It is unseasonably warm here, even as some parts of the country deal with a fresh helping of winter. Either way, we've got things to read. Remember-- if the piece strikes you as an important one, go to the original location for the post or article and share it through your social media. It's all about the amplification.
Putting a Price Tag on Public Schools
Wendy Lecker doesn't write enough, so this piece from the Stamford Advocate is a welcome look at the legacy and future of Eli Broad's do-it-yourself superintendent school.
3D TV Tells You Everything You Need To Know About This Decade's Tech
This Wired piece isn't about education, except that it is. Tag line: "You don't need special glasses to see what it looks like when smart people run out of ideas." Tech that's all about what you want to make, while steadfastly ignoring what the users actually want.
Bad Tech-- Pearson Wants Teacher's Jobs
Alan Singer at the Daily Kos about the problems with AI replacements for actual humans.
Laziness Does Not Exist
Yup. A psychology professor explains why not.
Bernie Sanders: End High Stakes Testing
This was the week that Sanders plugged that one hole in his education platform And USA Today let him write an op-ed to do it.
Hoboken NJ Charter Schools
Nobody is better than Jersey Jazzman for breaking down actual facts and data and rendering it all intelligible. This look at Hoboken tells us a lot about much of the charter universe.
Top Reads of 2019
I can resist a good reading list, and Nancy Flanagan has an excellent one.
John White Resigns
And the indispensable Mercedes Schneider is here to tell him goodbye, and good riddance.
Pressuring Parents To Teach Their Kindergartners To Read
Nancy Bailey and another disturbing trend among parents of the littles.
Mike Feinberg's New Home
Feinberg was booted from KIPP over allegations of harassment and abuse, but that didn't end his career in the ed reform biz. Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat has the story.
Bugs In Teachers Ears? What We Should Be Doing Instead.
Yes, Nancy Flanagan again. When EdWeek trotted out bug-in-ear coaching again, lots of shade was thrown, but Flanagan is smart enough to take it a step further and ask what the answer to ear-bugging should be.
Homeowners Fed Up
Up in Wisconsin, Up North News reports that taxpayers are getting tired of paying for two school systems, only one of which has any accountability.
The Rural Conundrum
Coincidentally, Jennifer Berkshire was just in rural Wisconsin, where even the red parts are still voting to raise their own taxes for schools. What's going on?
Sunday, January 12, 2020
Saturday, January 11, 2020
NH: No, Again, To Federal Charter Money
A month ago, the Granite State's Joint Legislative Fiscal Committee said, "No, thanks" to an offer of $46 million from the feds to be used in doubling the number of New Hampshire charter schools from 28 to 55. The money was to come from the federal Charter School Program, a grant program that has come under fire due to a recent pair of studies showing massive waste and fraud by recipients of CSP money. The legislature was concerned that doubling the number of charter schools would harm public schools and existing charters.
But that, it turns out, was not the end of it.
Frank Edelblut is currently the grand poohbah of education in NH. He was previously a businessman, venture capitalist, and one-term state representative. He took a swing at the governor's office, but was beaten in the primary by Chris Sununu; he then supported Sununu who, upon becoming governor, appointed Edelblut to the education post based on God-only-knows-what. Edelblut has no education background, pushed vouchers as a representative, and homeschooled all his kids.
But Friday (1/10) Edelblut brought the $46 million back to the table for the committee with what I suppose he thought was a sweetener-- a quote from Democrat Maggie Hassan, former governor and current senator for New Hampshire. Hassan had supported a similar grant in 2016, writing:
An objective of this grant is to use best practices from positive outcomes at our charter schools to inform programs at other public schools, which in turn benefits our entire public education system.
This is, of course, baloney. Note that Edelblut did not follow up with, "And here's a list of the successful academic best practices that have been pioneered by our existing charter schools and transferred successfully to our public schools." He couldn't, because if we've learned one thing after two decades of modern charter schools, it's that charter school operators don't know anything about how to educate students that public schools don't already know.
Republicans accused Dems of sticking it to taxpayers and children, but Democrats pointed out that the grant left too many questions unanswered while circumventing both the legislative and budgeting process. NH charters already have empty seats, and one analysis showed a long-term cost to the state of $57 to $104 million.
It would have been fiscally irresponsible for the Fiscal Committee to move forward with this grant, which would have doubled charter schools outside of the legislative process, jeopardized the financial health of New Hampshire’s current traditional and charter public schools, and made an end run around the state budget that would have committed the state of New Hampshire to millions of dollars in unbudgeted education aid years into the future.
The Dems also cited the NPE reports showing CSP waste. As for Edelblut, he was sure that the committee just didn't understand the grant the first time around. He also wanted to claim that the money could totally be used by public schools, somehow. Is he now satisfied that the committee understands what they have rejected twice? Well, as he told the Union Leader:
Do I look like someone who gives up that easily? We’ll be back.
So watch for New Hampshire's head of public education to continue trying to undermine and defund public education. Speaking of people who just don't understand.
But that, it turns out, was not the end of it.
 |
| This frickin' guy. |
But Friday (1/10) Edelblut brought the $46 million back to the table for the committee with what I suppose he thought was a sweetener-- a quote from Democrat Maggie Hassan, former governor and current senator for New Hampshire. Hassan had supported a similar grant in 2016, writing:
An objective of this grant is to use best practices from positive outcomes at our charter schools to inform programs at other public schools, which in turn benefits our entire public education system.
This is, of course, baloney. Note that Edelblut did not follow up with, "And here's a list of the successful academic best practices that have been pioneered by our existing charter schools and transferred successfully to our public schools." He couldn't, because if we've learned one thing after two decades of modern charter schools, it's that charter school operators don't know anything about how to educate students that public schools don't already know.
Republicans accused Dems of sticking it to taxpayers and children, but Democrats pointed out that the grant left too many questions unanswered while circumventing both the legislative and budgeting process. NH charters already have empty seats, and one analysis showed a long-term cost to the state of $57 to $104 million.
It would have been fiscally irresponsible for the Fiscal Committee to move forward with this grant, which would have doubled charter schools outside of the legislative process, jeopardized the financial health of New Hampshire’s current traditional and charter public schools, and made an end run around the state budget that would have committed the state of New Hampshire to millions of dollars in unbudgeted education aid years into the future.
The Dems also cited the NPE reports showing CSP waste. As for Edelblut, he was sure that the committee just didn't understand the grant the first time around. He also wanted to claim that the money could totally be used by public schools, somehow. Is he now satisfied that the committee understands what they have rejected twice? Well, as he told the Union Leader:
Do I look like someone who gives up that easily? We’ll be back.
So watch for New Hampshire's head of public education to continue trying to undermine and defund public education. Speaking of people who just don't understand.
To A Teacher At The End Of A Discouraging Week
It just sucks. You spend the time and effort (and maybe money) to create a lesson that you hope will be engaging and provide your students an exciting, maybe even fun, break from routine. And it bombs. More than once. Not only do your students not appreciate it, but they bitch about it. Sure, these are students who generally bitch and moan about everything (that's partly why you went an extra mile for them), but this still feels like you stayed up late to bake someone a beautiful cake and they just took a bite, spit it out, and threw the rest back in your face.
It feels personal, but it also shoots straight to your core as a professional (because, let's face it, your personal and professional selves are pretty intertwined anyway). Maybe my pedagogical sense is not very strong, you think. Maybe I'm not very good at motivating or connecting with the students. Maybe I just suck at this whole teacher thing.
I was in the classroom for thirty-nine years, and I still remember, way too vividly, those days, or weeks, or, in one case, the better part of an entire year. It just sucks. And nothing anyone can say really makes it any less sucky. Nevertheless, let me offer you a few pieces of hope.
You Don't Always Know
Here's a story. In February of my first year of teaching, one of my students entered my classroom during a period other than his scheduled one, and stood in front of me threatening me with assault. It lasted roughly seven hundred hours, and then he left. I pretty much kept doing what I was doing (handing out papers) and responding very little to him (I later learned the students in that class were split between believing I was scared and believing that I was secretly a kung-fu master and I didn't want to kill the kid). It was not a good moment. I'd been trying to reach the student, and congratulating myself on doing a decent job of getting through. This did not seem like a sign that I was doing all that well.
Then, at the end of the day, he came back, sat down in a desk, and we talked for thirty or forty minutes about what was bothering him. What I came to understand was that I had probably been the recipient of his threats and venting because he actually felt safe with me. He served his suspension and we had a decent rest of the year.
Now, the point of the story is not that threats are okay (they aren't-- and if he had actually thrown a punch at me, this would be a much different story). The point is that sometimes it looks like you're not getting through at all, and yet, you actually are. You just don't know. I can't tell you how many times students later in life would tell me how much they liked my class or even me and all I could think was "But you were an absolute ass to me all day every day." It's a mystery. If you care about them and act like it, somehow they get that, somehow? I don't know. I just know that you're probably reaching more students than you think you are.
It's Not Personal, Because You're Not A Person
Okay, most teachers get this, and it doesn't always make you feel better. But to your students, you're not a real person (the younger they are, the more true this is). Sometimes this is cute, like when they run into you in the grocery store and are shocked to realize that you eat food and do actually leave the school building. But sometimes it means that you are like a door or a sofa or some other object that they punch because they can't strike out against what they'd really like to strike ott against.
This Is About Them
How your students treat you is largely about them. It's about the baggage they carry to school with them, about the families that create a particular atmosphere at home, about the problems that nagged them in the morning before they left for school and the problems that will be waiting for them when they leave the building. This is about whether or not they've learned the basics of respect and kindness. This is about whether or not they have the emotional resources to deal with one more thing in their life, even if that thing is as innocuous as an art project.
Yes, I know. A great teacher is supposed to be able to reach past all of that a perform pedagogical awesomeness, and it's true that the longer you teach, the better-trained your reach. But you're not magic and you're not a superhero and you don't have infinite time or resources, and so you aren't going to be all things for all students on all days. Plus, their main job is to grow up and you can't do that for them.
Play the Long Game
Sometimes education comes in time-release capsules. Another benefit of teaching a long time in a small place-- I've had former students tell me about how they had fond memories of, or had been influenced by, Lesson X. And I have no memory of teaching that lesson, or saying that thing they've always remembered me saying. I can recognize most of them as thins that certainly sound like me, but that's it. And I know that I must have thought that Lesson X was a dud, because if I hadn't, I'd remember it from the many times I used it over many years.
Or there's my former colleague who taught upstream from me. Her students would come to me the next year, often disparaging her class. "Oh, heck-- we didn't learn anything in there," they'd say, but as each unit began, I would quiz them on prior knowledge, and they would already know all this stuff, and I would ask how they knew that and they would scratch their heads and say, "Huh. We learned that last year in Ms. Z's class." She was the greatest stealth teacher I've ever known.
Sometimes teachers are just planting seeds, and the harvest doesn't come until weeks, months, or years and years later. It sucks, because we usually don't get to see the crops come in, but there can be no doubt-- just because your students don't appear to have grasped anything right now doesn't mean that the lesson failed completely and forever.
Some People Are Jerks
Seriously. You know adults who are jerks; do you think they turned into jerks suddenly when they turned 21? The tendency, in my experience, runs the other way-- far more young jerks grow up to be great adults than great children who grow up to be jerks. The odds are excellent that somewhere in your classroom are some young jerks. The odds are good that they will grow out of it, and it would be jerk-like for a teacher to hold it against them or engage them in a contest of jerky wills. Still, that's what you're working with in the here-and-now.
De-jerkification lessons like "other people exist" and "being unkind is uncool" take a long time to take root, and you may never reap the rewards of teaching them (see above). But in the meantime, some of your immature students will act like immature children, and that is natural and normal and the greatest teacher in the history of the world cannot instantly erase nature.
Yes, if you find yourself blaming all your classroom troubles on all your students being jerks, then you are a big part of the problem. But it is okay to recognize that children will sometimes act childishly, and that is both normal and outside your control. Just keep focusing on their better parts.
Avoid the Failure Spiral
Any teacher worth her salt can tell you, right now, five things that she needs to do better. One of the hardest parts of teaching is this-- you know what you should be doing in a perfect world, but you don't have enough time, enough resources, enough you to do all that, and so you have to pick deal with the knowledge of all the ways you're coming up short.
What that means is that if you go deliberately looking for reasons that you are inadequate, you can always find them. Don't let yourself get sucked down that failure and shame spiral. And do not imagine that somewhere in the world, or your building, there are teachers who never have any of these problems. You know which teachers don't think they have anything to work on as teachers? Lousy teachers. That experience of getting to the end of a day and thinking, "I am just never going to get good at this," is absolutely universal.
After 39 years, I still had those days. My secret? Not taking a single day as an indication of my whole career. At the end of a crappy day, I (mostly) said "Well, today I sucked" and not "Well, I guess I'm a total failure as a teacher always and forever." Teachers have successes and failures; don't get into the habit of thinking that your failures mean everything and your successes mean nothing.
Next Week Is Another Week
The students will reset quickly-- a day is a long time to them. You will reflect on what happened, what worked, what didn't. Spend time with people who love you. Do that self-care thing. Next week is another week. You will go back to the classroom better than you left it, and you will continue to grow stronger and better as a teacher. You got this.
I was in the classroom for thirty-nine years, and I still remember, way too vividly, those days, or weeks, or, in one case, the better part of an entire year. It just sucks. And nothing anyone can say really makes it any less sucky. Nevertheless, let me offer you a few pieces of hope.
You Don't Always Know
Here's a story. In February of my first year of teaching, one of my students entered my classroom during a period other than his scheduled one, and stood in front of me threatening me with assault. It lasted roughly seven hundred hours, and then he left. I pretty much kept doing what I was doing (handing out papers) and responding very little to him (I later learned the students in that class were split between believing I was scared and believing that I was secretly a kung-fu master and I didn't want to kill the kid). It was not a good moment. I'd been trying to reach the student, and congratulating myself on doing a decent job of getting through. This did not seem like a sign that I was doing all that well.
Then, at the end of the day, he came back, sat down in a desk, and we talked for thirty or forty minutes about what was bothering him. What I came to understand was that I had probably been the recipient of his threats and venting because he actually felt safe with me. He served his suspension and we had a decent rest of the year.
Now, the point of the story is not that threats are okay (they aren't-- and if he had actually thrown a punch at me, this would be a much different story). The point is that sometimes it looks like you're not getting through at all, and yet, you actually are. You just don't know. I can't tell you how many times students later in life would tell me how much they liked my class or even me and all I could think was "But you were an absolute ass to me all day every day." It's a mystery. If you care about them and act like it, somehow they get that, somehow? I don't know. I just know that you're probably reaching more students than you think you are.
It's Not Personal, Because You're Not A Person
Okay, most teachers get this, and it doesn't always make you feel better. But to your students, you're not a real person (the younger they are, the more true this is). Sometimes this is cute, like when they run into you in the grocery store and are shocked to realize that you eat food and do actually leave the school building. But sometimes it means that you are like a door or a sofa or some other object that they punch because they can't strike out against what they'd really like to strike ott against.
This Is About Them
How your students treat you is largely about them. It's about the baggage they carry to school with them, about the families that create a particular atmosphere at home, about the problems that nagged them in the morning before they left for school and the problems that will be waiting for them when they leave the building. This is about whether or not they've learned the basics of respect and kindness. This is about whether or not they have the emotional resources to deal with one more thing in their life, even if that thing is as innocuous as an art project.
Yes, I know. A great teacher is supposed to be able to reach past all of that a perform pedagogical awesomeness, and it's true that the longer you teach, the better-trained your reach. But you're not magic and you're not a superhero and you don't have infinite time or resources, and so you aren't going to be all things for all students on all days. Plus, their main job is to grow up and you can't do that for them.
Play the Long Game
Sometimes education comes in time-release capsules. Another benefit of teaching a long time in a small place-- I've had former students tell me about how they had fond memories of, or had been influenced by, Lesson X. And I have no memory of teaching that lesson, or saying that thing they've always remembered me saying. I can recognize most of them as thins that certainly sound like me, but that's it. And I know that I must have thought that Lesson X was a dud, because if I hadn't, I'd remember it from the many times I used it over many years.
Or there's my former colleague who taught upstream from me. Her students would come to me the next year, often disparaging her class. "Oh, heck-- we didn't learn anything in there," they'd say, but as each unit began, I would quiz them on prior knowledge, and they would already know all this stuff, and I would ask how they knew that and they would scratch their heads and say, "Huh. We learned that last year in Ms. Z's class." She was the greatest stealth teacher I've ever known.
Sometimes teachers are just planting seeds, and the harvest doesn't come until weeks, months, or years and years later. It sucks, because we usually don't get to see the crops come in, but there can be no doubt-- just because your students don't appear to have grasped anything right now doesn't mean that the lesson failed completely and forever.
Some People Are Jerks
Seriously. You know adults who are jerks; do you think they turned into jerks suddenly when they turned 21? The tendency, in my experience, runs the other way-- far more young jerks grow up to be great adults than great children who grow up to be jerks. The odds are excellent that somewhere in your classroom are some young jerks. The odds are good that they will grow out of it, and it would be jerk-like for a teacher to hold it against them or engage them in a contest of jerky wills. Still, that's what you're working with in the here-and-now.
De-jerkification lessons like "other people exist" and "being unkind is uncool" take a long time to take root, and you may never reap the rewards of teaching them (see above). But in the meantime, some of your immature students will act like immature children, and that is natural and normal and the greatest teacher in the history of the world cannot instantly erase nature.
Yes, if you find yourself blaming all your classroom troubles on all your students being jerks, then you are a big part of the problem. But it is okay to recognize that children will sometimes act childishly, and that is both normal and outside your control. Just keep focusing on their better parts.
Avoid the Failure Spiral
Any teacher worth her salt can tell you, right now, five things that she needs to do better. One of the hardest parts of teaching is this-- you know what you should be doing in a perfect world, but you don't have enough time, enough resources, enough you to do all that, and so you have to pick deal with the knowledge of all the ways you're coming up short.
What that means is that if you go deliberately looking for reasons that you are inadequate, you can always find them. Don't let yourself get sucked down that failure and shame spiral. And do not imagine that somewhere in the world, or your building, there are teachers who never have any of these problems. You know which teachers don't think they have anything to work on as teachers? Lousy teachers. That experience of getting to the end of a day and thinking, "I am just never going to get good at this," is absolutely universal.
After 39 years, I still had those days. My secret? Not taking a single day as an indication of my whole career. At the end of a crappy day, I (mostly) said "Well, today I sucked" and not "Well, I guess I'm a total failure as a teacher always and forever." Teachers have successes and failures; don't get into the habit of thinking that your failures mean everything and your successes mean nothing.
Next Week Is Another Week
The students will reset quickly-- a day is a long time to them. You will reflect on what happened, what worked, what didn't. Spend time with people who love you. Do that self-care thing. Next week is another week. You will go back to the classroom better than you left it, and you will continue to grow stronger and better as a teacher. You got this.
Friday, January 10, 2020
The Foundation of Real Writing
As I've mentioned before, we have the poor fortune to live in a golden age of bad writing instruction. There are a variety of reasons for this, ranging from the rise of high-stakes testing to some less-than-wonderful traditions to the widespread discomfort with writing instruction of many classroom teachers.
The last is probably the worst issue facing writing instruction. It's a curious thing; you don't find many band directors who don't play an instrument or many phys ed teachers who aren't involved in some sort of physical activity, but schools are loaded with folks who teach writing, but who never write themselves.
You can spot the different kinds of bad writing instruction by the foundations on which they are built, by the things that are treated as basic building blocks of writing. Here are the false foundations you're likely to find.
Text and a Question
Colemanism in action, this approach to writing starts with the idea that the only writing worth writing is in response to a text in order to answer a particular question that a teacher or test manufacturer has posed.
Look at the Big Standardized Tests of the past two decades and you find a remarkable phenomenon-- the writing test using multiple choice items. That's possible because one of the premises of this bad writing is that there is really only one correct answer. Every excellent answer to the prompt should use the same text evidence organized in the same way to support the same points; all of the best essay answers to the prompt should be essentially indistinguishable.
The other premise here is that the content of writing must be a reaction to someone else's writing. As with most types of bad writing, there is a germ of truth here-- great critical writing or strong explication do indeed start with someone else's writing. But then the author brings his or her own thoughts, ideas, reality and reactions to the piece. In Colemanism, nothing outside the fabled four corners of the text is allowed. Also in Colemanism, there is only one "true" interpretation of what lies within the four corners.
So this type of bad writing is an exercise in mind reading, a task that involves figuring out what the test manufacturer wants you to say and how they want you to say it, and then performing that response. It has words arranged in sentences and paragraphs, and that creates the impression that it is writing, but the fact that it can be translated into multiple choice questions (What is the main idea? Which of these statements can best be used to support the main idea? etc) is a dead giveaway-- this is not actually a writing task at all.
Structural Outline
An approach most commonly enshrined in the five-paragraph essay. You start by knowing how many paragraphs there will be in the essay; in more extreme examples, you also know before you start how many sentences each paragraph will contain. Which is patently nuts, but here we are.
It's not that the five-paragraph essay is useless; I've taught it myself, particularly early in my career when few of my colleagues were teaching writing at all. If your ideas are a formless soup, a bucket to hold them in can be helpful at first. But the five-paragraph essay is like training wheels; they might be-- might be--useful at first, but they go very quickly from being an aid to being a hindrance.
What you get is a more-involved fill-in-the-blank puzzle. The writer tries to answer the question "What can I use to fill in these paragraph-shaped blanks?' No real thinking about the topic is required.
In the very worst of these scenarios, we find state writing assessments that are "scored" by computer software. As has been shown repeatedly, computer software does not care about your ideas. It does not even care if your details are correct. All it can do is break down structure and vocabulary. Companies trying to sell this baloney will sometimes trot out "research" showing that the software gets the same results as human scorers, but the correct statement is that the software will get the same results as humans, if the humans are trained to score the essays just like software would.
But that's the appeal of a structure-based foundation; it gives the evaluator some simple, clear items to look for and "assess."
Sentences and Paragraphs
The previous two approaches may have been given a special boost by the high-stakes testing baloney, but this school is old, and still much-beloved by edu-experts. Folks like Judith Hochman, who declares in interviews and her many writing instruction guides that the foundation of writing is a sentence.
I don't mean to pick on Hochman, who is just a high-profile example (and enabler) of teachers across the country whose idea of writing instruction is first you do a unit on sentences, then move on to paragraphs, then on to full essays (and it should come as no surprise that the essays are often five-paragraph ones).
This is writing for school, not an authentic task, but a performance of writing-like tasks that is comfortable for all parties. But like the structural approach, it pushes students to start with the wrong question-- what can I write to fulfill this assignment. In its most traditional form it focuses on writing that is error-free, and as such is not so focused on what it does do, but on what it avoids. But mistake-avoidance is not a virtue in writing. First, it encourages timid, safe writing (don't attempt anything that might risk including an error). Second, the absence of mistakes is not the same as the presence of quality. A sports team can make zero mistakes and still lose. A musician can perform a piece with zero mistakes and still be excrutiatingly boring.
This can also lead to a performance tug-of-war, in which students try to figure out how small a technical performance they can get away with and teachers set artificial performance limits to thwart them ("This paper must be two pages long, size 12 font, margins exactly one inch, etc")
Does a writer need control of her technical tools? Sure-- but those tools need to be employed in something other than an empty display of tool use.
The Actual Foundation of Real Writing
An idea. Real writing starts with a deceptively simple question-- what do I want to say? In a school setting, it might be "what do I want to say about this topic" ore even "about this text." After that, we move on to "how can I best say that," a question for which there are hundreds of answers. The writer should pick the answer that best suits her.
Not all students will greet this approach warmly. My usual answer to "How long does this have to be" was "Long enough to make your point effectively, and no longer," which students do not find helpful when they're really asking, "What's the least I can get away with here?" Students will deliver versions of "Just tell me what hoop to jump through and how to jump so I can get my grade and move on." Because part of what's appealing and comfortable about the kinds of bad writing that students get used to in school is that thought is not required; in fact, real thinking about the content can get in the way of the performance you're supposed to give.
But think you must. Figure out what you have to say and how you want to explain it (and, maybe, to whom you want to say it, though focus on audience is overrated) and also what may be most important of all, saying it in your own voice. But the thinking is critical. Most of my students' writing problems were really thinking problems-- a failure to figure out what they wanted to say or how the supports fit into the larger picture (plus those parts that didn't belong, or seemed not to belong because the writer didn't show the connections clearly enough).
Does it make life harder for the teacher? Of course it does, because writing and writing instruction are squishy and messy and it is not possible to impose any standardization without having an effect on the process and product. Compromises are necessary for teacher sanity and survival, but make every one mindfully and conscious of the cost.
If you are serious about teaching real writing and not just the test-based or scholastic tradition versions of a performative writing-like activity, then you have to embrace the mess, open your classroom to more student control, and make your peace with whatever corners you have to cut. I've written elsewhere about some of the basic rules for teaching real writing-- hell, I have part of a book about this, but then John Warner wrote a book that says much of what I have to say and I felt redundant. So until I get wind back in my sails and some publisher offers me a juicy deal, read his book.
What's the point of teaching writing for real? Because of the various types of writing being discussed, it's the one that is most useful in the actual world. Writing for tests is good for tests. Writing for school is good for school, and for places that still pattern themselves on what they remember as "good" writing from their school days. And having a good technical command of structure and other tools is useful if you have a career that involves concealing baloney under a verbal smokescreen.
But for everything else, including, especially, bridging the gap between human beings with actual communication, writing for real is what's useful. It's not a performance or a show or a trick to be performed under artificial conditions; it's authentic, actual, real. Writing instruction is yet another area where teachers have to ask themselves whether they want to do what serves the institution or what serves the students.
The last is probably the worst issue facing writing instruction. It's a curious thing; you don't find many band directors who don't play an instrument or many phys ed teachers who aren't involved in some sort of physical activity, but schools are loaded with folks who teach writing, but who never write themselves.
You can spot the different kinds of bad writing instruction by the foundations on which they are built, by the things that are treated as basic building blocks of writing. Here are the false foundations you're likely to find.
Text and a Question
Colemanism in action, this approach to writing starts with the idea that the only writing worth writing is in response to a text in order to answer a particular question that a teacher or test manufacturer has posed.
Look at the Big Standardized Tests of the past two decades and you find a remarkable phenomenon-- the writing test using multiple choice items. That's possible because one of the premises of this bad writing is that there is really only one correct answer. Every excellent answer to the prompt should use the same text evidence organized in the same way to support the same points; all of the best essay answers to the prompt should be essentially indistinguishable.
The other premise here is that the content of writing must be a reaction to someone else's writing. As with most types of bad writing, there is a germ of truth here-- great critical writing or strong explication do indeed start with someone else's writing. But then the author brings his or her own thoughts, ideas, reality and reactions to the piece. In Colemanism, nothing outside the fabled four corners of the text is allowed. Also in Colemanism, there is only one "true" interpretation of what lies within the four corners.
So this type of bad writing is an exercise in mind reading, a task that involves figuring out what the test manufacturer wants you to say and how they want you to say it, and then performing that response. It has words arranged in sentences and paragraphs, and that creates the impression that it is writing, but the fact that it can be translated into multiple choice questions (What is the main idea? Which of these statements can best be used to support the main idea? etc) is a dead giveaway-- this is not actually a writing task at all.
Structural Outline
An approach most commonly enshrined in the five-paragraph essay. You start by knowing how many paragraphs there will be in the essay; in more extreme examples, you also know before you start how many sentences each paragraph will contain. Which is patently nuts, but here we are.
It's not that the five-paragraph essay is useless; I've taught it myself, particularly early in my career when few of my colleagues were teaching writing at all. If your ideas are a formless soup, a bucket to hold them in can be helpful at first. But the five-paragraph essay is like training wheels; they might be-- might be--useful at first, but they go very quickly from being an aid to being a hindrance.
What you get is a more-involved fill-in-the-blank puzzle. The writer tries to answer the question "What can I use to fill in these paragraph-shaped blanks?' No real thinking about the topic is required.
But that's the appeal of a structure-based foundation; it gives the evaluator some simple, clear items to look for and "assess."
Sentences and Paragraphs
The previous two approaches may have been given a special boost by the high-stakes testing baloney, but this school is old, and still much-beloved by edu-experts. Folks like Judith Hochman, who declares in interviews and her many writing instruction guides that the foundation of writing is a sentence.
I don't mean to pick on Hochman, who is just a high-profile example (and enabler) of teachers across the country whose idea of writing instruction is first you do a unit on sentences, then move on to paragraphs, then on to full essays (and it should come as no surprise that the essays are often five-paragraph ones).
This is writing for school, not an authentic task, but a performance of writing-like tasks that is comfortable for all parties. But like the structural approach, it pushes students to start with the wrong question-- what can I write to fulfill this assignment. In its most traditional form it focuses on writing that is error-free, and as such is not so focused on what it does do, but on what it avoids. But mistake-avoidance is not a virtue in writing. First, it encourages timid, safe writing (don't attempt anything that might risk including an error). Second, the absence of mistakes is not the same as the presence of quality. A sports team can make zero mistakes and still lose. A musician can perform a piece with zero mistakes and still be excrutiatingly boring.
This can also lead to a performance tug-of-war, in which students try to figure out how small a technical performance they can get away with and teachers set artificial performance limits to thwart them ("This paper must be two pages long, size 12 font, margins exactly one inch, etc")
Does a writer need control of her technical tools? Sure-- but those tools need to be employed in something other than an empty display of tool use.
The Actual Foundation of Real Writing
An idea. Real writing starts with a deceptively simple question-- what do I want to say? In a school setting, it might be "what do I want to say about this topic" ore even "about this text." After that, we move on to "how can I best say that," a question for which there are hundreds of answers. The writer should pick the answer that best suits her.
Not all students will greet this approach warmly. My usual answer to "How long does this have to be" was "Long enough to make your point effectively, and no longer," which students do not find helpful when they're really asking, "What's the least I can get away with here?" Students will deliver versions of "Just tell me what hoop to jump through and how to jump so I can get my grade and move on." Because part of what's appealing and comfortable about the kinds of bad writing that students get used to in school is that thought is not required; in fact, real thinking about the content can get in the way of the performance you're supposed to give.
But think you must. Figure out what you have to say and how you want to explain it (and, maybe, to whom you want to say it, though focus on audience is overrated) and also what may be most important of all, saying it in your own voice. But the thinking is critical. Most of my students' writing problems were really thinking problems-- a failure to figure out what they wanted to say or how the supports fit into the larger picture (plus those parts that didn't belong, or seemed not to belong because the writer didn't show the connections clearly enough).
Does it make life harder for the teacher? Of course it does, because writing and writing instruction are squishy and messy and it is not possible to impose any standardization without having an effect on the process and product. Compromises are necessary for teacher sanity and survival, but make every one mindfully and conscious of the cost.
If you are serious about teaching real writing and not just the test-based or scholastic tradition versions of a performative writing-like activity, then you have to embrace the mess, open your classroom to more student control, and make your peace with whatever corners you have to cut. I've written elsewhere about some of the basic rules for teaching real writing-- hell, I have part of a book about this, but then John Warner wrote a book that says much of what I have to say and I felt redundant. So until I get wind back in my sails and some publisher offers me a juicy deal, read his book.
What's the point of teaching writing for real? Because of the various types of writing being discussed, it's the one that is most useful in the actual world. Writing for tests is good for tests. Writing for school is good for school, and for places that still pattern themselves on what they remember as "good" writing from their school days. And having a good technical command of structure and other tools is useful if you have a career that involves concealing baloney under a verbal smokescreen.
But for everything else, including, especially, bridging the gap between human beings with actual communication, writing for real is what's useful. It's not a performance or a show or a trick to be performed under artificial conditions; it's authentic, actual, real. Writing instruction is yet another area where teachers have to ask themselves whether they want to do what serves the institution or what serves the students.
Wednesday, January 8, 2020
DeVos and Department May Face Increased Fine
Back in October, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her department were fined $100,000 for contempt of court regarding their non-compliance with a court order to stop collecting loans from students bilked by a chain of fraudulent for-profit colleges. Turns out that price tag could get a little steeper.
In October, the department said that, oopsies, they had continued to collect from about 16,000 students and parents. The "oopsy" was a little hard to believe, given that DeVosd has been abundantly clear that she does not believe that defrauded students should have their loans forgiven. If they are making money now, then too bad about the loan. As she told the House Education Committee when they tried to rake her over some coals on this matter:
I understand that some of you here just want to have blanket forgiveness for anyone who raises their hand and files a claim, but that simply is not right.
So maybe the department made a few clerical errors. Or maybe DeVos just decided she would drag her heels as hard as possible against the injunction against collection from May 2018, as witnessed by the loans forgiven by the previous administration which she signed off "with extreme displeasure" and by her attempts rewrite the rules for loan cancellation.
Judge Sallie Kim was pretty cranky when she offered the October ruling (“I’m not sending anyone to jail yet, but it’s good to know I have that ability.” So she was not any happier in December when it turned out that the department had been collecting-- against the injunction-- from not just 16,000 students, but from over 45,000. So, a more-than-double oopsy.
The plaintiffs in the original suit against DeVos and the department made a motion to reconsider the court's sanctions. They can do that because facts have been added that weren't available at the time of the original sanctions; in this case, the fact that the department under-reported their non-compliance with the injunction by about 30,000 indebted former students.
Judge Kim filed her response to that request on Tuesday, January 7. It is short and to the point: because the compliance reports filed by the defendants (aka DeVos and the department) have brought up these new facts that are "directly relevant to the amount of sanctions appropriate to compensate for the Defendant's flagrant and continuing violation of the preliminary injunction," plaintiffs can go ahead and file their motion for partial reconsideration (aka a new amount of fine).
That was due today. DeVos's folks get till next week to respond.
The amount is symbolic, and DeVos could pay it with the change in her sofa at home, but it's still extraordinary to see a United States Magistrate Judge have to publicly and repeatedly take a cabinet secretary to the woodshed. And today is Betsy DeVos's birthday, too. We'll see what sort of present she gets.
I understand that some of you here just want to have blanket forgiveness for anyone who raises their hand and files a claim, but that simply is not right.
So maybe the department made a few clerical errors. Or maybe DeVos just decided she would drag her heels as hard as possible against the injunction against collection from May 2018, as witnessed by the loans forgiven by the previous administration which she signed off "with extreme displeasure" and by her attempts rewrite the rules for loan cancellation.
Judge Sallie Kim was pretty cranky when she offered the October ruling (“I’m not sending anyone to jail yet, but it’s good to know I have that ability.” So she was not any happier in December when it turned out that the department had been collecting-- against the injunction-- from not just 16,000 students, but from over 45,000. So, a more-than-double oopsy.
The plaintiffs in the original suit against DeVos and the department made a motion to reconsider the court's sanctions. They can do that because facts have been added that weren't available at the time of the original sanctions; in this case, the fact that the department under-reported their non-compliance with the injunction by about 30,000 indebted former students.
Judge Kim filed her response to that request on Tuesday, January 7. It is short and to the point: because the compliance reports filed by the defendants (aka DeVos and the department) have brought up these new facts that are "directly relevant to the amount of sanctions appropriate to compensate for the Defendant's flagrant and continuing violation of the preliminary injunction," plaintiffs can go ahead and file their motion for partial reconsideration (aka a new amount of fine).
That was due today. DeVos's folks get till next week to respond.
The amount is symbolic, and DeVos could pay it with the change in her sofa at home, but it's still extraordinary to see a United States Magistrate Judge have to publicly and repeatedly take a cabinet secretary to the woodshed. And today is Betsy DeVos's birthday, too. We'll see what sort of present she gets.
Tuesday, January 7, 2020
How Tech Killed Tractors, And Why Teachers Should Care
If you don't spend a lot of time around farms and farmers, you might have missed this story, which just made its way into legit journalistic coverage via the Star Tribune of Minnesota-- there is an exploding market for forty-year-old tractors.
Adam Belz reports on auction bidding wars over old tractors. Is it because of tractor nostalgia? Nope-- and if you think about your car or music system or the device with which you're reading this post, you already know the answer. Those earlier tractors were well-built and have lots of hours in them, but tyere's one other factor:
The other big draw of the older tractors is their lack of complex technology. Farmers prefer to fix what they can on the spot, or take it to their mechanic and not have to spend tens of thousands of dollars.
“The newer machines, any time something breaks, you’ve got to have a computer to fix it,” Stock said.
The tractors are loaded with shiny new tech. As Jason Bloomberg put it at Forbes, "John Deere is but one of thousands of enterprises undergoing digital transformation as it becomes a software company that runs its technology on tractors, rather than the other way around."
Farmers have steadily lost the right to repair, meaning that a tractor breakdown can result in a lomng wait for your turn to get a costly repair. It's not just the cost and the downtime that suck; as pointed out by Greg Peterson, the founder of Machinery Pete, "That goes against the pride of ownership, plus your lifetime of skills you’ve built up being able to fix things."
John Deere has become a major cutting edge pain in the butt on this topic:
In a particularly spectacular display of corporate delusion, John Deere—the world's largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don’t own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”
There's a whole Right To Repair movement in the agriculture world, but they are swimming upstream, and as quickly as it wins lawmaking victories, corporations like John Deere claw them back.
This is the tech world. Remember, you don't own the music on your ipod or the books in your kindle. Your Windows machine keeps reminding you that Windows is a "service," implicitly pointing out that you didn't buy a product you now own, but are simply licensing-- renting-- access to what they allow. Apple spends a ton of time in court arguing that no third parties should be allowed to horn in on their lucrative repair business.
The implications for ed tech are large and often overlooked. But when your school gos to a digital textbook, they don't buy copies-- they buy licenses. They subscribe to software. Those lucrative Big Standardized Tests (and their cousins, the Big Standardized Practice Tests) are licensed, not purchased. And God forbid that you should ever make an illegal copy of anything.
A few decades ago, I taught from an exceptionally good literature series from MacMillan. The company was purchased, the text was discontinued, we bought a new series-- all the usual stuff. But until the day I retired, I had an old weathered class set of those books in my cupboard (and my successor still does) that I could pull out at any time. Because those were tools that the school bought and subsequently owned.
As ed tech moves further into schools, schools actually own less and less of their own instructional materials. If all the ed tech companies were to go belly up tomorrow, some schools would suddenly find themselves without a large portion of their instructional tools.
And, of course, like farmers with a glitchy John Deere tractor, teachers who hit a snag with a piece of ed tech just have to wait till the company can send someone to fix it.
Tech takes control away from the people who actually do the work. Your building may have many people who know how to, say, load toner into the copier. And there are probably many people who could, if given access and permission, deal with some computer tech problems. If.
Tech makes many swell things possible, but it also extracts a price, from the car you can no longer fix yourself to the media that you can only have access to as long as you keep up payments. It would be wise for schools to give attention to the extra costs they pay for new ed tech products.
Adam Belz reports on auction bidding wars over old tractors. Is it because of tractor nostalgia? Nope-- and if you think about your car or music system or the device with which you're reading this post, you already know the answer. Those earlier tractors were well-built and have lots of hours in them, but tyere's one other factor:
The other big draw of the older tractors is their lack of complex technology. Farmers prefer to fix what they can on the spot, or take it to their mechanic and not have to spend tens of thousands of dollars.
“The newer machines, any time something breaks, you’ve got to have a computer to fix it,” Stock said.
Farmers have steadily lost the right to repair, meaning that a tractor breakdown can result in a lomng wait for your turn to get a costly repair. It's not just the cost and the downtime that suck; as pointed out by Greg Peterson, the founder of Machinery Pete, "That goes against the pride of ownership, plus your lifetime of skills you’ve built up being able to fix things."
John Deere has become a major cutting edge pain in the butt on this topic:
In a particularly spectacular display of corporate delusion, John Deere—the world's largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don’t own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”
There's a whole Right To Repair movement in the agriculture world, but they are swimming upstream, and as quickly as it wins lawmaking victories, corporations like John Deere claw them back.
This is the tech world. Remember, you don't own the music on your ipod or the books in your kindle. Your Windows machine keeps reminding you that Windows is a "service," implicitly pointing out that you didn't buy a product you now own, but are simply licensing-- renting-- access to what they allow. Apple spends a ton of time in court arguing that no third parties should be allowed to horn in on their lucrative repair business.
The implications for ed tech are large and often overlooked. But when your school gos to a digital textbook, they don't buy copies-- they buy licenses. They subscribe to software. Those lucrative Big Standardized Tests (and their cousins, the Big Standardized Practice Tests) are licensed, not purchased. And God forbid that you should ever make an illegal copy of anything.
A few decades ago, I taught from an exceptionally good literature series from MacMillan. The company was purchased, the text was discontinued, we bought a new series-- all the usual stuff. But until the day I retired, I had an old weathered class set of those books in my cupboard (and my successor still does) that I could pull out at any time. Because those were tools that the school bought and subsequently owned.
As ed tech moves further into schools, schools actually own less and less of their own instructional materials. If all the ed tech companies were to go belly up tomorrow, some schools would suddenly find themselves without a large portion of their instructional tools.
And, of course, like farmers with a glitchy John Deere tractor, teachers who hit a snag with a piece of ed tech just have to wait till the company can send someone to fix it.
Tech takes control away from the people who actually do the work. Your building may have many people who know how to, say, load toner into the copier. And there are probably many people who could, if given access and permission, deal with some computer tech problems. If.
Tech makes many swell things possible, but it also extracts a price, from the car you can no longer fix yourself to the media that you can only have access to as long as you keep up payments. It would be wise for schools to give attention to the extra costs they pay for new ed tech products.
Monday, January 6, 2020
NC: Whitewashing The Charter Report
North Carolin's 2020 Annual Charter Schools Report has caused some consternation among members of the state's Charter Schools Advisory Board (CSAB). They've seen the first draft and requested a rewrite, because, well, members of the public might become confused by the information that suggests Bad Things about North Carolina's charter industry.
This is not the first time the issue has come up. Back in 2016 the Lt. Governor called the report "too negative" and pushed to have it made "more fair." The report was not substantially changed-- just more data added. But in 2016 it still showed that North Carolina's charter schools mostly serve whiter, wealthier student bodies. This prompted a remarkable explanation:
Darrell Allison, president of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, said that fact is simply a reflection of which families are applying to charters.
Well, yes. Education reform in North Carolina has been about crushing the teachers' unions and teachers themselves, while also being aimed at enabling white flight and accelerating segregation. One might be inclined to deduce that they hope to set up a spiffy private system for whiter, wealthier folks (including a corporate reserve-your-own-seats policy) along with vouchers, while simultaneously cutting the public system to the bone so that wealthy taxpayers don't have to spend so much educating Those People's Children. North Carolina has done plenty to earn a spot in the education policy hall of shame, enabled by some of the worst gerrymandering in the country.
But while NC legislators don't seem to experience much shame over what they do, they sometimes worry about how they look (remember the great bathroom bill boycott of 2017). So now the charter report is going to be carefully whitewashed.
For instance, the report included a section about the racial impact of charter schools. But amid concerns that it might contain “misleading” wording that could be “blown out of proportion,” that section will apparently be removed. Regarding the report, " I think it doesn’t actually represent what I believe to be true," said Alex Quigley, chairman of the CSAB. "And given the choice between facts and the stuff I choose to believe, well, my beliefs and our charter marketing should come first." Okay, I made up the last part, but that first part he totally said.
What data said is that 75% of charter schools have a white student enrollment that is more than 10% "off" from the surrounding district. Well over 50% of charters were off by more than 10% on black enrollment numbers. State law says that charters have to "reasonably reflect" the makeup of the district's where they are located.
Kris Nordstrom, education finance and policy consultant for the N.C. Justice Center’s Education and Law Project. was author of a 2018 report that found North Carolina resegregating. He puts it this way: “The questions they’re debating are mostly questions of math. Are charter s contributing to segregation? That’s a math question. The answer is yes.”
But the segregation issue is not the only part of the charter report that makes-- well, would have made-- charter advocates sad. Joe Maimone is a non-voting CSAB member and the state superintendent's chief of staff, and he has concerns:
"The big one im concerned about is the A, B, C, D, F breakdown by percentage of economically disadvantaged [students]," Maimone said. "I think that’s a very misleading chart and is going to get blown way out of proportion if we don’t either remove it or give some greater detail on it."
Here's the misleading chart in question:
Yes, that set of data might mislead one into thinking there was a direct connection between a school's grade and the number of poor students that school served, if by "mislead" you mean "cause one to conclude through use of your eyeballs and the basic sense God gave you." You might be mislead into thinking that charter success is based strictly on what sorts of students the charter enrolls, and not any special chartery magic. I should also point out that the data could mislead one to thinking that standardized test scores are a lousy way to evaluate schools of any sort.
CSAB members also requested more positive charter stories in the report, like noting that half of charters open one to five years provide bus transportation. I did not make that part up. At some point the final version of the report will come out. One can only hope that it will make charter advocates happy and not muddy the water with confusing facts.
This is not the first time the issue has come up. Back in 2016 the Lt. Governor called the report "too negative" and pushed to have it made "more fair." The report was not substantially changed-- just more data added. But in 2016 it still showed that North Carolina's charter schools mostly serve whiter, wealthier student bodies. This prompted a remarkable explanation:
Darrell Allison, president of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, said that fact is simply a reflection of which families are applying to charters.
But while NC legislators don't seem to experience much shame over what they do, they sometimes worry about how they look (remember the great bathroom bill boycott of 2017). So now the charter report is going to be carefully whitewashed.
For instance, the report included a section about the racial impact of charter schools. But amid concerns that it might contain “misleading” wording that could be “blown out of proportion,” that section will apparently be removed. Regarding the report, " I think it doesn’t actually represent what I believe to be true," said Alex Quigley, chairman of the CSAB. "And given the choice between facts and the stuff I choose to believe, well, my beliefs and our charter marketing should come first." Okay, I made up the last part, but that first part he totally said.
What data said is that 75% of charter schools have a white student enrollment that is more than 10% "off" from the surrounding district. Well over 50% of charters were off by more than 10% on black enrollment numbers. State law says that charters have to "reasonably reflect" the makeup of the district's where they are located.
Kris Nordstrom, education finance and policy consultant for the N.C. Justice Center’s Education and Law Project. was author of a 2018 report that found North Carolina resegregating. He puts it this way: “The questions they’re debating are mostly questions of math. Are charter s contributing to segregation? That’s a math question. The answer is yes.”
But the segregation issue is not the only part of the charter report that makes-- well, would have made-- charter advocates sad. Joe Maimone is a non-voting CSAB member and the state superintendent's chief of staff, and he has concerns:
"The big one im concerned about is the A, B, C, D, F breakdown by percentage of economically disadvantaged [students]," Maimone said. "I think that’s a very misleading chart and is going to get blown way out of proportion if we don’t either remove it or give some greater detail on it."
Here's the misleading chart in question:
Yes, that set of data might mislead one into thinking there was a direct connection between a school's grade and the number of poor students that school served, if by "mislead" you mean "cause one to conclude through use of your eyeballs and the basic sense God gave you." You might be mislead into thinking that charter success is based strictly on what sorts of students the charter enrolls, and not any special chartery magic. I should also point out that the data could mislead one to thinking that standardized test scores are a lousy way to evaluate schools of any sort.
CSAB members also requested more positive charter stories in the report, like noting that half of charters open one to five years provide bus transportation. I did not make that part up. At some point the final version of the report will come out. One can only hope that it will make charter advocates happy and not muddy the water with confusing facts.
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