ICYMI: Scary Time of Year Edition (10/28)

Just a few things to catch up on. Remember, sharing is caring.

Documenting Maine's Failure To Implement Proficiency Based Education

Maine tried to turn the whole state into proof of concept for PBL/CBE. Things didn't work out. Here are some of the details.

Maine Went All in on Proficiency Based Learning The Rolled It Back

Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat also took a look at Maine's failure. Just in case you want to see the same disaster from a different angle

Putting Public Back Into Public Accountability

An answer to the question, "Well, if we don't grade schools on test scores, how will we know if they're any good?"

Kentucky Pension Crisis

How those wacky hedge fund guys took a state's pension program to the cleaners.

Puerto Rico Recovery

More disaster capitalism on parade.

Georgetown Law Students Objects To Exam Software

So what if your school said that in order to take exams, you had to load some of their software on your own computer.

Hack Education Weekly News

Audrey Watters does a weekly roundup of education news, just in case you don't get enough to do from me.  

A Buttload of YouTube Education Money

YouTube has decided to sink a ton of money into educational videos. Please, may some go to the Honest Trailers people.

PA Keystone Exam: The Monster We Refuse To Let Die

Steven Singer looks at the latest development in Big Standardized Test. 

Here's Hoping That The Myth of the Bad Teacher Is Finally Laid To Rest

Could we have finally reached the end of the search for the fabled Bad Teacher? It's pretty to think so.

How High Schools Shaped American Cities 

Amy Lueck has an interesting look at how schools are tied to community, and how school choice threatens both.

Will the Save Our Schools Movement Propel a Change Election

Ruth Coniff at The Progressive takes a look at what's going on in the resistance and how it might affect the election

DeBlasio School Renewal

In what should come as a surprise to nobody, NYC's Renewal School turnaround plan flopped-- and some students were left to experience the flopping first hand.

Snake Oil, Charter Schools, and Disingenuous Debates  

A local op-ed in the Johnson City Press is a blunt response to charter supporters.

The Digital Gap Between Rich and Poor Kids Is Not What We Expected  

Nellie Bowles in the NYT says that one group will be taught by humans, and one by screens. Take a wild guess at which is which.

A Teacher's Opinion and the Classroom Door

Twice this week the issue of teachers and their opinions cropped up, first in David Berliner's thoughtful piece at The Answer Sheet and again in Robert Pondiscio's reaction to a math teacher's tweet about the Kavanaugh hearings. Berliner was not wrong in answering student questions about how he would use his vote, and Pondiscio is not wrong to point out that a teacher's First Amendment rights are surprisingly limited inside a classroom.

I've thought about this issue a great deal in my career, my thinking propelled by three factors:

1) I had teachers in high school who spent time trying to tell us what to think, and I hated it.

2) For most of my career, I have taught American literature, and you can't teach about the literature without talking about the culture it's rooted in, and you can't talk about American culture without talking about religion, race and gender.

3) My teaching of writing has always been rooted in getting students to express themselves, and that's hard to do with a classroom policy of "Only some ideas are okay to express."

So as a way of working through all this one more time, let me walk through what that meant in a classroom, and how it was challenged in my last years of teaching.

My students over the decades heard some version of the following many, many times:

Okay. Before we start on these notes and discussion, I'll remind you that I'm not advocating this and I'm not attacking it. My job is not to tell you to agree with these people or to disagree with these people-- but my job is to convey to you as clearly as I can what they believed about how the world works. 

And that was a prelude to laying out Puritan beliefs and Romanticism and Realism. In answer to questions ("How could the Puritans belief that material things didn't matter but that material things were a sign of God's favor?") my answers were prefaced with "I think they would give this as an answer..." And I committed to representing each set of beliefs as true-to-the-originals as I could, making sure I neither highlighted the problems inherent in them nor ignored them. It is not an easy balancing act, and it requires a sincere effort to understand how the world looked from that person's point of view.

I know over the course of the year I challenged and confused some students, who found, for instance, both Romanticism and Critical Realism compelling while I was explaining them. That's okay. For many (if not most) of my eleventh graders, it was a revelation just to grasp that there are different ways of understanding the world and figuring out how to be fully human in it.

The same principles applied in some writing instruction. I assigned essays that dealt with controversial topics, and we kicked them off by arguing about them in class, and to make sure the discussion kept going, I always argued all sides. "What do you think," students would invariably ask, partly because they were curious and mostly because they wanted to know what correct answer they should write about. "You don't need to know," I said.

Pro tip. I never assigned an essay about a topic on which I had a fixed opinion that only one side was defensible and that the other was just plain wrong.

For discussions of literature, it always came down to evidence. I was in college when I realized there are two types of English teachers-- the ones who think that there's only one way to read each work and their job is to convey that right answer, and the ones who think that the act of reading and building a relationship with the work could lead to many shades of meaning which were all okay as long as you could back it up. And that this didn't mean anything was fair game; you can claim that Hamlet is suffering from PTSD due to alien abduction in a previous life, but you can't make a very good case for it. Every year some smartass would argue that "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" (a poem that serves as a great example of how much difference one word choice can make) is about Santa Claus, and every year I would say, "Make your case," and they would give it a shot, and the rest of the class would pick them apart.

Discussions about non-content issues are thornier. What to do with the student who wants to argue that women should be silent and do as they're told, or that religious people are mentally ill?

I've always believe that truth (not Truth-- I'm not a huge believer in Truth) rises, and that if you pursue it honestly, with openness to where the trail leads, it will finally rise above the rest of the flotsam and jetsam to reveal itself. Not that we can't all push and contrive and argue as a way of helping lift it, but one of the advantages of teaching in the same small place for almost forty years as that you see an awful lot of people who Figure It Out eventually. It helps if you can let go of the notion that you need to get them to figure it out Right This Minute.

And Ponticello (the guy whose tweet started much of the discussion) is correct when he says we need to teach civics, but we are always teaching the soft stuff whether we intend to or not, and so it's important to hold onto our intentionality.

Here's a story. Years ago I was a class advisor, and as a sort of goof, a couple of less-than-stellar students ran for class officers. And as sort of a goof, the students elected them. I had a moment when I was counting votes. My mentor, the person who was supposed to be my extra set of eyes, said, "Look, it's fairly close. This will be disaster. Just fix the results." Turns out that advisors sometimes do that. I was tempted. I didn't do it. Then, to make things worse, the student who was elected president moved out of town and the vice-president less-than-serious student was suddenly in charge of the senior year. "Fix this," the other students said. "Let me out of this," he pleaded. But I made them live with their choices, and nobody died, and somewhere out there are a couple hundred adults who learned years ago that A) voting matters and B) you can rise to an occasion when you have to.

My point (I'm sure I had one) is that in the classroom we often want to sacrifice long term results for short-term comfort. And that includes the desire to straighten out students who believe terrible stupid things. People get where they're going in their own way, in their own time. We can't force them to do otherwise.

Now, there has always been a hole in my approach that has bugged me from time to time, but just flared up something awful over the past two or three years. That would be students who won't engage and insist on holding on to facts that aren't facts.

This is the challenge of the Trump era. A student says that Obama is a Muslim from Kenya. What do you do? How do you respond in a way that respects the student's autonomy as a human being while still dealing with the absolute incorrectness of what they're saying.

"Two plus two is five" was easy, and "No, Hamlet's mother's name is not Ethel" also. I could work my way past "I think the verb in this sentence is 'balcony'," But we now live in an era in which facts have been politicized, and to challenge even the simplest statement about a sentence recorded in a video is to make a political statement. It is hard to find a way forward in conversations like "Someone sent me a bomb. Here it is," and the response, "No they didn't. No it isn't."

If a science teacher teaches evolution, it's a political statement. Hell, the Flat Earth Society is growing, so round earth teaching is political. As many have noted, what do we even do with value judgments like "Bullying is bad."

I still think a teacher should not be foisting their opinions on their students. It's not our job to tell them what to think or what to value. But it is our job to tell our truth-- hell, that's all we do. We cannot keep our opinions out of the classroom-- it's not humanly possible, and even the decision to keep our opinions out of the classroom is a way of injecting our opinions about opinions into the classroom. And we live in a time when other people are thrusting their opinions into our classrooms. The President suggests that immigrants are rapists and criminals, that all immigrants should be run out of the country-- that's an opinion that lands right in our classrooms. When the President suggests that some of the people who want to see some of our students, literally, dead are "very fine people," that is an opinion that lands right in our classrooms. When people decide that it's okay to start flying Confederate flags everywhere, that opinion lands right in our classroom. And this is not about tolerance or coming together to compromise-- there is no "compromise" with people who say, "I think people like you should be thrown out of the country, or just killed." Those opinions all land in our classrooms, along with the ones that say women owe men sex or black folks are stupid and lazy or that white men are the most oppressed group in the country. We can't pretend they aren't there, and we can't pretend that we don't know they're wrong. To stay silent is to become an accomplice to gaslighting.

As open as I was, I had rules. Everyone in the room treats everyone else with respect. No exceptions. No disrespectful actions, no disrespectful language. I had values that I held onto, and I was explicit about almost everything.

And looking back, I guess what I did was model all of that. This is what I believe. This is why I believe it. And when all is said and done, this is my classroom and we're going to live by these beliefs in here. For me, a basic element of respect is that you don't try to force someone to think or feel a particular way, and that is doubly true when you are in a position of power, acting as an agent of the state. You have a job, and your job is to help those young humans become more fully themselves, learning what they think it means to be human in the world. That means you have to show them a complete human, and that means you have to balance between leaving them free to figure things out and telling them what you passionately and deeply believe to be true. If this doesn't seem like a very clear and straightforward set of rules, that's because it's not a very clear-cut uncomplicated feat to pull off. That's why they pay teachers the big bucks.

AZ: Why Conservatives Should Oppose ESAs

Education Savings Accounts are the uber-vouchers, the last stop on the reformster railroad before we get to the place where schools simply disappear.

ESAs come in a variety of flavors, but here is the basic idea.

With charter schools, you can send your child to any school in the system, and tax dollars are sent to that school to cover the cost of educating your child.

With a voucher system, tax dollars are given to you and you can use them at any school you wish to send your child to.

With ESAs, you get some money, typically via a debit card, and you spend it on educational whatever. Charter school, home school supplies, tutors, books. In most cases, if you spend very little of it, you can hold onto it for college expenses.

We can talk about all the reasons that left-tilted folks don't love this idea, but not today. Because today we're talking about Arizona. Arizona has had an ESA program in place for students with special needs, but the legislature recently moved to expand that to all students, and now a bunch of scrappy activists have managed to get the expanded ESA rule put on a ballot. Arizona voters have a chance to vote ESAs down, right there in heart of Koch Country, in a state where left-tilted folks are fairly rare.

So let's ask, instead, why a conservative, a right-leaning free market voter should defy the state's governor and the Koch interests to vote down ESAs. They may not consider the issue of draining money from public schools a big deal, and they may, in fact, be in favor of school choice. But from the conservative view, there is a critical issue with ESAs.

Accountability.

Charter schools face some degree of accountability, both financially and academically. In theory, at least, there is an authorizing group that is responsible for making sure the charter school is reasonably decent. Even a voucher system allows for some oversight of the schools that are receiving the tax dollars.

But Arizona's ESAs, like most existing and proposed ESAs, give the family a card (Bank of America, in Arizona's case) with a balance on it that they may spend for "educational products and services." So private school tuition, or a tutor, or coaching software, or books, or whatever. Arizona parents have to agree not to spend the money on consumables like paper and pencils, nor is the money to be used for transportation. Advocates complain when I say that ESAs could be used to buy a PlayStation and some educational games-- but what in the law says they couldn't (maybe the "technological devices" provision, but that's awfully broad and vague)? And what in the law provides any sort of oversight to catch any such abuses? Can you imagine the kind of manpower that would be needed to check up on every family with an ESA to make sure they are spending tax dollars responsibly-- it would be expensive and time-consuming and intrusive and it's not going to happen.

The state of Arizona is essentially offering students a cash incentive to drop out of school. Take the few thousand dollars, tell us you're doing something educationy with it, and no questions asked.

Yes, accountability-ish steps have been taken along the way. For instance, according to a report from EdChoice:

For example, in 2013, legislators gave the department the authority to create a 1-800 number for fraud reporting and a website where parents or vendors could report fraud. 

But if the ESA money is spent and used within the home, who is going to see anything? And which citizens will be well-versed enough to know fraud when they see it? Advocates also call for "surprise" audits of families and making sure that only certain vendors and products are "unlocked" for the card, similar to what some states now do with food stamps. Can those locks be circumvented? And where is this staff that is going to audit family ESA spending for thousands of families more than once a year-- the law is capped at 30,000 students, but there are 1.1 million students in the state,
and ESA backers would like to include them all.

In fact, the ESA program already in place has been an accountability mess. The credits can be converted to cash by buying books, then returning them. Some took the ESA-- then returned to public school. Some crafty families parked the money in 529 college savings account so that the state could not get it back. There is even reason to suspect that ESA money was used to get an abortion. 

The kind of abuses possible with this sort of system stagger the imagination, and the money drained out of the larger education ecosystem would be a loss to public, private and charter schools alike. Plus, the end result will be students whose education was inadequate and who cannot contribute to society.

If you're a conservative, you may well like the idea that nobody should get welfare unless they can prove they're working or incapable of working. You don't want to see your tax dollars wasted (and there has already been some pretty spectacular fraud in Arizona). If you are giving somebody money to get an education, would you not also want to see some proof that they are actually getting one? Arizona's legislature is tough on welfare recipients-- but not on ESA recipients, even though an ESA is basically education-flavored welfare.

Proposition 305 will be up for a vote in November. Here's hoping that Arizona voters from across the political spectrum do the right thing and roll back ESAs in Arizona.

Outsourcing the Classroom To Ed Tech

This presentation was part of the Network for Public Ed convention last weekend. The panelists are Leonie Haimson, the super-activist from NY who beat Gates and InBloom; Audrey Watters, the expert on the subject of ed tech history and keen critic of its current manifestations; and me, trying not to be all fanboy about my co-panelists.

You can find a copy of Leonie's slides here, and Audrey's prepared remarks here. My part doesn't have any useful meatworld analog.

The panel looks at where the trends in privatizing-via-computerization are headed, as well as the concerns about data safety and just how good we can expect this stuff to be, anyway. Plus some things to keep in mind if it looks like this technocluster is headed toward you (and it probably is).

Leonie's slides are great, and Audrey says a naughty word while explaining just why the claims of AI-directed education are bunk.

What To Read (2018 Edition)

At the NPE gathering, I received many requests to repost (and update) my list of people worth reading, so here we go. This is in no way all-inclusive; I'm going to miss somebody and every day I find new writers I didn't even know about, which means tomorrow I'll find out about someone I don't know about today. There are also bloggers who are worth reading, but if they've been silent for many months, I may leave them off this list. Caveats offered; here we go.

A Dog With a Bone   
Audrey Hill is a 30+ year English teacher. Sometimes the posts are brief and poetic, while some dig deep into a particular item.

A Teacher's Life For Me    
Michael Soskil was a PA teacher of the year. He has a good eye for the places where Big Ideas and Actual Classrooms intersect.

Accountabaloney
I'm a sucker for a good name, but this Florida blogging duo includes a graphic designer, so it looks good, too. The good fight in Florida is a barometer for reformy messes elsewhere, and these folks have a good eye for malarkey.

Alfie Kohn 
Kohn doesn't post often, but when he does, you don't want to miss it. This is what actual education reform ideas look like.

Annie Tan, An Angry Teacher
This fiery teacher has a big activist streak, and she'll tell you all about what is making her angry at the moment.  

Andrea Gabor
Gabor is a journalist and author (The Capitalist Philosophers, Einstein's Wife and After the Education Wars) who is frequently doing exceptional work looking at charter schools.

Answer Sheet 
Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post is the only big media journalist doing regular, daily coverage of education. Get national news, a public ed perspective, and answers from the kind of people who will ignore bloggers like me, but answer the phone when it says "Someone from the Washington Post is calling."

Automated Teaching Machine
Adam Bessie is a cartoonist who works the education beat. For those of you who like visuals.

Badass Teachers Association 
The activist group, best known through their facebook page, also has a blog featuring an assortment of voices.

The Becoming Radical
Paul Thomas is a college professor comfortable blending references to ed research, race issues, poetry and comic books. A good pair of eyes for seeing beneath the surface of many issues in the ed realm.

Big Education Ape 
One of the best aggregators of edublogging out there. If you only have time to make a couple of stops, BEA will get you up to speed. And as a bonus, you get some fairly hilarious paste-up illustrations.

Blue Cereal Education
Snappy, funny and pointed writing about issues in education. Recently transplanted from Oklahoma to Indiana. "Everything I say is so wise even I can hardly believe it. Feel free to concur."

BustED Pencils
BustED Pencils is a webcast (I've been a guest and it was fun), and it is also the host to regular blogging from Morna McDermott, Peggy Robertson, and others, as well as regular features like What Would Matt Damon's Mom Say. It is unabashedly progressive and activist.

Bob Braun's Ledger 
Long-time New Jersey reporter who has covered politics and education for decades. Regional and national stories with a hard-eyed reporter's view.

Bright Lights Small City
Sarah Lahm covers Minneapolis schools, policy and politics. As with many of the regional bloggers, her writing gives a good look at how the bigger issues play out on a smaller, specific stage.

Charter School Watchdog 
Longstanding clearing house for news of charter school shenanigans.

Children Are More Than Test Scores 
Jesse "the Walking Man" Turner's blog. Personal, heartfelt education activism.

Chicago Public Fools
Julie Vassilatos blogs in and about Chicago, but watches national stories as well.

Cloaking Inequality
Julian Vasquez Heilig has been a visible and vocal part of the pro-public ed movement, covering a wide range of national topics.

Dad Gone Wild
A father in Tennessee who has educated himself in the issues and done some activist work as well. Another regional blogger with national lessons for all of us to learn.

DCulberhouse
Generally Really Big Picture thoughts about transformation, leadership, and how it relates to organizations like schools.

Deustch29 
I don't call her the indispensable Mercedes Schneider for nothing. Schneider blogs almost daily, generally on topics for which she has done research and digging-- she comes up with the facts about the reformsters and their organizations that nobody else had discovered.

Diane Ravitch's Blog
The chances that you read me and don't know about Ravitch are zero-to-none. But this list would look odd without her on it. This blog is like the pro-public education town square where everyone passes through at some point.

Disappointed Idealist
A British blog focusing on education and politics.

Eclectablog
The primo source for progressive coverage of all things Michigan. And they've now got Mitchell Robinson blogging about education for them. Essential regional read if you want to understand the state that spawned DeVos.\

Ed in the Apple
A teacher in NYC focusing on "the intersection of education and politics."

Education in the Age of Globalization
The website of Yong Zhao, an international writer and thinker about education. The best man to put China's educational "achievements" in perspective.

Education Opportunity Network
One of the places to find the work of education writer Jeff Bryant. Always well-sourced and thorough, a grown-up voice for public education.

Educolor
Educolor is a movement, a network, a hashtag, and a voice for equity in education. This is a place where you can start to get activated.

Filling the Pail
The website of Greg Ashman, a teacher in Australia.

Finding Common Ground

One of the family of EdWeek blogs. Peter DeWitt is a former principal and a bridge-builder who is almost always entirely reasonable and thoughtful when discussing issues of policy or managing a school.

Fourth Generation Teacher
Claudia Swisher is yet another Oklahoma blogger and advocate who provides a good look at what advocacy looks like on the ground out west.

Fred Klonsky
Progressive union-loving activist with a clear direct tell-it-like-it-is style, writing in Chicago.

Gadfly on the Wall
Steven Singer blogs about national issues from a fiery progressive perspective. You won't find anyone more passionate about the issues.

Gary Rubinstein
Former TFA-er who keeps the pressure on that organization as well as other reformsters in New York and across the country. A prodigious debunker of miracle schools.

Gene Glass
A senior researcher at the National Education Policy Center and co-author of 50 Myths & Lies that Threaten America's Public Schools. Smart man with a wide grasp of the actual research behind policy debates.

Grumpy Old Teacher   
"Generations of public investment in a quality public education system should not be thrown away."

Hack Education
Nobody knows and understands the past and present of ed tech better than Audrey Watters. She's a really smart lady and a very snappy writer.  

Have You Heard
The website for the podcast by Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider. Berkshire is one of the best interviewers around, and Schneider is a great education history scholar. Together they talk to some of the most interesting and compelling folks in the education debates.

I Love You But You're Going To Hell
Not only my favorite blog title, but a great blog for unpacking religious conservatives for everyone else, respectfully yet clearly. Also, school stuff.

Jan Resseger
She's a strong and insightful voice in the push for a progressive public education system.

Jersey Jazzman
There's no better place for plain-language explanations of the wonky data behind policy debates. I've learned a ton reading this blog.

The Jose Vilson
A consistently decent, human, humane, and personal perspective on teaching and race. Pretty sure this is one of the major teaching voices of a generation.

Keystone State Education Coalition 
A great roundup of links to news and commentary regarding Pennsylvania education.

Living in Dialogue
Anthony Cody, a co-founder of the Network for Public Education, has long been one of the steady progressive blogging voices in education. This site continues his own blogging work along with contributions from other strong voices for public education.

The Merrow Report
John Merrow was a top reporter for decades. He's retired, but he hasn't stopped finding and commenting on some of the important stories in education.

Mitchell Robinson
Heads music education for Michigan State University, as well as being a long-time policy wonk. Great lively writing about national issues. You'll also find him at Eclectablog.

Momma Bears
If you're going to talk about public education activism in Tennessee, you have to talk about the Momma Bears, digging deep and laying bare the tools of the reformsters.

Mother Crusader
New Jersey mom who became a powerhouse public education advocate.

Mr. Anderson Reads and Writes
Reading, writing and policy, digging deep for details, from a classroom teacher.

My Two Cents
Mary J. Holden was an English who left the classroom and became an education activist-- then she went back to the classroom. Located in Nashville, she's busy in one of the flagship states of reforminess, so there's lots for us to learn from her.

Nancy Bailey's Education Website
Former special ed teacher with a Ph.D. in educational leadership, Bailey tackles national issues with both fists. Smart as hell.

NYC Public School Parents 
Leonie Haimson and Class Size Matters are among the heroes in the defense of public education. They thwarted a big data incursion into NY, and they continue to have a sharp eye on what threatens public education in this country. 

Othmar's Trombone
Politics, reform and English teaching in the UK.

Politics K-12
Alyson Klein and Andrew Ujifusa cover the political side of education at EdWeek and are a reliable source of what's happening in the halls of power.

The Progressive-- Public School Shakedown
The Progressive magazine is about the only news magazine with an actual commitment to public education, and that is shown through this ongoing project featuring eleven outstanding national writers (plus me).

Russ on Reading
Russ Walsh focuses on reading instruction, but sees the connections to larger education issues. Incidentally, Walsh has published the definitive layperson's guide to what's going on in ed reform.

Save Maine Schools

Emily Talmage is based in Maine, but she has been one of the voices out front in spotting and opposing the personalized competency based computerized learning trend.

School Finance 101
Bruce Baker manages to make sense out of the twisted labyrinth that is school financing. More interesting and important than you may imagine. Sometimes he shouts.

Schooling in the Ownership Society
A blog focusing on the moves to privatize public education with corporate reform.

Schools Matter
A roster of writers that includes Doug Martin, who wrote the book on Indiana Ed Corruption, and Jim Horn, who takes no prisoners and makes no compromises, but he knows his stuff. An aggressively anti-reform site.

Seattle Education
Another regional blog with a national take on ed reform, filtered through the unique perspective that comes from living in the shadow of Bill Gates' money.

Susan Ohanian
Ohanian had started to figure out what the hell was going wrong long before some of us had even started to wake up. Do not be put off by the design of her site, which can be... well, challenging. Trust me that it's worth it to dig in.

Teacher in a Strange Land
Nancy Flanagan has moved out of the EdWeek gated community, so there's no longer any excuse for missing any of her great posts. She's not as obviously combative, sparkly or full of fireworks as some blogs on this list, but she is smart and funny and honest and always worth the read.

Teacher TomTom teaches at a pre-school co-op in Seattle, and his perspective (and that of his students) is always a welcome breath of cool air.

Truth in American Education
An anti-common core, conservatively angled website with a variety of contributors.

Tultican
Thomas Tultican keeps an eye on national stories and the bloggers who cover them.

What Is Common Core
These ladies in Utah are from the conservative wing of The Resistance; they pay close attention and do their homework, and they've been doing it for over four years, making them oldsters in this game.

Wrench in the Gears
A blog focused on the multinational machine driving the data mining of society. You may at times feel as if you fell down the rabbit hole, but this woman has done her homework.

VAMboozled
Audrey Amrein-Beardsley is one of the top experts on Value Added Measures and their general use and abuse. An excellent source for your VAM-related concerns.

The Other Side
That link will take you to a post I wrote about reading Reformsters, which I think is generally a good exercise.

Also, while I'm tossing up links, if you're interested in living green and mom stuff, let me recommend Sunshine Guerrilla, my daughter's blog. She's got a great big heart and writes awfully well.

Are Expectations Free?

It was a tweet by Jose Luis Vilson that drew my attention to the quote:

“It doesn’t cost one penny more to have higher expectations for kids, to actually believe that kids–low-income kids, kids of color, English-language learners–can succeed,” he says. 

The speaker is TNTP CEO Dan Weisberg, speaking about TNTP's latest "report." I've addressed that report elsewhere, but this particular idea is worth a closer look because it has been so persistent. Arne Duncan was a big believer in the magic of expectations, and Reformsters have often touted its powers-- perhaps precisely because it is a "reform" they can have for free.

But are expectations free?

I suppose expectations themselves are free, just as wishes and dreams are free. But creating the conditions and providing the tools that allow those expectations to be met-- that's not so free. And without support, some expectations are just cruel.

I mean, I can expect someone who is confined to a wheelchair to live a full and active life-- but somebody needs to provide that person with the actual wheelchair as well as appropriate physical therapy. Stephen Hawking's super-cool chair, computer interface, and voice synthesizer were not free.

And when we talk about education, there's a problem with free if by "expectation" we mean that a teacher should expect a child who is hungry, who lives with poverty every day, who lacks support for education at home, who lives with fear and instability in her world-- well, if we're just supposed to "expect" that child to handle school as if she lived a comfortable, stable, well-fed existence, that's just wrong.

It is also wrong to "expect" that students who go to school where there are not enough books, not enough desks, not enough supplies, but plenty of mold and decaying corners of the building-- to expect those students to approach school as if it were well-supported, well-funded, shiny and clean. Too often this business about the soft bigotry of low expectations is another way to say, "No, we're not going to fully fund this school, nor are we going to address the systemic racism and poverty that surrounds it-- just get in there an expect harder."

There is, of course, a solid core of truth to this talk about expectations. Every decent teacher understands that expectations are important in a classroom, that if you approach students with an attitude of "Well, these are just the dumb kids, so let's not expect much, try much, or do much" you are failing those students.

But. But but but.

A good teacher masters the art of calibrating expectations. Expect too little, and the student coasts and learns too little. But expect too much, and expect it too inflexibly, and you will break the student, push the student past the point of frustration so that she simply gives up, dejected and demoralized. This careful calibration has to be teamed up with a teacher's sense for what support will look like-- what ratio of hand-holding to ass-kicking does each student need. And of course both of these factors need to be recalculated every day. (This is also the kind of learning personalization that I don't imagine a computer program ever providing, ever.)

But isn't all that free? Can't a teacher throw in the whole calibration of expectations and support at no extra charge?

Yes, and no. Because what we're talking about is a teacher's relationship with her students, and that is directly affected by the number of students in that classroom, which means, ultimately, that it's a budget item. If you want a culture of high expectations in your school, you will need to spend enough money to have small class size.

It's hard to believe that guys like Weisberg and Duncan don't know they're spouting baloney. First off, they never add the corollary "If colleges and universities would just raise their expectations, it wouldn't matter how well-prepared students were coming out of high school."

Second, anyone who looks at a wealthy, well-funded, well-supported, shiny school full of high achievers will find a district clearly motivated by the idea, "We expect lots of great things from our kids, and therefor we are going to spare no expense to give them every possible tool to help them accomplish those things." Nobody ever won a school board election in those well-heeled districts by saying, "Let's just cut all our taxes, cut back on buildings, slash all the extra programs, and just tell teachers to expect harder."

No, expectations always travel hand in hand with the tools and conditions needed to make those expectations manifest in the actual world. High expectations don't mean a teacher who tosses a math book to her students on Day One and says, "There's your book. I expect you to learn what's in it. See you in 180 days." High expectations mean a teacher who says, "I expect great things from you, and I am going to help you achieve those things with every tool at my disposal."

Expectations are just a form of faith, and even the Bible tells us that faith without works is dead. Expectations matter, but expectations are only a foundation and no, you can't build the house for free. "Teachers should just expect harder," is just an excuse for politicians and policy wonks to avoid the issue of giving underserved, underfunded schools the resources they need, the kind of resources and funding that politicians and policy wonks would give them if those guys really, truly believed in the success of those students.

Another Sub Service Fails

Professional Education Services Group may be "the leader in Educational Staffing driven by a constant focus on the success of our Educational Partners through innovative, hand-crafted solutions that meet the needs of your local educational community" in almost 5000 schools across the country. But in Michigan, they failed hard.

PESG sent out a letter last night letting about 100 schools know that the company was closing down immediately and would not be getting them subs for today. They are shuttering all Michigan operations.

Is there some sort of explanation? The head of the company had sent out a note to employees, indicating that the company had been seeking capital as well as negotiating with "a competitor" to be bought out. But it was not to be, because reasons:

"The urgency of the shutdown was exacerbated, however, when those negotiations broke down over the weekend due to unforeseen developments outside of our control," he said. "Without operating funds to stay open, therefore, the company is now forced to close immediately. Under the circumstances, we believed our only serious option was to notify you as soon as possible."

Most of the affected districts, including the large Dearborn district, were scrambling to make plans. PESG said 1,500 to 2,000 substitute teachers were affected. Some of these districts still have contracts with PESG, so we may see some court action before the smoke clears.

This, of course, is what you get when you let a business have a piece of the education pie. Does this kind of sudden shut down make sense? Was the company down to its last $150 last week but they figured it would all work out anyway, or is this "immediate" shutdown necessary to protect the business's remaining assets. Who knows. All I know is that a school district would do-- well, exactly what the districts are doing, which is to put their heads together, rig something up, and generally move heaven and earth to make sure the needs of students are met.

Public schools put students first. Businesses put business concerns first. That doesn't make them evil-- just bad partners for schools.

Substitute services have a spotty record. Philadelphia tried privatizing its substitute pool, and the results were ugly. Districts find sub outsourcing attractive, but for substitutes it's a pain-- one more layer of bureaucracy to deal with, and another hand out to cut into your check before it gets to you. Some services can even be insulting-- a local district just handed its sub pool over to a company (rhymes with "smell") and now subs who have already been working for years are told they need to take some special smelly training. I have no figures on how many subs walk out when a new subcontractor walks in, but the number can't be inconsequential. To recruit more people, you need to make the job more attractive-- adding a subcontractor to the sub teacher biz hardly ever makes the job more attractive.

All districts know at least one solution, and some larger districts actually embrace it. You hire full time subs. You put Mrs. McSubteach on full salary, have her report to work every day, and plug her in wherever, and you never have to worry about her being poached for the day by some other district. But that costs money, and districts want a cheap solution.

Privatizing is not that solution. 500 subs cost less than 500 subs plus a corporate payroll for the company that took the work over. You don't make an operation cheaper by adding more mouths to feed.

The substitute recruitment problem cannot be solved by making the job less attractive, and privatizing is not a solution, either, as many schools in Michigan are finding out today.