Hammering the Littles: Are The Kids Really All Right?

The headline says "Kindergarten classes are getting more academic. New research says the kids are all right." The news is that a big shiny new study shows that the increasingly academic approach to kindergarten is okee dokee.

The quick take is that the study followed 20,000 kindergarten students and found that they both achieved academically and their social and emotional development was just fine. So, apparently, all the adult humans who were concerned that over-emphasizing academics with five-year-olds was developmentally inappropriate, at best a waste of time, and at worst destructive-- well, all of those folks can just chill because this study says everything is hunky and dory.



Here are some of the reasons that you can ignore this study.

1) The study is based on the 2010-2011 school year. That means these students were barely, if at all, subjected to the rollout of Common Core, a set of standards that seriously pushed developmentally inappropriate instruction into the primary grades. It means that the study was only looking at the academic advances in kindergarten that happened under No Child Left Behind, but predates the even huger ramping up that happened in the last decade.

In other words, this is like saying, "A study of increased auto speeds between 1910 and 1915 showed little correlation between auto speed and traffic fatalities, so there's no reason we can't increase the current speed limit to 150 mph."

2) If you're a regular reader, you already know what I'm going to say-- their measure of academic achievement is based on a math and reading test. That's it. For the love of God-- show me a parent who sends their precious five year old off to school saying, "Take good care of her this year, and whatever you do, get her to score well on a standardized math and reading test."

And that was a test given at the end of the kindergarten year, which means that if the study proved anything at all, it proved that spending a year getting students ready to take a test tends to improve their score on that test. Give them the test at the beginning of first grade and then we can talk.

Those first two points are, for me, enough to disqualify the study from serious consideration. But there's more.

3) For instance, the folks at Defending the Early Years (who also responded to this study with a much more scholarly and grown-up response than you can expect from me) point out one other important fact about this business of giving littles a math and reading test:

The authors based their conclusions on kindergartners’ test scores in math and English language arts. They note that, in the standards-and-testing-based “reform” movement of the 1980s and 1990s, “standardized testing was not mandated until the third grade.” But they don’t say why. The reason is that testing experts universally agree that standardized test scores have virtually no meaning before third grade. According to the findings of the National Research Council’s definitive “High Stakes” study, basing educational policymaking on kindergarten test scores is essentially a form of educational malpractice.

4) The other missing link here? Any kind of causal connection between early display of reading skills and benefits to the student further down the line. Do children who start reading earlier end up lifelong readers or outstanding students? And if so, is that simply correlation and not causation. In other words, we might find that students with larger shoe sizes at age 5 are more likely to grow up to be basketball players, but it would not follow that surgically enlarging the feet of kindergartners would turn them into later-life NBA material.

There are other problems.

5) How, exactly, are we measuring social and emotional health in five year olds. DEY has some thoughts about that, but I find the idea of measuring SE health in littles a bit mind-blowing. I'm especially afraid of systems that mark compliant behavior as healthy. But that's a conversation for another day.

6) The study hinges on spending "additional time" on "advanced" material. Neither term is clearly or exactly defined.

One more bad study would be neither here nor there, except this is exactly the kind of study some folks are dying to use against the umpteen studies that show that hammering littles with academics is a bad idea. If you are having a spirited discussion with one of those folks, and they try to wave this study in your face, do not be impressed or intimidated or silenced.

Reclaiming Choice

So we just froze our way through School Choice Week, the annual PR blitz in favor of privatizing public education, and I find myself troubled and annoyed by the word "choice."

See, I favor choice. In all my years at our tiny small town/rural high school, we'v e graduated students who went on to become doctors, artists, teachers, welders, construction workers, lawyers, telephone linemen, and jobs you don't even realize exist. We have sent them to Ivy League schools and community colleges and two year tech schools and straight into jobs they love. And our students were able to choose those paths in life because they were able to choose the kind of education they wanted while they were with us. They could spend half their days in a shop at the CTE program we've offered for fifty years. They could pursue extra challenging courses in our honors track, prep for college, or aim for working world skills. They could take art classes, cooking classes, go full band geek.

These students had ample choice-- and they could exercise that choice without to apply and re-apply if they changed their minds. Changing their life goals (not exactly an uncommon activity for teens) could be done without having to change schools and upend their entire lives.

But somehow, charter advocates keep trying to paint this as "one size fits all" schooling, as if every student in a public school must follow exactly the same path-- which is pretty much the opposite of how public schools actually work.

It's true (and maybe ironic or maybe ill-intentioned) that standards-based reform has tried to turn this one-size-fits-all model into reality, with Common Core college and career ready standards the special dream of folks who think that uniformity and conformity are virtues. It is absolutely tragic that some school districts have bought into the notion that education should be like tofu-- exactly the same however you slice it.

Part of the language we should have been using to beat back the standards movement is the word "choice"-- students should be able to choose from a variety of paths within their school.

But "choice" hasn't been available because the term has been co-opted by another brand of reformster-- the charter cheerleaders, who are not just interested in charters, but in privately operated corporate style run-like-a-business charters. So the word "choice" has not only been co-opted, but narrowed to serve as a stand-in for "privatization."

We don't even see it anymore. School choice could mean any number of ideas, such as the pioneering schools-within-schools of New York City (see Andrea Gabor's After the Education Wars for a history of these revolutionary schools). It could mean deliberately fostering multiple approaches within a single public school district run by various and varied teacher leadership teams. Heck, on the other side of the scale it could-- and once did-- refer to voucher systems. But vouchers are controversial even as they reveal the empty promise of school choice-- no voucher in the world can make a private school accept your child if they don't want to. And choice fans have backed away from including vouchers in the "choice" brand.

My point is that "school choice" could have a big broad batch of meanings, but it has been carefully narrowed by and large to mean a system of privately owned and operated charter school businesses.

It's a deliberate framing maneuver, of course, suggesting that if you are anti-charter, you are against choice and freedom (and probably hate apple pie, too).

Yet a modern charter system is no better at providing choices than a traditional public system. A modern charter system provides only the choices its operators decide to provide, and only to the students that "fit" their charter, and no group of parents have the option of showing up at a board meeting to demand other choices. Meanwhile, charters drain resources from public schools, reducing the choices available to students there.

Charters were going to be laboratories that taught us new things about education. That, of course, turned out to be a crock (name one new educational instructional pedagogical anything discovered and disseminated by a charter school). Charters have "discovered" that if you spend extra time on students who are "good fits" you might do well on standardized tests. And charters have underscored one other piece of not news-- the best way to get more educational choice for students is money. The more money, the more programs, and the more choice.

Wealthy public schools have all the languages and arts and music and theater and AP courses and specialized classes. Poor schools get the basics. Charters develop resources of wealth by managing costs (no students that are costly to teach, low wages for teachers) and by hitting up donors.

If we were having a real discussion about educational choices, we'd be talking about how to get more money to public schools, the schools that are already well-structured to provide choice inside their big tent. But we've been suckered into accepting that "choice" must mean privately owned and operated charter schools.

If you want poor families to have choices like Latin, a strong theater program, and awesome science labs, you don't get there by spreading dollars thinly across multiple charters that those families may or may not have access to. You get those choices by pumping money and resources into the schools that are already in place and already committed to educating those students. This is one of the crazy assertions of modern charters-- if we take the same money that wasn't enough to run a single school system and spread it across multiple systems, it will suddenly act as if there were more of it.

We need to take back the word "choice," because it's an important word in education. Students do deserve choices-- real choices-- and the best way to get them is to fully fund and support the public school system so that we can build variety and meaningful options under one roof. That's real choice

ICYMI: Really Big List Edition (2/3)

Was it the cold? Did we all just have more time to wander the internet? I don't know, but it's a huge list this week. Remember to share-- that's how the word gets out.


LA Strike: Charters Are An Existential Threat To Public Education  

The LA strike was extraordinary in that it addressed so much more than wages and benefits, but also addressed policy as well. Here's a good look at where the LA charter movement fits in the bigger picture.

The Headband Obsession with Student Concentration.

From the "You Can't Make This Stuff Up" files, the program that's going to read student minds via fancy science headbands.l

Betsy DeVos Fabricating History To Sell Bad Education  Policy

DeVos has been talking a lot lately-- well, at least for her-- and much of it has been a sales pitch based on history that is not exactly accurate

Only Two Percent of Teachers Are Black Men Yet Research Confirms They Matter. 

Let's go over this again- we need more black men teaching in the classroom.

Teacher Strike Interview

NEPC fellow Terrenda White creates some context for the strikes of the last year, up to and including the current struggle in Denver

Betsy DeVos's Favorite Teacher Story Wants Her To Stop

DeVos likes to tell a story about a teacher named Jed to help make some of her points. Rebecca Klein tracked Jed down; turns out he wishes DeVos would knock it off.

Can Altschool Save Itself From Failure

This might be the "if you only read one piece this week" article. Susan Adams is the education editor at Forbes, and she took a good hard look at Max Ventilla's super cool ed tech charter, Altschool, and probably got one of the most fluff-free looks at it ever (complete with cringing PR people). Joins Andrea Gabor's book in pointing out that some of these guys thinking they can business model their way to ed reform are actually using bad business models.

Shark Tank Recap: Teaching Harvard Grad Financial Lesson

Speaking of bad business. A Harvard grad goes on shark tank with her idea for mail order Montessori and her tail of having blithely burned through a mountain of investor money. Things do not go well for her.

This Is How Horribly Teachers Are Paid In The US

The story here is that this piece ran in Vice, not exactly known for their prodigious education coverage. This is brief, solid, and sad.

DC C charter Administrators Have Some Of The Highest School Salaries In Town; Their Teachers, Some Of The Lowest

City Paper goes digging, and has to work at it, because of course Freedom of Information Act doesn't apply to charters. Most amazing part-- a charter wouldn't let a teacher see her own salary schedule to know what steps up she might expect.

Another KIPP Teacher

Need another reminder of how awful a Teach Like A No Excuses Champion school can be. Here's are some words from a teacher who used to be a KIPPster.

Their Levers Are Destined To Fail.

A new-to-me blog with a post looking at the different ways reform has tried to bring teachers to heel.

America Is Falling Out Of Love With Billionaires

Not exactly an education story, except of course it is. Are US citizens getting fed up with the oligarchs?

Here We Go. Another Koch Push 

More news you didn't want to hear-- the Koch brothers have decided to help fix education some more.

When Schools Say "All Means All," What Do They Really Mean.

Peter DeWitt talks about safeguarding our LGBTQ students

10 Out Of 15 PA Cyber Schools Are Operating Without A Charter

Steven Singer calls for a little less cyber charter baloney and a little more-- or just some-- oversight.

Broken Promises: Camden's Renaissance Charter Schools

Jersey Jazzman with yet another tale of charter shenanigans.

That's it. I mean, that's not really it, because there is always more (which reminds me-- your recommendations are always welcome).

Measuring Success: A Study in Contrasts

Two items tossed my feed this week that underline contrasting ideas about what constitutes success in  education.

First, let's go to the Jackson-Madison County school system of Tennessee. At JMCSS folks are pretty excited because they've made such strides with the addition of a unified curriculum. They know this worked because they have all sorts of growth data, much of it exceeding expectations.

Not on the same page.

Now, I don't want to gloss over the good parts here. Having some sort of planned curriculum is probably a good step (no district has "no curriculum," even if that curriculum is "whatever the teacher decides to do today"), and I'm sure that it probably helped. But we can't really tell, because all JCMSS has to say for itself is "We made test scores go up." And as every teacher knows, you can raise test scores without really teaching anything worthwhile except how to do better on standardized tests.

Nor is the "how they did it" part of the article very encouraging. Talking to Superintendent Jared Myracle (I swear I am not making that up):

“It’s a game changer,” he said. “Getting everyone on the same page, having everyone use the same approach is a huge thing.”

With a new, uniform curriculum, there is consistency across the district. He said that’s important because students at one school shouldn’t be learning differently than students at other schools, especially because families move across the district.

Sigh. So they found a super-duper one-size-fits-all program and jammed the entire teaching staff into that one size. All students learn the same thing at the same time in the same way, and that's how we raise test scores. This is how public schools help promote charter school and home schooling-- by insisting there's just one way to teach and learn and measure what has happened.

But meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, there is this:

In many people's lives there is at least one teacher who inspired them, and helped them become who they are today. In our early years, when we are still being formed, they often see in us more than we see in ourselves, more than our families see and, as a result, help us to evolve into who we ultimately become. These inspirational people are not often recognized for the life changing role they have played. These are the teachers who define us, teachers who widen our horizons and encourage us to explore. These teachers are touchstones to paths of achieving more than we might have otherwise accomplished, in directions we might not have gone.

That's from the website for the Kennedy Center/Stephen Sondheim Inspirational Teacher Awards. It's time again for nominations to this prestigious award that recognizes teachers who-- well, you just read the paragraph. I've poked through the whole site, and there doesn't seem to be anything about "teachers who faithfully got one the same page as everyone else in their building" or "teachers who implemented one-size-fits-all programs with fidelity" or even "teachers who helped students get higher scores on the Big Standardized Test."

But here's what one nominator wrote about the teacher she put up for the award:

At the age of 15 the word "different" was something I never wanted to be. Despite detecting my "differences" at a very young age, I decided to try to deny that part of myself existed in order to fit in... [Coach Brown] helped me recognize my differences not as flaws, but rather my most precious and unique pieces that make me special.

So you tell me. Would you rather have your child in the classroom of that guy, or of the guy who carefully stayed on the same page of a one-size-fits-all program? If you teach, how would you like to be remembered by your students? As someone who widened horizons and inspired students, or as someone who helped raise standardized test scores?

The information about how to nominate someone for the Kennedy/Sondheim award is on the website.

How American Should American Schools Be?

Part of the impetus behind modern education reform is the idea that more of the education system should be operated by businesses. Many merits and drawbacks of that approach continue to be debated, but one aspect is rarely discussed. Modern business is multinational, so we need to ask--how much control of our educational system do we want to send outside of U.S. borders?

Charter schools have been one path by which foreign nationals can become involved in the U.S. education system. The most notable example is the schools of the so-called Gulen charter chain. The Sunni imam Fethullah Gülen (who is almost always awarded the adjective "reclusive") moved to the U.S. in 1999 for medical treatment. Within a decade, he had created a wide-ranging group of charter schools. The chain has been used to issue H-1B visas to large numbers of Turkish nationals to come to teach; numerous reports claim that they are also expected to kick back part of their salary. The schools are also accused of funneling money to groups such as Gulen-linked construction companies. While some conservative critics worryabout Gulen schools as indoctrination centers, many others are concerned that the Gulen schools are using U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund a government in exile. At the very least, Gulen schools put U.S. students in the middle of a foreign power struggle; the Erdogan government has actively worked to undermine the chain, and the 2016 Turkish coup attempt was blamed on Gulen.

That's just one charter chain, but it's one of the largest chains in the country, with as many as 150 schools (not all schools are eager to advertise their Gulen connection, so counts vary). But in most states, charter schools are run as businesses, allowing for investors and operators from across the globe.

The explosion of education technology has opened other pathways for foreign influence in U.S. public education and raised some important questions. In April, writing for EdSurge, Jenny Abamu asked the question "What Happens To Student Data Privacy When Chinese Firms Acquire U.S. EdTech Companies," and the question is not rhetorical. This year the Chinese company Netdragon acquired Edmodo, an education learning platform, for a hefty $137.5 million. Speculation is that the acquisition has far less to do with Edmodo's revenues (which have been described as"struggling") and more to do with the 90 million users and the data they have generated. If data is the new oil, then many ed tech companies are sitting on rapidly filling tanks that will attract attention from businesses all around the globe.

Chinese firms are working hard to get a piece of the ed tech pie (one analyst predicts that the analytics sector of ed alone will be a $7 billion business by 2023). Squirrel AI Learning, one of the biggest ed-tech companies in China, has hired experts from Knewton (previously an AI partner of Pearson) and just announced that it was bringing on Tom Mitchell, Dean of Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, as their Chief AI Officer.

Squirrel AI Learning provides a good example of the potential problems on the horizon. Their AI+ model, already in wide use in China, leaves only about 30% of classes to be taught by live human teachers. The other 70% are taught by AI software, meaning that the educational decisions are being made by the programmers who create and manage that software. We still need to have a conversation about whether educational decisions should be made by educators or ed tech programmers, but it adds a whole new level of concern when those technicians are not actually in this country.

There is nothing inherently wrong with foreign involvement in U.S. businesses, though Americans have experienced some shock as iconic American products from beer to jeans have become the business of foreign interests. But these days it is in the very nature of business to be multi-national.

We've talked about the problems of privatizing public education, cutting it loose from the traditional democratic processes of an elected school board and handing decision-making power to a business-style operation. But what would it mean to American education to send those decision-making powers to another country entirely? If we're going to turn American public education into a business, there's no reason to assume that it would be an American business. Are we prepared to deal with that possibility when it comes to the education of our children? Perhaps a multinational education system would be great. Perhaps turning over what is essentially an arm of our government to other countries would be disastrous. Perhaps the wealthy would send their children to private American-run schools, while education for the lower classes would be outsourced. Perhaps a multinational school system could treat our multi-ethnic student population better than we do ourselves. Perhaps selling off our school system to companies in other countries would be our final mark of shame and failure. The only thing that is certain is that we are failing to discuss any of these potential implications.

Originally posted at Forbes.

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.