Eight Weeks of Summer: Big Hairy Say What Now?

This post is week 5 of 8 in the 8 Weeks of Summer Blog Challenge for educators.

I've been doing the Hot Lunch Tray eight week challenge. Unlike other challenges, it does not require me to eat responsibly or beat myself up with ice water or plastic gerbils. I'm answering the questions as my old pre-retirement self. You can see what other folks are writing by checking out the #8WeeksofSummer hashtag. So here's this week's prompt:

What is your BHAG for next school year?

That's "Big Hairy Audacious Goal" for those of you haven't sat through professional development that pushes this kind of thing.

So I guess I have to address this one with a confession-- in thirty-nine years of teaching, I never set a BHAG. For that matter, I not sure I know anyone who did.

Maybe it's just a matter of phraseology. BHAG strikes me like "wacky" or "wise" or "hilarious" or "weird" or "badass rebel"-- if you have to apply the term to yourself, then you aren't. BHAG is an approach that calls attention to itself, that hollers, "Wow! Look at how bold and outside the box I'm being!" Maybe it's my New England roots or my general attitude, but this kind of thing takes me right back to Rule 10: Shut up and do the work.

I always had goals. Any teacher who's worth their salt (or cod, or whatever you want to trade in)always has goals, because any decent teacher can tell you, right now, the list of things that she knows she needs to get better at. There's never enough time, and while we refine and refine our game, it's never perfected. So teachers have projects, all the time. Get faster at assessing papers. Reconfigure the room. Rebuild the reading list. Incorporate ideas from that book/video/presentation that set my brain on fire. Come up with a better approach for that unit I can never quite sell.

Are any of those goals hairy and audacious? I don't know. I don't know how you would upscale them.  But-- and I guess this is also where BHAG rubs me the wrong way-- what is wrong with setting a goal of substantially improving your classroom practice? It may not be stunningly dramatic, but it will certainly benefit the students, and you'll enjoy feeling like you've gotten a better handle on the job you love.

I mean, yes, do something. There is no surer sign that a teacher has started become a lousy teacher than a declaration, spoken or un-, that they have everything pretty well figured out and there's nothing they really need to work on. Don't do nothing. And if you can't think of anything you need to work on, it may be that you are just done in the classroom. Spend your summer job hunting.

I also worry about the effect of setting a BHAG you don't reach (I once heard a presenter argue that a BHAG should seem unattainable). If you end up wasting energy, paying an opportunity cost, and feeling like you failed, well-- that doesn't seem helpful.

I don't want to be dismissive of those who have BHAGs. Maybe the big jolt or drama and adrenaline is just what you need, or maybe you feel the need to blast yourself out of a rut. That's fine. I may the kind of person who makes you bored, and you may be the kind of person who makes me tired. The world, and the students, needs all kinds.  But BHAGs seem vaguely accusatory, like  those Facebook posts from your friends at the top of Mount Kilimanjaro while all you've got is a picture of the mess you made trying to feed your toddlers avocados. "Audacious" is a word that wants to brag "I just had to take it further than ordinary mortals," and it hard to send that message without also sending the message that ordinary mortals are just not so great.

Maybe my BHAG was to keep improving professionally for 39 years, to better at juggling more balls and doing it more efficiently, to run the race as a really long marathon and not a sprint. Maybe it was  to push my own personal envelope just one more notch each year. But I was never a superhero teacher and nobody ever came back in the fall breathlessly wondering what new mountain i had conquered since last May. And I was-- and am-- always okay with that.

So if you're working on your BHAG, good for you. And if you are just plugging away at the goal of doing your job better than you did before, I'm here to tell you that your goals don't have to be larger than life in order to be worthy of your time and effort. Set goals that help you grow and improve as a teacher and don't worry about whether they have hair on them.

Does The Most Interesting Teacher Pay Proposal Belong To A Billionaire Friend Of Trump?

Stephen Schwarzman might have an idea. Schwarzman, cofounder of the Blackstone Group, has been named a Bloomberg Most Influential person of the year more than once, and in 2007 he was one of Time's 100 Most Influential people of the year. He is a long-time friend and advisor of Donald Trump, including help set up Trump's Strategic and Policy Forum. He has given away a great deal of money and put his name on a wide variety of enterprises, from the Schwarzman Scholars program for global leadership at Tsinghua University in Beijing, to having his name inscribed six times on the New York Public Library. You may remember him from a donation to his old high school that turned into a flap about renaming the school, but he is most recently in the news for a huge donation ($188 million) to the University of Oxford to change the way the humanities departments at Oxford interact, and to study the ethics of artificial intelligence. That's in line with his donation last year to M.I.T. of $350 million to anchor a new billion-dollar Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing for the study of artificial intelligence.

Schwarzman is well connected and he lives large, but some of his ideas do always not match what we might expect from the typical plutocrat. His interest in AI ethics, for instance, is in part focused on the problem of displacing human workers. And when he spitballed an economic Marshall Plan for the middle class in April, he identified "income insufficiency for the bottom 50% of society" as a major problem, and said finding a solution "is not optional." He advocated for a minimum wage increase, and for more CTE style education.

In education, he shares a common misconception; he thinks that when he was young, the US was number one in primary and secondary, and now they have slipped. It's unclear what measure he's using, but if he is commenting on PISA testing, the golden age he remembers from his youth never existed. The US was never number one.

But his most intriguing suggestion was his third one. Teachers are central to education, he says, so "we should make teachers pay no tax."

"It's not just money," he adds. "We need to make teachers a special class in our society."

And then the interviewer cut him off. I reached out to Schwarzman to elaborate, but did not receive a reply. But let's look at this.

The financial side of this is interesting. Several Democratic candidates have proposed raises for teachers, but there are plenty of problems with trying to collect federal money and somehow spread it down to local school districts. How will distribution be determined? How will federal and state authorities move the money around?

Let's assume that we're only talking about federal tax exemption for the moment. Teacher Tax Freedom would give almost every teacher in the country an instant raise. For some it would be a few thousand dollars. In states and districts where the pay is well below the national average, the raise would not be huge--in fact, for some folks struggling with low pay and a family, the tax freedom would give them almost nothing except a respite from tax form paperwork. From the local school district's point of view, it is an instant raise that doesn't cost them a cent. In fact, it reduces the amount of work they have to do to deal with deducting taxes from paychecks.

Of course, there would be lost revenue for the federal government. The exact amount is impossible to calculate, but let's look at some rough numbers. According to the NEA, the national average teacher salary in 2017-2018 was $60,477. Federal taxes on that amount, for a single person, would be, according to tax calculators, around $6,500. Add a spouse and two kids and that drops to $3,764. But the average tax bite will be lower because teachers on the lower end of the scale fall under a lower effective tax rate. There are roughly 3.2 million public school teachers. If we arbitrarily set the average tax bite at $3,000, we get a loss of under $10 billion to the federal government.

That's roughly double the hole that DeVos would like to open up in the budget with the proposed $5 billion tax credit scholarship program. One could argue that Teacher Tax Freedom would put that $10 billion in the hands of people all across the country, to be spent in the local community in ways that would stimulate the economy. But we would be trading a cost to the government for teacher financial gains that would be limited. All the tax forgiveness in the world does not turn a $39,000 salary into a $60,000 salary.

But there is no discounting the second part of Schwarzman's explanation. Teacher Tax Freedom would clearly mark teachers as a special class in society. Closing the respect gap is no small thing, and a proposal that did so would have value beyond dollars and cents (though if more respect for teachers were there, it would be followed by dollars and cents). Education policy in the last few decades has been exceptionally creative in the many ways it has found to treat teachers with disrespect; Schwarzman may have stumbled on a way that policy could actually work in the other direction. It wouldn't solve all the issues of respect for teachers, and it wouldn't solve the problems of teachers who are working multiple jobs to get by-- you can't eat respect. But it wouldn't hurt and, unlike more complicated and ambitious plans, it would be really easy to implement. We'll wait and see if anyone besides Schwarzman decides to talk about it.

Originally posted at Forbes

Whom Do We Trust

One of the unending underlying challenges in education is that parents and taxpayers have to trust somebody.

Back In The Day, the default was to trust teachers and administrators. That would be back when the default was to trust authority figures as a whole-- but that pendulum has swung far in the other direction (on behalf of all the Boomers, let me just say, "You're welcome"). Heck, even within the more recent past of my own career, a shift has been visible. In my first job (1979-1980) parent-teacher-student conferences often involved a parent absolutely taking my side, even though they didn't know me from a hole in the ground.

The erosion of trust has been widespread and has resulted from a variety of causes, and many of them have been--and continue to be--legit. Some of it is not an actual erosion at all, but simply finally hearing the voices of people who have never had a reason to trust authority. And some of it is the result of baloney, the kind of thing we see when someone explains that a youtube video deserves far more trust than an actual trained medical doctor. And some of it is the result of deliberate attempts to break down trust.

Education has been hit by a trust problem that really kicked off in 1983 with A Nation At Risk, a work which had as its singular purpose to deliver the message that public education, and the people who work in it, cannot be trusted. "Those folks," it said none-too-subtly, "are no more trustworthy than a hostile foreign power."

For thirty-six years, that drumbeat continued. Teach for America launched with the premise that teachers and the programs that produce them cannot be trusted. Common Core was sold as an antidote to untrustworthy teachers who just randomly pulled up standards for their classes higgledy piggledy. Reformsters boosted High Stakes Testing with the message that parents couldn't trust teachers to accurately report student achievement.  Charter advocates sold their business with the idea that public schools couldn't be trusted with anyone's children. And ed tech continues the pitch by suggesting that teachers can't be trusted to do their jobs.

Though some folks have turned down the volume a bit, one continuing thread running through all of modern ed reform is the notion that public schools and the people who work there simply can't be trusted.

It's not like some schools, administrations, and teachers haven't broken trust with parents and their community. Institutional racism, institutional inertia, just plain bad choices--public schools and the people who work there are capable of all of it. "Look, just trust me to do  my job," doesn't really cut it any more.

And yet, we have to trust somebody.

Reformy organizations like TFA ask us to trust their training, their process, their claim to really know what they're doing. Common Core asked us to trust the people who wrote and pushed the standards. Charter operators ask us to trust their intent and their methods. Rich education dilettantes ask us to trust them to run the whole edubiz.

Some reformy tools are sold as some sort of objective view. Your teacher's test might be biased, so that's why we need a standardized test to tell us the truth. The computer delivering the lesson won't be biased in any way, because, you know, computer magic.

But that's a lie and an illusion. High stakes testing, particularly in states like PA where teachers aren't allowed to see the test items and students must pledge  to keep them secret, asks us to trust the test manufacturers. Every kind of computer based lesson delivery system asks us to trust the people who wrote the software. And in these cases, parents and taxpayers are being asked to trust someone who is far away, separated from the students in both space and time. How many Black and Brown test manufacturers do you suppose the company employs?

In short, I don't care how scientific or evidence-based or expert-created or whatever your educational thing is-- you still have to trust somebody. The dream may be a system that depends on completely scientific objective elements, but that's simply never going to happen. It may look like systems and computers  and the like dispense with those untrustworthy carbon-based life forms, but behind every system, behind every piece of software, lurks a live human being who is no more or less trustworthy than any of the rest of us.

Trusting a whole bunch of teachers who each bring individual issues and perceptions to the table may well seem foolish. Trusting folks who support an institution that has consistently treated you and others like you badly is a bridge too far for most normal humans.

But you have to trust somebody.

You have to trust a politician who swears they're going to wrote policy that will make it better, and then you have to trust the people who will implement it. You have to trust the standardized test makers or the standards writers or the software engineers. But one problem with so many of these folk is that they aren't here to answer your questions or complaints.

You have to trust somebody.

It's almost impossible to operate a system in which the default assumption is that your front line workers can't be trusted. To effectively monitor and micro-manage all those untrustworthy teachers would require an enormous amount of humanpower and technology--a huge expense that requires you to somehow come up with a 100% trustworthy workforce for the task (otherwise, who watches the watchmen?). And while you'll effectively hamstring the people who could have been trusted, the less trustworthy folks will still find a way to gum up the works.

Plus, a school that soaks its employees in a constant soup of distrust cannot avoid slopping that soup all over the students. How effectively can students be taught in an atmosphere of distrust. What lessons do they learn in an institution where everyone is considered untrustworthy until proven otherwise? What kind of human beings does such a school produce?

You have to trust somebody.

We talk about earning trust, but I'm more inclined to think in terms of growing it. It does have to be nurtured and fed and watered and cared for and if you screw up you can kill it. But like any other plant, you can't grow it from nothing. There has to be a seed.

I have to plant that seed and start to trust someone, so I pick the teachers and other educators in the school. Not blind trust. Not I-will-ignore-the-evidence-of-my-eyes-if-you-say-to trust. There has to be an accountability piece. There also has to be a piece that allows me to speak up when I believe something is wrong. There have to be some checks and balances in the system (starting with this question-- if you have a bunch of untrustworthy employees, who hired them, and why?) There has to be a means for dealing with the misplaced, the racist, the misguided.

But teachers have chosen to be there. They have chosen to get (and continue) training. They have chosen to work through all the daily grinds and nuisances of this particular career. They are there in the trenches, and they have spent the most time right at that magical spot where learning and young human minds meet. Those factors alone mean that teachers deserve, at least provisionally, our trust.

We have to trust someone, and lord knows, sometimes it's hard to find people that can live up to that trust anywhere. Trusting educators, not blindly, but with eyes wide open and paying attention, because trust can never be a substitute for paying attention-- well, trust is scary. And it is a the worst possible way to operate an educational system. The only thing worse than that is every other possible system.

ICYMI: Really Really Summer Now Edition (7/6)

Hot and steamy here, which still makes us better off than some corners of the world. Here's some reading for the day. Remember-- share the stuff that really speaks to you.

The Teaching Machine Imaginary

I do miss Audrey Watters, but here's a new Hack Education post that, in typical Watters fashion, links book editing, the Jetsons, teaching machines, and pigeons.

Education Reformers Still Don't Understand Racism 

Rann Miller over at the Progressive takes a look at what reformsters still don't get.

Did Busing Ever Succeed?

Matt Barnum takes a dive into the research to see if he answer the newly-revived question.

Charter Schools Unleashed Education Hunger Games in California      

Andrea Gabor's background as a business journalist lets her bring a special level of insight to ed reform coverage. Here's the story of the ups and downs of charters in California.

L.A. charter schools’ plans: Take back mayor’s office, sue district, battle teachers union 

Meanwhile, California charters haven't learned much.

Charter Schools Aren't a Radical Solution and Neither Is Blaming Them

Andre Perry with a thoughtful and nuanced look at some of the systemic problems schools face.

Indiana's Catholic schools get millions in public money. Some lawmakers want that to stop.

In Indiana, some folks are finally figuring out how vouchers really work to give tax dollars to private religious schools (including those that actively discriminate against LGBTQ students).

People Who Regulate Charter Schools Also Make Millions From Them

It's this story again. This time we're in Utah for a local TV station's tale of self-dealing and profiteering.

The Facts About Newark Schools-- Update  

Since Cory Booker's Presidential run brought the subject up again, here's Jersey Jazzman with the actual facts about the big money play in Newark.

The Breaststroke  

Jose Vilson reflects on the last year of school.



  

Elizabeth Warren's Better Answer On Testing

Yesterday the NEA did quickie interviews with ten of the Democratic candidates, ranging from the front-runners like Sanders and Warren all the way down to (checks notes)-- some guy named Tim Ryan who is apparently also running.

There were plenty of fine moment and plenty of pandering, and, it has to be noted, plenty of issues that went unaddressed by some candidates because they didn't get asked a question about them. If, like me, you found the streaming experience frustrating, you can watch the whole thing over on YouTube.

The favorite headline for coverage involves all the folks who have jumped on the Make A Teacher Secretary of Education bandwagon. But there were several moments I found more important-- especially this next one.

Elizabeth Warren was handed a question about ending high stakes testing (not even "would you" but "how would you") and she started out by offering her own version of putting someone from public education in the office, then she moved on to this:



"It's about our values," she says as she pivots. She invokes her special needs teacher background (again) and says, "This notion that it's all about testing, that it's all about what somebody far off in the state capitol or far off in the national capitol says here's what constitutes success, and worse yet, here's what constitutes failure-- no, that's not what education is about."

"Education is about what goes on in the classroom," she continues. A teacher sets a goal and a teacher knows when a student has met that goal. "We do not need high stakes testing." That gets big applause, and then Warren adds something that I think is important.

"I think this goes to the fundamental question of respect for our teachers. Too many folks seem to have gotten the idea that teaching is kind of like, y'know, working on an assembly line, and we'll just test your widgets to see if they're coming out all right, you must be a good teacher, and if they don't meet the standards set somewhere else, you must not be. No, that is not what teaching is all about."

She winds up with some nice words about teaching and focusing on children and that's not testing and teachers need to be front and center.

The Warren record on testing has been spotty and a little scary-- in 2015, she came down on the side of needing testing in order to know if schools are doing a good job with their widgets or not.

This clip doesn't get into the more concrete ways in which high stakes testing has damaged US education (narrowing and refocusing the curriculum, etc), and that's not a knockcause Warren was racing the clock. But it does show an appreciation for one of the underlying features of testing-- the foundational idea that teachers can be neither trusted nor believed, and therefor we must have tests, because somehow those are more reliable and trustworthy.

Like many of the candidates (cough*cough*Biden*cough) she would be well-served by talking about what she used to believe and how she has come to understand that she got parts wrong. And I still worry about some of the company she keeps. However, it's July, and my Christmas shopping is more urgent than my need to pick a Dem candidate.

But here she has nailed a policy idea that has been missing from all the platforms. Modern charters, as currently implemented and regulated, are a problem. Getting people to drive policy who aren't rank-but-rich amateurs would be great. But nothing in the last twenty years of education has done more far-reaching and pervasive damage than high stakes testing. If the candidates want a bandwagon to jump on, I recommend this one.

Eight Weeks of Summer: Learning Conditions

This post is week 4 of 8 in the 8 Weeks of Summer Blog Challenge for educators.

I'm continuing this challenge, answering the questions from the viewpoint of my old non-retired self. Here's this week's prompt:

What are optimal conditions in which to learn, for you, and for students?

For me, it's mostly a matter of opportunity and independence. Probably the biggest single thing I learned in college was how to teach myself, and I was born just in time for the biggest explosion of self-education resources in the history of the world. But that's as an adult, and the biggest advantage that adults have is that we rarely have to learn anything we don't want to learn.

I've always said-- I could probably learn conversational Chinese, but the time and effort involved, compared to the actual benefits, is such that I choose not to. But I'm an adult, so I can make that choice and nobody thinks worse of me. However, if a teenager made that same calculation and choice about my English class, then we might call him lazy or worse. Not that I think teens are necessarily good judges of what they do or don't need to learn for life; just that adults have a type of freedom when it comes to learning that students generally do not.

As a student, what I most needed was a safe space, security. If I spent the whole class time worrying about how other students or the teacher might react if I said X, if I had to carefully watch every single word that came out of my mouth, then it was hard to have much mental energy left to spend on paying attention to the actual lesson.

Students need to be able to work on the content-- what are adjectives, what is Hamlet's motivation, what's the best introduction to craft for an essay-- without that content mastery somehow becoming evidence about whether or not they have the right to take up space on the planet. In the quest for leverage, schools too often escalate the stakes so that school is about judging who the student is as a human being instead of letting her figure that out while feeding her brain.

I often describe education as the process of learning how to be more completely yourself, and how to be fully human in the world. That's a process that requires a broad, open playing field and an atmosphere that assures students that they are okay, and that they are going to be okay. Plus a useful balancing of the tension between order and chaos, freedom and authority.

That also means a setting that handles fundamentals-- physical safety, solid resources, food, shelter.

Plus, a teacher with expertise in the content area. It will require some combination of sage and guide, but that teacher must know the content, know the material, know what the heck she's talking about.

CAP & Fordham Shoot The Moon

When the Moonshot For Kids competition first crossed my screen, I took a moment to consider it as a topic for commentary, then moved on. But then this tweet popped up today:

What is education’s version of the self-driving car?

Let @edprogress and @educationgadfly know your innovative idea to improve student outcomes through a #MoonshotForKids and you could win $10,000 https://t.co/evwibCFhrl

— CAP K-12 Education (@EdProgress) July 5, 2019

Well, now.

There's a lot to unpack here.

First of all, the partnership. The Center for American Progress is theoretically a left-tilted thinky tank, a place where many Clinton staffers were parked in stasis awaiting the ascension of Hillary to the White House. But they have been relentless in their advocacy for corporate ed reform, to the point that I literally ran out of ways to title blog posts some variation of  "CAP tries pushing Common Core and Testing again" (see here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, for just a few examples).

So while it may seem odd to the casual observer to see CAP teaming up with Fordham, which is a notably right-tilted thinky tank, the two organizations, despite any apparent political tilts, are full-on fans of corporate ed reform. Their partnership here is just a reminder that when it comes to education, some progressives are just free market conservatives in sheep's clothing.

But this idea.

What's education's version of the self-driving car?

Do you mean something that's promoted relentlessly but is still far off in the future? Or do you mean a program that faces major obstacles that tech-cheerleaders just sort of gloss over?

Perhaps you meant a tech-based solution that strips all participants of power and agency and gives it instead to a bunch of programmers? Or did you mean a new tech initiative that promises to make a bunch of people rich?

Or do you mean something that can fail with really catastrophic results?

It's a holiday weekend, so maybe that tweet comes from some CAP intern who just didn't think things through. But "self-driving car" is an analogy that I would pick were I trying to argue against most ed reform ideas. Except-- no, there it is in Mike Petrilli's pitch.

They should have stuck with the moon shot analogy. But let's look past the wrapping, the overall idea of search for "the rationale, potential, and possible design of a sizable new investment in basic and applied research and development that leads to innovation on behalf of America’s children" and see if the actual goals are worthwhile.

They're looking for an idea that would help achieve one of the following goals:

* Cut in half the number of fourth graders reading “below basic”
* Double the number of eighth graders who can write an effective persuasive essay
* Shrink by 30 percent the average time a student spends in English-language-learner status
* Double the amount of high-quality feedback the average middle schooler receives on their academic work
* Ensure that every student receives high-quality college and career advising by ninth grade
* Double the number of students from low-income families and students of color who graduate from high school with remediation-free scores on the SAT, ACT, or similar exams
* Double the number of young women who major in STEM fields

Cut number of below basic fourth graders? Many states have already figured this one out-- just give third graders a test that they must pass to get into fourth grade. Then your fourth grade classes are only populated with pre-proven reading test takers. Boom-- mission accomplished.

Double eighth graders who can write an effective persuasive essay? Also easy. Just dumb down your definition of "effective persuasive essay," (which you'll have to do anyway in order to assess on your standardized writing test) until it's just a paint-by-numbers template, then teach and drill the template. You won't teach anyone to write, but you'll get those test scores up.

Magically make ELL students learn English faster. Sure. Or I suppose we could change the criteria for ELL status.

Double high quality feedback? Well, again, we need a helpful definition of "high quality feedback." At any rate, this one is easy peasy-- smaller class sizes, more work time for teachers during the day. Or did you want a solution that wouldn't cost schools money?

High quality college and career advising by ninth grade. Again, those words. "High quality." Again, an easy solution-- hire more counselors (of course, you'll have to find a deep pool of people who can cope with the challenge of talking to a young person about college and career-- "Chris, please put down the blocks so we can talk about how you can best be useful to employers in the future.")

Raise SAT and ACT scores for non-white non-wealthy kids. I suppose discussing why we should just scrap these tests entirely is not the direction these corporate types want to go.

Double the number of women who major in STEM. That seems pointless unless we somehow address the fact that women are driven out of STEM employment in huge numbers.

These goals are all about changing numbers; they are an open invitation to apply Goodhart's or Campbell's Laws, in which focus on a measurement leads to that measurement being rendered useless. This is about coming up with ways to make better numbers. Yes, one way to improve numbers can be (though not always) to improve the underlying reality those numbers are supposed to represent. But those techniques are hard to scale, expensive and not easy to devise. There are always simpler methods.

If you want a piece of this action, the group is open to submissions of 500 words until the end of the month. But remember-- this is not about coming up with a self-driving car. It's about coming up with a marketing package that makes it look like a self-driving car has been perfected. It's about doing a good job of using modern CGI to fake your presence on the moon without all the hard work, expense and challenge of actually getting a rocket up there.