Solnit, Books, Rand, and Young Readers

If you are not a regular follower of Brain Pickings, you should be. Thoughtful and erudite and really, really human, the site has for over a decade presented Maria Popova's essays spun off the works of others. I've met many authors I was glad to know on her site.

This post focuses on author Rebecca Solnit and A Velocity of Being, a collection of 121 illustrated letters written to young readers. Periodically something wakes up my teacher brain, and like an amputees phantom limb it leaps up to say, "Ooo! You should get that for the classroom" before I remember that I know longer have a classroom into which I can out such things (I do, however, have children and grandchildren.) It's about why we read and how books transform us, and Popova quotes from Solnit's letter about how books helped through a difficult childhood.

The books of my childhood were bricks, not for throwing but for building. I piled the books around me for protection and withdrew inside their battlements, building a tower in which I escaped my unhappy circumstances. There I lived for many years, in love with books, taking refuge in books, learning from books a strange data-rich out-of-date version of what it means to be human. Books gave me refuge. Or I built refuge out of them, out of these books that were both bricks and magical spells, protective spells I spun around myself. They can be doorways and ships and fortresses for anyone who loves them.

"A strange data-rich out-of-date version of what it means to be human" might be my new favorite explanation of what literature can offer.

Coincidentally, the other thing I stumbled across the morning was an old National Review reprint of Whittaker Chambers' blistering review of Atlas Shrugged. It's a review that can be enjoyed simply as a writing exercise in excoriation. It's hard to pick from a review that opens by calling the book "remarkably silly," but let's try this:

So much radiant energy might seem to serve a eugenic purpose. For, in this story as in Mark Twain’s, “all the knights marry the princess”–though without benefit of clergy. Yet from the impromptu and surprisingly gymnastic matings of the heroine and three of the heroes, no children–it suddenly strikes you–ever result. The possibility is never entertained. And, indeed, the strenuously sterile world of Atlas Shrugged is scarcely a place for children. You speculate that, in life, children probably irk the author and may make her uneasy. How could it be otherwise when she admiringly names a banker character (by what seems to me a humorless master-stroke): Midas Mulligan? You may fool some adults; you can’t fool little boys and girls with such stuff–not for long. They may not know just what is out of line, but they stir uneasily.

Chambers acknowledges that Rand dislikes much of what he dislikes, yet he shows no mercy for the book. His basic criticism is that Rand populates the book with simplified, unreal flat characters, "without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly."  In short, there is little to see in Rand's work about what it means to be human.

It is easy in the ed biz to get caught up in things like the reading wars and test results and arguments about whether or not Pat can read and if not why not. And in our very utilitarian reformster-created status quo, some lapse far too quickly to the discussion of reading as a set of Very Useful Skills that will make children employable meat widgets for employers on some future day, and therefor we shall have drill and practice and exercises to build up reading muscles for that far off day.

"But let's not kill the lifelong love of reading," is a common reply, and one that I'm not entirely comfortable with. It's fuzzy and reductive. I can love peanut butter and jelly, but that doesn't really open any windows on the world; I don't love science, but understanding it at least a little has enriched my world. The act of reading is wonderful in a sense, like looking through a pane of glass in an otherwise dull and impenetrable wall. It's magical, yes-- but what's really uplifting and life-changing is what we can see on the other side.

The reading technocrats and pure phonics police are focused on the future, and even the lifelong love of reading camp is looking forward. Both run the risk of forgetting that reading is useful for children right now, this year, this minute, as a way of finding answers to fundamental questions-- how does the world work, and what does it mean to be fully human, and how can I be in the world? Reading gives children access to answers beyond their own immediate experience which is always limited and all-too-often, as in Solnit's case, severely limited by the control of adults who have trouble working out answers of their own. In the crush to provide reading instruction that will benefit children someday, we shouldn't overlook the ways in which reading will benefit them right now. Both reading science and lifelong love camps stand at the window and say some version of, "Let's look at this window. Let's examine it and study it and polish it and enter into a deeper relationship with it," while anxious children hop up and down on their toes and beg to look through it.

Solnit likes the wall metaphor. I'm fond of windows. You can pick your own favorite. I just want to argue that we not get carried away by either the desire to reduce reading instruction to hard science or fuzzy emotions, that we not forget that there's an actual reason for children to read, and that the reason exists today, right now. Don't get caught up on the trees in the larger reading forest. The children are small people, but that doesn't mean they aren't working on big questions. School should help.

DeVosian NAEP Nonsense

I wasn't going to write about NAEP for any number of reasons, but then I happened to look at Betsy DeVos's comments on this year's results and, well, this whole blood pressure thing happened. So to get my numbers back down, I'm going to talk through the nonsense she issued forth, notable for its disconnection from reality, its devotion to public education bashing, and, most of all, its bizarre display of an amnesia-fueled dismissal of responsibility for any hand in the results of the Nation's Report Card.

DeVos declares that we have a "student achievement crisis" and even if you correctly read "student achievement" as "scores on a single standardized reading and math test," getting to "crisis" is a long leap. Thousands of kids taken from their parents and stuck in cages is a crisis. California on fire is a crisis. Scores on a single standardized math and reading test not going up the way you'd hoped is not a crisis. But then we get this baloney:

For more than three decades, I—and many others—have said that America's antiquated approach to education fails too many kids.

No. For three decades you and many others have used aggressive chicken littling as leverage to remake education in your preferred image. You said, "Let us have our way and NAEP scores will shoot up like daisies in springtime." Do not even pretend to suggest that you have somehow been hammering fruitlessly on the doors of education, wailing your warnings and being ignored. The current status quo in education is yours. You built it and you own it and you don't get to pretend that's not true as a way to avoid accountability for the results.

She tosses out some anecdotes which, who knows, might even be true, illustrating the horrid state of public education and the frustrations of parents.

Blame the "experts" who assure us each year that American education is "doing OK." That our schools are "good enough."

Who are those people? Reformsters have been yammering about these mythical beasts, these Deep State educationers who have been insisting that the state of US education is awesome. I don't know who they are. The closest I can get are the people who have ben saying for decades that we are doing a pretty good job given the lack of support and the inadequacy of funding and the screwing over of schools in poor districts.

Our Nation's Report Card shows that two thirds of American students can't read at grade level. Two out of three!

Nope. The results show that two thirds are not at NAEP proficiency level, which is considerably above grade level. She is simply wrong here, a fairly stunning level of wrong for a US Secretary of Education.

DeVos tosses out some more straw people who, she says, will say the results are super-okay so that she can clap back:

In reality, scores have not improved enough. Achievement has not improved enough. And our children continue to fall further and further behind their international peers.

Let me digress for just a moment to question the notion that school test scores m,ust somehow crawl ever upward like stock prices, as if students steadily evolve and improve year after year, as if our genetic stock is somehow improved. Baloney.

But the assertion that we are falling further behind international peers has no particular support (no other nation is taking America's Report Card tests) but even so, so what? What decline in our natinal fortunes can be traced to low standardized test scores. Do we have high-priced inadequate health care because of test scores? Did we have a corporate-created recesion because of test scores? What the hell difference does it actually make?

She then rattles off a list of school districts that are having troubles, like Harrisburg and Providence, but she has the giant brass ovaries to finish with Detroit, as if Detroit is not a freakin' educational nightmare because of policies that she personally rammed through the Michigan education system. She mentions suing for the right to read which, yeah, three years ago happened and the state successfully argued that they don't have to provide adequate education-- just something called school.

She tells some more stories, including one about a father who discovered that his son was an honored high school grad who couldn't read. N one of these stories feature the kind of details that would allow for fact checking.

Now she will point fingers. Education spending has increased in this country (she knows because, I don't know, avoiding paying taxes gets harder every year). It all goes to bureaucracy and administrators  and assistant superintendents and a list that does not include failed charters or bogus voucher programs or even successful charters that pay administrators far more than public systems do. She cites with horror that taxpayers have spent over a trillion dollars trying to fix public education, which I guess is a more impressive figure than the one billion that taxpayers had wasted on failed and fraudulent charter schools.

So, she concludes, we shouldn't spend any more money on school buildings. She throws out the Einstein insanity, because she still holds to the false belief that US education has stayed in place for a hundred years. Oh, and she wants us to think of how much of this money could have been spent on teacher salaries, because that's a thing she's really keen on.

She does get one thing right:

No amount of spending can bring about good results from bad policy.

Unfortunately, she does not mean all the failed reform ideas of the past twenty-some years, because in Betsy's Bizarro worlds, those policies are the product of the same Deep State "Big ED" group of people, as if everything from NCLB to Common Core to charter baloney and voucher foolishness hasn't been strenuously fought by folks in education, as if ed reform itself hasn't been the product of meddling rich amateurs many of whom are DeVos's friends and one of whom is, in fact, Betsy DeVos. Nope. Somehow, in this new alternate history, they weren't there.

She moves on to positive examples. Mississippi's reading score went up, which could be for any number of reasons but probably just one, and she is soooooooo close to figuring it out.

The idea was simple: students who can't read, can't learn. And if a student can't read by third grade, a student won't learn. So now, all Mississippi's third graders must demonstrate that they can at least read at grade level before advancing to fourth grade.

In other words, students who will do poorly on the NAEP given in fourth grade are kept out of fourth grade.This is like keeping all the short kids hidden in a back room on measuring day and then announcing that your student average height has gone up. This may be the part where my blood pressure medication threw up its hands in defeat.

Then it's Florida.

"Students there outperform nearly every other state," she says, and no, no they don't. Florida uses the same "hide the third grader trick" and has the advantage of starting in the basement for all growth measures. The rest of their policies range from disastrous to damaging. They are well on their way to completely dismantling public education, though, so they will be oft-referenced by folks like DeVos who want to see the same thing. And Florida did not do well this time.

Next comes her pitch for privatization, currently branded as "freedom." She wants to see states flex their ESSA-endowed freedom, and she wants to see the USED go away. She is anti-bulding. She wants to see more of a whole bunch of reformster ideals that have flourished in the past decade, and yet, somehow, here we are with unimpressive NAEP scores and an ever-increasing gap between the top and the bottom and Detroit and Milwaukee, loaded with all her favorite choiciness, bringing up the NAEP rear. None of Big Reform's ideas has panned out, and yet, Betsy "Einstein" DeVos wants us to do more of the same. And here comes the big finish:

If we rediscover that Founding principle, if we embrace education freedom, American students can achieve, American students can compete, American students will lead, and America will win.

Good Lord, what the hell does that even mean? Compete with whom? Win what? And since when were school vouchers a Founding principle? And can we stop pretending that the NAE$P scores aren't related to policies that reformsters have been pushing for the last twenty years? And now I need to take another pill and lie down.

PA: A Chance To Improve Teacher Evaluation

No sooner had I written about taking back teacher evaluation, then a note crossed my desk about SB 751 and HB 1607.

Pennsylvania's teacher evaluation system is currently pretty lousy. There is nominal commitment to the Danielson model, a time-consuming pre- and post- observation process that involves a big bunch of online paperwork and Q & A answering, a cumbersome process involving Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) that-- well, it might be a stretch to say that nobody really understands SLOs, but I think it's fair to say that how SLOs play out for teachers depends an awful lot on how your local administration interprets the process.

And after you suffer through all that, your evaluation score still depends a lot on scores on the Big Standardized Test (in the Commonwealth, that's PSSAs for elementary and Keystones for secondary).  Your school gets a rating (SPP/Future Ready Index) that is about 90% test score based (the numbers are massaged a couple of different ways then added back together). If you teach a tested subject, you get another little jolt of test score magic. After everything is all factored together, you'll find that you are somewhere in the acceptable middle. All PA administrators are apparently required by law to keep repeating, "Nobody lives in distinguished. You just visit." The state doesn't want a whole bunch of awesome teachers for some reason, but the practical result is a bunch of teachers who get to have one or two peak years and thereafter look like they went back to slacking off.

Currently evaluation is about 50% observation, and and the rest a combination of processed and reprocessed test scores (i.e. your SPP), plus, in some cases, your SLO.

Because the testing is weighted so heavily, high-poverty schools are at a disadvantage. And the SPP (which is morphing into the Future Ready PA Index) is largely test-score based, which means math and reading scores, which means every teacher in the system who doesn't teach those subjects is being evaluated on them anyway. Not that the state is very forthcoming about this-- here is how Pennsylvania explain the computing of school ratings on its FAQ:

Q: What is the source of the data used in the calculations? Who performs the calculations?
A: All data comes from PDE’s authoritative data sources such as PSSA results from Data Recognition Corporation, Bureau of Assessment and Accountability, Bureau of Special Education, Bureau of Career and Technical Education, Education Names and Addresses (EdNA), Pennsylvania Information Management System (PIMS), Pennsylvania Value-Added Assessment System (PVAAS) results from SAS, Inc., Advanced Placement (AP), SAT results from the College Board, and ACT results from ACT, Inc.

It's always a bad sign when your own FAQ page is dodging the question. SPP replaces AYP and is becoming Future Ready PA Index, with none of those changes actually involving a change of much more than rhetoric. FRP is more up-to-date gobble-dee-gook, but it's still mostly math and reading scores. Like SPP, it gives a few points for things like AP classes offered and AP tests taken (way to go, College Board marketing department).

SB 751 and HB 1607 would improve this in several ways.

The student scores on a Big Standardized Test (which students have no stake in because the legislature keeps losing its nerve about making test results a student graduation requirement, and may let them substitute something else) would be cut. The observation would be bumped up to 70%. Plus, everyone can be distinguished; no more just visiting for just a few.

The old system said that if you hit two "needs improvement" within a decade, you went to the naughty list; the proposal says it would take two low scores within four years. That maters because PA actually did away with FILO, saying that "unsatisfactory" teachers must be laid off first. The number of unsatisfactory-rated teachers in PA has always been small (usually a couple hundred out of 130,000-ish).

The Senate bill passed in June while the House bill is languishing in committee. If you're in PA, you might want to give someone a holler about that. The proposal is not perfect, and it doesn't solve the "my principal is a jerk" problem, but at least it gets us further away from the foolishness of a science teacher being evaluated on math and reading test results.

For This Blog, Another Mile Marker

Some time in the last couple of days, this blog hit the 8 million views mark.

I mention this mostly to make one point-- if you wonder whether or not anybody else cares about this stuff, the answer is yes-- a whole bunch of people. It has been one of the most common reactions I've had here-- "I thought I was crazy, that I was the only person who could see what was happening." So, again, I say, you are not.

This blog has connected me with a whole country full of people who care about public education and who are upset about the various assaults upon it, a whole world of people who think education is important and that getting it right really matters. And it's another example of how this whole thing works. The corporate disruptors of education are amplified by money--piles of it. The members of the resistance are amplified by each other--I owe my audience to people who have pushed my writing out into the world. I'm grateful and humbled by the audience that has grown for this blog that started mostly so I could blow off steam.

I once wrote that the resistance meets on weekends, and that's still true. It's also true that most on line "communities" have a shelf life of about two years-- many of the people who were writing and reading when I started are now on to other endeavors. And of course there are those whose gift is activism and activation, who get their work done out on the street. It's a big busy group working in a hundred different ways, and it has been having an effect, shaping the conversation about education and creating a landscape in which casual lying about ed reform is no longer easy (when was the last tie someone tried to tell us that teachers wrote the Common Core). The original reformster approach was to try to have this entire conversation without us--without teachers, parents, supporters of pub lic education. While that still may be the dream for some, it's no longer a possibility.

So for me personally, eight million is another mile marker. But for the support of public education, t's just one more small sign that a bunch of committed individuals have stood in the path of mountains of money aimed at changing the whole premise of education in the US, and we've made a difference. So thank you for being part of this, and thank you for making me a part of this as well.

Now back to work.

CAP Wants The Feds To Boost Charters

The Center for American Progress is supposedly a left-tilted thinky tank, but when it comes to education, they really love corporate reform. Here on this blog, I literally ran out of ways to title sa post "CAP is still working hard to push common core" (seriously-- just use the search bar in that upper left corner).

CAP became a little rudderless when Hillary Clinton's candidacy failed; till then it had served as a holding tank for Clinton staffers. But they're still plugging away to throw their weight behind neoliberal corporate education reform disruption.

Take this recent piece from Neil Campbell. He's a "Director, Innovation" whose expertise is K-12 education. His focus is personalized [sic] learning, charter schools and "effective use of student data." Campbell came from Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education (2years) because A) all the best progressives come from the Bush camp and B) in the last decade, roughly three people have become new figures in the corporate reformster movement--everyone else just keeps cycling between the various groups. Campbell also worked at USED under Arne Duncan (3 years), did some consulting free lancing, and further back we find him as a consultant with the Boston Consulting Group. He studied economics, political science, and business administration--oh, and he interned at Lowes. So the basis for his "expertise" in K-12 is... a mystery. Actually, the big mystery is how Duncan hired him with nothing but the BCG gig, the Lowe's internship, and two years as manager at something call (r)evolution under his belt. I'm betting there's a story there.

His role at CAP involves some fancy juggling. On the one hand, he has written some pieces with strong opposition to the Trump/DeVos administration. On the other hand, he's been pushing charters since he arrived at CAP, mostly claiming they'll be the great equalizer.

So here he is last week, sticking up for the federal Charter Schools Program. You may remember the CSP as a long-standing federal program used to give entrepreneurs start-up money to get into the charter school business. You may also remember the CSP as the program that has thrown away a billion dollars on charter waste and fraud, including charter businesses that closed quickly or never even opened. This is a program with some serious oversight and accountability problems.

But Campbell does not want to end the program nor tighten it up. H woiuld like to "modernize" it, by which he appears to mean broaden the sorts of charter business that CSP throws money toward, "to reflect the current strengths and challenges of the charter sector." Yes, "challenges" is a great word when you don't want to admit any failures or weaknesses in your program. But what does Campbell want to see?

In addition to grants to open new schools and facilities financing assistance, the CSP should reflect a balanced approach to charter school policy focused on encouraging the smart growth of excellent schools, improving the quality of existing charter schools, and confronting challenges in the charter sector. Using this approach, federal policymakers can support states and local communities in reaching the goal of public schools having a good seat for every child.

The last sentence makes no sense unless Campbell wants to argue that charter schools are public schools. They aren't. The rest of this... well...

What the heck is "smart growth"?

It appears to involve a couple  of proposed factors. There should be "community-wide analyses" to figure out what kind of programs the community wants or needs. It should apply "an equity lens" in order to provide programs for underserved students--for instance, dual-language or career and technical education, because CAP has been consulting through a time machine and flashing back to the days when we thought CTE programs were for low-achieving students and poor kids.

As further part of smart growth, the CSP should help push unified enrollment systems. One application good for the whole "eco-system," public and charter both. Charters like this for several reasons. It helps foster the perception that they are part of and equal to the public schools, and it automatically gives them a larger pool of customers to select from. The benefits to a public school from such a unified application system are basically non-existent.

Finally, in the smart department Campbell wants--well, it's a little hard to decipher, because he has a great command of bureaucratese. But it looks like he also wants to throw money at fledgling charter management organizations and make existing charters eligible for some more federal largesse. I am not sure why this is smart.

Help existing charter schools improve.

"Researching the impact that charter schools have on student outcomes is challenging." Oh, there's that word again. What he means is that charter supporters are having a ard time coming up with any compelling research to show charters doing any better than public schools. Which has created a real marketing challenge, both in marketing charter businesses and in marketing the policies that support them.

And what he doesn't mention is that virtually nobody is doing the research that matters-- are the results from charter schools worth the many costs to the public schools in the same community?

Charters have "marked variability" in performance, and Campbell notes that one response to that variability has been to invest in the "successful" schools. As a former FEE-ster, he should already know that corporate charter fans consider this a feature, not a bug. Free market competition sorts out the "winners" and "losers," identifiable by how much money they're getting. But what he's proposing doesn't really have anything to do with that.

The CSP should fund special ed consortia between district and charter schools. Which sounds a l;ot like "solve the problem of charters that won't/can't handle students with special needs by 'teaming up' with public schools to manage that load." The CSP should fund charter consortia to help them achieve economies of scale so they can save money ordering stuff. And the CSP should fund dstribution of curricular resources from super duper charters. I'm not sure we need to bother with this one; I have yet to see a charter that had discovered anything about education that folks didn't already know.

Note that there really isn't anything here about strengthening weak charters.

Confronting those darn "challenges" in the charter school biz.

Campbell has noticed that the charter business includes some "bad actors" (go search #anotherdayanothercharterscandal on Twitter) and those bad guys might be sullying the charter brand. So maybe there should be a few more regulations, like banning compensation for student recruitment. Families shouldn't have to pick a school without "receiving high-pressure sales pitches from people with money on the line." Again, a former FEE guy should know better-- everyone involved in a charter has money on the line because a modern corporate charter school is a business. But I think he just means "no working on commission."

There should also be clear rules against self-enrichment through real estate or other self-dealing shenanigans. It is not clear to me how CSP, which is busy handing out money to charters that aren't even operational yet, can enforce such a rule. But he also says the school's board should retain control, not the management organization which--I mean, you're hiring them to manage the school. How does that even work?

Conclusion

"Do that stuff." It's a pretty simple conclusion.

There are two things to notice about this proposal. Okay, three. Four if I remind you that all of this CSP largesse is funded exclusively by public taxpayer dollars.

First, this is from a supposedly lefty thinky tank, but then entire piece would be perfectly at home on the old FEE site or at the uber-righty Center for Education Reform. I can't think of anyone in the reformster biz who would look at this and say, "Wow, that's just too far left for our blood." That's because it's not particularly progressive at all.

Second, this is about widening access at the trough. Why offer free federal money just to start-ups when you can use it to help feed existing charter businesses.

Third, there's something weirdly "full circle" about this piece. When modern charters kicked down the education door, they did so by declaring that students needed to be rescued from failing public schools, and they needed to be rescued Right Now, so let's have no talk about taking measures to improve public education and certainly no more money because we gave you losers enough money already. Now that charters have failed to revolutionize the actual educating of students, it's suddenly  give them more time, give them more money, give them help in dealing with their "challenges," and a dozen other arguments that were soundly rejected back when they were proposed in support of public education.

Finally (this is just a bonus thing), it is past time for professional reformists with no actual education experience but an uncanny ability to bounce from one reformy group to another-- it's past time for these folks to just take a seat and hush. And I don't know what exactly CAP's issues portfolio is aimed at these days, but they need to just back away from education. They've been too wring for too long.

ICYMI: Nearly Spooky Edition (10/26)

Here's the reading for the week. Remember to pass it on.

School Choice Has Not Cured Philadelphia's Ailing System  

The Inquirer takes a look at choice in Philly and the various problems it hasn't fixed.

The History of Privatization  

Talking Points Memo takes a look a privatization across a series of articles, including public education.

Teach For America Will Not Save Us  

Larry Lee blogs about one of the "solutions" that will not help with Alabama's teacher shortage.

How To Reduce the Toxicity of Teen Girl Social Media Use  

Some good ideas for blunting the impact of social media on teens. Pretty sure this would work for boys, too.

Could Betsy DeVos Cost Trump the Election  

Jennifer  Berkshire has made a few trips to Michigan, and this time she brought back an interesting angle on 2020 elections for the New Republic. To know DeVos is....well, not to love her, exactly, and that could well be cutting into the GOP base.

College Board Under Fire for Selling Student Data  

No this isn't an old article from one of the other six zillion times the College Board has caught grief for monetizing young humans. This time it's Non Profit Quarterly noting their well-earned troubles.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn Pushes for USED To Move To Tennessee  

Okay, it's not going to happen, but it's an intriguing little proposal.

DeVos Held In Contempt By Court  

Yes, you've already heard about this. But don't you want to read about it one more time?

City Fund Looking To Buy Elections  

Chalkbeat reports that one of the newer reformster groups is throwing large piles of money at local school board elections. Because democracy is just so damned inconvenient.

Taking Back Teacher Evaluations

There's a slowly-rising tide of writing out there focusing on principals and evaluations, quietly returning focus to the idea of making evaluations meaningful.

It's a welcome change, because the status quo for the past over-a-decade has been the junk that disruptors stuck us with, in which teacher "evaluation" meant "slap some Big Standardized Test scores together and call that the teacher evaluation." As many folks pointed out repeatedly, this is a super-crappy way to evaluate teachers. And worse, reformsters were insistent that these crappy evaluations should be used to make employment decisions. Fake junk papers like TNTP's oft-referenced "Widget Effect" were used to justify the idea that schools should be firing teachers whose students got low test scores, and only paying good salaries to teachers whose students get high scores,  and if we could get rid of "tenure" and FILO and just fire our way to excellence then education would be saved.

This was a stupid idea. It was always stupid, it's still stupid, and I look forward to the day when it's like polyester bell-bottoms and pet rocks and people look back at it and ask, "How did anyone ever think this was anything except stupid."

Sadly, that day has not yet arrived. Still, some writers are starting to suggest that teacher evaluations could be reclaimed as useful tools for principals to use to help teachers do better work.

Take, for instance, this piece from the ever-stodgy Education Week, supported in part by the ever-reformy John Arnold Foundation and written by Denise Superville, an assistant editor at EdWeek. "8 Ways to Make Teacher Evaluations Meaningful and Low-Stress" is almost like a relic from another time-line where BS Tests aren't fetishized and "getting rid of bad teachers" is not the primary purpose of evaluation. The list has some good advice.

The first one is actually the most important and the most subversive. What she writes is "Understand your evaluation tool" but what she means is "comply with the state's paperwork but otherwise ignore them." Collect data and "use it to devise an action plan that you, as principal, can take to help your teachers move to the next level." Take what you can use for your own purposes; excellent advice even for this list, which includes some clunkers.

Pre-conference with the teacher before evaluation time; good advice and formally by some states. Likewise, post conferencing (and doing it while you can both remember the class that was observed), is a good idea that is built into the system in some states.

Drive-by observations. This belongs to a general category that can be described as knowing what goes on in your building. If all the principal knows about Mrs. McTeachface is what is seen during the forty minutes of formal observation, that principal is doing a lousy job. In fact, I question why we fetishize the formal observation, anyway. Principals should walk the halls daily, and pop into classrooms daily. I know some teachers hate it, and some principals think they're too busy. Everyone needs to get over it. Job Number One for a principal is to know what is going on in the building. If teachers freak out when you're in their room because they see you so rarely, you are doing a bad job of principalling.

Superville gives what could be some good advice, but the elaboration is terrible. Observe everything-- not just teacher. Look at the classroom, look at how the students are reacting, get a feel for the atmosphere of the room. The principal that Superville quotes offers, "Are they using the academic language that is aligned to the content within the standards?" To which I say, "Dear God, I hope not." Nor should the principal be checking dopey things like "are the anchor standards posted on the wall."

Superville suggests "Find a root cause." Struggling teachers have a host of interlocking issues going on in the classroom. Giving them a long list of fixits will not help. Helping them figure out what the root cause of all these various issues might be. Note from me: classroom discipline problems are almost always a symptom of some other problem. Trying to address them without addressing the root issue is a waste of time. And as anyone who has coached a challenged student teacher can tell you, sometimes those root issues get to real fundamentals, like what the person thinks the job of teaching entails, or how they conceive of the whole learning process. In other words, this is not the kind of stuff that will be settled by a paragraph on paperwork and a fifteen minute conference.

Give teachers a voice. It's kind of sad that we've let the disruptors push us to the point where this has to be said, but so much of modern ed reform has been about deliberately silencing teachers, and the evaluation process has turned into something that is done to teachers, not with them. Evaluation should be a conversation, not a lecture. May I suggest that all principals adopt my "Seven most powerful words in education"-- what can I do to help you?

Superville's last item is her most obvious and most sad-we-have-to-even-say-this-- "Provide opportunities to learn and grow." This has been totally lost in test-based evaluations and their premise that we just fire the bad teachers and go pick some good teachers off the good teacher tree that's growing somewhere. It is better, cheaper, less disruptive and more human to help struggling teachers to learn and grow than to simply can them and holler "next." And here's the most important secret-- All good teachers are trying to learn and grow. Every good teacher I've ever known could tell you five things they are trying to get better at. Teaching is a job that will always require more than you have, so you will spend your entire career trying to perfect the art of doing more with what you've got.

The only evaluation method that matters, the only one that's worth a damn, is one that helps you become a better teacher. Spoiler alert: threats and punishment do not help people become better teachers. And scores on a single standardized test that you are not permitted to see, and which may have been the scores of students you don't have in a subject you don't teach-- these are utterly useless in helping teachers do better work. May we please--please--take teacher evaluation from the useless baseless stupid status quo we've been stuck in for more than a decade.

Two important things to remember about taking evaluation back.

First, Rick Hess's Cage Busting Teacher aside, it's almost impossible for teachers to do this. Not completely impossible, but we're talking about convincing our bosses to change the way they evaluate us, and that's tricky in pretty much any job. It requires a level of trust and communication that not everyone enjoys in their school. At any rate, no teachers get to walk into their evaluation and say, "Nah, I don't think I'm doing it that way this year."

Second, no evaluation is jerk-proof. If your principal is a jerk, there is no system that can keep him from being a jerk to you at evaluation time. One of the selling points of BS Test-based evaluations was that it would be objective in ways that human principals could not be, but all that really meant was that good principals had their hands tied and bad principals still found ways to be jerks.

Teacher evaluation cannot be reduced to hard, objective science any more you can objectively measure how good a spouse or parent someone is. Yes, the folks at the extreme ends of the scale might seem objectively awful or wonderful, but that's not where most people are. Plus, human relationships are very much a factor of the two humans involved. The dream of some scientific measure of the objective swellness or awfulness of an individual teacher is just a dream. It can't be done.

But the job of a principal (or any other manager) is to help her people do their best possible work. And the only useful function for a teacher evaluation is the same-- to help teachers do their best work. It's past time to take teacher evaluations back and make them useful again.