PersonAOLized Learning

If you are of a Certain Age, you have fond memories of America OnLine. You grabbed one of those magical discs that arrived in the mail like Harry Potter's unthwartable Hogwarts invitations. You stuck it in your computer, listened to the modem beep and boop and finally hissssss like R2D2 had just fatally assaulted a snake. Then a portal opened up, promising a variety of channels with a dizzying assortment of websites and digital content.

It was a simpler time. The internet (which your grandmother thought was actually on the aol disc) was a big scary place, but AOL promised to hold your hand and bring it all to you in safely curated pieces. You chatted with your friends on AOL Instant Messenger. You marked your favorite channels. AOL ate CompuServe and Netscape; it had so many subscribers that at one point, its servers faltered. AOL smelled like the future of media, big enough to merge with Time Warner.

But then, about five minutes after the AOL Time Warner merger, a few million Americans asked themselves a question:

If AOL can take me to the Ugly Kitty website, can't I just use one of those browser thingies and go straight to Ugly Kitty myself?

The tools were there. Search engines. More sophisticated browsers. Broadband connections. Users now savvy enough to pick up tricks of navigating the web; your grandmother no longer thougbt the internet came on a disc.

AOL still exists (or, rather, Aol still exists)-- but most of you were surprised to learn that. In 2015 it was acquired by Verizon; its top guy promised it would be the largest media technology company in the world. Nope.

I thought of all this history this week as I read a newspaper account of a recent school board meeting in my old district (sadly, behind a paywall).

The upshot is that the sixth grade classrooms in one of our elementary schools have gone one-to-one with chromebooks and an entirely digitized classroom.

Now, I don't want to get into the question of whether or not that' a great idea. What I want to notice is that it wasn't done with Summit Learning or Rocketship software or AltSchool-designed programs. They're just using Google classroom, like many teachers across the country. Google provides a framework that the teachers use to do whatever it is they design. es, Google is a notorious data-gathering hog. But the difference here is that all the assignments and assessments are teacher-designed, meaning that the data is not created in any way that makes it easy for crunching together with that from thousands of other students.

Before you burn up the comments with reminders about the evils of Google's evil data-mining empire, let me go on to make my actual point.

We didn't need AOL. We didn't need a large complex structure pre-filled with content for us. All we needed as a simple tool-- a browser-- that let us manage whatever content we saw fit to manage.

The modern digital iteration of personalized [sic] learning doesn't need a Summit or some other giant super-structure already stuffed with content and assessments and pedagogical soup (particularly when all those things are being created by computer programmers and not teachers). All it needs is a platform- one loose enough to allow teachers to fill it with whatever goodies they think would best serve their purposes. Something like Moodle would be plenty good enough.

I am not a fan of digitized personalized [sic] learning built on a foundation of mass customization and algorithmic direction, and the incorporation of competency-based education is a fatal flaw. But I am not tech-averse, either. I taught in a one-to-one room for a decade and found ways that computers could extend my reach as a teacher. A computer is a tool, a digitized high tech hammer, and the best way to make sure it's used for good is to keep your own hand wrapped around it. The biggest problem with modern personalized [sic] learning is that it puts the hammer in the hands of the wrong people, who intend to use it for the wrong purposes.

There are things that the software or a computer platform can't do. It can't assess writing. It can't analyze exactly what a student does or doesn't need to master, nor can it absolutely tell us whether a student has mastered something or not. It can't teach, or usefully engage a student for But it can manage paperwork, handle grading, give us a way to let students self-pace and enrich the content of the class. It can allow students methods of expression and discussion beyond what we used to be able to offer. It's not The Tool, but it is a tool.

It will become a more effective, less dangerous tool the moment teachers take it into their own hands. AOL pretended to open up a world of possibilities and choices, but in fact unseen people on the other end were making all the choices for us, limiting what would and wouldn't be seen or done.

I don't want to have the technology argument now-- my point is just this. The future of tech-assisted computer-delivered education isn't Summit or Altschool or any digital curriculum on a hard drive-- it's a Moodle or Google classroom type framework with the guts built by some classroom teachers. AOL looked like it would dominate the market, but it was a domination based on relatively helpless users. The current wave of tech-based education has the same base.

Is Your School Year Over Already?

Depending on which state you live in, your schools are now, or are about to be, entering testing season.

It's the magical time of year when your schools must subject students to the annual Big Standardized Test, a narrow slice of testing aimed at reading and math skills. In most states, the stakes are high, including the rating of the school itself as well as the professional ratings for the teachers who work there. And so every spring, schools turn their attention to preparing students for that test.

Fans of the modern test like to argue that these tests are impervious to test prep, which is true if you think that test prep refers only to memorizing the specific answers that will be on the test. And it's true that classic rote memorization is of very little use on these tests.

But modern test prep is not about rote memorization. Test prep involves teaching students to think like the people who manufacture these tests. Test prep involves learning the kinds of wrong answers (distractors) that these test manufacturers favor. In a multiple choice test, distractors are the whole game, the little traps and tricks that test writers include to "catch" students in particular sorts of mistakes, so students need to learn what sorts of enticing traps to recognize and avoid. And while students can't memorize specific answers to specific questions, they can expect certain types of questions, and so benefit from practicing those types of questions. For instance, there will almost certainly be a question asking students to use context clues to determine the meaning of a word. That word may well be familiar, and good readers will think, "Oh, I know this word," but the word will appear in a selection that uses it in an unusual manner; the whole point of the question is to trick the student into selecting the common definition of the word rather than the unusual one.

Students can also be prepared to recognize certain sorts of questions. The test manufacturers have certain ideas in mind when they talk about "mood" or "author's intent." Students benefit from practicing these terms and the test writers' intent before test day arrives.

Some will argue that if one just teaches the student well all year, she'll automatically be ready to do well on the test. No. We could get into this in depth, but the short answer is that a standardized test is not an authentic measure of learning or skills. Someone can be a great basketball player; that doesn't mean they will do well on a tricky standardized test about basketball. Someone can learn to be a great jumper, but that doesn't automatically make them great at jumping through a particular set of hoops, nor does learning to complete a particular hoop course make one a great all-around jumper.

Politicians periodically announce their intent to reduce the length of the Big Standardized Test, because they have heard the many complaints about how much school time the test takes up. But the actual days spent ploughing through the test are only the tip of the iceberg. Tested classes may interject test prep materials throughout the year, culminating in an intensive four, five or six weeks of test prep. There will be practice tests throughout the year, taking up additional time. The results of those practice tests may be that students who are "on the line" will be pulled from a study hall or elective and required to take a "course" which is nothing more than a daily period of test practice.

By March or April, all eyes will be on the test and the preparation for it. Then comes the actual testing, which may shut down even grades and classes that aren't being tested because staff is all tied up proctoring the test itself. Once all of that process is completed, teachers may have a few weeks of the year left to teach, if they can get their students' minds back in the classroom. This can be even more problematic in schools that have cute pep rallies and catchy songs to get their students ready for the test; the subtext of that approach is, "This test is the culmination of the whole year," and the unintended result is students who say, "But we took the test already. Doesn't that mean the year's basically over?"

High stakes tests have become the educational equivalent of the office where nobody can get their work done because they're constantly attending meetings to give progress reports on the work they're not getting done. High stakes testing have effectively, drastically, shortened the school year, not just by the week or two required to give the test, but by all the weeks used to get ready for it. Simply abolishing the test, or even removing all stakes from it, would instantly improve education in this country because it would instantly lengthen the school year by weeks.

Not all schools suffer from this issue. Some have administrators who are brave enough to put education ahead of testing. You may be fortunate enough to have such a leader in your child's district, but if not, your school year--the part of the year in which school and teaching and learning take place in an authentic and meaningful way--may already be over.

Originally posted at Forbes   

Florida Really Is The Worst

There are plenty of states in the country that are not very friendly to public education, but Florida under its new governor has established itself as the very worst state for public education. The worst. Its hatred of public school teachers and its absolute determination to dismantle public education so that it can sell off the pieces to privatizers and profiteers puts the sunshine state in the front of the pack.

The Newest Baloney

The latest nail in the coffin is Senate Bill 7070, a bill that adds yet another school choice program to the Florida portfolio of choiceness. That bill was passed today and now needs only Governor DeSantis's signature, which it will get quickly. The bill offers up vouchers that can be used for private schools, including the religion-based ones, like the ones that teach dinosaurs and humans roamed the earth together and the ones that maintain their right to discriminate against, well, whoever. The vouchers will be one more drain on the public tax dollars intended to fund public education, but then, a key feature of the Florida approach has been to keep underfunding public schools so that charter and private schools can look better by comparison.

No signs of help for education anywhere on the horizon

One Democratic representative during the discussion of this bill pointed out that Florida has been proud of its accountability system (the stupid test-score based awarding of letter grades to schools) and these vouchers will completely circumvent that system.

"What are we doing?" Montford said. "We're allowing them to take public funds to go to schools where the standards are not as high, or maybe don't have any standards. And worse than that, we don't even know what those standards are. Why are we supporting allowing parents to take their children to schools that don't fit the accountability system that we all are so proud of? Why are we doing that?"

Just spitballing here, but I'm betting the answer is "The accountability system was just a tool for dismantling public education, and once we've cracked open that piggy bank, we don't much care how good or bad the schools are."

The bill was "delivered" by one member of the DeSantis all-star team, Jennifer Sullivan, the 27-year-old homeschooled college drop out (and we're talking Liberty University here) who heads the House education committee. DeSantis also banks on . There's the longtime grifter and profiteer Richard Corcoran, who, after being term-limited out of the legislature landed a new job as state education chief (here's another take on just how bad Corcoran is). The legislature itself is loaded with reps with a family stake in the charter biz (which is not a new thing in Florida). 

But the most important team members for this play are the three new state supreme court justices that DeSantis installed. In 2006, Jeb Bush tried a similar move, and the court recognized the obvious-- that the law violated the state constitution (they didn't even get to the problem with public money for religious education). DeSantis is expecting friendlier judges to see things his way. 

About That Teacher Pay

Meanwhile, Florida has fallen to 46th place in rankings for teacher pay. The legislature wanted to-- oh, I don't know what they wanted to do. Look like they're addressing Florida's problem in recruiting people to work under their lousy job conditions? At any rate, the same bill that added vouchers also tweaked Florida's boneheaded teacher bonus program. Now a Florida teacher's bonus is not based on her SAT scores, but instead we're back to the old student test score baloney. 

What's key remains the same-- it's a bonus. It doesn't help you build a pension or buy a house, and you can't count on it to feed your family in the future. It's almost as if the legislature doesn't actually want to attract people to come teach in public school.

Killing Competition

Local school districts had, in fact, decided to address the teacher problem on their own, with voters in several counties giving themselves a tax increase in order to attract more teachers.

One would think that free market competition-is-good legislators would applaud this move. It is, after all, exactly what they've said all along-- charters and choice would spur competition and make public schools better. 

But rather than applaud, the legislature is in the process of stifling that competition in a piece of brazen thievery. HB 7123 has passed in the house, and it requires public schools to share any increased tax levy money with charters. This tweet thread of the discussion shows just how ballsy and cynical the charter thieves have been. Charter supporter Rep. Bryan Avila argued that the voters didn't know why they voted for increased taxes, so maybe they did mean to give charters some of the money (they didn't). Avila is asked repeatedly what mechanism will be used to hold charters accountable for using the money for its intended purposes; he has no answer for that, because the answer is that charters will be free to use the windfall for whatever they wish.  An amendment to require accountability from charters is called "unfriendly" and denied. And in perhaps his most ballsy comment on the purpose of the bill, Avila says, "We don't want school districts acting on their own." 

Oh, and the tax grab would be retroactive.

And The List Just Goes On

The legislature seems likely to pass a bill arming teachers with minimal training. Because irony is still legal in Florida, yesterday a school resource officer accidentally fired his gun while it was still in the holster.

Meanwhile, DeSantis has some ideas about how to significantly ramp up Schools of Hope. Schools of Hope is a cynically designed program for bypassing local elected school districts by using state authority to plunk new charters directly across the street from struggling public schools. Too bad, voters. 

But that doesn't stomp on locally elected school boards hard enough, so there's also a bill to impose term limits on school board members. School boards are a problem because they don't always approve charters. You see the repeating theme-- the Florida legislature just finds the democratic process to be a big problem.

A bill that will make it a felony to provide students with banned books. It also gives any citizen the right to challenge any material, as well as forbidding any pictures of naked folks (good luck in your Florida physiology classes). And the book banners behind this bill already have a list ready to challenge, including Angela's Ashes and The Awakening. Banning the latter is-- well, something. I've taught The Awakening for decades, and it doesn't have anything remotely graphic in it (generally I have to explain to most of my students "Between the end of this chapter and the beginning of the next one, sex probably happens"), but it does have a married woman who has an affair.

And That's On Top Of

The American Federation for Children School Guidebook reminds us that Florida is already awash in school choice. Florida has every flavor of choice we know of-- ESAs, vouchers, tax credit scholarships-- and leads the rest of the country by a wide margin. By AFC's figuring, Florida spent 39% of all the voucher money in the US in 2018-- that's $956 million out of $2.4 billion.

Florida teachers were stripped of job protections (what folks sometimes call tenure) years ago.

Florida has one of those stupid third grade test failure rules-- third graders must pass the Big Standardized Test in reading to be promoted to fourth grade. Never mind that this is a bad rule; they have adhered to this rule with stunning determination, and justified it by arguing in court that teacher-given grades are meaningless.

Florida consistently ranks close to the bottom in spending-per-pupil.

Peak Cynicism

There's so much more, but these lowlights give you the idea. Talk to some charteristas on line and get a feel for just how deeply some of these folks hate teachers and teacher unions and public education. But nothing captures the cynicism driving the privatization of Florida education like the moment DeSantis explained "If the taxpayer is paying for education, it's public education."

Sure. The best way to steal something is to gaslight your audience and tell them, "What? I didn't steal it. It's still right there." Don't tell the public you're ending public education; just redefine public education as a private business with no meaningful transparency, oversight, or democratic local control, and which the public does not own or operate.

There are lots of places in this country where public education is under assault, hampered by privatizers and profiteers, and in the past, I wouldn't have tried to pick a Worst, but I'm ready now. I have no doubt that there are many good teachers, many good schools still hanging on and doing their best in spite of it all. But I wouldn't send my worst enemy to raise children in Florida, and I wouldn't send my worst enemy to get a teaching job there. Openly hostile to public education and systematically trying to break it down and replace it with privatized businesses while degrading and attacking the people who do the actual work, who actually care about education. Florida really is the worst.


  

Why It's Important To Say There Is No Teacher Shortage

I've been saying it. Tim Slekar has been saying it. Other people who aren't even directly tied to teaching have been saying it.

There is no teacher shortage.

There's a slow-motion walkout, a one-by-one exodus, a piecemeal rejection of the terms of employment for educators in 2019.

Why is it important to keep saying this? Why keep harping on this point?

Because if you don't correctly identify the problem, you will not correctly identify a solution (see also every episode of House).

It's not lupus.

"We've got a teacher shortage," leads us in the wrong direction. It assumes that, for some reason, there just aren't enough teachers out there in the world, like arguing there aren't enough blue-eyed people or enough people with six toes. It assumes that "teacher" is some sort of solid genetic state that either exists or does not, and if there aren't enough of them, well, shrug, whatcha gonna do?

"We've got a teacher shortage," argues that we've had the meat widget equivalent of a crop failure. The drought and the dust storms were just so bad this year that we didn't get a full harvest of teachers. And when the harvest is slow, what can we do except look for substitutes?

That's where teacher shortage talk takes us-- to a search for teacher substitutes. Maybe we can just lower the bar. Only require a college degree in anything at all. Louisiana is just the most recent state to decide to lower the bar-- maybe we can just let anyone who had lousy college grades but still got a job doing something, well, maybe we can make that person a teacher.

Or maybe we can substitute computers for teachers. A few hundred students with a "mentor" and a computer would be just as good as one of those teachers that we're short of, anyway, right?

We need to stop talking about a "teacher shortage" because that kind of talk takes our eyes off the real problem.

Teaching has become such unattractive work that few people want to do it.

This is actually good news, because it means that we can actually do something about it. The resistance to doing so is certainly very human-- if we convince ourselves that a problem in our lives is something that just happened to us, then it's not our fault. Unfortunately, that also means we have no power. Stan Lee told us that with great power comes great responsibility, but the converse is also true-- with great responsibility comes great power, so when we accept the responsibility, we get some power that comes with it.

Anyway. The most obvious answer folks land on is "Offer them more money," and that is certainly an Economics 101 answer. If you have a job that people don't want to do, offer more money to do it. If teaching paid $500,000 a year, there wouldn't be an unfilled job in the country. But as the #RedForEd walkouts remind us, money isn't the whole issue.

Respect. Support. The tools necessary to do a great job. Autonomy. Treating people like actual functioning adults. These are all things that would make teaching jobs far more appealing. I've often wondered how much job satisfaction you could add by giving teachers actual personal offices, some space of their own. These are all things that any school district could add, on their own, almost immediately (well, maybe not the offices).

There are other factors that make the job less attractive. The incessant focus on testing. The constant stream of new policies crafted by people who couldn't do a teacher's job for fifteen minutes. The huge workload, including a constant mountainous river of stupid paperwork (is there any wonder why special ed positions are among the hardest to fill). The moves to deprofessionalize the work. The national scale drumbeat of criticism and complaint and repetitively insisting that schools suck, teachers suck, it all sucks.

The continued pretense that there is some sort of deep mystery about why teaching jobs are hard to fill, as if it's just an a mystery wrapped in an enigma covered with puzzle sauce. Shrugging and saying, "Well, there's just a teacher shortage," is a way for everyone responsible, from the building administrators who do a lousy job of taking care of their people all the way up through legislators who continue to beat down public education, to pretend innocence, to say innocently, "Well, it's not like there's anything I can do about it."

And, we should note, this all piles on top of more specific problems, like the dire need to get Brown and Black teachers in the classroom. Again, folks just shrug and say, "Well, you know, there just aren't that many teachers of color" as if that's because of some act of God.

We know exactly why so many teaching jobs are hard to fill. But the folks with power would rather not bother exerting the effort to actually fix the problem. After all, it would be hard, and expensive, and anyway, why go to so much trouble over a bunch of whiny women. Even after being dragged to some level of understanding by teachers, many legislators have turned away and gone back to denial.

"We have a teacher shortage," is a fig leaf with which we are trying to cover the Grand Canyon, but many folks are only too happy to play along rather than rock the boat. Because "disruption" is only good for some folks.

So don't say "We have a teacher shortage." Say "we can't convince qualified people to take this job": or "we won't try to make these jobs attractive enough to draw in qualified people." Stop pretending this is some act of God; even the dust bowl turned out to be the result of bad human choices and not nature's crankiness. If we start talking about what-- and who-- is really responsible, perhaps we can fix the problem-- but only if we start with the correct diagnosis..

OH: The Ongoing Fight To End School Takeovers

I have been watching events unfold in Lorain, Ohio, site of both my first job and an absolute clusterfrick of epic proportions It's time for an update.

You can find the complete story so far starting here, but the short form is that Ohio has a bone stupid law known as HB 70, passed using underhanded legislative shenanigans in order to get it run through quickly and without public discussion. The law takes over school districts that score low on state evaluations too many years and installs a mostly-state-appointed board which in turn hires a school tsar. HB 70 strips the powers from both the elected school board and the district superintendent and hands them to the tsar. So far, Lorain, East Cleveland, and Youngstown have been put under the HB thumb. Knowing how the Big Standardized Test effects class and economics, you will be unsurprised that these are three of the poorest districts in the state.

State superintendent DeMaria: Everything's great, right?

In Lorain, it has not gone well. The tsar, David Hardy Jr, is a TFA product with little actual experience, who has brought in other TFAers, also with little real experience, to help run things. Hardy writes pretty speeches about collaboration and relationships, but he doesn't live in Lorain, won't meet with local elected officials, and has adopted a management style that improbably combines Chainsaw Al and the Three Stooges.

There have been lessons to learn from Hardy's reign. For instance, Lorain appears to answer the question "What would happen if you tried out some charter school management techniques not on newby teachers who didn't know any better, but on seasoned veterans who can tell that it's a bunch of baloney?" (Answer: morale plummets and your staff revolts.) Hardy is also a great study in how educational amateurs with a data fixation do not help (in East Cleveland, they're in the process of selecting a tsar, and one candidate already has a 90-day plan; in Lorain, Hardy is still collecting data).

In Hardy's defense, it has to be said that HB 70 is a terrible law that sets the tsar up for failure. Because the state-powered tsar is an all-powerful autocrat who is supposed to fix a district with serious problems, he has to be expert in all areas of school district management, from bus schedules to scope and sequence of all subject areas. He must also be the kind of diplomat who can sell, "Hi! The state sent me to strip all your local control and change everything about your local schools, and if that doesn't work, dismantle it and give it to charter operators. Who would like to cooperate with me?" And yes-- you'll note that the district's failure represents success for the fans of charter expansion. Does this takeover come with extra resources, financial and otherwise, from the state to help turn the district around? Ha! What a cute question. Of course not.

The only good to come out of Lorain's experience is that it has drawn attention to the myriad flaws of HB 70. Affected districts have sued. Ohio's current governor-- the one who wasn't instrumental in ramming HB 70 through-- has expressed sympathy with the need to change things up.

Better not to hope for help coming from the Ohio department of education; the current state superintendent is Paolo DeMaria, a fan of school choice and Common Core whose background is finance and budget-- he has never worked in a school district, but he is part of Jeb Bush's reformy Chiefs for Change (as is Hardy). He has proposed a revamp to the laws, but much of that involves giving more power to his office; he also proposes removing the last power remaining to an elected school board-- the power to levy taxes. A recent exchange of emails between DeMaria and school board president Mark Ballard suggests that DeMaria really doesn't have much of a clue. In fact, he suggested that Ballard is pushing conspiracy theories.

Meanwhile, DeMaria's hand picked replacement for the departed head of the Academic Distress Commission (ADC) is Randall Sampson. Sampson ran into some issues immediately, such as the fact that after over two years, Hardy still hasn't had an evaluation. He has gotten cranky with folks like the actual elected mayor of Lorain, a problem that he has solved by blocking people on social media. Sampson's day job is running Liberty Leadership Development LLC, a company that does school turnarounds; he touts years of experience as a teacher and administrator, but his LinkedIn profile shows just one year in a classroom.

So there's not much hope of help there, either. There's just one ray of sunshine on the state level-- actually, three rays.

There are three bills currently kicking around the state legislature.

HB 127 would put a stop to further state takeovers. It would not help the three districts currently under the gun, but it would keep the cancer from spreading.

HB 154 is considerably more aggressive; it would dissolve the current ADCs, repeal HB 70, and create a whole new process for handling struggling school districts.

SB 110 is a Lorain-specific fix, addressing the issues the citizens of Lorain are facing.

These bills are not slated for a special late-night speedy approval, so there will be actual discussion and opportunity for input. That means they're better than HB 70 already.

Lorain city schools have sacrificed local control, morale, and stability to become a disproof of concept city for state takeovers. They are more evidence of the major flaws the central premise of state school takeovers-- that somebody in the state capitol knows a special secret to running schools that people who actually work in schools do not. They are also evidence that amateurs from outside the community are generally not the people to turn to for answers.

We'll keep watching to see if the legislature brings relief. In the meantime, if you live in Ohio, it's time to make some phone calls.

Have We Stolen a Generation's Independent Thought?

"Kids these days," the complaint begins. "They cannot think for themselves." The complaint has come across my desk three times this week, voiced by someone in the higher education world complaining about the quality of student arriving in their ivy-covered halls.

It's worth noting that the observation itself has no particular objective, evidence-based support. There's no college student independent thought index we can consult to check for a dip. Just the subjective judgment of some people who work at the college level. So the whole business could simply be the time-honored dismay of an older generation contemplating the younger one.

If we do accept the observation as valid, there are a variety of possible explanations. A study showing that people just stick with their team and don't think about the ideas involved. A political climate in which truth-telling and truth-searching are not currently highly valued. The power of YouTube conspiracy videos. Helicopter parents armed with bazooka-mounted lawnmowers.

But there's another factor to consider, a firmly school-embedded factor that has promoted anti-thought for a generation.

Since the advent of No Child Left Behind, the U.S. has used high stakes standardized tests as accountability measures for schools, districts and teachers. This has led to a twisting of public education, as schools have reassigned their resources to focus on preparing students to do well on standardized math and reading tests. Music, arts, history--even recess--have been placed on the back burner because they are not on the test.

Much has been written about the effects of high stakes testing on education, but we should also pay attention to the nature of the tests themselves. They are, for the most part, standardized multiple-choice tests, and as such, they promote a particular view of the world.

Consider the difference between the two following questioning strategies:

Read this poem. What do you think the author's main idea is? Provide some evidence of how particular words and images are an important part of how the author makes their point. You'll be scored on how well you express and support your idea.

Read this poem. Here are four possible statements that could be the author's main idea, but only one is correct. Pick that one. Here are four quotes from the poem that might be the most important evidence of the author's main idea, but only one choice is correct. Pick that one.

The first strategy encourages the student to explore, to think, and to support her own ideas. Her task is to think and to express her thinking. The second strategy tells the student that the questions have already been settled and that somebody already knows the one correct answer. Her task is to figure out what that somebody believes the answer to be. The second is anti-thought. Even though a question like "what's the most important detail" is what many students would consider an opinion question, successfully answering means setting aside their own opinions, their own thoughts, and trying to predict the opinions and thoughts of the test writers.

The second is, of course, a standardized multiple-choice testing strategy. By focusing on that type of questioning for students' entire academic careers, we hammer home that, rather than a world open for exploration and discovery, the world of math and reading is a world where every question already has a known answer and no exploration or thought is needed. Just learn the kind of compliance that keeps you on the path that has been laid down for you.

Test manufacturers can keep making noises about new generation tests, but as long as we stick to the fundamental formula--we will tell you which answers to choose from, and only one is "correct"--we are still deep in the land of anti-thought, the kind of place where the writer of poems can't even answer standardized test questions about her own works. Every test, every question, pushes on students some fundamentally troubling notions about the nature of knowledge and understanding in the world. They also teach students that independent, open-ended, exploratory thought is neither necessary nor desired to navigate the world.

We are teaching students, literally, not to think, but instead to clear their own thoughts and concentrate on following the path followed by the people who wrote the test questions. We are teaching them that every question has just one right answer, that somebody out there already knows it, and that you go to school to learn to say what those people want you to say.  This is not a new issue in education, but we have ramped it up, systematically injected it into every level of K-12 education, and incentivized it like never before. If it has stifled a generation's desire for independent thought, that is no surprise.

Originally posted at Forbes

ICYMI: Post-Easter Chill Edition (4/28)

In my neck of the woods, we figure that spring can't arrive until there has been a post-Easter snow. We appear to be working on tht today. So while we sip our hot chocolate of shivery bitterness, here are some current readings to absorb and-- please-- share!

Choice As A Substitute For Adequacy 

Did states deal with the Great Recession by expanding choice to cover their cuts to public education? School Finance 101 takes a look.

The X-odus Files

Tim Slekar has long believed (as do I) that there is no teacher shortage, but rather a nationwide slow-motion one-at-a-time walkout. And he's started collecting the stories as evidence.

School Districts Are Going Into Debt To Keep Up With Technology  

Cash-strapped districts are financing their tech programs with debt (which just makes the tech even more expensive). The Hechinger Report digs in  .

Tony Soprano Visits Tennessee Legislators

A look at the GOP assault on education and voting rights and oh, boy, is Tennessee a fun place right now.

For all the Talk About School Competition in Camden, Families Really Haven’t Had a Choice 

When choice turns out to be not choice at all.

Success Academy Podcast IV- Got To Go

Gary Rubinstein is listening his way through a podcast about Success Academy. It's not exactly hard hitting, but he finds some content worth talking about.

A Flippity-Do-Da Day In Tennessee

Momma Bears look at how Governor Lee slimed his way to passage of his assorted bills. This is not how it was described by Schoolhouse Rock.

How Is School Choice "Freedom" When Students Lose School Libraries and Librarians 

Nancy Bailey looks at one of the casualties of the school choice movement.

The Problem With Education Research Fixated on "What Works"  

 Rick Hess makes his contribution to the research wars, and it' a good one. Really.

An Ambitious Plan To Combat Segregation Just Made Things Worse

Dana Goldstein in the NYT looks at the San Francisco plan to desegregate and how it only made matters worse.

Who Should Pay For Public Education  

Nancy Flanagan answers the question, "So if philanthropists want to spend their money on education, what's the problem?"

Let Us March On 'Til Victory Is Won

Jose Luis Vilson is a poet of connections. Here we find Beyonce, testing season, and school spaces.