campaigns and to several PACs, including one that he's set up on his own and another that aims specifically to end teacher pensions in PA (you'll be unshocked to know that Wagner also opposes teacher tenure and other job protections). He hates taxes, and he wants Pennsylvania to be organized around what businesses want, and he has thrown a lot of money at campaigns for those causes.

At the same time, Wagner has become more pragmatic. Where he once railed against lobbying firms-- particularly those that served as PR firms for the campaigns of officials they would later lobby-- he now employs exactly that kind of firm. If you want to take over the state government, you have to be willing to pay up. Wagner promised he would throw seven figures worth of his money at the campaign, and there's no reason to doubt him.

Wagner is as clear an anti-labor, pro-rich guy candidate as you're going to find. He's a fan of Trump and Scott Walker. He hates unions, particularly the teacher union, and would like to gut them from every possible angle. He's a very rich guy who thinks that his money should give him the power to reshape the state to suit his own preferences. If you care about teachers or public education, it is not too early to start working to support Governor Tom Wolf.

Where Are The Russian Ed Bots?

So it turns out that the Russian bots haven't just been messing with us politically; according to research from George Washington University, the Russian bots have been busy trying to sow discord among US citizens on the subject of vaccinations.

If you've never wandered into the middle of a bot attack, well, all you really need to do is log in to Twitter and shoot your mouth off to someone with a high profile about a hot political topic. I don't know for certain that I've been a guest at a bot party, but once, after I posted about the need to abolish ICE in a conversation, my feed was flooded with aggressively attacking tweeters about half of whom had only been on Twitter for a day or two.

As our understanding of Russian bot farms grows, it becomes obvious that they are playing both sides of any topic that Americans like to argue about. Some folks argue that the Russians wanted to elect Trump President. I don't know if that's true; I suspect they mostly just wanted to make the election as divisive as possible. So it makes sense that they would also try to aggravate other contentious issues, because social media have made us cranky (I once received Very Cranky comments for making fun of Flat Earthers). Every one of us has had that kid in class-- he doesn't care what side wins, but he's going to jab folks into arguing just so he can spread chaos and keep class from happening.

But if the bots are everywhere, where is education's share?

Where are our Russian ed bots?

I know plenty of cranky posters from all sides of the debate, but I have ample evidence that they are real people. I've actually met some of them. I've seen them on videos. And they manage rants far longer than 280 characters.

I'm not sure they're always clearly labeled.

So why aren't the education debates being goosed by the Russians? Why aren't we a sufficiently agitating wedge issue?

There are a couple of answers, all a little depressing.

One is that they're here, and we just haven't noticed. I'll bet they were humming for a while back in the crazy Common Core debate days. I guess I'm going to start paying closer attention.

Another possibility is the educational debates are so arcane and wonky that bots just can't handle them.

Yet another possibility is that the Russians themselves have decided that education just isn't a very big issue. They've looked and all they see is a handful of people who really, really care about this stuff, while the vast majority of the US population continues to not bother with education all that much. This is sadly possible. Education is no longer a "topic" in news media, and folks who have tried to launch super-influential websites (like Campbell Brown) or Presidential campaigns (like Jeb Bush) based on education issues have been disappointed and largely ignored. Yes, Betsy DeVos is widely known and belittled, but mostly all anyone has absorbed is the idea that she's rich and dumb; vanishing few mainstream critiques of DeVos include any intelligent observations about her actual education policies.

We all kind of know this. Whatever side of the education debates you're on, you know that huge numbers of people aren't that concerned, that to even have the conversation you're going to have to explain all sorts of things because they haven't been paying attention to education for the last decade. It becomes really striking when an education story actually flares up, and suddenly people are noticing state-wide teacher strikes.

The explanation that I'll cling to is that most education issues can't be easily reduced to snappy tweet and dumb memes. "We're just too smart for those dumb bot farms" is better for the self-esteem. But the vaccination story is a reminder that any debate in the US is susceptible to being blown up by folks who just want to watch the world-- or at least one hemisphere of it-- burn. It's a reminder that in any online debate, it's best to think before you engage. Not every comment deserves a response.

Running Them In

After a baby-induced sabbatical, my wife has returned to running. Her first post-baby 5K was a couple of weekends ago, taking us back to a world we've spent lots of time in. And yes, she ran pushing the twins, because she's that adorable.

Many of the same old faces were there. We don't live in a huge area, and if you run the 5K circuit, you see many of the same runners race after race (you also, if you're the guy who waits supportively for his spouse, see many of the same supportive faces race after race). I ran years ago, but plantars facitis sucks, so I stopped.

My wife and the Board of Directors get ready to roll.

There's one runner I've watched for years who I find fascinating and inspirational. He usually finished toward the front of the race, though he doesn't win often. But as soon as he crosses the finish line, he circles around and goes back up the course. He'll meet other runners as they approach the final stretch, and he'll run with them (he's not the only person to do this, but he's the one I see always doing it). He may shout encouragement at them, he may cheer for them, he may just run silently beside them. But he runs them the rest of the way in.

Over and over and over, until I swear he has essentially run the whole race twice, he runs out, looks for someone who can use a hand, and runs them in. And he seems to be able to gauge what sort of coaching do they need-- support? a little kick in the butt? silence? chatter? a boost to come in strong, or just enough support to make it across the line?

I'm always moved by this display. Running is a tough sport, but every race is a reminder in many ways that competition doesn't have to be cutthroat. And in the average 5K, you'll see everything from people who train relentlessly and seriously to people who are just giving it a try. This guy runs with all of them.

It's not a perfect analogy for teaching, but it still strikes a chord-- reaching out to help people who are trying to meet their own personal goals, whether it's to beat their own personal best or just to finish. There's no judginess at these events; spectators and finished runners don't stand on the final stretch and holler "Loser!" or "Sad!" or "You need a remedial running class" at people who are struggling to some in at the back of the pack. The assumption is that everyone is just trying to do the best they can, and that making the attempt is deserving of support and a cheer. It's not that the race doesn't separate folks into winners and losers-- it absolutely does-- but it doesn't make winning and losing indicative of anything else. Maybe you ran the 5K in more time than another person did; that doesn't mean anything about your worth as a human being or your right to take up space on the planet or how deserving you are of help or support or love. I can't imagine that the races would better or faster if the runners and the crowd were harsh, cruel, trying to threaten runners with dire consequences if they didn't hit the mark.

The race is hard. You ran the best you could. Good for you.

And at the end, we cheer you on, maybe even run you in so that you cross that line with someone by your side, because runners run against each other, but they run with each other, too. They work to make the mark, to overcome the obstacle together, all the way to the end. School, I think, ought to feel more like that.