Accountability has always been an educational buzzword, and the modern reformy era has put accountability on a high, if somewhat cockeyed pedestal. Testing? Not testing? Running test scores through models soaked in magic VAM sauce? Regular school visits, inspections and audits? Administrators and school boards that actually pay attention? A big fat stack of state and federal regulations and reports thereon? So many fun things are on the table these days.
But as with many reformy subjects, what's really being discussed is accountability for large, urban districts. Those districts face a unique set of challenges, all of which boil down to these districts just being too damn big.
That gets us models like "Filling out a bunch of paperwork that may or may not have any connection to reality" (spoiler alert-- it's "not") or "Creating and administering instruments that purport to measure something that is alleged to be a proxy for the thing we really want to measure" (spoiler alert-- it doesn't). This gets us highly politicized grandstanding as well as representative bodies that may or may not truly represent poor and powerless neighborhoods-- the very neighborhoods that need schools that have strong and responsive support.
There's a good accountability model you can find out here in rural spaces and small towns. It's the living in the community you serve model.
I taught in a small town for almost forty years; in fact, I taught at the same school from which I graduated. I live in the town, a smallish place with a steady drain on our population, but not many new folks moving into town. I cannot take a step without encountering a former classmate, student, student's parent, or student's offspring.
This has always meant a special level of accountability. If I assigned something that folks disagreed with, I could hear about it at church, in the grocery store, at a restaurant. My life in the classroom followed me immediately into the community. And I had steady long-term feedback; I knew that certain assignments were effective because students were talking to me about them ten years later. I knew that if I did it in my classroom, I should be prepared to explain it out in the world.
This is not always a comfortable model; a divorced male teacher can generate lots of stories in a small town, and when you're the president of a striking union, there is zero insulation between you and the taxpaying public. Not everyone can handle it; lots of teachers make it a point to live outside of the community where they won't have to run into students and faculty. I think that's a mistake. Many of our administrators over the past few decades have lived outside the district and it is bad for school-community relations.
A friend once told me that in management school he was told that company officials should live at least fifty miles away from the facility they supervise, so that they can make purely business decisions without thinking of their workers as, you know, real people. That strikes me as completely wrong for schools (well, businesses, too, but that's another conversation). A school should be tied to the community it serves; administrators and teachers should be familiar names and faces, just like local elected officials and community pillars. If your position is that you just want to do your job and go home, you are not someone I prefer to have teach my child. I want someone who's invested. There is no better guarantee of accountability than invested. After all-- that's the whole point of attaching high stakes to things like tests, so that teachers will feel invested in test scores. But an investment in numbers that's been forced on you is nothing like an investment in human beings and community that you make voluntarily because, well, you are a human being and you live in a community.
And if you're thinking this model is impossible for schools in big urban areas, look at this piece from a school administrator who, among other things, had her staff take regular walks through the neighborhood.
Yes, there are levels of accountability that this model might not manage. It won't fix everything and won't stop all the bad actors. But do not underestimate the power of having to stand face to face with the people whose lives your decisions effect, especially if these are people with whom you already share relationships and connections of community.
Monday, April 1, 2019
Sunday, March 31, 2019
DeVos, Class Size, and the Reformistan Bubble
I almost feel sorry for Betsy DeVos. Her two big news breaks this week are not entirely her fault.
First, there's the Special Olympics fiasco. It appears that the budget office made the hugely unpopular cut, and DeVos stood by it like a good soldier, right until Donald Trump threw her under the bus and canceled the cuts (that were never going to get past Congress). But now DeVos is the one who gets to carry that policy albatross around her neck, right next to her grizzly-shooting merit badge, even though she did previously, in fact, give Special Olympics her own salary.
Then there's the business of students benefitting from higher class sizes. Make no mistake-- this was awful and stupid and just all-around bad (though by no means the worst thing to come out of her mouth at the hearings). But it's not really fair to hang this one on DeVos-- the idea of the super-teacher crammed into a room with a gazillion students has been on reformsters' preferred policy list for at least a decade.
I wrote about this almost exactly four years ago ("Super Sardinemasters: Paying More To Teach More"), then as now leaning on the work of Leonie Haimson at Class Size Matters.
The big class with a great teacher idea seems to have made its public mainstream debut in a 2010 Bill Gates speech to the CCSSO. Not surprisingly, Arne Duncan was shortly thereafter talking it up.
We spent billions of dollars to reduce class size,” Duncan told ABC’s Andrea Mitchell in 2011, when we could instead give teachers higher salaries in exchange for larger classrooms, thereby attracting much more talented teachers.
That was back in 2011, and as near as Haimson can tell, nobody ever actually tried to do it. Broad "graduate" (can you graduate from a fake superintendent training program?) John Covington was going to give it a try in Kansas City Schools, but instead resigned and went to Michigan to work for EAA which played with using computers as a way to shoehorn many many students into single classrooms.
First, there's the Special Olympics fiasco. It appears that the budget office made the hugely unpopular cut, and DeVos stood by it like a good soldier, right until Donald Trump threw her under the bus and canceled the cuts (that were never going to get past Congress). But now DeVos is the one who gets to carry that policy albatross around her neck, right next to her grizzly-shooting merit badge, even though she did previously, in fact, give Special Olympics her own salary.
 |
| Okay, but that's the last time I'm going under that bus for you. |
I wrote about this almost exactly four years ago ("Super Sardinemasters: Paying More To Teach More"), then as now leaning on the work of Leonie Haimson at Class Size Matters.
The big class with a great teacher idea seems to have made its public mainstream debut in a 2010 Bill Gates speech to the CCSSO. Not surprisingly, Arne Duncan was shortly thereafter talking it up.
We spent billions of dollars to reduce class size,” Duncan told ABC’s Andrea Mitchell in 2011, when we could instead give teachers higher salaries in exchange for larger classrooms, thereby attracting much more talented teachers.
That was back in 2011, and as near as Haimson can tell, nobody ever actually tried to do it. Broad "graduate" (can you graduate from a fake superintendent training program?) John Covington was going to give it a try in Kansas City Schools, but instead resigned and went to Michigan to work for EAA which played with using computers as a way to shoehorn many many students into single classrooms.
I was writing back in 2015 because no less than Georgetown University's Edunomics Lab had put out a paper supporting this nonsense by Marguerite Roza and Amanda Warco. The paper was almost honest about the problem it was trying to solve-- how can you pay teachers more without raising your payroll costs? Easy peasy-- fire all your bad teachers and give their salaries, and their students, to your remaining super-teachers.
The hook from which any such proposal hangs is the assertion that great teaching matters more than small class size, but even in the Edunomics paper, that's a shaky hook indeed. The "research" cited includes "research" like a paper from the Fordham Institute and research that "modeled the effects"-- in other words, not actual research on the actual stuff we're talking about. The critical point it completely ignores is the degree to which great teaching depends on class size.
Edunomics also has to tap dance around preferences. Parents prefer smaller classes; that's unequivocally true, but Rozas and her co-author try to get past that by citing research that says parents would prefer a 27-student class with a great teacher to a 22-student class with a random teacher. This ignores a great many things, not the least of which is that in many districts, a 27-student class would represent far smaller class-size than most teachers and students are currently dealing with.
There's also some useless research suggesting that a majority of teachers would rather have a $5K bonus than two fewer students in class. This research comes from Dan Goldhaber, Michael DeArmond and Scott Deburgomaster, “Teacher Attitudes About Compensation Reform: Implications for Reform Implementation,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 64, No. 3 (April 2011) and we could spend some time trying to evaluate its bona fides, but really, who cares? We aren't talking about two students-- we're talking about enough students to significantly cut the teaching staff. This is like trying to argue that because you like having your back scratched with a one of those little backscratchers, you would undoubtedly like to be impaled with a rake.
But Roza has made a career out of this. She went to work for the Gates Foundation back in 2010. She's been cranking out work for EducationNext, as well as turning up with CRPE and Harvard and FutureEd.
My point is this-- it is not unlikely that DeVos has, over her years in the reformster biz, encountered something passing itself off as research to support this idea. She is certainly not the first person to say it out loud.
Her doing so points to many things, in particular the reformistan bubble, which has been built from Day One without any actual educators inside it. Instead, the bubble is populated by rich people, people who want rich people's money, people who think they have great ideas about education, and even people who sincerely want to make education better. The bubble does not include people who can turn to an Arne Duncan or a Betsy DeVos or a Bill Gates and say, "Based on my years of experience in a classroom, I'd have to say that idea is ridiculous bullshit."
In fact, the bubble includes an entire buffer system that stands ready to reject anyone calling bullshit, primarily by dismissing all attempts to defend public education as simply a ploy by the unions to gather money and power.
There are a tiny handful of people within the bubble who will occasionally act as bullshit detectors, but they are not enough. The ed reform movement has gathered power and money and has set up a parallel education system even as it has managed to capture leadership roles within public education, but the ed reform movement still lacks what it has always lacked-- actual teachers and experienced educators who know what the hell they're talking about.
The shock and scandal and outrage is not that DeVos would offer up this class size bullshit on the Hill, but that she stands on top of a whole pile of educational amateurs who have been pushing this bullshit for at least a decade, despite the mountain of evidence and the actual teachers who speak against it. The biggest scandal is not that an agent of ed reform like DeVos would say something this dumb, but that she could be part of a larger machine that eats dumb for breakfast and then spits dumb back out for the rest of the day, for a decade, without ever listening to a dissenting voice. It's one thing to be ignorant, but to be willfully, deliberately stubbornly ignorant and to take pride in that ignorance, to actively preserve that ignorance like it's a precious flower and not a dried cow patty-- that's just inexcusable.
It's worth remembering that, with the exception of her stand on civil rights, there really isn't much going on with DeVos that would have disqualified her from the Obama-era USED leadership spot. If we focus strictly on her, we're letting a whole lot of people inside that bubble off the hook.
Edunomics also has to tap dance around preferences. Parents prefer smaller classes; that's unequivocally true, but Rozas and her co-author try to get past that by citing research that says parents would prefer a 27-student class with a great teacher to a 22-student class with a random teacher. This ignores a great many things, not the least of which is that in many districts, a 27-student class would represent far smaller class-size than most teachers and students are currently dealing with.
There's also some useless research suggesting that a majority of teachers would rather have a $5K bonus than two fewer students in class. This research comes from Dan Goldhaber, Michael DeArmond and Scott Deburgomaster, “Teacher Attitudes About Compensation Reform: Implications for Reform Implementation,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 64, No. 3 (April 2011) and we could spend some time trying to evaluate its bona fides, but really, who cares? We aren't talking about two students-- we're talking about enough students to significantly cut the teaching staff. This is like trying to argue that because you like having your back scratched with a one of those little backscratchers, you would undoubtedly like to be impaled with a rake.
But Roza has made a career out of this. She went to work for the Gates Foundation back in 2010. She's been cranking out work for EducationNext, as well as turning up with CRPE and Harvard and FutureEd.
My point is this-- it is not unlikely that DeVos has, over her years in the reformster biz, encountered something passing itself off as research to support this idea. She is certainly not the first person to say it out loud.
Her doing so points to many things, in particular the reformistan bubble, which has been built from Day One without any actual educators inside it. Instead, the bubble is populated by rich people, people who want rich people's money, people who think they have great ideas about education, and even people who sincerely want to make education better. The bubble does not include people who can turn to an Arne Duncan or a Betsy DeVos or a Bill Gates and say, "Based on my years of experience in a classroom, I'd have to say that idea is ridiculous bullshit."
In fact, the bubble includes an entire buffer system that stands ready to reject anyone calling bullshit, primarily by dismissing all attempts to defend public education as simply a ploy by the unions to gather money and power.
There are a tiny handful of people within the bubble who will occasionally act as bullshit detectors, but they are not enough. The ed reform movement has gathered power and money and has set up a parallel education system even as it has managed to capture leadership roles within public education, but the ed reform movement still lacks what it has always lacked-- actual teachers and experienced educators who know what the hell they're talking about.
The shock and scandal and outrage is not that DeVos would offer up this class size bullshit on the Hill, but that she stands on top of a whole pile of educational amateurs who have been pushing this bullshit for at least a decade, despite the mountain of evidence and the actual teachers who speak against it. The biggest scandal is not that an agent of ed reform like DeVos would say something this dumb, but that she could be part of a larger machine that eats dumb for breakfast and then spits dumb back out for the rest of the day, for a decade, without ever listening to a dissenting voice. It's one thing to be ignorant, but to be willfully, deliberately stubbornly ignorant and to take pride in that ignorance, to actively preserve that ignorance like it's a precious flower and not a dried cow patty-- that's just inexcusable.
It's worth remembering that, with the exception of her stand on civil rights, there really isn't much going on with DeVos that would have disqualified her from the Obama-era USED leadership spot. If we focus strictly on her, we're letting a whole lot of people inside that bubble off the hook.
ICYMI: Snowy Relapse Edition (3/31)
The weather outside is, in fact, frightful. So here's a list of things to read inside today.
Teen Boys Ranked Their Female Classmates Based On Looks, And The Girls Weren't Having It
It's a great story, in part because it's about working the issue out, not just getting somebody in trouble.
Small District Reaps Big Profits With Chart Fees
There are a lot of things wrong with California's charter system; here's an explainer for one of them. Are you a small district with money problems? Become a popular charter authorizer and you can make a bundle.
The Digital Expansion of the Mind Gone Wrong
Daniel Willingham looks at three areas where technology was going to make education so much better-- and why none of them lived up to the hype.
Experts Call for an End To Online Preschool
Please.
NJ Tax Money Disappearing Into Charters
A look at charter fraud and waste in the Garden State.
Six School Voucher Myths
A quick debunking of some common voucher talking points.
Trump, DeVos. Special Olympics
The NYT breaks down the wheels within wheels of this massive cluster
Betsy DeVos Told Us Her Real Plan
All Special Olympics and class sizes, Nancy Bailey picks out the most concerning DeVosian quote that tells us what she wants to do.
The Single Most Telling Sentence
If Bailey tells us what DeVos wants to do, Valerie Strauss picks out the sentence that explains why she wants to do it. This is probably my top DeVos hot take of the week.
School Freedom Plans Aren't About Schools Or Education
Leon Galis with a pretty good explanation of why some reformsters and public ed defenders don't seem to be on the same planet.
A Parkland Teacher Speaks Out
One of the most shameful failures of any school system-- public, private or charter. A teacher talks about the follow-up failure after the murders. I'm sorry I have to send you to the 74 to read this, but schools have to do better.
Don't Cry Over the Death of Arizona's Charter Reform Bill. It Was a Joke.
Well, that's disappointing.
Charter Schools Are Closing, But DeVos Wants More
USA Today ran this piece, and it doesn't even include a quote from Mike Petrilli.
How One Couple Made Charter Millions
If you want a specific example of how California's lax charter oversight allows fraud, waste and profiteering, here's a perfect example from the LA Times.
Teen Boys Ranked Their Female Classmates Based On Looks, And The Girls Weren't Having It
It's a great story, in part because it's about working the issue out, not just getting somebody in trouble.
Small District Reaps Big Profits With Chart Fees
There are a lot of things wrong with California's charter system; here's an explainer for one of them. Are you a small district with money problems? Become a popular charter authorizer and you can make a bundle.
The Digital Expansion of the Mind Gone Wrong
Daniel Willingham looks at three areas where technology was going to make education so much better-- and why none of them lived up to the hype.
Experts Call for an End To Online Preschool
Please.
NJ Tax Money Disappearing Into Charters
A look at charter fraud and waste in the Garden State.
Six School Voucher Myths
A quick debunking of some common voucher talking points.
Trump, DeVos. Special Olympics
The NYT breaks down the wheels within wheels of this massive cluster
Betsy DeVos Told Us Her Real Plan
All Special Olympics and class sizes, Nancy Bailey picks out the most concerning DeVosian quote that tells us what she wants to do.
The Single Most Telling Sentence
If Bailey tells us what DeVos wants to do, Valerie Strauss picks out the sentence that explains why she wants to do it. This is probably my top DeVos hot take of the week.
School Freedom Plans Aren't About Schools Or Education
Leon Galis with a pretty good explanation of why some reformsters and public ed defenders don't seem to be on the same planet.
A Parkland Teacher Speaks Out
One of the most shameful failures of any school system-- public, private or charter. A teacher talks about the follow-up failure after the murders. I'm sorry I have to send you to the 74 to read this, but schools have to do better.
Don't Cry Over the Death of Arizona's Charter Reform Bill. It Was a Joke.
Well, that's disappointing.
Charter Schools Are Closing, But DeVos Wants More
USA Today ran this piece, and it doesn't even include a quote from Mike Petrilli.
How One Couple Made Charter Millions
If you want a specific example of how California's lax charter oversight allows fraud, waste and profiteering, here's a perfect example from the LA Times.
Saturday, March 30, 2019
Is CTE Good News Or Bad News
In the last two decades of education reform, a great deal of emphasis has been put on sending high school graduates to college. President Obama in his 2009 State of the Union address proclaimed that by 2020 America would "once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world" (though he hedged that a bit by later saying simply that everyone would need some kind of post high school education.) We've repeatedly used college enrollment and completion as a measure of K-12 success. While the modern reform movement paid lip service to "college and career," policies have always suggested that college is the superior part of that team.
Now it is finally occurring to some folks that A) college is not necessarily the best choice for all students and B) the world needs people who do what Mike Rowe always called the jobs "that make civilized life possible for the rest of us." Done well, new studies show, it can boost both academics and wages for students. It might even help solve the mystery of the missing non-college educated male workers. And so Career and Technical Education (CTE) is coming back into its own.
This movement does not come without some concerns. Mishandled CTE can end up replacing a full education with simple vocational training, reducing public education to a provider of free meat widgets for selected employers, but opening up a limited future for the students who receive the narrow education. CTE programs are most effective when schools partner with relevant industries, but that partnership can't be one-sided, with schools subordinated to HR departments. Badly mishandled CTE can also become a dumping ground for "problem" students, a type of education that some students are encouraged to "settle for" by adults who have decided that the student just isn't smart enough or good enough for college education.
In short, CTE reflects our own culture's conflicted feelings about blue collar workers. On the one hand, we venerate the idea of hard work and getting one's hands dirty during an honest day's work. On the other hand, we tend to assume that someone sitting behind a desk making a six figure income must have some stellar qualities that the hard-working blue collar guy does not.
CTE as a dumping ground for system-rejected students where they can be fashioned into fodder for dead-end employers is a bad, bad idea. Fortunately, because CTE is not a new idea, there are many schools that can show how to do it properly.
I had the good fortune to work in a district that was part of a seven-district consortium operating a CTE school (called vocational-technical for many years, now called a Technology Center) that has been in business for around 50 years. Many of my students over the years attended that school, and it served them well. Here are some of the ways that school does CTE right.
Students attend the Tech Center for half a day; the other half of the day they attend their "home" school. This insures that in addition to the technical education they receive at their shop, they get the same core of academics that all our students study. They don't have to give up their full high school education to get their technical training.
The Tech Center is not a dumping ground. In fact, students who don't maintain good academic standing at their home school lose the privilege of attending at the Tech Center.
The Tech Center is staffed by people who really know their fields, and so the programs have a good reputation for providing students who are well-trained not just in the particulars of their field, but in the work ethics of them. And the learning is hands on. The construction students build a house. The auto body students work on cars that have been brought in for service. Welding students work toward their certification. Students graduate from the program educated and employable.
The experience is not seamless. Within the school, there are people who look down on tech students just as their are people in the world who look down on blue collar workers. And tech students themselves have to navigate the contrasts between two different systems; in the morning, a student may be trusted to operate heavy machinery outdoors, and in the afternoon, that same student has to sit in a desk indoors and ask permission to pee.
But it's a system that by and large works and serves students and employers well. It's not cheap, and it's not easy to set up. It is certainly not setting up a "vocational ed" room in some back hall where students are sent when the school doesn't want to deal with them any more. If CTE is coming to your school district, it could be good news or bad. The trick, as with many education programs, is to look at the specifics and make sure that the program is going to be done right.
Originally posted at Forbes (where it was picked up by Mike Rowe, and don't think that didn't make my day.)
Squeezing the Clock
Put this on my list of Things I've Noticed Since Retiring From The Classroom.
In a teaching day, every single second counts. Teachers squeeze the clock till it screams. Five minutes left in the period? Just enough time to review the main concept from yesterday. Three minutes between classes? More than enough time to pee and swing by the office to pick up my mail. Twenty-five minute lunch period? If I get my eating done in ten minutes, then I have time to make some copies, answer three parent e-mails, check my phone messages, and finish making up a test for tomorrow.
You know you're operating at a fast clip when you're still in it, but like many things about teaching, you just don't realize how very hard you are working at using every minute of your day. Ask a civilian how long X will take, and the answer is, "I don't know-- about five or ten minutes?" Ask a teacher and the answer is, "Three minutes. Four if someone asks a question." Five or ten minutes? To a teacher that is crazy inaccurate, a difference of an entire five minutes. Five minutes! Do you have any idea what I can do with five minutes?!
And I'm talking about a high school setting. Ask an elementary teacher how long it takes them to pee and the answer will be, "It takes until I get home after school."
This is one of the things about teaching that non-teachers just don't get. If you have an office job and someone says, "Hey, I want you to work in this little project some time this week-- it should just take a half an hour or so," then nobody gets excited because, hey, you can always find a spare thirty minutes here or there. But teachers are desperately sick to death of all the politicians, policy makers, administrators, and public spirited folks who propose, "Here's a worthwhile thing to do-- let's just have teachers add it to their classroom. It won't take much time out of their day." If teachers are feeling polite or restrained (or just resigned) they'll smile and say, "Sure. Sure. Just send me the materials." If they're feeling undiplomatic they will say, "Sure. Please tell me exactly what you want me to cut, because every damn second of my day between now and July is spoken for." And we're not talking about blocks of "an hour or so." Teacher time is measured out in minutes. It is one of those things that you just don't get if you haven't been there.
And God bless and defend teachers from the parents who call to say, "I'll just take a minute of your time" and then take thirty.
Being at home with the Board of Directors is different. If I try to measure out time in minutes, all I do is increase my own blood pressure, because for the twins, everything takes as long as it takes (as one parenting site wag noted, "Sorry we were late, but we had to get from the house to the car.") All times are measured in "arounds." It will take around this much time for them to eat lunch and around this much time to go down for naps, and they will keep napping for around this time. When I said "ten minutes" as a teacher, that meant ten minutes; now "ten minutes" means "somewhere between five minutes and an hour."
I know that I could have used more of this in the classroom, that at times I had to step back and check myself before I started thinking that my students were an obstacle to the proper following of the schedule. But it's still a bit of an adjustment shock to realize that I can now glide through hours without noting the time, when a few years ago my world suffered a major upheaval when class periods went from 43 minutes to 40 minutes.
Every once in a while it's a useful skill (while the boys are eating a banana is enough time to start a load of laundry), but it's kind of tiring and stressful to push push push, and I wonder how much stress and tension teachers operate under, how much teacher healthy is hit by swimming in a slightly toxic soup of being pushed pushed pushed by the clock, by fighting with that clock to squeeze every second out of it. I have renewed respect for the teachers I have known who were able to stand their ground and maintain a steady human pace even if, of course, they're seen as not working hard enough.
This is yet another reason that teachers should have lives outside of school; it helps them stay in touch with the part of the world that isn't squeezing minute by minute out of the clock. It is okay to remember to breathe. Just don't use more than, say, two and a half minutes for it.
In a teaching day, every single second counts. Teachers squeeze the clock till it screams. Five minutes left in the period? Just enough time to review the main concept from yesterday. Three minutes between classes? More than enough time to pee and swing by the office to pick up my mail. Twenty-five minute lunch period? If I get my eating done in ten minutes, then I have time to make some copies, answer three parent e-mails, check my phone messages, and finish making up a test for tomorrow.
And I'm talking about a high school setting. Ask an elementary teacher how long it takes them to pee and the answer will be, "It takes until I get home after school."
This is one of the things about teaching that non-teachers just don't get. If you have an office job and someone says, "Hey, I want you to work in this little project some time this week-- it should just take a half an hour or so," then nobody gets excited because, hey, you can always find a spare thirty minutes here or there. But teachers are desperately sick to death of all the politicians, policy makers, administrators, and public spirited folks who propose, "Here's a worthwhile thing to do-- let's just have teachers add it to their classroom. It won't take much time out of their day." If teachers are feeling polite or restrained (or just resigned) they'll smile and say, "Sure. Sure. Just send me the materials." If they're feeling undiplomatic they will say, "Sure. Please tell me exactly what you want me to cut, because every damn second of my day between now and July is spoken for." And we're not talking about blocks of "an hour or so." Teacher time is measured out in minutes. It is one of those things that you just don't get if you haven't been there.
And God bless and defend teachers from the parents who call to say, "I'll just take a minute of your time" and then take thirty.
Being at home with the Board of Directors is different. If I try to measure out time in minutes, all I do is increase my own blood pressure, because for the twins, everything takes as long as it takes (as one parenting site wag noted, "Sorry we were late, but we had to get from the house to the car.") All times are measured in "arounds." It will take around this much time for them to eat lunch and around this much time to go down for naps, and they will keep napping for around this time. When I said "ten minutes" as a teacher, that meant ten minutes; now "ten minutes" means "somewhere between five minutes and an hour."
I know that I could have used more of this in the classroom, that at times I had to step back and check myself before I started thinking that my students were an obstacle to the proper following of the schedule. But it's still a bit of an adjustment shock to realize that I can now glide through hours without noting the time, when a few years ago my world suffered a major upheaval when class periods went from 43 minutes to 40 minutes.
Every once in a while it's a useful skill (while the boys are eating a banana is enough time to start a load of laundry), but it's kind of tiring and stressful to push push push, and I wonder how much stress and tension teachers operate under, how much teacher healthy is hit by swimming in a slightly toxic soup of being pushed pushed pushed by the clock, by fighting with that clock to squeeze every second out of it. I have renewed respect for the teachers I have known who were able to stand their ground and maintain a steady human pace even if, of course, they're seen as not working hard enough.
This is yet another reason that teachers should have lives outside of school; it helps them stay in touch with the part of the world that isn't squeezing minute by minute out of the clock. It is okay to remember to breathe. Just don't use more than, say, two and a half minutes for it.
Friday, March 29, 2019
What Did We Learn From DeVos Hearings This Week?
So during Betsy DeVos's terrible horrible no-good very bad week of hearings, what did we learn?
Opposition Parties Matter
This is the third budget in which DeVos tried to zero out Special Olympics. The third. So why so much fuss this time around? Perhaps because somebody made her go before Congress and explain herself (or not) in some exchanges that made for insta-viral hits.
Just imagine what it would be like if more legislators acted more like actual defenders of public education more often.
Finally, Evidence of the Deep State
Donald Trump stepped in to "override" his people, so the Special Olympics are off the chopping block sooner rather than later (this was a cut that was never, ever going to happen). Then DeVos said she was delighted because she has "fought behind the scenes" for the Special Olympics for years. She's the head of the department, and he's the President-- who put that cut in there if neither of them wanted it? It must be--gasp-- the Deep State, trying to make them look bad by somehow sneaking damn fool items into the budget.
But boy-- for someone who fought for it behind the scenes, she sure stood up for it in front of the scenes.
The Benefits of Big Classes
DeVos touted the advantages of larger classes. This is the second time in one month that a North American education official has tried to argue for this piece of fried baloney. It's an idea so bad that even Education Post ran a rebuttal. But it really should not be a surprise-- reformsters have been arguing for years that we should fire all the bad teachers, gather up all the students in front of the remaining teachers, and maybe pay those teachers more, because a good teacher will still be great if she's teaching a few hundred students. In fact, Arne Duncan thought this was a swell idea.
The actual benefit? Lower personnel costs. Benefits to students? It's easier to hide from the teacher.
About Race
For my money, the more important was not the kerfluffle about Special Olympics-- it was the DeVos exchange with Representative Clark, in which Clark took us back to DeVos's safety commission-- the one that was supposed to study the problems of school shootings and concluded that school problems actually stem from Black kids. Clark went back to look at the research basis for DeVos's recommendations and discovered that-- surprise-- it was racist as shit.
Don't expect DeVos to crack on this--she never will. The Secretary stuck with "all children should be treated as individuals" which leaves plenty of room for "if all the Black students in school are individually bad apples, we'll just have to deal with them, won't we."
Charter Cheerleading
There were several references to the Network for Public Education report that shows just how much federal money has been lost to fraud and waste through charter school support. DeVos smiled that smile of hers and declared that we need more charter schools, not less. This was the least surprising thing that happened all week.
Betsy DeVos still does not owe you a damned explanation.
I remain steadfast in my belief that DeVosian stonewalling and awkwardness is not because she's a dope. To some degree it's predictable and predicted; remember that DeVos doesn't just have zero experience with public schools. She also has zero experience with situations in which she has to be accountable to others or in which she has to convince people to agree with her using tools other than her checkbook and power. But she's doing God's work, and she doesn't need to explain herself to all these heathens.
And if you've ever needed further evidence of how disconnected she is, watch this painful video of what Anderson Cooper calls an "epic non-answer."
Finally, who wore it best?
And by "best" I mean "a stunned look of disapproval." From the DeVos hearing, we have NPE co-founder Anthony Cody:
And then we have the Swamp Creatures that descended on the hearing for former oil lobbyist and future Interior Department chief:
Just a reminder that the USED budget cuts a ton of worthwhile stuff, and will ultimately be decided by Congress. Study up and contact your Congressperson.
Opposition Parties Matter
This is the third budget in which DeVos tried to zero out Special Olympics. The third. So why so much fuss this time around? Perhaps because somebody made her go before Congress and explain herself (or not) in some exchanges that made for insta-viral hits.
Just imagine what it would be like if more legislators acted more like actual defenders of public education more often.
Finally, Evidence of the Deep State
Donald Trump stepped in to "override" his people, so the Special Olympics are off the chopping block sooner rather than later (this was a cut that was never, ever going to happen). Then DeVos said she was delighted because she has "fought behind the scenes" for the Special Olympics for years. She's the head of the department, and he's the President-- who put that cut in there if neither of them wanted it? It must be--gasp-- the Deep State, trying to make them look bad by somehow sneaking damn fool items into the budget.
But boy-- for someone who fought for it behind the scenes, she sure stood up for it in front of the scenes.
The Benefits of Big Classes
DeVos touted the advantages of larger classes. This is the second time in one month that a North American education official has tried to argue for this piece of fried baloney. It's an idea so bad that even Education Post ran a rebuttal. But it really should not be a surprise-- reformsters have been arguing for years that we should fire all the bad teachers, gather up all the students in front of the remaining teachers, and maybe pay those teachers more, because a good teacher will still be great if she's teaching a few hundred students. In fact, Arne Duncan thought this was a swell idea.
The actual benefit? Lower personnel costs. Benefits to students? It's easier to hide from the teacher.
About Race
For my money, the more important was not the kerfluffle about Special Olympics-- it was the DeVos exchange with Representative Clark, in which Clark took us back to DeVos's safety commission-- the one that was supposed to study the problems of school shootings and concluded that school problems actually stem from Black kids. Clark went back to look at the research basis for DeVos's recommendations and discovered that-- surprise-- it was racist as shit.
Don't expect DeVos to crack on this--she never will. The Secretary stuck with "all children should be treated as individuals" which leaves plenty of room for "if all the Black students in school are individually bad apples, we'll just have to deal with them, won't we."
Charter Cheerleading
There were several references to the Network for Public Education report that shows just how much federal money has been lost to fraud and waste through charter school support. DeVos smiled that smile of hers and declared that we need more charter schools, not less. This was the least surprising thing that happened all week.
Betsy DeVos still does not owe you a damned explanation.
I remain steadfast in my belief that DeVosian stonewalling and awkwardness is not because she's a dope. To some degree it's predictable and predicted; remember that DeVos doesn't just have zero experience with public schools. She also has zero experience with situations in which she has to be accountable to others or in which she has to convince people to agree with her using tools other than her checkbook and power. But she's doing God's work, and she doesn't need to explain herself to all these heathens.
And if you've ever needed further evidence of how disconnected she is, watch this painful video of what Anderson Cooper calls an "epic non-answer."
Finally, who wore it best?
And by "best" I mean "a stunned look of disapproval." From the DeVos hearing, we have NPE co-founder Anthony Cody:
And then we have the Swamp Creatures that descended on the hearing for former oil lobbyist and future Interior Department chief:
Just a reminder that the USED budget cuts a ton of worthwhile stuff, and will ultimately be decided by Congress. Study up and contact your Congressperson.
Thursday, March 28, 2019
What To Look For In A Teacher School
Robert Pondiscio just reviewed a new NCTQ book for high school students about how to become a teacher. I haven't seen the book, so I'm in no position to comment on it, but it does remind me that we don't spend nearly enough time talking about teacher prep, not from a policy point of view, but the point of view of high school students who want to end up teaching some day.
I am not the person to come to for a spirited defense of traditional teacher prep programs. I've sent students off to them and hosted student teachers from them, and the fact is that some are fine and some suck with the suckage of a thousand black holes. There are many current alternative paths to the classroom that also suck, but dammit, we asked for it by letting North Shmeretown State Teachers College get away with doing a terrible job. I've written before about fixing that, but this time, let's talk about your teen should be looking for when she goes teacher school shopping.
If you (or your child) want to become a teacher, what qualities should you look for in a teacher prep program?
1) Emphasis on content.
My own program prepared me to be an English teacher by requiring me to be an English major, so I was shocked to discover that some teachers were arriving in the classroom with no more subject matter knowledge in some areas than they remembered from their own high school classes.
The foundation for everything you do in the classroom-- including classroom management-- is you knowing what the hell you're talking about. Yes, you need classes about the pedagogy and technique, but all the lesson-writing skill in the world will not save you if you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
"But I'm going to teach elementary grades-- everybody already knows that stuff, right?" First, no, not as much as you think they do. Second, the elementary grades need more understanding of child development. And every elementary teacher should be an expert in teaching reading. Every one.
Look at the course requirements for the school's program. If it's mostly education methods with little room for the content that you'll actually have to teach, that is a weak program.
Note: Teaching you your state standards is not teaching you content. If state standards are a major theme of the program, it's a bad program.
2) Professors with classroom teaching experience.
No, teaching college courses does not count. Way way way way waaaaaayyyyyy too many college education professors teach methods and instructional techniques based not on experience, but on a couple of pieces of research they read, or their own pet theories, or their ideas about what ought to work in a classroom. Every teacher who ever hosted a student teacher has had that moment when, hearing the student teacher describe what her professor told her to do, they wish they could teleport that professor into the classroom to try the technique himself. But of course many college ed professors don't even go out into the field to watch their students work in a classroom.
And no, having been in a classroom for one or two years when he was 22 also does not count. Look for colleges that have ed course taught by professors who took the job as a second career after a first career in the classroom. Look for professors who work one day a week as substitutes in the local public system.
3) Practice practice practice
Teaching is large part performance, and there's only one way to get ready to perform, and that's to stand up and do it. In my most useful methods class, we did weekly workshops in which we presented trial lessons while the professor sat in the back of the room as "Bobby," a good representation of That Student. For years after, when a student posed a problem in a class, I would think, "Oh, hi, Bobby!"
Practice can take many forms-- the important part is that you do something with the theories about practice. You have to stand up in front of real live humans and try to make your pitch for Hemmingway or punctuation or the Louisiana Purchase or integers or whatever. There is no substitute. You can help prepare to perform Hamlet by reading criticism and studying Shakespeare and watching videos, but until you physically stand up and start doing it, you won't be ready.
4) Field experience with support
A full semester of student teaching is a minimum requirement. If a program promises that they can get you already with less, or none, take a hard pass. It's a good sign if the program also has other field experiences built in. Several local colleges have added a shadowing experience that seems to be useful for getting pre-teachers ready for the more intensive world of student teaching.
You may think this is not so necessary. "Hey, I was just in school!" But elementary school was a lonnnng time ago. And high school-- well, there were many parts to which you were not paying attention. You didn't see what happened in classes you didn't take, and in your own classes, you weren't paying attention to what the teacher actually did.
But the most important question to ask is about what sort of support you will get while in the field. This is by far one of the weakest areas in many programs. In your fifteen weeks in the field, you might see your supervisor three times-- and it will b a supervisor who has never previously met you and doesn't know you from a whole in the ground. In these programs, your success and the foundation of your career rests on the blind luck of your cooperating teacher selection.
Your supervisor should see you often-- weekly is not too often. It would be nice if he was a professor who already knew you, but many programs hire retired teachers to do supervision, and they can turn out to be good mentors as well.
Support also means processing and reflection time. Say, a methods course taken while student teaching in which student teachers and their supervisors talk about the hows and whys of what's going on in those classrooms during that same week.
But if the school's approach is to say, "We got a placement lined up. There will be someone by a couple times to make sure you're still alive. See ya next semester," that's not a good program.
5) Getting you outside of your box.
One of our local colleges is fairly socially conservative, and it draws many students from private religious schools and homeschooling. They train their student teachers with a strong content background, but when they land here in a public school, there is often some culture shock. "It's almost as if," one frustrated student teacher told me, "as if these students don't really care about Shakespeare." Yes, almost. Another told his co-op, "Oh no, I don't want to teach those classes. Can't I just teach the honors students?"
My own experience was going from this rural, small town mostly white district to student teach in a mostly black urban school. I had preparation and support for that, and it was far better for me as a teacher than if I had simply student taught in a school similar to the one I came from.
Your job as a teacher is not to get students to see the world the same way you see it. It's not just about being culturally sensitive. It's about getting outside of your own box, about being challenged in all of your assumptions about what is normal and reasonable to expect. This will open up your own understanding of the world and how your content fits into it. It will also serve your students because it will keep you from mistaking "different" for "wrong." Every student ought to see someone like them in front of a classroom at least-- at least-- once in their educational career. But barring that, they should at least have a teacher who sees them as they are, and doesn't just see a bunch of deficiencies or differences. If you think you're sure what "normal" is, you are a menace to your students. Your program should, somehow, get you out of that box.
Programs, traditional and alternative, that come up short in these areas are not your best choice. Keep looking and keep asking questions.
If you (or your child) want to become a teacher, what qualities should you look for in a teacher prep program?
1) Emphasis on content.
My own program prepared me to be an English teacher by requiring me to be an English major, so I was shocked to discover that some teachers were arriving in the classroom with no more subject matter knowledge in some areas than they remembered from their own high school classes.
The foundation for everything you do in the classroom-- including classroom management-- is you knowing what the hell you're talking about. Yes, you need classes about the pedagogy and technique, but all the lesson-writing skill in the world will not save you if you don't know what the hell you're talking about.
"But I'm going to teach elementary grades-- everybody already knows that stuff, right?" First, no, not as much as you think they do. Second, the elementary grades need more understanding of child development. And every elementary teacher should be an expert in teaching reading. Every one.
Look at the course requirements for the school's program. If it's mostly education methods with little room for the content that you'll actually have to teach, that is a weak program.
Note: Teaching you your state standards is not teaching you content. If state standards are a major theme of the program, it's a bad program.
2) Professors with classroom teaching experience.
No, teaching college courses does not count. Way way way way waaaaaayyyyyy too many college education professors teach methods and instructional techniques based not on experience, but on a couple of pieces of research they read, or their own pet theories, or their ideas about what ought to work in a classroom. Every teacher who ever hosted a student teacher has had that moment when, hearing the student teacher describe what her professor told her to do, they wish they could teleport that professor into the classroom to try the technique himself. But of course many college ed professors don't even go out into the field to watch their students work in a classroom.
And no, having been in a classroom for one or two years when he was 22 also does not count. Look for colleges that have ed course taught by professors who took the job as a second career after a first career in the classroom. Look for professors who work one day a week as substitutes in the local public system.
3) Practice practice practice
Teaching is large part performance, and there's only one way to get ready to perform, and that's to stand up and do it. In my most useful methods class, we did weekly workshops in which we presented trial lessons while the professor sat in the back of the room as "Bobby," a good representation of That Student. For years after, when a student posed a problem in a class, I would think, "Oh, hi, Bobby!"
Practice can take many forms-- the important part is that you do something with the theories about practice. You have to stand up in front of real live humans and try to make your pitch for Hemmingway or punctuation or the Louisiana Purchase or integers or whatever. There is no substitute. You can help prepare to perform Hamlet by reading criticism and studying Shakespeare and watching videos, but until you physically stand up and start doing it, you won't be ready.
4) Field experience with support
A full semester of student teaching is a minimum requirement. If a program promises that they can get you already with less, or none, take a hard pass. It's a good sign if the program also has other field experiences built in. Several local colleges have added a shadowing experience that seems to be useful for getting pre-teachers ready for the more intensive world of student teaching.
You may think this is not so necessary. "Hey, I was just in school!" But elementary school was a lonnnng time ago. And high school-- well, there were many parts to which you were not paying attention. You didn't see what happened in classes you didn't take, and in your own classes, you weren't paying attention to what the teacher actually did.
But the most important question to ask is about what sort of support you will get while in the field. This is by far one of the weakest areas in many programs. In your fifteen weeks in the field, you might see your supervisor three times-- and it will b a supervisor who has never previously met you and doesn't know you from a whole in the ground. In these programs, your success and the foundation of your career rests on the blind luck of your cooperating teacher selection.
Your supervisor should see you often-- weekly is not too often. It would be nice if he was a professor who already knew you, but many programs hire retired teachers to do supervision, and they can turn out to be good mentors as well.
Support also means processing and reflection time. Say, a methods course taken while student teaching in which student teachers and their supervisors talk about the hows and whys of what's going on in those classrooms during that same week.
But if the school's approach is to say, "We got a placement lined up. There will be someone by a couple times to make sure you're still alive. See ya next semester," that's not a good program.
5) Getting you outside of your box.
One of our local colleges is fairly socially conservative, and it draws many students from private religious schools and homeschooling. They train their student teachers with a strong content background, but when they land here in a public school, there is often some culture shock. "It's almost as if," one frustrated student teacher told me, "as if these students don't really care about Shakespeare." Yes, almost. Another told his co-op, "Oh no, I don't want to teach those classes. Can't I just teach the honors students?"
My own experience was going from this rural, small town mostly white district to student teach in a mostly black urban school. I had preparation and support for that, and it was far better for me as a teacher than if I had simply student taught in a school similar to the one I came from.
Your job as a teacher is not to get students to see the world the same way you see it. It's not just about being culturally sensitive. It's about getting outside of your own box, about being challenged in all of your assumptions about what is normal and reasonable to expect. This will open up your own understanding of the world and how your content fits into it. It will also serve your students because it will keep you from mistaking "different" for "wrong." Every student ought to see someone like them in front of a classroom at least-- at least-- once in their educational career. But barring that, they should at least have a teacher who sees them as they are, and doesn't just see a bunch of deficiencies or differences. If you think you're sure what "normal" is, you are a menace to your students. Your program should, somehow, get you out of that box.
Programs, traditional and alternative, that come up short in these areas are not your best choice. Keep looking and keep asking questions.
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