Privatization and the Weather

Like many Trumpian flaps, the recent Alabama hurricane flap du jour directed our attention to things we probably should have already been paying attention to-- in this case, the drive to privatize the US Weather Service.

Barry Myers was the top lawyer for Accuweather, the weather service founded by his brother Joel. This article from Bloomberg Businessweek chronicles the thirty or so years that Myers spent fighting with the National Weather Service. He had a variety of complaints, not the least of which was that while Accuweather was charging clients to get weather reports, NWS was giving away that stuff for free.

It's going to be a bad day for somebody.

There are two things wrong with that argument. One is that one of the people that the NWS gives it away free to is-- Accuweather. NWS has 120 Doppler Radar positions around the country, plus the computer power to process all that information that comes in, and they do, in fact, give it away. Even if your local tv station has its own Super Eye On The Weather Sky Place weather product, chances are good that it depends on NWS data. At one point in his years of kvetching, Myers argued that it was like the US Postal Service vs. FedEx, only with the USPS delivering for free. While his analogy is a bit off, it's self-defeating in one respect-- when FedEx doesn't want to deliver your package to some remote address, it hands the package off to the USPS. Their entire business model depends on using the federally funded service to fill in the less profitable holes, because their business is built on only serving the profitable customers. Not unlike the basic business model for a charter or voucher system.

The other problem is that the NWS stuff is not free. Yes, they don't charge the users of the information, but we taxpayers have already paid for the whole operation. That is our information-- to collect it and then charge us for it again would be like, well, those times when taxpayers pay for a school building twice (once to build it and once to finance a charter buying it) and still don't own it.

If you clicked through to the article, you already know the other parallel here to education-- Myers was the Trump nominee to head up NOAA (the agency under which NWS falls) in fall of 2017. That has not gone particularly well; in the meantime, the agency is just one more that is operating without a permanent chief. They come under the purview of Wilbur Ross, another swamp dweller.

Oh, and fun trivia. Rick Santorum once tried to float a bill to force the NWS to charge for their stuff, thereby helping Accuweather compete.

So the plan was (or still is-- who knows) to have the government agency that provides an important service for all citizens headed by somebody whose allegiance is with private businesses that want to compete with the taxpayer-funded agency that provides essentially the identical service. Barry Myers, meet Betsy DeVos.

Is there anything new to learn from this? Well, Myers is still not head of the NOAA because some senators actually took a stand. So I guess that could hypothetically work, sometimes. And the silencing and attempted discrediting of actual experts seems familiar. I guess the only other lesson here for public education advocates is that it's not just us-- if the government does it, and taxpayers pay for it, somebody would like to make a buck offering a private alternative, and they would like to kneecap the government in order to do it. It's not just education.

ICYMI: No Teacher Shortage Edition (9/8)

So about forty-eight hours ago I put up a post at Forbes.com that has been blowing up. It's an interesting study in the vagaries of the interwebz-- the post (why it's important to recognize that there's not a teacher shortage) makes some points that I have made before many times, and several other bloggers have made before, but somehow this time, it found an audience. It's a reminder to keep plugging at the point you want to make (even if you feel like you're repeating yourself). And for our purposes here, it's a reminder of how important readers are to the whole process. I didn't really do anything in this post that I haven't done before; what made the difference was not me, but the readers.

So when I ask you every week to pass along the posts that speak to you, I really mean it. That's what gets these pieces out into the world.

How Charter Schools Won D.C. Politics 

Rachel Cohen is at City Paper, laying out the ugly, infuriating story of how lobbyists are spending our tax dollars to keep charters happy and unregulated.

Come As You Are   

Jose Vilson with some important start-of-year thoughts.

Almost No Education Research Is Replicated  

Inside Higher Ed reports on one more reason to remain unexcited about what education researchers report.

Enemy of Public Schools

Infuriating. One guy is traveling around the country running anti-bond campaigns because he's sure God hates public education. Really.

How Big A Mess Is the PA Charter Sector?

Big. Carol Burris at Washington Post breaks down the details of my home state's miserable charter situation.  

School District Secession Deepens Segregation

Look at a Penn State study that shows the problems behind school district secessions.

Why Don't We Have Enough Teachers  

Tim Slekar is on Wisconsin Public Radio explaining why there is no teacher shortage.  I told you I'm not the only person beating this drum. If you'd rather read than listen, try this one.

The Parable of the Teacher and the Experts  

Rick Hess often gets it wrong, but this EdWeek piece is pretty fun and painfully familiar for any teacher.

Why 2020 Dems Should Target Nonprofit Charters

When a charter destroys a beloved local landmark. Sarah Lahm with a story at Common Dreams, showing how there's big money for charter nonprofit operators-- and big losses for communities.

ALEC Legislator Retires As Charter Millionaire  

Lawmaker plus charter guy equals big bucks. From the indispensable Mercedes Schneider.

No, We Cannot Look Everything Up  

From eLearning, a reminder of the reasons that the internet doesn't excuse us from actually know stuff.

Who Gets To Use A Single Classroom  

Charter versus public school for space-- and it gets ugly.

For Teachers, the Money Keeps Getting Worse  

At the Atlantic (with their shiny new paywall limiting you to only five free articles per month), a very depressing look at teacher pay.

The Walton Plan for the Little Rock School District  

More infuriating news, this time from the Arkansas Times, in which we learn that the Walton forces have all sorts of bad ideas in mind.

Schools In Arizona Crippled By Ransomware 

Not everything is about ed reform. The problem of hackers holding district IT systems hostage is growing, and now it's shutting down school districts. From The Hill.

Excess Teacher Responsibilities Are Stealing Bonding Time With Students 

From Bored Teachers, talking about all that extra piddly baloney that gets in the way of the better parts of the job.

How To Practice Best Practices

McSweeney's comes through again with the absurdly recognizable. And for more fun, check out McSweeney's First Faculty Meeting of the Year Bingo.

The College And Career Ready Scam Continues

ESSA requires schools to pick another measure of success, and many have gone with some version of gauging college and/or career readiness, but the results, as described by EdWeek, are a "hodge podge." But here come the folks at Achieve, the same folks who brought us all the beloved Common Core, with a state by state hodge-podgy guide to just how states are measuring the Common Core compliance college and career readiness. It highlights beautifully why the whole CCR business is a scam, a snare and a delusion, a room full of smoke and mirrors, and a web of moonbeams and unicorn farts.

We're ready for what, now?

The table version really does provide a useful state-by-state compendium of who is doing what (mostly-- some states are a big ole blank). But the real fun is in the Data Explorer, a collection of hyperlinked graphics that take you to all the various measures. I'm honestly not sure who, exactly, this is for, though EdWeek Marketplace did a piece about it which suggests somebody thinks there's money to be made here.

The Data Explorer starts by laying out the challenge:

Though all states collect data on student outcomes, the measures they track differ from state to state—differences like which students are included in each indicator, which assessments are used, whether data on student subgroups are reported, and how indicators are constructed. Furthermore, the data states report are often found across a number of websites, and some states publicly report more information than others. Each of these factors makes it hard to know how well-prepared students are for their next steps after high school.

There is, of course, a big whacky assumption there, which is that knowing how well students are prepared for post-high school life is a knowable thing. Achieve settles on seven key indicators-- let's see if those indicators would be useful in determining such a thing.

4-Year Graduation Rate

This has always been a stupid piece of data, because it assumes that a student who drops out of school should count the same as a student who stumbles, repeats a year, and then gets his act together and graduates. I have enough anecdotal data (and so do most high school teachers) to know that that's just not so. I know that this is not news to anybody who spends time around young humans, but fourteen year olds are not super-mature, but then, as they get older, they sometimes figure things out. The chemistry slows down, the brain grows a few more anterooms, and they figure things out. But sometimes they take a few detours first. The notion that they are only ready for college or career if they spend exactly four years in high school first is just, well, dumb.

CCR Coursework Completion

Achieve thinks that students have completed proper CCR preparation if they take math and ELA courses that are aligned with Common Core "state-adopted CCR standards." The problem here is, which we will return to a few more times, is that there's no shred of research, evidence, support, or anything other than David Coleman's dreams that says that the CCR standards are aligned with life or college or careers or anything.

9th Grade on Track

Checking to see if 9th graders have enough credits to be on track for graduation is just another way of playing the four-year completion card, and it's equally balonified. I mean, it's a useful piece of data to have, but it doesn't tell you anything about CCR stuff.

CCR Assessments

This is based on the percentage of students who score at the CCR level on the Big Standardized Test. There are so many things wrong here. First, the CCR level is, of course, refigured by the states every year, and that refiguring has absolutely nothing to do with anybody saying, "Studies show that to be career ready this year, students need to score fifty points higher on the BS Test." But of course that cut score can float around year to year because nobody has any idea at all what the relationship between cut scores and future CCR might be. Well, that's not true-- actually, as Jay Greene (University of Arkansas Department of Education Reform) has pointed out repeatedly, there is ample evidence that there is no connection at all between BS Test scores and what happens to the student in life. In other words, CCR assessments, tied as they are to the standards, which are in turn tied to nothing but Yeti breaths, have no useful role in measuring college and career readiness.

CCR Measures

What we might call the kitchen junk drawer of CCR measures. AP classes, CTE courses of study, apprenticeships, "military readiness" (so, high school ROTC or a good score on the ASVAB?) and whatever else states have come up with. This indicator actually contains some useful ideas. Have you studied welding for three years at your tech school, done a work study with a fabrication plant, and passed some welding certification tests? Then you probably really are ready for a career in welding. Congratulations, and feel free to ignore every other indicator listed here.

Earning College Credits In High School

This includes both taking actual college courses and earning a 3+ on an AP exam. It's no guarantee (particularly since so many colleges will tell you not to bother taking an AP exam in the field you plan to actually pursue), but at least this one isn't flat out stupid.

Postsecondary Enrollment

This indicator rises to the level of the Kafka-esque. Remember, part of the entire argument in favor of Common Core college and career ready standards was that students were arriving at college unprepared to do the work there. In other words, it was turning out that getting into college was no guarantee that they were actually ready for college. So it makes no sense to use the number of students enrolling in college as an indicator of college readiness. Well, unless the original argument was just baloney.

For The Love Of God, Please Stop

Look, it would be a great thing if we could tell if students were ready for college or career. Mostly it's a bell curve-- some students we know are absolutely ready for anything, and some are not ready to do anything. In between, there's a vast grey area.

In that grey area, one of our actual jobs as educators is to help students figure out what college-or-career future best suits them, which one is the one they are, or can be, ready for.

But the notion that any standardized measure can tell us that a student is ready for any future, from carpentry to brain surgery, from deep sea welding to jazz drummer, from majoring in art at Harvard to studying accounting at community college-- well, that's just stupid. There is an infinite number of futures ahead of students, and there is simply no way to measure whether or not they're ready for every single one of them. "College and Career Readiness" is, in some ways, an excellent replacement term for "Common Core" because CCR more clearly captures the one-size-fits-all-ness" of the whole exercise. Folks who pursue this as a legitimate measure of education reveal a tiny vision, a failure to imagine all the rich, varied futures that await our students and the marvelously winding paths they will take to get there.

I get it. I understand the parent impulse that makes you want to know with certainty, to have a guarantee of ironclad knowledge that your child is, as Arne Duncan often put it, "on track for success." I totally get wanting that. But you can't have it, any more than you can have a clear guaranteed prediction that your child have a happy marriage or a nice house. All you can do is give her as many tools as possible, as many chances as possible, as much support as possible, and a system that doesn't short-change her by focusing on meagre piddly goals like "score well on this standardized math and reading test." She had have an education that helps her understand the world and her best self and how to be fully human in the world, not standardized test prep. Better that her school system focus on giving her that kind of educational experience rather than focus on giving government officials and education thought leaders the kind of paperwork and reports that they want.

What Should Be Our Hot Topics For The New Year?

It's the beginning of a new school year, and a good moment to take stock of the major policy issues, controversies and problems that we can expect to be (or ought to be) wrestling with in the coming year. Which issues are on the rise, which have lost a little steam and which should we be addressing?

Common Core

For years, the Common Core Standards were the hot button issue. Widespread pushback, from both left and right, changed that. The original Common Core dream was that every student in every school in every city in every state would be studying essentially the same things at roughly the same time. That dream is dead.

But the standards themselves live on. Some states have modified them lightly and given them an assumed name to hide under, but they're still there. Other states have promised to stamp them out, but it remains to be seen if they can really accomplish the task. Much of the discussion of standards is still held in plain sight, under the phrase "college and career ready." But on the school and classroom level, many teachers have long since adapted the standards to fit their own professional judgment.

The standards are still a presence in education, but not the hot-button issue they once were.

High Stakes Testing

High stakes standardized tests have been with us for a while, but the federal push for Common Core gave HST a tremendous boost. Education reform advocates leaned hard on the notion that test results could be used to make staffing and salary decisions for teachers, or even evaluate college teacher programs. None of that turned out to be actually possible; test results were inconsistent and unreliable, and converting test scores to a value-added measure turned out to be a pipe dream. In the meantime, teachers and parents have complained about the amount of time spent prepping for the Big Standardized Test.

Some states are backing away from at least the graduation exam version of the test. Pennsylvania repeatedly postponed their Keystone graduation exam requirement and now allows a variety of gradation readiness assessments; New Hampshire has been experimenting with a shift to Performance Based Learning. Ohio's attempt to shift graduation requirements under guidance of business representatives is resulting in a patchwork of shifting requirements over the next few years. Several states are toying with the use of the SAT or ACT as a new graduation exam. So while many states are looking to draw back from a high stakes test, the search for an alternative is a bit messy, depending on which state you live in. Meanwhile, there's no real respite in sight for elementary students.

Personalized Learning

Nobody knows exactly what it is, but personalized learning is seen as one of the more promising sectors for businesses and investors in education. Depending on the form it takes, it may appear under a variety of other names (performance based learning, competency based education, etc) and drenched in a thick sauce of marketing jargon. Watch for terms like "artificial intelligence" as a clue that your child might be learning through algorithm-selected computer activities. Gates, Zuckerberg and Jobs are all throwing big piles of money at personalized learning, and opening up education to more digitizing also means tapping into a goldmine of data, so expect many different vendors to turn up plugging their product and extolling the wonders of personalized learning--whatever it is.

The Parallel School System

Charter schools get most of the attention, but vouchers, scholarship tax credits, and education savings accounts are all part of a mechanism that has been built to divert funding from public schools into a parallel school system that is privately owned and operated. One can argue that the debates over these are overblown, given the small part of the sector they encompass (charters enroll a little over 6% of all U.S. students). Charter growth has actually stalled, though Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is more partial to voucher style reforms. But in some local districts, the cost of school choice programs has created major financial crises. Trying to run multiple parallel school systems with the money previously used for just one system is taking a toll on American education. We are starting to see state leaders push back; Governor Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania just this week announced that he would push some charter reform through via executive order.

Related to this, but much less discussed, is the parallel staffing system set up to feed and advocate for the parallel school system. Much comment has been made about how Teach for America provides just a few weeks of training for its teachers; less note is made that after just two years in the classroom, TFA grads may become policy "experts," opening charters, starting education businesses, doing ed reform advocacy, or even taking high level leadership positions such as superintendent or even state education chief. Other programs like the Broad Academy or the Relay Graduate School of Education turn out educational leaders even though they are founded and run by people who have little educational training.

In many ways, education is suffering from a notion that has long been causing trouble in the private sector--that if you're a really great manager or CEO, it's not necessary to know anything about the industry in which you're working. Expect continued flare-ups of this conflict on the local, state and national level.

Equity

Decades after Brown v. Board, school segregation is still a problem (read here, here and here), not just because of the segregation of students, but because of the segregation of resources that follows it. Public schools are bad; charter schools are worse. And while a few places have addressed the problem successfully, mostly the education system is stumped. There's work to be done with how school district boundaries are drawn, but we know full well that segregation can occur within a single building, simply by blocking students of color from resources and higher level classes. The issue deserves to be on the front burner of education policy discussion, and the Democratic primary has brought some attention to it, but time will tell if we have the will to really work on it.

Taking Care of the Littles

The biggest crisis, the most major struggle in education right now, may well be the education of the Pre-K through grade 3 crowd.

It has been years since we first started saying the kindergarten is the new first grade, but we haven't fully reckoned with the implications of that shift. Ramped up kindergarten has several causes. One was the backwards scaffolding of the Common Core. Imagine that your goal was to have students bench press a hundred pounds at graduation. To scaffold that, you figure that they can add five pounds to their load in each preceding year of school--the end result is telling 5-year-olds to bench press forty pounds. Backwards scaffolding works poorly if one disregards the developmental stages of the youngest students, and that has been a criticism of Common Core all along.

High stakes testing has also pushed schools to move academics into lower grades. "We don't have time for recess," many administrators have declared. "We've got to get them ready for that fourth grade test now!" Several states have made passing a standardized reading test a requirement for moving into fourth grade. The argument is that third grade reading skills are correlated with later success, but there is little evidence that retention does any good. Meanwhile, 8-year-olds are facing the pressure of taking a single test that could flunk them for the year.

There are other signs the push to get academics into the early years is out of control. Some states are now offering cyber-school Pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds. We are seeing increasing problems related to making small children sit in chairs at a desk for long hours. Writers are repeatedly publishing articles about the importance of play for children because somehow we are having an argument about whether a 5-year-old should be working on papers (or a computer) at a desk most of her day. Some states, like Florida, are wringing their hands over the huge number of littles who are testing as "not ready" for kindergarten.

If most of your students are testing as "not ready" for kindergarten, the problem lies with your kindergarten program and not the children. Not that small children can't learn--they are essentially learning machines. But this failure to build developmentally appropriate education for the early years is going to affect an entire generation across all dividing lines. Here's hoping that we do a better job of addressing it over the next year.

Are There Others?

Sure, we could talk about the trouble folks are having filing teacher vacancies-- but that would require some honest reflection by policy makers and leaders. And data mining remains an issue inside the schoolhouse and out. But the list is the one I originally cranked out, and I'm inclined to stick with it for now. Feel free to discuss.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

Harry Potter and Vouchers

The Harry Potter books were back in the news for the six zillionth instance of a ban placed on the Rowling classic novels. The books have been repeatedly banned since they were published, usually because conservative religious folks think the books will normalize wizards and warlocks and witchcraft, but Reverend Dan Reehil, a pastor at St. Edward Catholic School, cites that classic argument, but then ratchets things up a bit:

"These books present magic as both good and evil, which is not true, but in fact a clever deception,” he explained. “The curses and spells used in the books are actual curses and spells; which when read by a human being risk conjuring evil spirits into the presence of the person reading the text."

The books hit 500 million copies sold in 2018, so it's really, really remarkable that we haven't heard anything about this. With half ab billion copies of conjuring spells out there that can be activated just by reading, it's amazing that the whole world hasn't looked like the third act of Ghostbusters for the last two decades.

In the meantime, it seems unlikely that the Rev. Reehik's unilateral removal of the book from the school library (he apparently didn't consult staff) will serious affect any child's ability to get her hands on a copy.

The story is a slow news day chuckle. Except that I want to point something out.

St. Edward is located in Nashville. And Tennessee just okayed an education savings account program, a version of a school voucher. That means that parents can get a chunk of money from the state which they can then use to withdraw their child from public school and then enroll her in a private school. A private school like, say, St. Edward.

That's what vouchers get you-- a system by which your tax dollars can go to support not just a religious school (which is where voucher dollars tend to end up),  but the kind of religious school where they ban Harry Potter because reading the books might conjure up evil spirits. Rev. Reehik didn't give his staff or students or parents a choice. Once the voucher program goes into effect, taxpayers don't get a choice, either.

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.