You should know who Jack Ma Yun is. He's the Chinese combination of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg (without the rich parents) who has been behind some of the most profitable internet start-ups in China (China Pages, Alibaba).
And like every other sentient being on the planet, he occasionally has some thoughts to share about education:
As you can see here, Jack comes down in the "Students don't need to know anything because they can just Google it camp." We should teach students soft skills, art and sports skills, skills skills skills that computers don't have. I haven't actually disagreed with a millionaire yet this week, so let me go ahead and explain why I think Jack is just plain wrong.
"A teacher should learn all the time." Okay, he's on solid ground there. That's about the last moment.
Ma doubles the usual "school hasn't changed in a century" and says we've been doing the same thing for 200 years-- knowledge based. But "we cannot teach our kids to compete with machines" because the machines are smarter. By which I think he means that machines have more information stored. But he wants to teach things on which computers cannot catch up.
Ma is asked what those skills are that we need to teach. "Values, believing, independent thinking, teamwork, care for others-- " these are the things knowledge doesn't teach you. So Ma says teach our kids sports, music, art-- everything we teach should be different from machines.
There's certainly some appeal in what he's saying. But. But but but but. How can you develop and apply values if you don't have any knowledge about the area that you are applying your values to? How do you even develop a value without any knowledge? How, for instance, do you arrive at a personal value about how humans should govern themselves if you don't know anything about the history of human government? How do you believe in things if you don't have knowledge? Yes, faith is a swell thing, but it doesn't develop in a vacuum. If you lack knowledge, you might be inclined to, say, believe anything a narcissistic demagogue tells you without ever realizing that he's lying through his teeth. How do you care for others if you don't know anything about them, their culture, the context in which they operate, how human beings have behaved throughout history? And what does your care mean if you response to "I have a disease that needs immediate treatment" is "I really care about you, so maybe we can google your disease" as if WebMD is as good as an actual doctor. How do you work with a team if you don't know anything? What exactly will you contribute to the team if you have no knowledge base or area of expertise-- will you just volunteer to be the one who types questions into the Google search bar? And finally (I saved this for last because it's the worst) how can you possibly be an independent thinker if you don't personally possess knowledge that you can think about? How can you sort through the sea of knowledge that the computers have and separate the good stuff from the baloney if you don't personally possess the knowledge base with which to evaluate what you find?
Smart people make this mistake all the time-- they have literally forgotten learning things and so assume that a certain baseline amount of knowledge just springs into the human mind fully formed, that it's just "common sense." Hell, a complaint I have heard from elementary teachers is that some Common Core math materials say you're supposed to focus on process and not do things like memorize the times tables-- but then give lessons to understand process that assume that, of course, the students know the times tables.
It's hard to accomplish much of anything, to develop or use any skills, if you don't know stuff. And if Ma's argument is that people need to know stuff, but schools don't need to teach it-- just tell the kids to go look it up-- well, that's been an option since the invention of printing, and yet, somehow, students have still needed live humans to help them through the process of knowing stuff.
This is one of those things that I feel as if I've said a million times, but which I will keep saying as long as it needs to be said--
Skills, even soft skills, do not exist in a vacuum. You cannot have skills without knowledge any more than you can build a house without lumber, any more than you can have waves without some medium through which the waves move, any more than you can learn to sculpt with no material except air. American slaveowners did not keep blacks enslaved by restricting skills-- they restricted knowledge. Life is harder for people who don't Know Things, and the fact that we can now know a lot more things with a lot less looking up effort hasn't changed that. I would say at this point we've collected evidence that people who don't know things have their ignorance actually worsened by technology.
Jack Ma Yun may be crazy rich, but on this point he's simply wrong.
Monday, October 29, 2018
Sunday, October 28, 2018
The Real Digital Divide
You remember the digital divide. The rich kids were going to have all the tech, all the screens, all the widgets, and be plugged into the bestest, fastest internet. Poor kids would be straggling, cut off from the wonders of modern tech and trying to catch up. OMGZ, etc.
The assumption underlying this is one that we've allowed to permeate education-- more tech is always better.
But that assumption has been challenged, and according to a piece by Nellie Bowles in the NYT -- wait (looks again) yeah, okay-- style section, the digital divide is not quite what we were expecting.
It wasn’t long ago that the worry was that rich students would have access to the internet earlier, gaining tech skills and creating a digital divide. Schools ask students to do homework online, while only about two-thirds of people in the U.S. have broadband internet service. But now, as Silicon Valley’s parents increasingly panic over the impact screens have on their children and move toward screen-free lifestyles, worries over a new digital divide are rising. It could happen that the children of poorer and middle-class parents will be raised by screens, while the children of Silicon Valley’s elite will be going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction.
Bowles is overstating her own case here-- what the article says is that wealthy children use the screen less than the non-wealthy (five hours and forty-two minutes compared to eight hours and seven minutes, per day), almost-six screen hours a day is not exactly rolling back to the stone age.
Her broader observation is worth underlining (hence this post), particularly in education, where the rise of competency-based education (or proficiency-based learning or personalized learning-- I wish we'd agree on name for this whole trend) is definitely aimed at 1) more tech for 2) less wealthy schools. We've long worried about the creation of a two-tier education system; it looks increasingly as if one tier difference will be tech. The wealthy will be taught by humans; the less wealthy will be taught by screens.
As Bowles notes, this is already evident in some disturbing places, like the push for on-line pre-K that already is up and running in Utah (UPSTART), soon to expand to other states, even though we know full well that's exactly the wrong direction to go with the littles. In none of those states can we expect wealthy parents to pull their children from the Montessori Pre-K in order to enroll them ins Stare-At-A-Screen Preschool. Meanwhile, Google has worked mighty hard to make itself an indispensable part of school's infrastructure.
I taught at a Google school. Some of their tools have a level of utility that makes them, if not attractive, at least functional. They're the Radio Shack of app suites-- not anyone's first choice for any of their functions, but workable if you don't have better options. Google Docs is fine enough as long as you don't want to do anything else with it except type it and look at it on a screen (printing can be a nightmare). And Google has a frustrating lack of cross-platform shared capabilities; this blog and Classroom are both Google properties, but there are a million things I can do on this blog that Classroom was incapable of doing. And schools rarely read any of the fine print-- the part that says "It's Free!" is generally all many need to see. Parents are correct to be concerned about privacy and to ask the school pointed questions.
This, beyond the slight difference in screen hours, may be the other important digital divide-- the mindful and informed use of the tech.
I've made this point till I'm blue in the ears (way past my face)-- people of a Certain Age who think that Kids These Days know all about that tech stuff are nuts. The average teen knows as much about ed tech as the average driver knows about how a car works. My students, for the most part, knew how to operate their favorite apps-- and that was about it. Most couldn't run a search to save their lives, nor were their navigational skills any better than those of my mom.
All of my students used screens, and all of my students knew how to operate them to some extent. Only some of my students understood how any of it worked. Only some of my students have parents who talked to them about how the tech worked and how best to use it, or not. Only some of my students understand that they are using products created by businesses, and not magical gifts donated just to brighten their days. That last one is probably the most important one. Hence this quote from the article:
“These companies lied to the schools, and they’re lying to the parents,” said Natasha Burgert, a pediatrician in Kansas City. “We’re all getting duped.”
“Our kids, my kids included, we are subjecting them to one of the biggest social experiments we have seen in a long time,” she said.
We've been encouraged to think of tech, including ed tech, as free, under our control, gifted to us with no strings attached. We've been encouraged to not only ignore the man behind the curtain, but to not even notice the curtain is there. We've been encouraged to not so much as pause for a second to contemplate the effects of screen time, of socializing via tech, of staring into a blinking screen instead of another human's eyes.
Is there a danger of over-reacting? Sure. When written language appeared, elders complained about how Kids These Days were losing their memory skills and wasting time staring at those little dots. But I'll worry about over-reacting when there are more signs that people are reacting at all. This is why we hear so much about tech people limiting their own children's screen time-- they live behind the curtain and understand better what's back there. It's not that tech is inherently evil or destructive, but a hammer can be converted from useful tool to a dangerous object if you just start flinging it around without any thought to its proper nature.
You can have my tech when you pry it from my cold, cramped hands, and I have no doubt that the twins and my grandchildren will become screened sooner or later, but not without plenty of discussion about what it is, what it does, and how best to use it (or not). And that will put them on one side of the real digital divide. It's not a matter of who has the tech; it's about who has actually seen the wizard.
The assumption underlying this is one that we've allowed to permeate education-- more tech is always better.
But that assumption has been challenged, and according to a piece by Nellie Bowles in the NYT -- wait (looks again) yeah, okay-- style section, the digital divide is not quite what we were expecting.
It wasn’t long ago that the worry was that rich students would have access to the internet earlier, gaining tech skills and creating a digital divide. Schools ask students to do homework online, while only about two-thirds of people in the U.S. have broadband internet service. But now, as Silicon Valley’s parents increasingly panic over the impact screens have on their children and move toward screen-free lifestyles, worries over a new digital divide are rising. It could happen that the children of poorer and middle-class parents will be raised by screens, while the children of Silicon Valley’s elite will be going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction.
Her broader observation is worth underlining (hence this post), particularly in education, where the rise of competency-based education (or proficiency-based learning or personalized learning-- I wish we'd agree on name for this whole trend) is definitely aimed at 1) more tech for 2) less wealthy schools. We've long worried about the creation of a two-tier education system; it looks increasingly as if one tier difference will be tech. The wealthy will be taught by humans; the less wealthy will be taught by screens.
As Bowles notes, this is already evident in some disturbing places, like the push for on-line pre-K that already is up and running in Utah (UPSTART), soon to expand to other states, even though we know full well that's exactly the wrong direction to go with the littles. In none of those states can we expect wealthy parents to pull their children from the Montessori Pre-K in order to enroll them ins Stare-At-A-Screen Preschool. Meanwhile, Google has worked mighty hard to make itself an indispensable part of school's infrastructure.
I taught at a Google school. Some of their tools have a level of utility that makes them, if not attractive, at least functional. They're the Radio Shack of app suites-- not anyone's first choice for any of their functions, but workable if you don't have better options. Google Docs is fine enough as long as you don't want to do anything else with it except type it and look at it on a screen (printing can be a nightmare). And Google has a frustrating lack of cross-platform shared capabilities; this blog and Classroom are both Google properties, but there are a million things I can do on this blog that Classroom was incapable of doing. And schools rarely read any of the fine print-- the part that says "It's Free!" is generally all many need to see. Parents are correct to be concerned about privacy and to ask the school pointed questions.
This, beyond the slight difference in screen hours, may be the other important digital divide-- the mindful and informed use of the tech.
I've made this point till I'm blue in the ears (way past my face)-- people of a Certain Age who think that Kids These Days know all about that tech stuff are nuts. The average teen knows as much about ed tech as the average driver knows about how a car works. My students, for the most part, knew how to operate their favorite apps-- and that was about it. Most couldn't run a search to save their lives, nor were their navigational skills any better than those of my mom.
All of my students used screens, and all of my students knew how to operate them to some extent. Only some of my students understood how any of it worked. Only some of my students have parents who talked to them about how the tech worked and how best to use it, or not. Only some of my students understand that they are using products created by businesses, and not magical gifts donated just to brighten their days. That last one is probably the most important one. Hence this quote from the article:
“These companies lied to the schools, and they’re lying to the parents,” said Natasha Burgert, a pediatrician in Kansas City. “We’re all getting duped.”
“Our kids, my kids included, we are subjecting them to one of the biggest social experiments we have seen in a long time,” she said.
We've been encouraged to think of tech, including ed tech, as free, under our control, gifted to us with no strings attached. We've been encouraged to not only ignore the man behind the curtain, but to not even notice the curtain is there. We've been encouraged to not so much as pause for a second to contemplate the effects of screen time, of socializing via tech, of staring into a blinking screen instead of another human's eyes.
Is there a danger of over-reacting? Sure. When written language appeared, elders complained about how Kids These Days were losing their memory skills and wasting time staring at those little dots. But I'll worry about over-reacting when there are more signs that people are reacting at all. This is why we hear so much about tech people limiting their own children's screen time-- they live behind the curtain and understand better what's back there. It's not that tech is inherently evil or destructive, but a hammer can be converted from useful tool to a dangerous object if you just start flinging it around without any thought to its proper nature.
You can have my tech when you pry it from my cold, cramped hands, and I have no doubt that the twins and my grandchildren will become screened sooner or later, but not without plenty of discussion about what it is, what it does, and how best to use it (or not). And that will put them on one side of the real digital divide. It's not a matter of who has the tech; it's about who has actually seen the wizard.
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.
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.
Saturday, October 27, 2018
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.
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.
Friday, October 26, 2018
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, October 25, 2018
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
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.
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.
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