Life Sized Teaching

Like many teachers, I mostly hate movies and tv shows about teaching. There are too many about hero teachers, larger than life pedagogues who singlehandedly change the world and dramatically shift the course of entire lives (though they generally only teach one prep a day-- seriously, did Mr. Kotter or Mr. Feeney ever teach any other students?)

It's enough to make ordinary mortals feel inadequate.

It's easy for young teachers to develop feelings of inadequacy, to go home and night haunted by the knowledge that you did not change the life of every single child in your class today. I didn't get through to that one kid in third period math. I didn't know the answer to the question that one student asked. I don't have lesson plans done for next week, and it's already Wednesday.

Folks mean to be encouraging with all the rhetoric about teachers shaping the future and touching the future and shutting up some apocryphal guy at a cocktail party by pithily snapping, "What do I make? I make a difference!" But when we're not careful, the message we actually send is that teachers are Larger Than Life and More Than Human, that the only adequate level of teacher performance is Greatness. Which means of course that if you're just a regular human who had a pretty good day, well, you failed. I like to describe education as the work of helping students learn to be their best selves, how to be fully human in the world. And yet, to be a fully human teacher can feel like being Not Enough.

So for my brethren and sistern still in the classroom, on this Labor Day, here's a message from a retired guy who put in 39 years on the work.

Being human is plenty. Teaching life sized is plenty.

It is tempting to shoot for the teaching equivalent of the Grand Romantic Gesture, but that's not sustainable. Sure, it's nice when someone sends you a field full of daisies-- but not every single day. Every single day it's nice to have someone who helps with the dishes and cleans up after the dog and just sits down next to you in a real, present, human way at the end of the day. Nobody has the time and resources for a GRG every single day. And this is a marathon, not a sprint. Pace matters.

You don't need to be a superhuman genius or a firecracker burning fuses at both ends. You need to be real and human and present.

You need to be kind to yourself. Recognize that you are in a boat paddling upstream, against a hundred different currents, and some days it will take all your effort just to keep from being swept backwards.

You need not to compare. On any given day, you will be able to look around your school and see some teacher who seems to be absolutely killing it, absolutely putting you to shame. Let it go. She may have had one of those perfect storms that happen. She may be paying a price that you know nothing about.

Your students do not need someone who is larger than life, because that sends them the exact same message that is bugging you-- that human sized life is not enough.

And in a world in which so many people spend their lives in sad jobs, twisted  jobs, jobs that don't really need to be done, you are doing a job that is worth doing.

Yes, you need to care and try, and yes, the work of getting better and better at what you do is never ending (truly--I am retired and I still have the occasional flashes of "Oh, damn-- if I taught that unit this way instead of that way) and, yes, it's a very very bad sign if you are thinking that you have all the answers about how to teach and everything in the classroom that fails is the fault of those damned kids--

But life sized teaching is good. Teaching on the human scale, built on a relationship with your students that is human to human-- that is all good. You're an expert, a trained and experienced professional, doing work that most people can't, or won't, do, under conditions that are less than ideal with fewer resources than you really need. You are helping young humans become more fully themselves, learning how to be fully human in the world. It is hugely important work, but it is not work for a superhero or a larger than life ubermensch. It is work for a life-sized human.

Third Grade Reading Retention Does Not Work (Example #6,288,347)

The idea of retaining third graders who can't pass a standardized reading test has its roots in two things: 1) a bunch of research of varying degrees of trustworthiness and usefulness (see here, here, here and here for examples across the scale) and 2) dopey policy makers who don't know the difference between correlation and causation. 

What the more reliable research appears to show is that third grade is a good year for taking a student's reading temperature, and their ability to read at the third grade level seems to be a good predictor of future scholastic success. That seems to be a valid correlation but-- say it with me now, nice and loud for the folks in the back-- correlation does not equal causation. 

Nevertheless, many states have instituted a plan by which students are not allowed to exit third grade until they can show sufficient reading skills (or at least sufficient standardized read test taking skills). This is dumb.

This would be the equivalent of, say, noting that students who are more than four and a half feet tall in third grade are mostly over six feet tall when they graduate from high school. Therefor, in our desire to make graduates taller, we will not let anyone progress beyond third grade until they are at least four and a half feet tall. 

The most likely reading of the third grade reading correlation is that some factors are contributing to a poor reading level, and those same factors, exacerbated by reading difficulties, will be obstacles to future success. Third grade reading level is a canary in the coalmine, and you don't fix things by repeatedly sending canaries down there. But canaries are cheap, and fixing coal mines is hard and expensive. Addressing all the problems that hold a small child back-- well, that's complicated and expensive and difficult and it puts a lot of responsibility on the government. It's simpler to just threaten the kid and the teacher and make it their problem.

Could the results of that test mark certain students for interventions? Yes, but intervention before the test would be ideal (and there are schools that are having some success with this). Hell, intervention before third grade would be ideal. At any rate, telling the kid they've flunked third grade is a blunt instrument, nothing more than a nasty threat to level at an eight year old. Threats only make sense if you believe that teachers and eight year olds are purposefully holding out on education leaders. Yes, I'll bet those six and seven year olds are just laying back, thinking, "I could learn how to read, but I'm not going to bother-- that'll teach those politicians at the state capital a lesson." 

It is probably a remarkable coincidence that states have landed on third grade as the year to retain students who fail the standardized test, because that just happens to be the year before students have to take a federally-mandated fourth grade test, the results of which affect school and state standings in education. It's probably a coincidence that retaining third graders who fail a state standardized test keeps them from taking (and failing) the federal high stakes test in fourth grade. 

Of course, all of this would be useless quibbling if third grade reading retention worked. 

But it doesn't.

Here's just one more study that provides evidence. 

The study is from late 2016 and looks at retention in a Florida district, during the 2003-2004 school year. Florida's a great choice because Florida's education leaders have a crazy obsessive love of testing. They once went to court to force a dying, disabled child to take the Big Standardized Test, and they also ended up in court arguing to retain students who had demonstrated reading mastery in umpteen ways-- but who hadn't taken the third grade BS Test.

The results are pretty straightforward. Seven years after retention, 93% remained below proficiency. Similar students who were not retained yielded 85.8% who were not proficient in tenth grade. The district spent $587 million on retention. (there is also some baloney in here about future lost wages which is, in fact, baloney hoping to spark some shiny headlines). 

You can dig into the full dissertation by Kathleen Jasper; it's 93 pages long, and it includes, among other things, a thorough review of the mountain of literature that shows that grade retention is almost always a bad thing with a host of bad side-effects for the students who are retained. It's a good resource.

Jasper these days works as the founder/CEO of NavaED, a company that does consulting work in the area of teacher certification and other Floridian bureaucratic hoopjumping. Are they any good? I don't know, but at least Jasper started out her education high muckity muck career with a dissertation that says what many, many sources say and need to keep saying-- third grade reading retention does not work, plus it's expensive and damaging to students, so maybe we can just knock it off right now.

ICYMI: Here's September Edition (9/1)

Here we go-- it's an actual new month after August (which always seems about 5 days long). Here are some things to read from this week. Share!

A College Reading List for the Post-Truth Era   

From Forbes, an interesting batch of books for our times.

The Struggle To Keep Teachers In Rural Schools   

Bonus points for USA Today for avoiding the framing of this as a shortage.

"It's Totally Worthless!" Why Everybody Hates Indiana's ILEARN.

The Indy Star takes a look at the giant money-wasting boondoggle that is the new Big Standardized Test.

How Much of Your Education Still Lives In You

I want to be Nancy Flanagan when I grow up. A really thoughtful about the long-term tracks of an education.

Is Reading First Making a Comeback

I so admire Nancy Bailey for getting her feet in the turbulent waters of the reading wars (I set my metaphor mixer to "stun"). If some of what's been circulating lately feels kind of familiar, here's some explanation.

Pennsylvania's Cyber Charters Stink Expensively, And Yet They Persist  

Okay, I condense the title a little, but Paul Muschick's piece in the Morning Call makes the point clearly.

California Top Secret Charter Documents

A jaw-dropping reveal of what California charters really have planned.

Public Rec Center Given To Private School

From Deadspin-- privatization with a sports twist. Make sure you read the writer's full disclosure at the end. Sad and hilarious.

The Obliteration of Local Control  

Accountabaloney looks at the Florida district that converted to 100% charter. It's not pretty (but it is lucrative).

What Kind of A-hole Ransoms School Data

A few years ago I reported on the business of hacking and ransoming school data. As Steven Singer reports, that trend has only accelerated, with tough consequences for districts around the country.

Jay Greene: The Failed Premise of Reform

You may not read a lot of what is written by folks on the reformster side of modern corporate reform these days, but you probably should. First, it's important to understand what they're thinking these days. Second, there's a heck of a lot of nuance out there, because what we think of as reformsterism is actually several different groups working for several different motivations. Third, there is some pretty pointed criticism of reformsterism that comes from inside their own tent.

One such voice is Jay Greene (not related to me, as far as I know). Greene is a professor of 21st Century Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and he supports a lot of things that I think are bunk and aims for a lot of goals that I think should not be achieved. But over the years he has often been wiling to say "That's not going to work" and then transition straight into "That did not work."

He just posted a brief column that is a kind of inventorial "I told you so" for reform, muses about what all the various failed reforms have in common, and finds not that he's so much smarter than other folks, but that they are operating from a flawed premise, mainly "that there are policy interventions that could improve outcomes for large numbers of students if only we could discover them and get policymakers and practitioners to adopt them at scale." And then he writes this paragraph:

I begin with a different theory. I suspect that there are relatively few educational practices that would produce uniformly positive results. Instead, I’m inclined to think of education as similar to parenting, in which the correct approaches are highly context-specific. Even within the same family, we may choose to parent different children facing similar issues in very different ways. There may be some uniformly desirable parenting practices, but most of them are already known and widely disseminated. So, if we wanted to improve parenting, the best we could do would be to empower parents to be in a better position to judge their context and make their own decisions about how to raise their children. Similarly, the best we could do to improve education is to empower families and communities to make decisions within their own context. There is relatively little we could tell all schools or educators to do to improve outcomes.

I'm right with him, up until the moment when he veers off to set up support for school choice. But the idea that ed reform suffers from an uncontrollable impulse to impose top down solutions on everyone-- that's absolutely on the mark.

The other problem I'd say exists with all reforms is suggested by his, but not explicitly-- that Reformsters absolutely refuse to listen to actual practitioners in the field, and in fact have gone so far as to create their entire network and pipeline for alternative experts, people who don't really know anything about teaching or schools, but have come through a pipeline that is all about modern corporate ed reform and not actual education. Just as Greene managed to call a long list of ed failures well before they happened, there hasn't been an ed reform failure that teachers didn't predict, and, for that matter, not a single ed reform "success" that teachers didn't already know ("Oh! A school gets more teaching done if it hand picks its students, has a longer day, and spends more money on resources?? Do tell!").

It remains one of the oddities of ed reform, reminiscent of the crystals-and-jewelry crowd or the anti-vax crowd who believe they can fix the medical system by ignoring everyone who is actually a trained doctor and just setting up and listening to their own network of non-doctor non-scientific folks.

Greene calls out his fellow reformsters for refusing to learn from their failures. I say "Amen," and besides learning that their basic premises are flawed, they could also learn that there are professional educators out there who could tell them ahead of time before they waste a buttload of money.

Burn And Churn McModel Is Failing

To launch the fast food industry, owners and operators refined and adapted an industrial model, with every kitchen an assembly and every employee an easily-replaced meat widget, performing unskilled labor on a job that was employee proof. In the last couple of decades, some education reformsters have tried to adapt that McModel to education, creating teacher-proof content delivery systems that would allow schools to be staffed by easily and swiftly replaced low-cost meat widgets (if you want to talk about the industrial model in education, that's where it really is).

But we've had the McModel of churning turnover in place for it decades, and it turns out there are problems with it.

The headline of this piece hollers that Panera has worker turnover of 100%. But read the article and you discover that 100% employee turnover is actually pretty good in the industry. The industry standard is 130%, and some places run much higher. (That's mathematically possible if you lose workers and their replacements within one year). And--

“It’s definitely been going up,” said Rosemary Batt, chair of HR Studies and International  Comparative Labor at the Cornell School of Industrial Labor Relations.

The turnover-proof model, considered essentially cost-free, has been in place for years, but now burn-and-churn is showing signs of trouble. Batt says that some chains are starting to figure out the costs of turnover.

The actual costs. Batt says the rule of thumb is the time it takes a manager to hire, the time it takes to train, and the time it takes to become good at the job-- during that time, half the pay is considered a wash. And that's before we start talking about the disruption to the team and the organization. According to one authority, Burger King figures it costs about $600 per employees. Batt's survey suggests more like $1,600. The National Restaurant Association says about $2,000. The industry research firm TDn2K says $2,100 to $2,800.

You've probably already seen one of the industry responses-- automation, from the kiosks at McDonalds to the do-it-yourself pads on the table at fast casual spots. Meat widgets can be replaced by software that never quits and doesn't need to be paid.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Beyond robots, what other views of the problem and its solutions are there?

Well, some experts observe that fast food work has become a job that nobody wants, and some think no improvement of pay, benefits, training or culture will fix that. And Abraham Pizam, dean of the Rosen College of Hospitality Management at the University of Central Florida has a statement that would look good on a Teach for America t-shirt-- "No one who thinks of a job as temporary is motivated." But yeah-- when a job becomes hugely unattractive, finding people who will work it is hard.

Jordan Boesch actually started a company, 7Shifts, to help restaurants manage and plug holes in their work schedules. He has a couple of interesting observations:

“I don’t think training can be a game-changer,” Boesch of 7Shifts said. “The bigger determining factor for someone to stay with you is if they see a future there.”

Boesch said the big food chains are overly confident: They think they are better at training than they actually are, and as a result, they recruit and hire the wrong people. Citing Jim Sullivan, a well-known restaurant consultant, Boesch said hiring is 90% of the equation and training only 10%. “There is no way to develop the wrong person.”

In other words, the model is fundamentally wrong-- you can't just plug any meat widget into the job. You need someone who has the skills and tools to do it well, and then you need to provide them with an environment that helps them thrive. For employees who deal with customers, a toxic culture that doesn't care about people will be a huge turnoff, regardless of money. All the training in the world will not make them happy in a toxic work environment. So the whole "We just need to give teachers better training" plan might have a flaw.

Some experts have doubts about the all-robot fast food joint-- that human beings still want even the most basic contact with human beings when buying food. Nobody in the article mentioned the other elephant in the room-- computer-driven tools fail a fair amount of the time. Both points are worth noting when contemplating personalized [sic] algorithm driven computerized learning.

One other interesting point-- some experts suggest that a rise in minimum wage will motivate employers to hire better and train better to better protect their meat widget investment.

At any rate, the McModel that some Reformsters have been pursuing has turned out to be unsustainable. We already knew that it was incompatible with quality, but it turns out to cost a lot more than promised. As far as the bar has been lowered for restaurant work skills requirements, there are still plenty of people who can't clear it. There aren't enough people to create an endless supply of meat widgets, and that supply is further reduced because in attempting to degrade the job as much as possible-- thereby making it all the less attractive. Which in turn requires hiring people who aren't really qualified, which further degrades the workplace culture, because who really wants to work side by side with a bunch of folks who can't really do the work, and so on. And that's before we even start to talk about the impossibility of reducing the work of teaching to the point that any unskilled, barely trained meat widget can do it.

The McJob model isn't even really working for the people who McCreated it. One more reason among many for education reformsters to stop pursuing it as an ideal.

Is It Really That Simple?

Some days I look at the landscape of educational issues, and I think that all our educational problems boil down to one, simple, two-part problem.

1) We don't spend enough money on education because

2) We don't want to.

We could erase the pockets of educational underserving, by spending the money necessary to fix the buildings, provide the resources, support the students, create a safe and effective learning environment. We could coax people back into teaching by raising the pay and providing supports to make the job more attractive (imagine a school with, for example, a secretary for every department). We could provide a better array of support staff-- nurses, counselors specifically for personal issues, post-high school planning, in-school issues. Hell, we could do simple things like provide school-issued pencils and backpacks and paper for each student, and if we thought uniforms were important, we could provide those, too.

But we don't. We propose solutions that aren't solutions, like school choice, which proposes that we take the same money that isn't enough to support a single system and spread it around among several systems, which is like Daylight Savings Time to create more sunlight or pushing your lima beans around to make it look like you actually ate them.

No, we stay stuck tight to a system of districting and funding that is welded to housing, which all but guarantees that schools will reflect the same segregation of students and resources that we find in our housing system. And we back that up with an attitude of "I've got mine, Jack," and a side of "I'm not going to pay my tax dollars to build a school for Those Peoples' Children." And some folks further shut down the conversation by declaring, "Well, we can't just throw money at education and after all, we threw a bunch of money at it and look where we are. Harumph."

Yes, yes, yes, I'm a taxpayer, too, and I'd rather hang onto a couple of bucks and not be treated like the government's personal ATM. I get that. And I know that the obvious model for unhesitant spending-- the US military-- is really not a good model, as it shovels tons of money into private machinery that somehow takes better care of corporate honchos than actual US soldiers in the field.

Still, if being devoted to the care and education of children were suddenly an international crime, would there be enough evidence to convict the US?

Yes, I'm feeling a little cranky today, but dammit, why do so many education policy discussions end up really being about questions like "How can we do the barest minimum for the tiniest cost" or "How can we change this system so that somebody can actually make some money off it" or "How can we change this system so that the right people are threatened and punished" or "How can we make a buck off some of the byproducts of the system?"

Yes, there are plenty of people working in education or education policy or education policy kibitzing who have basically accepted this limitation and so move forward asking "How can we squeeze more blood out of this turnip, because nobody is going to give us anything but this single turnip to work with." And the teaching profession is composed primarily of people who make do as best they can with whatever they have, no matter how too-little that is (right up until they quit or change professions, that is).

And, no, I don't imagine that there's a magical money tree growing somewhere in this land of the free and home of the trillion dollar deficit. I don't imagine that our politicians are going to wrestle with this, and we could blame them, but the fact is that if we were all demanding they wrestle with it, they would, whether they cared or not. If there's anything politicians can be counted on, it's their willingness to fake care about whatever they think the electorate wants them to care about.

That's what really gets me some days-- we have an education system that systematically, purposefully underfunds all schools except those located in wealthy communities, and we're really pretty much mostly okay with that. Oh, there are people who care, but mostly what we get are solutions that aren't solutions-- Common Core, vouchers, charters, data hooping, high stakes testing and teacher bashing ("Let's root out all the bad ones and then just replace them with great ones from the Great Teacher Tree") are all ways of trying to make things look better without actually addressing any of the underlying structural issues.

The real problem is intractable, so we fuss around with proxy problems and we argue about shit that is just shit.

What would it look like, I wonder on grumpy days like this, if there was an actual attempt to envision a school system without worrying about the how to pay for it part. How many things would we figure out that we could go ahead and do anyway.

Rant over. I'll eat some ice cream, go to rehearsal, have a good night's sleep, and come back in a cheerier place tomorrow.

PA: Poorer Districts Worst Hit By Cyber Schools

A study released in February shows that poorer school districts are bearing the brunt of funding Pennsylvania's cyber schools. The study was published in the American Journal of Education, and you can tell it's serious because its title is painfully dull: Cyber Charter Schools and Growing Resource Inequality among Public Districts: Geospatial Patterns and Consequences of a Statewide Choice Policy in Pennsylvania, 2002–2014.

Bryan Mann (University of Alabama) is a professor of education policy and foundations, and co-author David Baker (Penn State) is a professor of sociology, education and demographics. As the title suggests, they looked at the changes in cyber enrollment and the patterns and financial costs of that enrollment from 2002 to 2014. And because it's behind an academic paywall, we'll have to depend on second-hand reporting of the results, as well as their own writing about it..

The abstract of the study, translated from heavy academese, boils down to this:

When cyberschools started, everyone said, "Cool! Computers! I bet that'll make kids damned smart!" But then it turned out that cyber schools don't actually school well at all, and as word got out in the media, upscale communities ditched it, while enrollment in poorer areas kept up. So now districts with low tax bases are losing "significant revenue" to the cybers, despite the "dubious academic benefits."

From the anecdotal perspective of someone who taught in a less-wealthy rural-ish district, that sounds about right.

There are several other takeaways from the study, all worth noting.

The study confirmed many of the usual criticisms of the cybers. Because Pennsylvania's payment system for cybers is an unholy mess that only a cybercharter lobbyist could love, the cybners are crazy profitable. And Mann and Baker note that

a steady stream of recent, scientifically sound, national evaluations reveals that cyber charter students tend to score lower on year-end tests and also have lower growth in learning over time than regular public school students. The same is true in Pennsylvania, where there is even evidence of knowledge loss (negative growth scores) from 4th to 8th grade in reading and math, literature, algebra, and biology among many cyber charter students.

They note, as I have in the past, that for a certain group of students with particular disabilities, cybers "can be a godsend."

The drop in enrollment in well-off communities while enrollment in less wealthy, less educated communities is documented in the paper.The number of students lost is virtually never enough to reduce any operating costs for the district, so the bullet has to be bitten in other ways. The average payout for a district is $800K, which in smaller districts is a serious amount of money, which districts deal with mostly by cutting staff and programs, or the more radical move of closing buildings. We've seen all three approaches in my region, and while it's impossible to draw a straight line from cybercharter payments to, say, not replacing an English teacher when he retired, and districts face other pressures (we'll talk about PA's pension mess another day), losing a pile of money to cybercharters certainly doesn't help.

This article comes with an interactive map that shows you, district by district, what the dollar costs and budget percentages are for each district. It's worth a look.

If you are outside of PA, there are two other things to know-- PA has a cap on how much school districts can raise taxes, and cybercharters are approved by the state, so local districts have no control at all.

Baker and Mann say that after an initial boost for cybers (they started appearing here in 2000 and were put into law in 2002), 2005 marked the first downturn in enrollment, coinciding with the first published studies that showed lousy academic results.

So why do some school districts still end up having so many cyberstudents? The Notebook asked around in 2016, and heard answers like "safety" or the child was having trouble keeping up or escaping Big Standardized Test emphasis or getting away from other "problem students" in public school.

But not all reasons are so education-related. Two superintendents testified in August noted other reasons. Some can be very local, like students who have moved into an area to be near a parent in the nearby prison, and who don't want to have to talk about it. Some are more universal. Daniel Webb of Everett Area School District said some enroll to avoid accountability, e.g. the family who pulled all their kids because one child was disciplined for smoking.

The teacher bag of anecdotes contains many similar tales. The family who put a student in cyberschool because they were about to draw fines for chronic tardiness and skipping. The family who put a student in cyberschool to avoid repeated disciplinary issues. The family who put a student in cyberschool because he's failing, and he's heard that it's easy to pass cyberschools (which, given the lack of controls of who actually does the assignments, is probably true). Some students just like the idea of being able to get up when they want, go "to school" when they want, go hang out when they want. There is a repeated pattern of students leaving public school because they lack the self-discipline to cope with the institutional demands (we can discuss how much of the fault lies with the institution another day) without realizing that they are stepping into a setting where the demands on their self-discipline is even greater.

In fact, one of the areas that I have yet to see studied, is the number of cybercharter boomerang students-- students who leave the public school, cyberschool for a year, and then come back. I had those students in my classroom more than a few times; they always returned further behind than when they'd left (of course, if they hadn't stayed behind, then they probably wouldn't have returned). I'd ask these students what they did in cyberschool; often the answer was "Nothing."

But I digress. Part of the answer to the question posed by this study is that the bad news about cybercharters many failings was most likely to drive away students and families that were most concerned about academics, leaving behind families that enroll in cybercharters for other purposes, and for whatever reason, those families are in the less-wealthy rural-ish districts, which end up footing the bill.

There are remedies. Rep. Curt Sonney is no BFF of public education, but he has made numerous efforts to rein in the cybercharters, including a hugely sensible bill that would require parents to pay their own tuition to a cybercharter if the local public school offers an online option (many do, in a effort to woo back some families). Heck, someone could just shut down the ten-out-of-fifteenm cybercharters that are operating without a current charter agreement! But the cybers spend a huge amount of lobbying money in Harrisburg.

The standard argument is that cybercharters help make school choice more available, particularly in areas without bricks and mortar charters. What this study shows is that, by draining poorer districts of funding and forcing them to cut staff and programs, cybercharters are actually making fewer choices available for poorer PA districts. It really is long past time to shut them down.