What I Know About The Reading Wars

Lord save us from the unending arguments about reading instruction. I started a Twitter thread just after Christmas and that thing was still flopping around six months later. Emily Hanford has somehow milked one not-very-new observation ("Use phonics") into a series of widely shared articles, which in turn has stirred up all the articles that people wrote the last time phonics was being  praised as the One True Science for Reading Instruction. And on and on.

I live with an elementary school teacher with an advanced degree in reading. I taught English for thirty-nine years. I have some thoughts about all this noise which, as always, you can have for free, and which are, I think, worth considering if you're going to get into this ongoing kerfluffle.

One More Explosion of Experts

As with many issues in education, reading is blessed with the expert insights of expert experts who have never actually had to teach a tiny human to read. This group of People Who Have Really Strong Opinions Even Though They May Not Know What The Heck They're Talking About includes, I must sadly note, high school teachers, who move into the house long after the foundations have been laid. Here's the rule-- all reading experts must be able to answer the question, "What happened when you applied your ideas about reading instruction to several different classrooms full of students?"

Reading Is Not Natural

Humans will do language naturally, by which I mean without any instruction. They will learn to interpret what they hear, and they will start to speak it on their own. This does not happen with reading or writing; in fact, most cultures go through a pre-literate stage in which a language exists only as spoken word (when writing appears, you'll find a lot of old farts complaining that Kids These Days can't remember stuff any more and don't spend time spooling off old tales in rumbling verse, but instead waste their time staring at those funny marks on paper).

English Is A Glorious Mess  

People who say, "Nonsense. I can teach you how to spell and decode every English word with just five rules" are absolutely full of it. English is a jumbly mess, and that's a beautiful thing, because it speaks to a wild and wooly history. For those of you who missed this day in school, here's the short version:

Around 450 AD the Angles and Saxons kick the last remains of the Roman Empire out of Britain, leaving Romanized Brits and Picts and Celts to welcome their new tribal overlords. We consider this the start of our language (the Angles now lived in Angle-land, speaking Angle-ish--- get it?) This is Old English, a language that is almost completely unrecognizable. Around 800 AD you get a bunch of invading Norse, some of whom settle and bring their language. There's a great vowel shift, when for some reason everyone starts pronouncing things differently, but the real game-changer is the Norman Conquest, after which all the classy people speak French and the vulgar low-lifes speak the descended version of Anglo-Saxon. Anglo-Saxon is relateds to German and Yiddish; French is a degraded version of Latin. Throw in all the other influences and you get a language that is patched together from many other languages, and each borrowed word brings its parent language rules with it.  And all this is beyond the natural shifting of language and the odd effects of things like the fetishizing of Latin.

That's just the overt-simplified version. For solid historical reasons, English is a mess. There's no shame in that, and I'm not sure why it's considered such a big deal to say it out  loud. Every year I would teach this history to all my 11th graders, and you could just see so  many lightbulbs go on in the room as students realized, "Hey, it's not just me!"

Bottom line: simple decoding in English is hard. Harder than decoding in other "purebred" languages. I'm not sure why some people want to insist that it isn't.

Science Is Not Magic

Just because science knows how something happens, that doesn't mean we know how to make it happen. We know a lot about the science of attraction and even love-- this does not mean that you can  just go out and make Padma Lakshmi or Brad Pitt want to marry you.

Your Feels Are Not Magic, Either

Having strong feelings about the art and love of something does not excuse you from knowing actual technique and practical principles. You can have a great vision of a painting, but you still have to know what happens when your brush pushes into certain pigments. I can play a jazz trombone solo because I have technical control (mostly) of the horn. Being able to express your feels or inspiration or instinct is not about the absence of technical knowledge, but about such mastery of technique that it doesn't get in your way (i.e. I don't have to stop to think  about what position an F is in).

Too Many Studies Are Bunk

The problem is that it's hard to determine just how well someone is reading. Every study about a particular approach to reading has to try to measure something-- but what? How well the student says the words out loud? How many details they retain? What higher-order thinky things they can apply? How many multiple choice questions they can answer correctly? And will they demonstrate these achievements immediately, with no time to reflect, or after some time (during which they may forget what theyve read).

Measurement can be hugely subject to reading bias. IOW, someone who thinks that the most important part is decoding may teach the students to decode and then measure their success by giving a test that shows how well the students can decode. But the premise-- decoding is the critical part of reading-- remains unexamined. Tests that focus on comprehension run into a different problem-- test manufacturers who decide there's just one correct way to comprehend a piece of writing.

Perhaps more importantly, standardize all you want

But There Is No Level Playing Field For Reading (Or Reading Assessment) Because A Critical Part Of Reading Is Knowing Stuff

If I am a huge fan of dinosaurs, I can read a book about dinosaurs cover-to-cover with high levels of comprehension. If all I know is football and all I know about dinosaurs is the word "dinosaur," then that book will stump me. It is far easier to decode a word that I already know or have heard.

Knowing stuff is a critical tool for reading, and no two students have the same body of knowledge. The only way to create a level field for testing is to provide excerpts that no child could possibly have prior knowledge about, and lord knows test makers have tried, but what that gets you is tests that are absurd, like a talking pineapple or asking third graders about trade patterns in ancient Turkey.

The other implication here is that an important building block for reading doesn't necessarily have as much to do with actual reading as it does with providing a student with a rich background of knowledge. Schools that have cut science or history to spend extra time drilling phonics flash cards are getting it exactly backwards.

Too Much Of Anything Is A Mistake  

Whatever philosophy one espouses, there is an extreme version of it that is just stupid. DIBELS, the test that checks student decoding skills by having them decode nonsense, is stupid. Whole Language approaches that leave students floundering to somehow absorb meaning through the pores in their fingers-- those are stupid, too.

Asserting that a student must have only one single tool in her toolbox, that even touching the other tools will somehow destroy the effectiveness of the One True Tool-- that's also stupid. And arguing for your personal One True Tool by cherrypicking only the most stupid examples from the other side is, well, stupid.

Also, while we're on the subject of stupid-- it's really hard to get somebody to read, let alone do it in a way that improves their ability, if they are exposed to reading via nothing but painful, soul-crushing, tedious, terrible drudgerious exercises. If you teach them to hate reading, it will be that much harder for them to get better at it, let alone achieve the exalted Life Long Learner status. However, it is nearly impossible to get somebody to love reading if they suck at it. Nobody loves doing things they do poorly, which means that poor readers will have to be coaxed, cajoled, bribed, pushed, encouraged, supported and even dragged through the valley of suckitude before they can learn to love reading (which means what, really? I love reading history and biography, used to love reading SF, and I hate reading technical manuals and bad pop novels). You can say that the love of reading is your instructional goal, but the pathway to that is through getting better at the skills involved.-- which will only be fruitful if that bettering instruction isn't terrible and awful and completely dismissive of the student's individual personality, skills, determination, and interests. So, no, you can't separate these two things.

Likewise, what classroom observations and research have shown time after time is that actual teachers who are actually effective teaching reading are doing some combination of a whole bunch of things. We can give students a variety of tools, and we can give them a setting that fosters growth in the use of those tools, and we can prod and encourage and provide a safe setting for the harnessing of those reading tools to the deeper intellectual tools of analysis and thinking, but as soon as we start approaching students as if they're machines in which every time press Lever X we get Result Y then we are going to accomplish less than we could have. They need the tools to break down the pieces, and they need the tools to see in those pieces a larger, richer pattern of meaning.

PS. Starting them younger and younger will do more harm than good.

Please, No Learning Engineers

If Ben Johnson is as good as his word, right now, out in Utah, a bunch of teachers are having to put up with being called "learning engineers."

Johnson is the executive director at Treeside Charter School (K-6) in Provo, Utah. This is actually Year 2 in that job; previously, he's been a world languages department chair in Tyler, the president of his own consulting group, a principal, a learning coach, and , from 1990-1997, a Spanish teacher. He got his teacher education at Brigham Young and a Doctor of Education from the University of Phoenix. When he took this job, he walked right into the middle of a scandal involving naughty legislator Lincoln Filmore, who was putting his legislator hat on along with his head-of-a-charter-management-company hat and ending up with a pocketful of taxpayer loot. The feds were involved and Johnson did some housecleaning.

Treeside Charter (motto: Nurturing the leaders, lifelong learners, innovators, and artisans of tomorrow) was "inspired" by Waldorf schools, and their "head, heart and hands" approach appeals to me (perhaps because I was in 4-H growing up). You can see a very earnest ad  for them here. On the other hand, Johnson says he's known as "the Big Hearted Genius," which, like "whacky  " or "wise" or "beloved" seems like one of those things you should never, ever call yourself.

Johnson regularly posts for Edutopia, the George Lucas Educational Foundation site, and back in June he caused a minor stir by deciding that he wanted to rethink the teacher's role. It does not get off to a great start:

That idea of the teacher as a dispenser of knowledge is not, as we know, what teachers do these days. But because so much tradition and social history are connected to the word teacher, I suggest that we give serious thought to using a different term, one that fully describes what we do as teachers. 

That first sentence is kind of sprung (teachers don't do the idea of teachers), but even untangled, there's a lot to disagree with, as Blake Harvard, The Effortful Educator pointed out in "Just Call Me Teacher," one of the better responses to Johnson. The whole "dispenser of knowledge thing" is either exactly what teachers do, or what teachers never ever did, depending on what you think "dispensing knowledge" means, exactly. If you think it means being the expert grown-up guiding the learning of the class, then yeah, that's what teachers do. If you think it means standing up in the front of the room spewing out smartitude into students like a fountain spouting into a bunch of little pails, then, no, that's not what teachers ever did.

As for the second sentence, well-- a bicycle, because a vest has no sleeves. Why exactly does the attachment of tradition and social history mean that a new word is needed? But what did Johnson come up with as a term that "fully describes" what teachers do?

Learning engineer.

Gah. SMH.

Now, his real idea, which he arrives at a bit later, is to center school culture on student learning. This places his firmly among the forward-thinking thought leaders or 1992, pushing Outcome Based Education and declaring that all lesson plans and pedagogy must be centered on what the student will learn and be able to demonstrate.

But "learning engineer"??

Speaking of tradition and social history, "engineer" comes with its own freight, like the idea that it's all about focusing on systems and processes, often involving inanimate materials and rarely focused on the needs of live humans. When it does focus on humans, it tends to treat them like meat widgets to be managed and shaped according to the desires of the system managers (see "social engineering"). Engineering is an action that you do to something, not with it.

But Johnson has high hopes.

I envision that this new title will shift our thinking away from the traditional and toward incorporating the incredible skill, planning, imagination, and creativity required to design incredibly effective learning opportunities for students. For our learning engineers, creating learning environments that inspire students to discover and apply what they learn will be a priority. 

I am betting that most teachers who think of themselves as effective teachers consider part of their daily job to be "incorporating the incredible skill, planning, imagination, and creativity required to design incredibly effective learning opportunities for students." I envision a whole lot of teachers rolling their eyes really hard when Johnson floats this whole renaming business, though I suppose the charter could be staffed mostly with first year not-actually-teachers who don't know enough about the job, so maybe Johnson is trying to explain it to them.

Maybe this is the same rethinking that replaces teachers with caches or mentors or content delivery specialists who read out of scripts or just, you know, That Live Human Helps You When The Teaching Software Glitches.

Johnson has more genius rebranding ideas. Teaching assistants (who used to be "teachers' aides") will now be "learning assistants," and "lesson plans" will now be "learning plans." The learning plan should focus on the question "what are students doing to engage their heads, their hearts, and their hands?" Johnson was in the classroom in the 90s-- he has to know that he's recycling OBE here.

Sigh. And then there's this--

Additionally, I have found that when we help students become expert with the tools of learning—often-overlooked soft skills such as analysis, critical thinking, creativity, persistence, flexibility, curiosity, and expression—they enthusiastically use them to take charge of their own learning, which also works in disrupting the traditional model of teacher.

Since when is critical thinking a "soft skill"? Since when is curiosity any kind of skill? And what does it look like when a six-year-old takes charge of her own learning? My aunt ran an open school in the late sixties. Disrupting teachers so that students can take charge is problematic in many ways, but in this case, it's double problematic because Johnson also dreams of data-discussion heavy PLCs-- but if the teachers have been disrupted and the students are in charge of their learning, exactly how will any sort of usable and comparable data be generated. And what are engineers engineering? And why does Johnson think that renaming PLCs "communities of learning engineers" inspire his teachers-- and dammit, that's what they are-- to greater "knowledge, skills and effectiveness in inspiring learning"?

Then the wrap-up:

Working to transform embedded and long-standing traditions of what a teacher is perceived to do is perhaps the most difficult thing a transformative administrator must do. 

Nope. Although, since Johnson never explains what those embedded traditions are, it's hard to be sure. But I can think of many more difficult things that an administrator, transformational or otherwise, (and why isn't he called, say, an "engineering engineer") must do. Support his teachers. Create a safe environment that fosters learning. Makes sure that his people have whatever they need to do the work.

Though part of the solution may be changing terms to include the word learning, the true cultural shift occurs, I believe, when we focus on deliberately designing learning opportunities with the mindset of an engineer.

What exactly is the "mindset of an engineer" in Johnson's view? And why, exactly, does he find teachers so inadequate, so defective that they need to pretend to be another profession entirely. Why do we need to rethink their roles, and why shouldn't they be insulted that Johnson thinks it's necessary? I have many engineers in my family, and I love them all dearly. But an engineer is literally one who works on engines, "a person who designs, builds, or maintains engines, machines, or public works." I really hope Johnson didn't go through with this as school opened up this fall. Students are not widgets, schools are not factories, education is not best served by systems designed to push widgets into place, and teachers are not learning engineers.

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.