MA: Turnover Starts To Give Charters A Clue

Teacher churn in Massachusetts charter schools is high (about 30%). And apparently at least some charters have decided to do something about that. But as this article by Carrie Jung at WBUR indicates, there is some sort of mystery involved.

Maybe there are clues in there.

I do give the charters involved credit for at least thinking about the issue-- in many modern charters, teacher churn is a feature, not a bug. If teachers don't stay long, they don't need raises, they don't get pensions, and they don't start getting all uppity and questioning the vision of the school's operators. Still, charter operators may be starting to come around

"Leaders are recognizing that high rates of turnover have become somewhat unsustainable," said Nathan Barrett, the senior director of research and evaluation with the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. "And they’re looking at creating a teacher workforce that’s going to be there longer."

"Become somewhat sustainable"? No-- they were always unsustainable. But at least some people can see issues:

"[Students] have so much fear about the teachers leaving," said Kimberly Luck, a history teacher at the City on a Hill Circuit Street charter school. "Sometimes when teachers are out sick two days in a row they think that the teachers have quit."

Luck is a four-year veteran, making her one of the senior teachers on staff. Which blows my mind-- I had been in the classroom for about 35 years before I was the certified Oldest Fart In The Building, and the building always had a dep bench of experienced teachers. How do schools where virtually everyone is a rookie even function. When teachers have questions about instruction, who do they talk to? How does the school develop any traditions? How does the school avoid having to reinvent the wheel constantly because nobody is around to say, "Oh, we usually take care of that this way."

And how do students feel secure or at home in a school where the adult faces always change? How do students build a helpful relationship with people who up and leave all the time?

At any rate, the hunt is on for an explanation for charter churn and with it, a solution. The article tries to "both sides" its way to avoiding any sorts of conclusions, and yet it includes the following:

"The reasons for that could be differences in environments between charter schools and public schools," said Marcus Winters, an associate professor of education policy at Boston University's Wheelock College of Education and Human Development.

Well, yeah.

It could also be the types of teachers that move into charter schools. They tend to be younger and have different backgrounds." He explains that historically charter schools have relied heavily on teachers working with programs like Teach For America or City Year that recruit "non-traditional" candidates who did not study education in college before entering the classroom.

You mean, when you hire teachers who aren't really teachers, they don't stay teachers.

Traditional public schools often pay better and have shorter hours, among other things.

Winters adds that while collective bargaining agreements are common at public schools in Massachusetts, they remain pretty rare among charter schools.

Well, yes, that's the charter model. Work them to death and pay them squat and keep the union out so that you can work them to death and pay them squat. Again-- this was always supposed to be a feature, not a bug. The visionary charter CEO was supposed to be free to hire and fire at will, and to use that leverage to demand 80 hour work weeks.

Another school, MATCH Charter Public School in Allston, also launched a professional development program known as Rising Leaders. Emily Stainer, the school’s chief academic officer, said that was also inspired by teacher feedback.

"I think we’ve learned a lot about what it takes to both hire and retain talent," said Stainer. She added there's more to turnover cost than just the money and effort it takes to constantly train new staff. "I think a lot of us have learned the lesson that the longer a teacher is with us, the better the student results are."

I am smacking my head so hard right now. After decades of reformster baloney like "We have to get rid of tenure so that we can fire old teachers because young ones are full of vim and ideas and no, this has nothing to do with young teachers being cheaper," it is finally dawning that experience matters.

"I see people leaving because they want competitive pay, wanting consistency, wanting to have voice," said Luck, of City on a Hill Circuit Street. 

Oh, charter people. Luck, incidentally, teaches at one of the charters that joined the union.

The leaders at Boston Collegiate and MATCH said unionization efforts at City on a Hill did not influence their decisions to launch teacher-focused programs. They said they wanted to be responsive to their teachers, because without them they would not have a school.

"No, we totally want to listen to our teachers. The unionization wasn't at all a wake-up call about how badly we were managing the place."

The only mystery continues to be the mystery of how so many charter operators believe that the secret to running a good school is to give teachers no voice, little pay, lousy work conditions, and long hours. Okay, only sort of a mystery-- the theory of action has always been that teachers are overrated and not that important if your school is run on a really good system. Too many charter operators are sure that teacher flavored meat widgets are sufficient, and easily replaceable, if you just have a Visionary CEO steering the ship.

Pay teachers well. Treat them well. Empower them. Listen to them. It's not that hard. I'm glad to see at least a few charter operators getting a clue. We can only hope that it might spread.

There Is No Teacher Shortage

I've made this point a dozen times in other contexts, but let me take a day to address it directly.

There is no teacher shortage.

Oh, across the nation there are districts that are having trouble filling openings with fully-qualified certified teachers. But there is no teacher shortage.

"Shortage" implies a supply problem. Like maybe people are born teachers and for some reasons, the gene pool has just stopped coughing out people with the special teacher genetic code. Or maybe the colleges and universities just aren't recruiting and educating enough proto-teachers. Or teachinmg is a "calling" and apparently there just aren't that many people being called. Or maybe all the teachers are falling through a black hole into that dimension where all the lost socks go.

"Shortage" also gives folks permission to plug the gap with "alternatives." If there "aren't enough teachers" to go around, then we'll just have to hire Ivy League Teach for America temps with five weeks of training, or loosen requirements so that anybody with a degree (or even with just a diploma) can be put in a classroom. Or we can bring in one of those artificial intelligence computer programs to do the work of teaching. Of course, none of these sound optimal, but we don't have much choice because there's a teacher shortage, donchaknow.

The idea of a teacher shortage feeds into the notion that teachers can only be found in classrooms-- in other words, teachers aren't human beings qualified to teach who may or may not choose to put those qualifications to work in a classroom.

Teachers are people with a choice. Hmmm....

I believe in a different explanation of why so many school systems are having trouble finding qualified people to fill teaching positions. And free market fans should be there ahead of me.

After all, we've heard the argument about why there is no need for unions, no need even for a minimum wage. If you offer too little pay or benefits for a job, the argument goes, people will just walk away from your job until you make a decent offer. Right? I've said it a dozen times: if I can't buy a Porsche for $1.98, that doesn't mean there's an automobile shortage.

If you think that workers should handle bad working conditions by walking away, you cannot be mystified when a whole lot of workers start walking away from a particular job.

For almost twenty years (at least) the profession has been insulted and downgraded. Reformy idea after reformy idea has been based on the notion that teachers can't be trusted, that teachers can't do their job, that teachers won't do their jobs unless threatened. Teachers have been straining to lift the huge weight of education, and instead of showing up to help, wave after wave of policy maker, politician and wealthy dilettante have shown up to holler, "What's wrong with you, slacker! Let me tell you how it's supposed to be done." And in the meantime, teachers have seen their job defined down to Get These Kids Ready For A Bad Standardized Test.

And pay has stagnated or, in some states, been inching backwards. And not just pay, but financial support for schools themselves so that teachers must not only make do with low pay, but they must also make do with bare bones support for their workplace.

And because we've been doing this for two decades, every single person who could be a potential new teacher has grown up thinking that this constant disrespect, this job of glorified clerk and test prep guide, is the normal status quo for a teacher.

Teachers have been systematically distrusted, unsupported, and disempowered. Not in every school district in America-- but in far too many.

There is no teacher shortage.

There's a slow motion walkout, an open-ended strike that's hard to see because teachers are walking off the job one at a time.

There are plenty of people who are qualified to fill the positions, plenty of people who could enter a teacher prep program and join the profession if they were so inclined. I'm surprised to see that there's no good count of all the teacher licenses sitting unused, but simple math tells us that it is the number of people who have left, plus the number of people who gave up before they got a job, plus the people who graduated with a certificate but took another job and never came back, plus all the people who just decided not to even start down that path. Undoubtedly some of those people were ill-suited for the classroom and we are better off without them. But that can't be every person whose teacher papers sit gathering dust.

People have a choice. Sometimes we talk about Teaching, The Calling, as if teachers have no choice but to become teachers. This is just the less insulting version of "Those who can't, teach." It's comforting to the People In Charge because it imagines a negotiation where they have teachers over a barrel, where teachers can't walk away because they must teach. But people have a choice. They can choose to be a teacher, or they can choose-- even if they choose reluctantly and painfully-- to not be a teacher.

If entry-level pay were $100,000, with top-drawer medical coverage and a kick-ass pension, we would never have to talk about teacher "shortages" ever again. But instead, states and districts play a game where they see just how little they can put into making the job appealing without feeling the pinch-- and then when they start to feel the pinch, they pretend not to know what the problem is. In some states, they set up commissions to "research" the problem and make recommendations, which require about as much wisdom and insight as telling a hungry person that you recommend that they eat.

It doesn't help that lots of folks keep hollering, "More money??!! Are you nuts? We already spend a whole bunch of money on schools! Teachers already make way more than clerks at the 7-11!" And this just adds to the aura of disrespect hovering around teaching, even as it involves a bunch of free market conservatives pretending they don't know how the market works. (Review: Will the dealer not sell you a Porsche for $1.98? Then you need to offer a better deal.)

There is no teacher shortage.

There's a shortage of willingness to invest the profession with respect and support. There's a shortage of willingness to make the jobs appealing enough to attract and retain all the people schools want to attract and retain. There's a shortage of will to make the job appealing enough to hold onto the people who start out. There's a shortage, not just of money, but of respect and support and empowerment.

There is no mystery to what is happening, but to deal with effectively, to actually face it, the People In Charge need to stop calling it what it is not.

There is no teacher shortage.

The Truth About Davos, AI, and Firing All the Humans

This article ran last week, and it made my ICYMI list Sunday, but you really, really need to see this.

Kevin Roos went to Davos for the New York Times to see what the masters of the universe are up to, and his most striking discoveries was "The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite."

The short version is simple. In public, they are going to talk about how much Artificial Intelligence will improve the workplace. In private, they talk about how AI will let them slash the human workforce to the bone. From the article:

All over the world, executives are spending billions of dollars to transform their businesses into lean, digitized, highly automated operations. They crave the fat profit margins automation can deliver, and they see A.I. as a golden ticket to savings, perhaps by letting them whittle departments with thousands of workers down to just a few dozen.

“People are looking to achieve very big numbers,” said Mohit Joshi, the president of Infosys, a technology and consulting firm that helps other businesses automate their operations. “Earlier they had incremental, 5 to 10 percent goals in reducing their work force. Now they’re saying, ‘Why can’t we do it with 1 percent of the people we have?’”

Is there any reason to think the advent of AI in education is different? Of course not-- education is a field where the single greatest expense is personnel. If your goal is to bust free some of that sweet sweet public education money, getting rid of live, trained teachers and replace them with a couple of cheap mentors.

Look at it this way. Since the beginning of the modern ed reform era, the dream has been to cut staff costs.

We were going to "teacher proof" classrooms with instruction in a box, complete with scripts, so that anybody could do it. We were going to staff schools with Teach for America temps who would never stay long enough to make more than starting salary or earn a pension. We were going to identify the super-teachers and give them classes of hundreds of students (after we fired everyone else). We were going to implement merit pay, meaning we'd lower the base pay into the base ment and give "bonuses" whenever we felt like it. We were going to get rid of tenure and FILO so that we could fire people who were too expensive. We were going to redefine success as high test scores keyed to a list of simplified standards so that no special expertise was needed to achieve success. We would break the teacher unions and strip them of negotiating power.

We tried all of these things to a greater or lesser success, and in theory and practice, they all have one thing in common-- they allow management to spend less money on trained professional teachers (which means that money can go elsewhere). They have tried to do to trained educators what McDonalds did to trained chefs.

Of course, notes Roos, corporate titans know that rubbing their hands and chortling about all the meat widgets they're going to fire is bad form. So, he says, they've come up with some less scary language. Raise your hand if you've heard this one:

Workers aren’t being replaced by machines, they’re being “released” from onerous, repetitive tasks.

Yup. Classroom AI will liberate teachers, freeing them fro boring clerical tasks so that they work on creative things. Like, say, freshening up their resumes.

Roos says to pay attention to Asia, where the executives pursuing this track are not shy about saying what they are really doing. True enough-- Squirrel Learning brags proudly about how its AI has taken over 70% of the teaching!

Is there any kind of conscience, humanity, or concern for fellow citizens holding back this tide?

“That’s the great dichotomy,” said Ben Pring, the director of the Center for the Future of Work at Cognizant, a technology services firm. “On one hand,” he said, profit-minded executives “absolutely want to automate as much as they can.”

“On the other hand,” he added, “they’re facing a backlash in civic society.”

So that's a no. Corporations pay attention to the optics and the backlash, but those are practical considerations, not moral or ethical ones. The corporate folks talk about how they have no choice, that they can't lose this race, that their stockholders demand profits right now, and firing humans gets those results. Nobody appears to be looking down the road at the human or societal cost, even as are starting to muse that the end of the middle class and stagnant wages for the lower class seems to be bad for business.

Meanwhile, I'm not sure that enough people understand which way this wind is blowing. Certainly some politicians find it useful to blame employment and economic issues on immigrants rather than software, but I'm not sure the techno-illiterate great-grampaws in DC understand what is happening either. And when I ran a post about the Oklahoman bozo who wants to fire and decertify every teacher who ever protests, I got plenty of response saying, "I hope all the teacher walk and they fire all of them. Then what will they do?" Well, one thing they might do is call Summit Learning, hire a bunch of uncertified mentors to sit in classrooms with the students and computers, and then call it a day.

There is ultimately a weakness to this approach-- at least when it comes to education, the AI can't deliver on much of anything that it promises. It's like hiring your sister's not-very-bright child Pat to rewire your house electrical system-- you'll save a ton of money, but the job won't get done. Of course, if the AI is in schools for Those People's Children, and the children of the wealthy and powerful are safely enrolled in a good, or at least exclusive, private school, it may take a while to do anything about getting rid of bad AI education-flavored products.

It's not a pretty picture, which is why we need to pay attention. No AI company is going to come into your school district and announce "We'd like to fire a bunch of you staff and just sit all these kids in front of computers." They aren't worried about what's right, but they are worried about "backlash." If you pay attention, you can provide some, even if you aren't the kind of person who takes fancy trips to Switzerland.

TN: Legislator Says Bring On Fashion Police

Tennessee state representative Antonio Parkinson (D) considered all the issues facing education and decided that the one he wants to address is-- parent dress codes.

Schools may be figuring out-- slowly-- that body-shaming students and chasing them down for ripped knees might be counterproductive. But this Memphis lawmaker wants to crack down on the parents:

"People wearing next to nothing. People wearing shirts or tattoos with expletives. People coming onto a school campus and cursing the principal or the teacher out. These things happen regularly," Parkinson told TODAY Style.

“A principal I talked to told me a lady came into the office with her sleepwear on with some of her body parts hanging out. You got children coming down the hall in a line and they can possibly see this,” he said.

Parkinson does know how to dress

The bill does not lay out specifics, but lets each district set its own standards. Parkinson is apparently still "working on" the bill, so the details are not yet available.

I'm hoping that the bill allows for actual honest-to-God fashion police. Chris's mama shows up to drop off her child in nothing but pajama's-- have the school's fashion officer arrest her or fine her or throw a giant burlap sack over her. Will it matter if she stays in the car? How much of his naughty tattoo must dad cover up. Seriously-- how does anyone enforce a law like this. Any teacher who has to enforce a dress code knows all the stupid problems that come with it-- do I whip out my ruler and measure those shoulder straps? do male teachers admit they've been examining student cleavage to make sure there's not too much boobage showing? and there is nothing like a fingertip length rule to make you aware of how widely relative arm lengths vary from teen to teen. So who is going to deal with all this baloney when dress coding grown-ups? And why do I suspect that this will be mostly about policing women?

Yes, it would be nice if folks dressed appropriately and respectfully when they came to school, but that doesn't mean we need to pass a law. I hate it when people use quotation marks incorrectly, but I don't want offenders arrested by actual grammar and punctuation police.

Given Tennessee's educational system, it seems as if there are better things to spend time on.

MD: Failing Five Year Olds

Maryland joins the ranks of those states that have kindergarten exactly backwards. News overage of this Alarming Crisis starts with this sentence:

Less than half of Maryland’s children have the behavior and academic skills they need to be successful in kindergarten, according to a new state report.

Only 47% tested as "ready" (that's up 2% from last year). And I want to smack my head so hard that Maryland education policy makers all get a headache.

Look. If I go into business making pants, and it turns out that my pants don't fit the proportions of most living humans, the headlines do not read, "American men are built all wrong."

If I open a restaurant that serves food that most human beings can't digest, the headlines don't read, "American digestion systems are dysfunctional."

If I open an amusement park and all the ride have a "you must be this tall to ride" signs with "the tall" being set at 7 feet, 6 inches, headlines do not read, "Experts declare that the majority of Americans are too short."

And if I declare that five year olds must weigh at least 100 pounds to be considered ready for kindergarten, the headline doesn't say, "State's five year olds have alarming developmental lag."

Maryland has seen red flags about their test already; school districts "rebelled" because the test took too long to give. Now districts are allowed to do a "sampling." This is Bad Management 101-- make your people spend more time reporting on the work than actually doing the work. The final paragraph of the story hints at an actual use for a test like this--

A majority of kindergarten teachers indicated that the test, given in the beginning of the school year, helps them identify their students’ strengths and weaknesses, according to survey results released by the state.

-- but of course that can only work in districts that give the test to all students.

In the meantime, Maryland continues to push for earlier and earlier "education" rather than considering that this data might show them that their kindergarten is out of whack.

Yes, there's no question that some sort of intervention in earlier years can help close some of the gaps in later educational achievement. But it is not a five year old's job to be ready for kindergarten-- it is kindergarten's job to be ready for the five year olds. If a test shows that the majority of littles are not "ready" for your kindergarten program, then the littles are not the problem-- your kindergarten, or maybe your readiness test, is the problem. The solution is not to declare, "We had better lean on these  little slackers a little harder and get them away from their families a little sooner." Instead, try asking how your kindergarten program could be shifted to meet the needs that your students actually have. And if you still think that children raised in poor families have "too many" needs, then maybe start asking how you can ameliorate the problems of poverty that are getting in the way.

This is one of the legacies of No Child Left Behind-- the upside down school, where students exist to meet the needs of the school, specifically the need for good test results. This backward approach continues to be most obviously out of whack with the littles, where all of the best goals of early childhood education have been systematically replaced with the goal of "get these kids ready to take the tests."

This is backwards. The school exists to meet the needs of the children; test results like this don't show a failure of children, but a failure of the school system.

ICYMI: Here Comes Another Arctic Blast Edition (1/27)

So it's going to get cold again. But in the meantime there are useful things to read about education. Here's the list for this week-- remember to share what you think needs to be shared.

Denver's Portfolio Model School District is a Failure

Thomas Ultican breaks down some of the details in the long-running reform experiment in Denver schools.

Automation at Davos

This is pretty stark stuff. The difference between what the movers and shakers say about AI publicly (It will be great for workers) and what they say privately (We'll be able to fire 99% of our human workforce).

Success Academy: The High School

One would expect Eva's attempt to expand her brand into high school to be ugly and messy, but this podcast with transcript shows just how ugly and messy (spoiler alert: really). Just brace yourself for the whiplash conclusion.

Floridians Choose Public Schools

Breaking down some survey data to see what Floridians would really like.

Under-discussed Stories of 2018

Have You Heard podcast looks at five six stories that didn't quite get the attention they deserved. (There's a transcript if you aren't a podcast person).

Houses for People

Teacher Tom provides his littles a lesson in activism.

MLK's Work Precedes Us And, With Resilience, Lives After

Jose Luis Vilson and a wake up call for what MLK's legacy is about beyond pretty memes.

How Do Charter Schools Affect Students With Special Needs?

From the LAUSD strike comes this set of word delivered to the board about some of the charter claims that just don't hold up.

The Battle For New Orleans Public Schools  

If you'd like one more article for the "NOLA Is Not A Huge Success" file.

Is Competency The Hot New Thing?

Tom Vander Ark thinks that competency is the up-and-coming next big thing in education. He just said so a few weeks ago at Forbes, but he's been saying so for several years now.  Vander Ark has been at the education reform biz longer than most, but his career also includes the launch of K-Mart's competitor to Sam's Club, point man for the Gates small schools initiative, and an attempt to launch some charter schools in NYC that left a bad taste in many mouths. He's not always right. How about this time?

When we talk about competency (as in competency-based education), we need to keep a couple of things in mind.

Everyone's probably at home working on badges

First of all, it's not remotely new. For most of its history, it has been called "mastery" or "learning for mastery," and it crops up as far back as almost a century ago, when programs like the Winnetka Plan started playing with the idea that instead of focusing on the hours spent in a program, we could focus on whether or not the students had mastered a particular piece of skill or content. Mastery Learning began to catch fire again in the sixties. Most of us who went to teacher school in the seventies learned about it and were encouraged to make it a factor in our work, though nobody had yet solved one of the central problems with mastery learning. The premise was that every student could learn the material as long as she was given enough time--but there were still only 180 days in the school year.

In the classroom, mastery learning often took the form of giving students multiple, even unlimited, attempts to show mastery of the material. On the ground, this looked like, "Students, you can keep taking the unit test until you pass it." Students sometimes took advantage of the reduced sense of urgency, and parents were not always supportive--as one parent asked me, "Why should my kid try when he gets a dozen shots and everybody passes?" While mastery learning became central in very few classrooms, by the eighties, many teachers had incorporated elements of mastery learning into their practice.

In the nineties, mastery learning made a comeback with the rise of Outcome Based Education. In OBE, each lesson would culminate in a student demonstration of some particular outcome--new terminology for showing mastery (immortalized in a million million lesson plans as "The Student Will Be Able To", aka "TSWBAT"). We would have authentic assessments, where the students would demonstrate mastery in some "real" way; multiple choice tests and their ilk would be banished. Each student would have a portfolio that would show the complex web of her mastered skills, not just some simple letter grade. And finally, the motto, drilled into teachers at countless professional development sessions, was that "all can learn all."

But OBE died a quick death. Part of the opposition came from conservative parents who resisted the "values" outcomes that required students to demonstrate mastery of the skill of being a good person. The other fatal attack on OBE came from the rising tide of accountability hawks, spurred to action by A Nation At Risk and demanding the kind of cold, hard numbers and measures that led us to No Child Left Behind, Common Core and accountability based on multiple-choice standardized tests.

Competency is a new branding of a century-long thread in education. Now mastery can be marked with digital badges, the progression of skills maintained, measured and recorded by computers, the badges earned and issued in and out of school.

If it's going to finally become the big thing in education, it will have to solve some of its old central problems. How long do you give students who progress to mastery slowly? How do you sequence competencies in a way that's fair and sensible? How do you break complex skills and knowledge into competencies that are measured in authentic and valid methods? If you let anyone, anywhere issue a "badge" for a competency that's been mastered, how do we keep accountability hawks happy? And a new problem--what happens when you let all of these educational decisions be made by tech companies?

Vander Ark's evidence that competency is going to finally bust through this time is essentially a list of tech companies that are working on various parts of the problem. Some companies are working out how to issue a digital badge for a variety of mastered skills that will be assessed... somehow. Financiers like XQ and New Schools Venture Fund are throwing money at groups that want to work on these problems. But even if all these groups successfully solve the problems of mastery learning, advocates like Vander Ark will still have one more question to answer-- can you get parents to sign up for a mastery learning system on a large scale for the first time in 100 years?

Originally posted at Forbes