Management and Directing

This weekend is arguably the biggest weekend of the year in my little corner of the world. Johnny Appleseed lived in this area briefly a couple of centuries ago, and on that thin peg we have hung a gigantic local festival, complete with crafts, food, strange tchotchkes, a car show, and a theater production.

Our local theater group owns and operates a refurbished local theater, a beautiful facility despite the lack of fly and wing space. The group puts on about six productions a year; the rest of the time the theater hosts other performances. I've been doing directing of one sort or another with that theater group for thirty years now, wearing a variety of hats (this time it's stage director, lighting designer, and pit orchestra conductor). This particular production (Mel Brooks' The Producers) has been a real adventure, but I wanted a real adventure to carry me past the beginning of the first school year of my retirement.

I bring all of this up because I never get involved with a theater production that doesn't get me thinking about teaching in general and leadership in particular (also because I like to brag on my little town). Community theater directing has to be, in some ways, more challenging than working with the Big Time Pros. BTP can be less-than-delightful because they are paying people; my casts are all volunteers doing this for fun. BTP can say "the lead should be able to sing, tap and act, and he should be blond, blue-eyed and 5' 3" tall" while community theater directors say "Okay, these are the fifteen people we've got to work with-- how can we make them fit into this show?"

Directing is just like management-- your job is to get the best possible performance out of your people. That means supporting them and providing what they need to succeed. It means providing a overall vision and direction, and many directors have lots of ideas about how to do this. Some are less productive than others.

Micromanagement is not uncommon. This director tells her actors every single exact move and moment, every little gesture, every bit of business. If there is a moment in the show that she hasn't covered (and there always is) the performers stand awkwardly paused because they don't know what to do. On the other end of the scale we find directors how under-direct, who tell the performers, "Just go out there and say the lines. Stand somewhere. Or maybe move."

The sweet spot is somewhere in between, and the critical part of the vision thing is to explain some sort of answer to the question "What are we trying to do here?" Tell the actors the essentials about their characters. Tell everyone in the production about the style and theme of the production. Tell them what emotional notes we want to strike.

In short, establish the guiding principles of your work.

If you can do this clearly and effectively, and if you have chosen guiding principles that are sound and that are supported by the work, then magical things will happen.

Actors have a million decisions to make in the course of a performance, and if your guiding principles are solid and sound and communicated, they can use their own expertise to make those choices in a way that contributes to the show. Mind you, each one will have her own way of filling in the blanks, based on who they are, what they know, what they've learned, and how their character fits in the whole piece. But you have to trust them. You may help them spot some choices they didn't see, or be a set of eyes to spot choices that don't fit quite right, but mostly you have to trust them, because as a director you simply can't make every single choice for them (there are to many choices) and as a director you can create a hard and fast set of rules that will serve every actor and every character being portrayed. And some choices are rooted in very practical issues (can this actor change costumes fast enough to make that entrance? can we build that particular set piece?) and sometimes the art takes a backseat to the limits of the facility (did I mention the theater's lack of fly and wing space?). And you have to make sure all the technical support, all the lights and sound and set are there to help support the actors in their work.

If you know what the play's about, if you know what the point is, if you can just keep your eye on the ball and not loose track of the main thing-- AND you can communicate that to everyone else, AND you can select people who are talented and able and willing to grow into the experience AND you can figure out artistic solutions to practical problems AND you can give them the freedom to use the skills and art that they brought to the table-- if you can do all that, then the curtain will open and your audience will be treated to an amazing, beautiful, moving display of magic wrapped around a core of something true.

All of that is true about theater and true about schools and true about classrooms.

Two performances left. Stop by if you're in the neighborhood. Unlike a school or a classroom, a show only comes to life for a short piece of time.

5 Necessary Additions to Teacher Prep Programs

In the search to improve teacher preparation programs, the focus has often been on tweaking some traditional features, like methods courses that focus on bulletin board construction and education professors who haven't been in a classroom since Ronald Reagan was a governor. But if we really want to beef up the preparation of teachers, there are some larger steps we need to take. If you run a college teacher program, consider adding these requirements. If you intend to become a teacher, the following should be elements of your preparation program.

Major Level Course Load

If you are going to teach English, you should take the same sort of course load that an English major takes (in fact, you should probably just go ahead and be an English major). Ditto for all subject areas. For elementary teachers, the requirement is the same, but you can pick your specialty.

There is no substitute in the classroom for knowing what you're talking about. That doesn't mean the teacher needs to be infallible. But if you have to teach the history of World War I and the last time you learned about it was in high school, you'll be challenged to come off like an expert. Beyond the academic benefits of having students learn from a teacher who knows, a teacher has far fewer classroom management issues when the students believe she knows what she's talking about. Be an expert in your field.

Be Involved In Performance

If you are going to work in front of an audience for a living, you should practice it. Join band or choir. Take a role in a theater production. Do something that requires you to get up in front of an audience and do your thing while simultaneously paying attention to crowd response. A good teacher is able to read the room; experience in the performing arts will help you develop that skill. Ideally, your experience should be in a small ensemble. As part of a hundred-piece marching band on a football field, audience reading is of limited use. But if you're working with a jazz trio, you will quickly learn about losing a room's attention and figuring out, on the fly, how to win them back.

Take A Course In Which You Stink

Nobody becomes a math teacher because math was their worst class in high school and they hated every minute of it. And yet, you will teach those very students. You probably plan to teach a subject that you aced, and despite what the critics say about the teacher pool, you are probably no dummy. Which means that your subject matter knowledge bank is filled a bunch of things you know because you just... well, you just know. You have skills that you just kind of have, somehow.

How do you help a student complete the journey from Being Deeply Lost and Confused all the way to Understanding the Subject Like a Boss if you never had to complete that journey yourself? Everyone has had that teacher--the one who doesn't really explain things but just keeps repeating them (and, in the worst version, looks at you like you're a dope for not getting it).

You owe it to every future student who will struggle in your class to go struggle in a class yourself. Feel the stress and frustration and burden of Not Getting It. Practice the attack skills that are needed by someone who needs more than just ten minutes of instruction and a single assignment to Get It.

Work At A Low-Level Job

You may very well do this already, but if you don't, you should. Not simply for the classic "this will help you realize how badly you want to use your college education to avoid this kind of work" reasoning, but because this is the world that a large number of your students are going into. In fact, if you teach high school, many of them are already there. Teachers are college educated, and if not careful, they develop a kind of college tunnel vision. But college is not everyone's destination after graduation. I'll gladly argue that all students benefit from studying Shakespeare and ancient history and algebra and classic American literary movements--but not all students benefit in a "this will help in college" way.

Some firsthand experience in the working world will help you maintain a more well-rounded perspective. Note: if you are in some parts of the country, you may be a teacher with twenty years of experience still also working at one of these low-level jobs. That's not helping your professional balance; that's being taken advantage of by your employers.

Take Up A Sport

It doesn't matter if it's a competitive sport like football or an individual sport like kayaking--get involved in an activity that involves bodily exertion, mental focus, and physical stamina. On that list of Things Nobody Tells You About Teaching is the fact that, done well, it is physically demanding. Not as demanding as roofing or professional wrestling, but definitely more demanding than office work. You will be on your feet all day, and you will not get to set your own pace--there is no "I'm just going to take five minutes to regroup" in teaching. So build your physical stamina and mental toughness, as well as getting involved in physical activity that will help shed stress.

Note: If you are going to be an elementary teacher, you'll want to work on your bladder-holding skills as well.

Originally posted at Forbes

More Charter Business Begging

Remember the days when part of the charter school sales pitch was that they could do it all better and cheaper? Those were the days. Now we are more likely to find charters demanding greater and greater chunks of taxpayer dollars.

Take this op-ed from Nina Rees, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools, appearing today in the Washington Examiner. Rees started her advocacy career with the uber-conservative Heritage Foundation, spent some time in education for the Bush administration (including some time as Dick Cheney's education advisor), hopped to a consulting firm, before landing with NAPCS.

I'm not holding Rees responsible for the title of her piece; these are typically given by the editors, and this one is both a) not really representative of the content of her piece and b) not very bright. "Public school buildings belong to public school students-- including charter students" is just dopey. Public school buildings belong to the taxpayers; charter building ownership is a more tangled web, depending on the state. But to date I have not seen a story about a charter school closing and giving its building and equipment to its students.

Rees' complaint is a common one these days-- why can't charter schools have access to public tax dollars to help build their physical plant? Why can't the state and federal authorities throw more money at charter education so that charter schools can have Nice Places?

Charters are not just poor-mouthing in hopes of getting some more cash. This issue goes right back to the Big Lie of Charters, the lie that says you can operate two or three or ten school systems for the same money you spent to run one. The physical plant is the first place that lie runs into trouble-- you can't buy, build or operate ten school buildings for the same money you used to operate a single school. That has never not been true, but charter fans couldn't start the charter revolution by saying, "...oh, and you're going to need to raise more tax dollars to finance all this." So charter creep has been incremental-- first, sell the idea of charters and how they'll do more with less. Talk about how the money should follow the child, but don't mention that, actually, that won't be enough money and we're going to need more. Get the charter foot in the education door and then, once you feel more safely entrenched, it's time to ask for more.

Rees slips the critical point of her argument in via dependent clause:

Even though charter schools are public schools, supported by state and local tax dollars...

That, however, is the crux of the problem. Charters are not public schools, nor does the fact that they are paid with public tax dollars make them public schools. Defense contractors are paid with tax dollars; they are private businesses, not public companies. And charters have been very aggressive about asserting their private business nature (eg the White Hat charter management case in which White Hat successfully argued it was a private company and was entitled to keep all the equipment and supplies and money left in its defunct charter schools). Read the astonishing research by Bruce Baker about how the public can end up buying a charter school building twice and still not owning it. Real estate companies are among some of the early adopters of chartering, recognizing that a charter school would make good cover for some real estate profiteering.

Charters aren't transparent, don't answer to elected representatives of the taxpayers, don't have to follow various rules, don't have to serve all students. They are not public schools. They're private businesses, no more entitled to a taxpayer subsidy or handout than any other private business.

Rees argues that charters have to spend money on buildings instead of students. They also spend a ton of money for advertising; should the taxpayers foot that bill as well? Rees argues that charters don't always have the amenities. That sometimes they have to set up in strip malls. That they need about $375 million to bring charter physical plants up to speed. But none of this is news. None of this can be a surprise. This is the business that charter operators chose to go into-- what other business opens up shop and then tells the government, "Actually, this is pretty expensive and I'm going to need you to give me some taxpayer money to help out." It is interesting, though, that Rees admits that many charters are "making the best of inadequate facilities that lack essential school features." How, exactly, did these charters get off the ground if they lack the basic requirements to operate? And why is that the taxpayers' problem?

As Rees notes, nine states have already fallen for this pitch, thereby increasing the burden on taxpayers-- even if those taxpayers never had a say in whether or not they wanted to foot the bill for a few more private schools in their neighborhood.

Rees wants to paint this as a fairness issue, but what is fair about having taxpayers fund a private business?

Rees' solution is simple enough-- give charters more taxpayer dollars, or taxpayer-owned buildings. That's not my idea of a solution. I'm willing to support the public funding of charter schools, as long as we agree to a few stipulations. If charters want public tax dollars, either directly by having the money to build, or indirectly by taking over taxpayer funded public schools, then here are the rules--

The charter school building is the property of the taxpayers, and it will be overseen by a board elected by those taxpayers. Charter management will answer to that board.

Should the charter fold, the building and all its contents will continue to be taxpayer property.

The charter will operate with complete transparency, accounting for every dollar of taxpayer money that it spends (and do that spending under the authority of the elected board).

The charter will serve any and all students in the area from which it draws its taxpayer dollars. That includes all students with special needs and ELL students.

The charter will not close mid-year.

If you want to claim public tax dollars by claiming to be a public school, then act like a public school. If you want to be a privately owned and operated business, then suck it up and deal with the invisible hand of the free market like every McDonald's and Walmart and furniture store struggling to make it in the marketplace.

The Learning Path

Everyone has their favorite metaphor for understanding education. This is mine.

An area of learning is a block of territory-- let's call it a square ten miles-- to be explored. Some of the territories are well-traveled, tramped flat by the footsteps of a million people who have gone before. Some are rougher, more untamed, more filled with little-examined places.

Our method of exploring these territories is our process of learning.

The classroom teacher sets out a path for students to explore the territory. There may be places to stop and rest along the way, and the path may have been carefully cleared of obstacles. Sometimes students wander off the path, and the teacher has to go find them and bring them back-- that's one reason the teacher should know every inch of the territory like the back of her hand. Not only will students wander off the path, but sometimes a student will see something interesting and unusual off the prepared path, and the teacher needs to be knowledgeable and flexible enough to take the whole class off-path and grab that unique teachable moment. But within the set time, they would have to make their way to the set exit point. Of course, the better the teacher knows the territory, the less the class has to depend on a pre-cleared path.

In more rigid classrooms, the teacher (or curriculum director or course-of-study-in-a-box) lays down railroad tracks. Each student is strapped into a seat; nobody leaves the train. The students proceed together along a pre-set path at a pre-set speed, and the teacher's job is to travel with them, pointing out the pre-selected sights along the way. At each stop on the track, the teacher and students would look at what that stop's lesson is. At every stop, every student gets off, gets the lesson, and gets back on the train. See something interesting away from the tracks? Can't stop for it. Of course the teacher doesn't really need to know about the territory; she just needs to know about the parts right next to the tracks as they lead to the exit point.

True personalized learning would work like this: we'd drop the students off somewhere in the territory. Then the students would each select where they wanted to go and what they wanted to look at. When they had satisfied their curiosity about one location, they could move on to another. The teacher would be an expert guide, able to answer questions, offer directions, and provide explanations at every location within the territory. In a traditional time-based school, the deal would be "You have 180 days to cover as much territory as you can, and then you'll move on." Each student would create her own path, select her own destination.

The personalized [sic] learning that is being marketed is just another train, because most often what is actually personalized is not instruction, but pacing. Every student still rides the same train on the same tracks to the same destination. The only difference is that when students get off at a stop, they can stay at that stop until they get it, and then board the next train. Proponents are silent on what happens if after 180 days or 13 years, that student is still on a station far away from the exit point, and there are no more trainings coming to pick her up.

The underlying theory of Common Core is that all we need to teach students is the skills involved in riding a train, so we practice having the students sitting up straight, properly fluffing a pillow, practicing walking in the aisles. The train has to stop every 500 feet for a Train Riding Practice test before the final Big Train Riding Test, so this train never does cover very much territory.

Charter operators want to build their own train, and to do it they need to take the wheels from the public train. Sometimes the charter ends up being a caboose sitting by itself in the woods, the students stranded and the operators long gone with the money they took for tickets. Other charters figure their train will go faster if it's painted really nice. And some charter operators just dump the students by themselves in the middle of nowhere with a baloney sandwich and some string cheese.

Education policy is written by men who have never actually visited the territory, but they have seen pictures, so they will decide based on pictures where the paths should be cleared or where the tracks should be laid. Cyberschool students also ride a train, but they never get off it, they have to shovel their own coal, and the windows are all painted black.

The Opportunity Myth Myth

When it comes to slick, pretty education "research," the folks at TNTP know their stuff. Reformsters have been milking the slick-but-hollow "Widget Effect" for years, and now TNTP has whipped up another sure-to-be-referenced-way-too-much "report" entitled "The Opportunity Myth."

If ed reform eats its own tail, what does it poop out?

Who are these folks? TNTP used to stand for The New Teacher Project; She Who Will Not Be Named created it as a spin-off of TFA, designed to put older career-changers into the classroom. At some point it changed into an advocacy group pushing a redesign of teaching (current slogan: reimagine teaching). TNTP is led by Daniel Weisberg, who started out as a lawyer and then served as a labor specialist under Joel Klein in NYC. The board is packed with entrepreneurs, PR specialists, and reform CEOs. You can hunt through the whole list of TNTP leaders and find that this organization devoted to teaching has no teachers in leadership positions (just a few TFA temps and other alternative paths to one or two resume-building years in the classroom).

So this report comes straight from the heart of reformdom.

The report is a slick piece of graphic-soaked digitized niftiness (Look! This part scrolls sideways! And here are more graphics!!) but it features the TNTP sleight of hand. The subheading is the first piece of misdirection-- "What students can show us about how school is letting them down-- and how to fix it." But despite a lot of dressing about Listening To The Students, at its heart, this report is making a familiar point.

The Remediation Myth

After opening with a story about an individual student, TNTP lays out a familiar picture of the problem.

While more students than ever before are enrolling in college, far fewer are succeeding once they get there. Nationwide, 40 percent of college students (including 66 percent of Black college students and 53 percent of Latinx college students) take at least one remedial course, where they spend time and money learning skills they were told they'd already mastered in high school. A recent study found that college remediation costs students and their families $1.5 billion annually...

There are several corners cut here on a subject that deserves attention. Were those students told they had mastered the skills? Because high school teachers have been part of the following conversation for the past several years:

College: This student is not ready to be here!
High school: Did you look at his transcript? Did you look at his grades? Did you look at which courses he took? Because we told you pretty clearly that he was not ready for college, and you took him anyway.
College: This student is not ready to be here!

By the way-- "learning skills"? Common Core and other reform movements may keep insisting it's all about skills, but higher learning also requires some content knowledge, too.

The rise of college remediation courses is a subject that deserves examination, because something's going on and we really need to know what. Possible explanations include:

1) Colleges desperate to fill seats accept underqualified students.

2) The college eligibility test, the one that determines who needs remediation, is not a good test.

3) Students need more remediation these days because more of the year is spent on test prep and testing instead of actual education.

4) Colleges are pushing maybe-not-necessary remediation because it makes them a whopping $1.5 billion each year.

I taught 11th graders at both ends of the academic spectrum. Here are two things I can tell you I've seen multiple times:

Student visits from college and says, "Yeah, they tried to push me into a remedial course, but I just didn't do it, and I've been fine."

Student in vocational prep class insisting they want to go to college; they just don't want to take the "hard" college prep course right now.

As I said, there's a huge conversation to be had here, because those remediation numbers are trying to tell us something important. But this report is not interested in that conversation-- it brings up the subject only so it can make the same old reform point---

Public schools are failing.

The We Did Research Myth

There are somewhere under 15,000 public, private, whatever school districts in the country. TNTP "partnered" with five of them. That is not an impressive sample size-- and they weren't even randomly selected. This is like deciding that, since you have a problem with geese running into jets at the airport, you will go study some penguins in the zoo.

They observed 1,000 lessons-- but that's 200 per system. They followed 4,000 students, but that's just 800 per school. Within each system, according to their technical appendix, they divided the district into elementary, middle and high grades. Then they split those subgroups between 1/2 above-average students and 1/2 below-average students. So the study literally does not include any average students. Ten teachers volunteered from each school, and each teacher picked two classes to have included in the study.

For the three urban districts, percentage of students involved in the study was 5% or lower. In the single rural district, 64% of the district's students were in a study classroom.

But wait-- there's less!! In each of the two classrooms, the participating teachers selected six students-- two way below level, two just below level, and two above level. So once we dig down, we find a tiny sampling of students that is skewed toward underachievers. Well-- relative underachievers, because these six were within one classroom. So presumably we've got the student in an AP classroom who is in over her head, and we've got the student who is taking the low-level class that is way below his ability.

From this tiny not-even-sort-of-random sampling, the authors are able to make all sorts of sweeping statements about how different sorts of students are being educated in this country.

The Grade Level Myth

The big sexy headline-generating takeaway from the report is that all these students are being failed by a system that doesn't require them to do work at their level. The lessons aren't challenging enough.

Students spend most of their time in school without access to four key resources: grade-appropriate assignments, strong instruction, deep engagement, and teachers who hold high expectations.

Because numbers are sexy, the report also tells us exactly how much time is wasted--  "Students spent more than 500 hours per school year on assignments that weren't appropriate for their grade."

The entire report rests on this assertion about the grade level of the instruction in these courses. But what does "grade level instruction" even mean? Once again we delve into the technical appendix (which, I should note, involves following a series of links to a pdf file written in about .2 font). Once again, the rigor is underwhelming.

Assignments were collected from the six special students (photographed by the teacher) and the assignment quality was rated by "raters," all of whom had "at least two hours of training." TNTP gave them a rubric to judge three domains--

1) Content. Does the assignment align with the expectations defined by grade-level standards.
2) Practice. Does the assignment provide meaningful practice opportunities for this content area and grade level?
3) Relevance: Does the assignment give students an authentic opportunity to connect academic standards to real-world issues and/or contexts?

By "standards" we mean the Common Core (NGSS for science). But if we're parsing Core standards by grade level, I foresee some problems. Here are two different years for the same standard (RL.1):

Cite textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.

That's the fifth grade and sixth grade standard. Can you tell which is which? I know-- it's an unfair question because you haven't had your two hours of training. TNTP does site some subject-specific criteria for the rubric-- but the link is dead and the address leads to an error page.

The raters are also supposed to determine if the student completed the assignment successfully-- in other words, grade the assignment-- which is pretty impressive work for someone with two hours of training. They were also supposed to see if the student met the standards' requirement. It is not clear if these raters were hired through Craigslist or the TNTP intern program or some other agency.

The Strong Instruction Myth

This is good old fashioned tautological ouroborean research. First, you decide how to identify "strong instruction" based on what you consider identifying characteristics. Then you check the "strong instruction" to see if it shows signs of the characteristics you believe are important. Voila. It mostly does. In this case, "strong instruction" includes lessons that reflect "the demands of the standards."

And they watched two whole lessons by each volunteacher.

Moving on. Nothing to see here.

The Chicken Littling Myth

The biggest bit of misdirection in this report is the great amount of weight thrown behind the narrative that these students have dreams and ambitions, but they are being lied to, lied to by school systems that tell them that they are on a path to college and career readiness. There are plenty of charts and numbers to quantify the size and shape of student aspirations, and to suggest that teachers and school systems somehow don't know this about their students, as if the entire system is that guy sitting at the desk behind a newspaper that he never lowers to actually look at his students.

This is the oldest routine in the reformster playbook-- lean heavily on explaining just how bad the problem is. Lay out the problem in gut-wrenching detail. Make sure to define the problem in terms that fit your proposed solution. But while you have research and data and details about the problem, the part where you insist on your solution remains unsupported by anything except your assertions.

Reformster: Look at these test results. Look at these x-rays. You definitely have a brain tumor, and if  it's not fixed, you'll soon lose feeling in your limbs and your legs will stop working properly.
Patient: Oh my God! Save me!
Reformster: Certainly. I'm just going to use this chain saw to cut off your legs.
Patient: Wait! What? How will that help with my brain tumor?
Reformster: Look at these x-rays! Look at how big it is! Right there in your brain! This is terrible!
Patient: But how will hacking off my legs-
Reformster: X-rays! Brain! Terrrrrrrible!

Oh, and the writers also want you to know that socio-economics are no explanation or excuse for students' low performance.

The Recommendations Myth

The recommendations portion of this report starts with a reminder that we should be doing this For The Kids, and that the classroom experience of students should be the center of policy decisions. Then it calls for two commitments: First, give every student grade appropriate assignments, strong instruction, deep engagement, and teachers with high expectations regardless of any part of their identity. Second, every student and family should be "an authentic partner" and should have a serious role indecision-making-- a real choice, one might say.

This leads to five recommendations:

1) Listen to parents and students.

2) Grade-appropriate assignments for everybody. Regardless of whatever.

3) Give all students, especially the behind ones that is [insert rhetoric that gets you around actually saying "rigorous" here].

4) High expectations. Stop being racist.

5) Conduct an equity audit to make sure everyone is getting the good stuff.

The Deja Vu Myth

So, to sum up....

Schools are lying to families by telling them that their children are college and career ready when they actually aren't. Teachers should have higher expectations, which can be put into action by aligning class work with the very best college and career ready standards-- and poverty and racism, while bad, are no excuse for low performance on the school's part. Do it For The Kids- don't put adult concerns ahead of children's needs. The school system should be responsive first and foremost to parents, who should have choices available that suit their goals.

Does this all sound familiar? It should-- this entire report is the report that Reformsters (particularly Arne Duncan) wish they had come up with a decade ago when trying to pitch Common Core and charters.

We could spend even more time picking apart the research techniques here, though Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat hit the basic issues pretty well, but looking at the details is really beside the point. The details are window dressing. This is the same pitch we've been hearing for over a decade, adroitly stripped of the test-centric angle and the demand to evaluate teachers-- arguably the two most hackle-raising obstacles to reformster goals.

The authors have tried to ease up on teachers, even going so far as to write at one point "for those of us working in the school system..." which-- well, no. The folks at TNTP are not down there in the trenches with actual trained educators. But the repeated calls to listen to the students and teach them the right stuff make it clear that the premise here is that teachers currently do neither. It's an odd charge, given that teachers have been laboring under reform programs for years, but then the other curious feature of the report is that it does not acknowledge how NCLB, RttT, Common Core, and test-centered accountability have changed the landscape.

This report could have been written fifteen or twenty years ago. Again, I'll bet some Reformsters wish it had been.  But there is nothing new here.

Here is probably the report's biggest flaw. If you really thought the problem was that students aren't ready for college and career, as evidenced primarily by the rate of college remediation, why wouldn't you gather up students who needed remediation and those who didn't, and compare and contrast them. Why wouldn't you study them to see what one group got that the other lacked? You wouldn't do that because you have a point you want to make, and your research "design" is based not on a quest for answers, but on building a scaffold for the answers you already want to sell. This report was funded by the Joyce Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Overdeck Family Foundation, and the Barr Foundation.

The Unfortunate Truth

As Barnum notes:

The research of TNTP, previously known as the The New Teacher Project, has a track record of shaping policy, particularly with an influential 2009 report known as The Widget Effect, which focused on perceived flaws of teacher evaluation systems.

The report is old wine in a slick new skin. But it looks really, really cool, and it layers on the For The Children with a shovel and a backhoe, which is always compelling because we really should do it for the children-- but not if "it" means launch a highly profitable education-flavored industry based on pumping amateur hour standards out into a top-down imposed framework that stomps on actual education professionals.

I don't know that anyone will be "influenced" by the report, because it is old news. But people who are already invested in this reform agenda will have a slick new publication that they can wave around to bolster their position. The Widget Effect mattered because instead of just saying, "I think this should be policy because I like the idea," reformsters could call policy-makers and wave around an official-looking report-thing. The same will happen here. TNTP has provided the striking headline-- "Students are wasting 500 hours a year on work that's below their level"-- and a whole bunch of policy makers will never look any deeper than that.

So that's a bummer.

When someone waves this in your face, you can tell them that it's a report based on a tiny number of students in a tiny number of schools about which we know no pertinent details. You can tell them that the report may back up the notion that students have aspirations and sometimes have trouble achieving them, but that TNTP made up its own notion of what "grade level work" means, and someone else's notion would yield different results. You could point out that this is one more call for schools to buy material aligned to the Common Core standards, and if the Core was going to fix all this, wouldn't it have done so by now? You could ask them to tell you what, exactly, is a new idea included in this report?

Here's hoping that more people listen to you than are going to listen to this report.

The New Standardized Morality Test. Really.

I'm not really sure how to start this, because -- well, I'll just let the lede on this press release speak for itself:

Personalized Digital Test Prep Lab Rats

If you want to see the worst of what Personalized [sic] Learning can look like, let me take you straight to horse's mouth. We're not going to look at a critique, but at an actual sales pitch, and see how on the ground, Personalized [sic] Learning is about computer-delivered test prep. It is about extending the tyranny of the test via digitized instruction.

Here's the pitch. At first glance it appears to be just another article at EdSurge-- and it's meant to-- but in fact is what's now called "sponsored content" aka "advertising meant to be mistaken for an actual legit article. "A Back-to-School, Personalized Learning Toolkit" is by Ryan Hagedorn, COO at Edmentum, where his career has been in marketing and sales (he earned a degree in marketing from Hofstra in 2004). Edmentume is, of course, a leading provider of online Learning Stuff, and the tool kit is ten pieces of PR materials. In their own presentation, these folks tell us what they think the main point, purpose, and strength of Personalized [sic] Learning is supposed to be.

Let's look through the kit.

1) A how-to guide.

It's a 16-page booklet, and it identifies personalization with creating a student profile, assessing their current status, and setting a path. While it acknowledges "learning modalities" and the need to "appeal to student interests," the guide comes back to the idea of a "path." As we'll see again and again, the personalized learning is really personalized pacing. All students follow the same track-- they just get to go at their own speed.

There is a creepiness factor here. After suggesting a wide assortment of academic and personal data to be collected about each child, the guide suggests you make the solution to making the student profiles "manageable" is to "leverage online solutions." Then make the profiles accessible and get students to contribute information. Everyone can grab  shovel so the data mining will go more easily! Your Data Overlords thank you.

2) Video- Personalized [sic] Learning at Oregon High School

The promotional video talks to people in various roles at the school, including an actual teacher plus a principal, student, online/blended facilitator, parent, district online/blended coordinator. There are computer-porn shots of laptops being opened, shots of students sitting silently together at a table in front of their screens. The student talks about moving along the path at her own speed-- but not about determining the path. And we get a favorite Edmentum quote about not teaching to the middle any more. We get lip service about the importance of teacher-student relationship, but all the students in the video are at computers (pricey Apple laptops), with a teacher occasionally appearing at the student's shoulder.

The district coordinator talks about getting the pacing right. Pace pace pace. And being in line with the standards, because the (Common Core) standards are a necessary part of this "revolution."

3) Workbook- Online Curriculum Guide

This is a link to yet more "resources" like blog posts about evaluating ed tech and Marzano's best teaching techniques. The workbook portion talks about how online resources can be used as text, complete course, or credit recovery scam program. It offers helpful teaching advice like "clearly present goal/objective for each assignment" and "provide students with all materials needed to complete an assignment" and "remember to breathe"-- okay, not that last one, but the "tips" here seem aimed at someone who slept through all of their college teacher prep classes.

There are also tips for running Personalized [sic] Learning like "monitor student work" and "allow students to progress through assignments at their own pace" and "treat all students equally." Also "allow students to ask questions." It is hard to escape the notion that this program is being designed to be run by aides with no actual classroom experience, because this is basic basic stuff.

Then there are some tips for evaluating the online provider of your curriculum, thereby completing the picture of a program designed to be administered  by a "school" full of people who are either a) dopes or b) not actual educators.

4) Blog- Five Steps To Differentiated Instruction

Assess student, align to standards, create path, monito students, repeat. This is supposed to be a "deep dive" into how it's done. We may have some disagreement about what "deep" means.

5) Workbook- Blended Learning: Fundamentals of the Planning Process

This handy workbook defines blended learning as learning that occurs at least partly on line, in a physical location other than the student's home, and the "modalities along each student's learning path within a course or subject are connected to provide an integrated learning experience" which means-- well, I'm not sure. Edmentum might be rejecting micro-competency badges here, or they might just be flexing their gobbledeegook muscles.

They recognize four models-- rotation, flex, a la carte and enriched virtual. Rotation means moving through labs or stations, or using a flipped classroom. Flex is more a 1:1 computer situation. A la carte involves taking all of some courses on line. "Enriched virtual" means "virtual." Cyberschool.

It offers a blended learning project timeline for implementation. My favorite checkpoint on that is "Staff Onboarding."

6) Webinar-- Blended Learning: Which Model Works for You

Hard pass. The description indicates they actually focus on rotational and flex models.

7) Video- Blended Learning at Red Mill Elementary

Heavy once again on the personal pacing, but the most striking feature is how heavily it pushes the idea that Edmentum's stuff helps the school get better scores on the Big Standardized Test. Expected because one of the "teaching" programs is Study Island, which is a really terrible program designed to do computerized test prep. I don't want to go off on a Study Island rant, but if my children were spending any amount of time on Study Island at school, I'd be making phone calls. But the teacher and principal in the video are excited that students know "exactly what will be on the test" and that reports from the programs tell them what standards need to be additionally taught in order for the test prep to be effective. To be clear, "test prep" is my words, not theirs-- but that's what we're talking about. Computer programs used as test prep and test coaching-- not actual education.

The video also underlines the data backpack personal record that will follow the students on and on. The principal repeats the "not teaching to the middle" line and we talk about how a child who is below level is left to work at their own pace. What the constant discussion of pace continues to ignore is the age old question-- what do you do with a child whose pace will get them through six grade in eight years?

8) Workbook-- Virtual Learning: Exploring the Options for Expanded Opportunity.

The workbook promises to help districts decide if complete virtual implementation is best, if they should become a cyber school. Let me save you some time-- it isn't. Ever. Virtual schools have proven consistently to be disastrous for everyone except the companies making money from them.

9) Blog-- Universal Design for Learning: Powering Personalized Experiences for All Students

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is thrown out as another idea for personalization, except that it also purports to be about designing curriculum that will work for everyone. "One size does not fit all," says UDL, "unless you make one size the UDL way, in which case one size will totally fit everyone." (UDL fans can argue with me in the comments). UDL also throws around "brain science": and some of the discredited ideas about learning styles.

10) Blog-- How To Evaluate EdTech Tools that Support Teaching and Learning

"As the traditional classroom evolves into an environment rich in technology..." opens this blurb, demonstrating how simple word choices like "rich" can help sell your product. Incidentally, none of these blog links are to an actual blog-- the links all lead to ad copy on an authorless corporate website of Edmentum's. I'm not sure whether this tech-based company doesn't understand what a blog is or if they just hope their audience doesn't know.

But this ad copy says that good edtech is standards aligned, because standards standards standards. To dive, even non-deeply into the edtech world is to realize how much they needed and use The Standards as a marketing tool.

The tech should engage students, by which they seem to mean that the tools should assess students a lot and use the data  "to construct learning activities at the student's zone of proximal development" with just the right level of challenge. Do you know how this really works? Students learn that doing too well on the pre-assessment gets you hard work to do, but if you deliberately throw the pre-assessment, you can get yourself a break.

The tools should support teachers and inform instruction. Do they give lots of reports. And toold should "leverage technology for effective assessment."

There's more, but what we really ought to notice is that a conversation that started out about personalized learning is now entirely about buying computer software products to teach and assess the students.

How To Use This Post

The next time a Personalized [sic] Learning disciple tells you how it's not at all about computerized learning or data mining or perpetuating the Common Core, just send them to this post. See, I agree with folks who say that personalized learning-- actual personalized learning-- doesn't have to be about all this digital baloney. But the ideals of personalized learning are not what's happening-- this is what's happening. Slavish alignment to the Core standards (even if they're operating under an assumed name) while students spend chunks of their day staring at a screen, teachers are just facilitators, and a bunch of data is steadily extracted as mediocre instruction is digitally delivered to digital natives who are not, I assure you, saying "Wow, when I do boring worksheets on a computer it's so much more exciting!" (In fact, digital natives now think that desktops and laptops are quaintly old-fashioned, but that's a discussion for another day.)

This is what companies are actually selling as personalized learning-- software teaching programs that take the person out of personalized and turn learning into lab rat style training. No thank you.