Strikes: When the Masks Come Off

Back many years ago, I was the president of a striking local. It almost ended my career.

In most districts, there's a nice layer of politeness over everything, and people subscribe to the usual Nice Thoughts. Teachers are super important. We want our district to be the best. We respect our educators.

But in strike season, the masks come off.

Some people think that teachers are overpaid, self-important jerks who should be grateful they even have a job. And you will know that some people think this because they will call you, at home, to tell you so. They will make an extra effort to tell you that some people only get minimum wage and what makes you think you deserve any more than those people.

You may have a decent working relationship with your administrators. When the strike hits, they may show you exactly what they think of you. Our superintendent was a "We're all a team and you guys are our most important team members and I want to help you accomplish great things," and after the contract negotiations and strike, nobody ever believed him again.

It's not always bad news. While one board member was publicly vocal about her feelings, explaining that the district had the money, they just didn't want to give it to us, the board president and I met once a week for breakfast, not to negotiate behind our teams' backs, but just to keep lines of communication open. It was a reminder that people who are divided by seriously different positions can still value each other.

But mostly the strike was like looking into the abyss. You know when you teach that lots of people don't value what you do, but you learn to push that knowledge into the background, like a faint buzz. But in strike season, it is in your face, loud and strong and unavoidable. You know that the board's main goal is to do the least they can get away with without actually breaking the law, and they want to do it for the least possible money-- but you just kind of ignore it, except that in strike season you can't. Every morale-busting profession-belittling obstacle and attitude that is usually only implicit now becomes explicit.  (Up to an including the person who is right now getting ready to type in the comments, "Well, then, if teachers don't like it, don't strike. Just take what you're offered and shut up.")

I thought of all that today when I saw this news item from Washington state, where teacher pay is erupting into a variety of possible strikes. That's because of a court decision in 2012 that found the state systematically underfunding schools. The results of that suit included a massive pile of money raised explicitly to raise teacher salaries.

You would think that would be it. Boards would say, "Okay, we have this money that we're supposed to give to the teachers. Let's give it to the teachers." And in some districts things have gone smoothly. In others, not so much. Teacher contracts have to be negotiated locally; you would think the fat stack of cash marked "for teachers" would smooth this process, but... well, you remember my board member who said "We have the money but we don't want to give it to them." So several districts are already on strike, and some are getting ready to.

Which brings us to yesterday's story-- the board of the Wapato school district has authorized their superintendent to sue the teachers, to use the power of the courts to force the teachers to work.

This is dumb.

The first rule of striking is (or should be) this-- when the strike is eventually settled, as it must be, everyone in your district will still have to work together. Watch what you say and do, because you won't be able to take it back (that goes double for what over-stressed striking teachers say to each other).

Wapato could settle their contract tomorrow. They could settle with a contract that gives the teachers everything they want. But they will still have to live with the fact that their board and their superintendent saw them as enemies that needed to be slapped down by The Law. And that's not something you come back from easily; no cheery professional development morning, "Hey, you teachers are the most important part of our team here at Wapato" changes that.

If I said it once, I said it a hundred times-- "This contract is not a battle to be one by one side or the other, but a problem for us to solve together." I know there are union folks who would disagree with me, just as I know that sometimes the other side is just so hopelessly awful that there's no option but full-out battle mode (the strike in my very first year of teaching was in just such a district). And yes, there are districts where the internal relationships are so badly broken that you can't break them any worse.

But for everyone else, a strike runs the risking of breaking relationships that a district needs to operate well. Maybe it's inevitable if what is behind the mask is nasty and dark. Maybe you're better seeing it than not. But I struggled. For several years after the strike, I thought about, even half-explored other lines of work I could pursue. I was never closer to leaving the classroom than I was then, and there were people on my board and in my administration that I never turned my metaphorical back on ever again.

When strikes happen, people worry about the obvious short term stuff. What about the seniors? What about the sports season? What about day care for the small children? What about our vacations? Those things certainly matter, but my experience is that students are far more flexible and resilient than you think. We lost all our vacation days except for the actual day-of-holidays; it ended up not being that big a deal (It was, as one student put it, "the same as what my old man has to do at his job").

No, the real damage from strikes comes in long term relationships, the trust. The masks come off and you see what people really value-- in particular you see what they value more than education. And that can be startling. And the longer things drag on, the more heated people become and the easier it is to lose sight of the actual goal-- a fair contract that pays teachers well, provides good working and learning conditions, and keeps the district healthy (why do so many board want to pursue a motto of. "If you can't get a real job anywhere else, settle for us") while respecting the economic realties of the taxpayers.

Wapato's board screwed up big time. Admittedly, I don't know the district, so maybe the board and administration have already made such a hash of things that it can't get any worse. But at a bare minimum this didn't help. They may have gained a point of negotiating leverage, but they've lost credibility with the people who work for them. I guarantee you, once the contract is settled, there will be teachers looking at the exits.

PA: Better Than a Graduation Test

Pennsylvania's end of the year test faces a new challenge from the legislature, and if you're in the Keystone State, you may want to give your favorite legislator a call.

In Pennsylvania, we actually have two flavors of the Big Standardized Test that everyone is mandated to inflict on students as a means of evaluation schools and teachers. For the elementary and eight grade students, we have the PSSA test. But our high school students take the Keystone exam.

There are many problems with the Keystone Exam. If I were still in the classroom, I would be forbidden by law and by the test-givers "code of ethics" to so much as look at the test, but now that I'm retired I can tell you that it has problems such as questions that are essentially vocabulary quizzes. I can also tell you that it's fond of questions where it gives the student a reasonably familiar word in an unusual context and asks the student to define the word based on context; this kind of "gotcha" question is a common feature. The Keystone, like many such BS Tests, likes the mind-reading in which students are supposed to discern the author's purpose. It also likes the "which sentence is best" question. All poorly written and designed not to see what the students know, but to trick the students into selecting the wrong answer.

Not that students feel the need to engage in this battle with the test writers, because the Keystones are zero-stakes tests for students.

Yes, in Pennsylvania, teachers and schools are evaluated based on a test that means nothing to the students taking it.

Now, that's not entirely by design. We were going to phase these in and after a couple of years, the tests would be a state graduation requirement for Pennsylvania students. But then that deadline approached, and legislators realized that a huge number of Pennsylvania students would be kept from getting a diploma for no reason other than this test that the state was making them take. And so legislators have flinched several times and pushed back the year in which students will have to pass the Keystone Exams. There are three-- reading, math and biology-- although there were going to be many more until it turned out that creating all those tests would be both hard and expensive. The whole history of testing in PA is the story of the ship of grand aspirations run aground on the hard shoals of reality.

Anyway, we're still in a holding pattern, waiting for the moment when the legislature thinks that more students will be above average. Okay, not exactly: The Keystone exams are theoretically standards-referenced, which should mean that everyone can pass. But it should also mean that we can get test results literally five minutes after the student finishes the test, but we're still waiting months. Why is that? Maybe because of something called scaling, which seems like a fancy way to explain different weights for different questions on different forms of the test. Or maybe it has to do with rangefinding, which seems an awful lot like norm-referencing-- collect answers and see what their distribution looks like. I get into all that more here.

Last year the legislature and governor (who are not always best buds) opened up an alternative route for career and technical students-- CTE students could prove their career readiness through tests actually related to their careers. For instance, welding students take a variety of tests to become certified as welders; Pennsylvania now says that's good enough to graduate, never mind the Keystones.

Now Senator Thomas McGarrigle is back with a bill that proposes other ways to take some of the bite out of the Keystone Exams, based on a fully sensible premise: recognizing that "success after graduation looks different for each student and that requiring a high-stakes, one-size-fits-all pathway to graduation does not provide an accurate representation of students’ abilities or likelihood for success in the future."

What are the specifics of the SB1095?

Composite Scoring

Rather than scoring "proficient" on all three tests, the bill would call for a satisfactory combined score from all three. Students could score "proficient" on just one test and "basic" on the other two. The secretary of education will set the satisfactory score and it will take an act of the General Assembly to change it.

Another Delay

Originally the Class of 2017 was going to have to pass the Keystones to graduate. Currently the Class of 2020 would be the first. This bill kicks the can down to 2021.

Supplemental Instruction

The school can offer extra instruction to students who don't make it (but the school may not require it). That extra schooling is not allowed to interfere with their regular schooling; in other words, the infamous practice of pulling a student out of regular courses for a bunch of test prep remediation is banned. Telling a vocational student that he can't attend his vocational classes until he's finished remediating is banned. The school can give the student a chance to supplement his instruction, but they may not hold his real education hostage to do so. This is a Good Thing.

This, Because...?

"No public school entity may be required to offer, nor may any student be required to participate in or complete, a project-based assessment as provided for in 22 Pa. Code 4.51c."

The Special Ed Loophole

A student with special needs who completes the requirements of his IEP but doesn't "otherwise meet the requirements of this section" must be given a regular high school diploma. Of course, any school can screw with this by writing Keystone Exam proficiency into the IEP. Smart parents will refuse, and smart schools will go along and wink wink nudge nudge some opting out, since that lets them drop some of the lowest test-takers' scores from the school evaluation.

A Whole Pack Of Alternative Assessments

A student "will be deemed proficient" if she does both of the following:

1)  Gets good grades in the "associated academic content areas of the Keystone Exams." These "grade-based requirements" are locally set.

and

2) Any of the following:

Gets a recommended-by-the-secretary score on the appropriate AP or IB exams

Gets an ASVAB score sufficient to qualify for military enlistment

Shows official notification that they will enter a registered apprenticeship program after high school

Gets a secretary-approved score on the SAT or ACT

Shows they've been accepted by "an accredited nonprofit institution of higher learning

Some other piece of compelling evidence that shows the student is ready for college, career, or the military

Reportage

The Secretary of Education is directed to report on how all this is working out.

One Weird Piece of Leverage

All of these alternatives are listed as existing in any year that the Keystone Exams are required for graduation. Which means, I presume, that if the Keystones are never required for graduation, all the rest of this stuff evaporates.

Who Likes This

The Pennsylvania School Board Association likes this. PSEA likes this. The PA Senate has already unanimously liked it, and now we're just waiting on the House.

And really, everyone should like this, because it takes the radical step of trying to judge college and career readiness by means other than a Big Standardized Test that's not even a very good test. If you're looking at all the alternative paths and thinking that under this bill pretty much nobody would need to take the BS Test, well, yes, I think you're correct-- and that's a good thing. Or to put it another way, why would we want to tell a student who has passed all their required classes, been accepted to college, or already started on a work or military plan that all that is going to be thrown out because of the results of a single standardized test.

No, this isn't perfect. And yes, there are a million conversations we need to have about the whole "college and career ready" issue. And yes, the SAT and ACT are probably not a great measure of anything, either. But it is still a huge improvement.

If you are in PA, this page has a simple link for sending your representative a note to support this bill. And here's another one. The bill is currently trapped in committee and needs to be sent out for a vote soon. This is soon. Send your note now.

Note. Some local school district administrations will grumble because in anticipation of the state's eventual action, many local districts have made the Keystones a local graduation requirement, even though the state never said they had to. Some may grump that this will require them to retool their system. Tough. If their system counts the Keystones as a graduation requirement, their system is seriously flawed and they should be delighted to have the chance to fix it.

Education Writers Association's Balance Problem

Education Writers Association (EWA) is just what it says-- the association of the various journalists and reporters who cover education (but not bloggers-- just legitimate journalists, and no, I'm not bitter at all). It contains some great writers and reporters who do some excellent and invaluable work.

But it does seem at times that education coverage in this country suffers from a reform tilt. Various reformsters are regularly quoted; actual teachers and folks on the defending public ed side of the debates, not so much. I have joked that there is a federal law that says no education story may be published until it includes a quote from Mike Petrilli (Fordham).

Here's a document that is either a symptom or a contributing factor; EWA keeps a list of sources that writers can turn to when they need someone to call or quote on a particular subject. It is not a balanced list, nor is it necessarily accurate. The heading says that this is a "tool to help you find experts on hundreds of topics in education." But the list seriously blurs the line between those who are experts on a topic and those who are advocates for a particular policy or position.

Here are some of the groups represented:

Thomas B. Fordham Institute is represented by five people, plus another four who are connected to it.

American Enterprise Institute is represented by six people, plus three more with connections.

Bellwether Education Partners is represented by three people, plus two connections.

NewSchools Venture Fund has three people listed, plus two connections.

Education Trust has five people, plus numerous other connections.

Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education has five people on the list.

TNTP's Kenya Bradshaw is listed as well as Center for Education Reform's Jeanne Allen. So is Peter Cunningham of Education Post. Several of the CANs are represented as well. Almost twenty from New America, a thinky tank that has cozy relationships with its corporate funders. Achieve has four "experts" and many alumni. And a couple dozen Teach for America alumni, including familiar names like Cami Anderson and Chris Barbic. Oh, and David Bornstein reps for Solutions Journalism Network, the project set up by Gate specifically to provide journalistic PR for his projects. And there's Nina Rees for the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools. EdWorks. CAP. Tom Vander Ark. Kevin Chavous. Richard Whitmire is a source without affiliation, a former president of EWA who wrote book-long love letters to Rocketrship Academy and She Who Will Not Be Named, former head of DC schools. The list goes on and on.

All of these groups are primarily advocacy groups, professional lobbyists for the education reform movement. Most of them do not conduct any sort of research, but simply issue position papers that are an attempt to make a case for whatever position they are advocating. Very few of these experts have ever spent real time inside a classroom.

Are there voices from the non-reform side of the tracks? Sure-- Diane Ravitch, Carol Burris, Jose Luis Vilson, Bruce Baker, Julian Vasquez Heilig, Helen Gym, Barmak Nassirian, Andre Perry. Probably some other names I missed or don't know.

You see the problem.

There are tons of colleges and universities represented, and if I had time I could try to sort out what side each individual department has staked itself out on.  Lily Eskelsen Garcia and Randi Weingarten are on the list. There are some folks who can claim some degree of expertise in what they do, but whose allegiances and bias are no mystery, like Eva Moskowitz and Doug Harris. There are plenty of people who represent particular businesses like PARCC or American Institutes for Research and some charter school operators.

There are many charter schools and chains represented. I found one public school classroom teacher (Timothy Meegan of Chicago).

Imagine that. An entire list of sources for writing stories about education, and little-to-no representation of public school classroom teachers.

The list can be filtered by topic, and no matter what topic you pick, you find some academians, a bunch of pro-reform advocates, maybe a pro-public ed person or two, and virtually nobody who is dealing with the topic as it relates to students in a classroom.

It's an unbalanced list. It's not just that it's heavily tilted in favor of Reformsters (though it is). It is also tilted in favor of politics over education. In a way this is not surprising; it's analogous to the horse raciness of political coverage, where reporters discuss whether the poverty bill of Senator Barpswaggle will get past Senator Whippensnot and what that means for the future of the political parties, but not a word about whether or not the bill is a valid approach to dealing with poverty. This list is best suited for people who want to discuss how well a particular ed policy is doing, but not how well it should be doing. This is a list for reporters who want to just report the school achievement numbers they're given without asking hard questions about how results of a single standardized test can tell us how good a school is (and whether or not the standardized test is good for anything at all).

Looking at the list crystalizes some things for me. I've often noted that the ed reform folks have large numbers of people who are well-paid to do nothing but sit around and push their policies-- this list shows how well that's working for them, and how far that puts them ahead of those of us who are "just" teachers, or former teachers, sitting at home blogging for free. It also shows how some ed journalism can be so hugely unbalanced, as if reform is an overwhelming, unstoppable, inevitable feature of the education landscape-- but then, when ed journalists look out into the world of sources, mostly what they see is reform and the pretty pictures that reform advocates paint for them.

Maybe I'm over-reacting. Maybe nobody who belongs to EWA actually uses this list. Maybe most education journalists actually personally know several working public school classroom teachers, and they call them for perspective all the time. Maybe.

And there are certainly many journalists working the education beat who do an excellent and well-balanced job, and they are a service and benefit to all of us. We, in turn, can make it a point to amplify and support their work.

If however, you're like me and you find this a bit discouraging, there is something you can do. On the source list page, there is a link for joining the source list. It warns that all additions are at the discretion of EWA, so we could all be rejected. But if you think you have valid expertise in the field of education and you think journalists researching stories ought to be talking to people like you (and you count as a person like you), then sign yourself up. The worst that could happen is that they'll say no, but the best that can happen is that you'll provide some enterprising journalist with a contact that will help them tell a better story. Help them out. Do your part.

How To Profit from Your Non-Profit Charter School

Occasionally politicians and policy leaders will try to thread the needle on charter schools by saying that they support nonprofit charters, but not those for-profit ones. Candidate Clinton tried that trick for keeping both sides happy back in 2016. But it's a distinction without a difference. Running a nonprofit charter school can still be a highly lucrative undertaking-- all financed with taxpayer dollars.

Here's how to make a bundle with your nonprofit charter school.

The Real Estate Business

There is such a thing as a business that specializes in charter schools and real estate. In some states, the government will help finance a real estate development if it's a charter school, and in general developers have noted an abundance of cash. Though, as one charter real estate loan bond financier told the Wall Street Journal, "There's a ton of capital coming into the industry. The question is: Does it know what it's doing?" Many states have found a problem with charters that lease their buildings from their own owners as well.

Why such interest in charter real estate? One reason: the Clinton-era Community Tax Relief Act of 2000 made it possible for funds that invested in charter schools to double their money in seven years. And the finance side can become so convoluted that, as Bruce Baker lays out here, the taxpayers can end up paying for a building twice-- and the building still ends up belonging to the charter company.

Management Companies

Once you've set up your nonprofit charter school, hire yourself as a for-profit charter management organization. Over the last decade, there have been numerous examples of this arrangement, sometimes called a "sweeps contract," where the charter school hands as much as 95% of its revenue off to a for-profit management organization. As with real estate, there have been instances where the school's assets (books, furniture, computers, etc) have been ruled to be the property of the management company-- so even if the school tanks, the organizers walk away with assets they can cash in.

Not every CMO is run by the same folks who own the charter school, but it's not an uncommon arrangement. Eagle Arts Academy in Florida not only paid its founder to develop a curriculum, but paid him for the rights to the school's name and logo.

Depending on your state, some of this is legal and some of it might not be. If we get into the grey areas, then we start seeing some really crazy stuff, like the Gulen charters. One of the largest chains in the US, the Gulen charters are connected to Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish religious opposition leader. The schools have been dogged by controversy, including allegations that their mostly-Turkish immigrant faculty are required to kick a portion of their salaries back to the movement. The Gulen schools are potentially using US taxpayer money to finance a government-in-exile. These schools are mostly nonprofit charters.

Charter schools, whether nominally for-profit or nonprofit, face the same basic problem-- they are businesses that do not control how much they charge for the service they provide. This means that every dollar spent on students is one dollar less to go into the bank account of the business; the interests of the students and the interests of the businesses involved in the school are in opposition to each other.

Nor can you assume that the laws protect taxpayer dollars in any meaningful way. In some states, the laws against self-dealing are strong and well-enforced. In other states, not so much. Eagle Arts Academy is a disaster by any measure, and local school authorities know it-- but state law does not give them, or anyone else, the clear authority to shut it down.

There are charter schools out there that are neither directly nor indirectly attempting to profit from the taxpayers via the students they are supposed to serve. But if you are shopping for a charter school for your child, knowing that it's nonprofit is not enough. Ask if there is a for-profit business operating the school, and if there is, think twice. If that for-profit business is operated by the same people that run the school, don't think twice-- just walk away.

Originally posted at Forbes.

What Privatization Really Means

We're living through an unprecedented age of privatization, filled with ongoing attempts to turn public spaces and public institutions into privately owned and operated businesses.

The first impulse is to ascribe this to corruption and greed-- surely the goal of privatization is to grab more money, to profit from institutions and endeavors that used to be for the shared public good.

But that doesn't entirely scan. The accusations are common, but I don't believe that Betsy DeVos is in the secretary of education's chair because she sensed a money-making opportunity-- certainly nothing that would make a perceptible difference to her family fortune. I don't think Bill Gates is one of the point men on the privatization of education for the benjamins; the man already has more money than he will ever spend.

Are people pursuing privatization simply out of a desire to rake in mountains of money?

I don't think so.

It's mine. All mine. 

You can look at Donald Trump, who, I would argue, has privatized the office of the President. Sure, this lifelong grifter is finding plenty of ways to make a buck from the office, but not everything he's doing is about money. He'd like to arrest Omarosa for running her mouth. He likes to hire and fire based on loyalty. He threatens Google because he doesn't like his self-googling results. He doesn't want to keep the flag lowered for John McCain because he never liked John McCain. None of this is about money; it's about exercising his personal will, making what should be public Presidential decisions based on his private personal preferences.

We've heard it over and over in the modern ed reform movement-- schools should be run more like businesses. Yes, that means watching the money side of things, but it also consistently means, "I want to be able to run this school like my own personal private business. I don't want the government to tell me there are rules I have to follow. I don't want unions telling me what I can or can't do. I just want to exert my will, unfettered and unrestrained, like I would over any personal, private operation I owned."

Throughout the Trump administration, in fact, we've seen a rush to do away with government regulations and "protections." But Betsy DeVos won't get richer because she canceled oversight of the predatory for-profit college industry. She's just making the world work more like she thinks it should, with business owners able to exercise their personal, private will over the things they own.

Privatization is not (just) about profiteering. It's about the exercise of will. It's about being able to treat public goods like private property, and about being able to exercise more unrestrained will over private property.

It's important to understand this, because if we simply look for profit motive, we'll miss much of the privatization that's taking place. Modern venture philanthropy doesn't have nearly as much to do with profiteering as it does with buying influence and compliance. Bill Gates appointed himself the Chief of Education in the United States, and he never had to stand for election. This is the Reed Hastings (Netflix) approach-- there shouldn't be elected school boards; those of us who know better should just be in charge.

Charter schools do not have to be operated as a private business. We've been hoodwinked into thinking that private ownership and operation is somehow a defining feature of charter schooling. There's no reason it has to be. But for the privatizers, that's really the only detail that matters-- the public school should be operated as a private possession.

Yes, money matters. It matters as a means of keeping and exercising power, and it's also a means of keeping score-- if I'm filthy rich, that proves that I'm wiser, smarter, better than. "Follow the money" doesn't just mean to follow the flow to the beneficiary, but also to follow the strings and see who is pulling them.

At its root, privatization is about taking possession of spaces and institutions that used to be shared public good. Your hospital is no longer a shared community service-- it now belongs to somebody. Your schools are not a shared community good-- they are now someone's possessions. The privatization dream is without boundaries. Let us own the roads. Let us own the water supplies and services. When we want to, let us take possession of the land. In a privatized world, everything belongs to somebody (certified worthy by his wealth), and that somebody is free to exercise his will over his possessions as he wishes. That somebody doesn't have to stand for elections, though elections themselves have been privatized, just as your tax dollars have been privatized, earmarked for the people who now possess the services and institutions that used to be operated by government on behalf of the public who once owned them. The 1% don't simply want more money-- they want to be in charge, and they don't want to have to listen to the 99% backseat driving.

Privatization is not (just) about profiteering. It's about the rich taking possession of a country and all its assets. It's about dividing society into people who get to exercise their own personal will and those who will have to decide whether to comply or resist, because they no longer have a voice.

Resistance to privatization can't just be about asking, "So who will make money on this deal." We also need to be asking, "So, once this has happened, who will be the decider? Who will decide who gets treated at the hospital? Who will decide who and what get taught at the school? Who will decide when the roads are plowed and paved? And what can I do if I don't like their decision?" The pitch will always be, "Well, the government decides that stuff now and they do a lousy job, amiright?" That may be true, but it doesn't answer the question. Get an answer to the question, because we're seeing the answer demonstrated right now in the White House-- "I'll decide. I'm the only one that matters. I'll decide, and if you don't like it, tough, and if you complain, I'll find some way to use my personal power to punish you."

Privatization isn't always about money, but it is always about power. This country was set up so that power would be hard to get and hard to keep and hard to exercise without restraint. Privatization is about getting past all of that, and back to modern version of feudalism. We should keep resisting.

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.