Administration Matters

This tweet turned up the other day.

I interviewed a teacher who is leaving the profession in June. I asked her why she was quitting.

Her response:
“I was told to teach to the test...that if it’s not a test-taking skill, don’t teach it. I didn’t become a teacher to help kids become better test-takers.”#EdChat

— Fixing Education (@FixingEducation) March 9, 2020

I wish the teacher hadn't slipped into passive voice. I wish she had said, "Principal Testy McScoresuck told me to teach to the test." Because administrators like this need to be outed. They need to be held up before the world as people helping to facilitate the creeping educational malpractice rooted in high stakes testing.

A manager's job-- and not just the management of a school, but any manager-- is to create the system, environment and supports that get his people to do their very best work. When it rains, it's the manager's job to hold an umbrella over his people. When the wind starts blowing tree limbs across the landscape, it's the manager's job to stand before the storm and bat the debris away. And when the Folks at the Top start sending down stupid directives, it's a manager's job to protect his people the best he possibly can.

NCLB, Race to the Top, Common Core, the high stakes Big Standardized Tests-- each of these bad policies is bad for many reason, but the biggest one is this: instead of helping teachers do their jobs, these policies interfere with teachers doing their jobs, even mandate doing their jobs badly. In each case a bunch of educational amateurs pushed their way into schools and said, "You're doing it all wrong from now on, you have to do it like this," like medically untrained non-doctors barging into a surgical procedure to say, "Stop using that sterile scalpel and use this rusty shovel instead."

That was bad. But it is base betrayal when, in that situation, management turns to its trained, professional workers and says, "Well, you heard the man. Pick up that rusty shovel."

NCLB and its "every student will be above average by 2014" was bullshit, and everyone in education knew it was bullshit, that by 2013 every school would be either failing or cheating, but too many school administrators didn't say, "You just do your job. I'm going to spend an hour of every day calling our legislators and explaining what bullshit this is." Instead too many said, "Look, here are some test practice books. We'll give some practice tests, identify the students who are close enough to drag over the line, keep our heads down, and maybe they'll fix the rules by the time it becomes hopeless." In other words, "You heard the man. Pick up the rusty shovel and at least pretend to use it."

By the time Common Core, Race to the Top waivers and waiver lite rolled around to ramp up the high stakes on the back end and attach amateur-hour standards on the front end, many administrators were already broken. Instead of "Oh, hey, wait a minute," they responded with "Well, maybe this will blow over" or "Nothing we can do about it but bend to the state" or "Get in there and teach to the test."

The argument has been that the federal and state authorities have mandated all of this, and in some states where test results have been used as a method of targeting public schools for destruction, the emphasis on the Big Standardized Test has been hard to avoid. In most states, the BS Test score has become part of every public school's profile, and it's hard to resist the urge to do something about going out in public with that big black eye.

I get all of that. I get the tremendous pressure that some administrators must feel to teach to the test. But it's still wrong. And when the rain starts, the role of a good manager is not to stand to one side and say, "Why the hell are you getting so wet, anyway?"

Administrators have offered a wide variety of responses over the years from the naive (Just teach the standards and the test scores will take care of themselves) to the heroic (Just do your job, and I'll manage whatever flak comes at us). And the same policy approach in a building can come with a variety of faces from sympathetic (I know this sucks, and I'm sorry) to abusive (Get your damn numbers up or I will be assigning you lunch monitor duty forever, you miserable slacker). Sometimes, of course, there are two or three faces involved in the same building.

Bottom line: when education policy is dictated from the top down, it often arrives at the classroom door wearing the face of the building administrator, and the amount of damage done by the bad policies of the last two decades has been affected, for better or worse, by district administrators.

DeVosian Priorities and Public Service

There's nothing new to see here, but it's still worth noting what DeVos tells us about her priorities.

From a recent interview with a conservative Christian podcast-- let me just set these side by side:

"I was fortunate enough to be born into a family that raised me to make my faith my own," she said. "I had exposure from my first memories to weekly church services."

"I'm grateful to have had that foundation."

"I'm for their parents to have the kind of opportunity to make the choices that I was able to make for my kids"

Note that DeVos is not waxing nostalgic for the days when her parents made her aware of the different faiths out there, leaving her to choose the one she liked best. No, she is grateful for a foundation built in what she believes is the only correct choice.

I've made this argument before; people don't really want choice. What they want is to have what they want. DeVos is not different. If her own church had been the only church in town when her kids were growing up, I don't believe for a second that she would have fought to get other houses of worship opened up so that she could have choices.

It's extremely human (maybe even necessarily so) to think some things are better than others. Pressed for an explanation for the $4.7 billion cut to education in the proposed budget, DeVos answered:

The administration has priorities, and we had to make difficult decisions around the entirety of the budget.

Unfortunately, the Senator whose question she was answering/not answering chose to reply with am zinger instead of probing for a more specific description of what priorities DeVos considered more important than the programs that she wanted to cut back, and why. Or why, given the Trump administration's to spend hundreds of billions of dollars more than they had, she didn't just tack that $4.7 billion onto the already-massive budget deficit.

But she gave some answers at another point in the hearings that clarify. Another proposed cut in the budget is the end of the college loan forgiveness program for people entering public service. Yes, it would just plain save the government money, but there are more philosophical reasons:

The administration feels that incentivizing one type of work and one type of job over another is not called for. And we have a demand in our over 7 million jobs going unfilled today, and favoring one type of pursuit over another type of pursuit philosophically doesn’t line up with where we are.

In other words, we'd rather not encourage people to go into public service, because we don't feel public service is more important (or maybe even as important) as serving as a needed meat widget for private industry. In fact, since the government should be really tiny and cost next to nothing, it would be best if nobody worked for it, because really, these "public service" jobs are just government jobs, many of the used to fuel those damn public sector unions (like the twice-damned teachers union, which we really need to finish breaking one way or another, and, yes, that's DeVos brother Erik Prince hiring spies to infiltrate the teachers union and the DeVos-funded Mackinack Center trying to convince teachers to quit the union). If we can convince just one person to become a cog in the corporate machine instead  becoming a teacher or a firefighter, well, then, that's been a good day's work.

As a free market devotee, DeVos is perhaps more inclined to think that the public should serve itself. Certainly, as she has told us in many was at this point, her priority is not to have the public served by a government that has the scale and resources to get the job done. She has told us that public education is a "dead end" by which she means a monopoly or "closed system," by which she means private operators are being denied the chance to make money doing it. She has told us that government "sucks." In other words, she's been quite clear, despite the occasional attempt to be more diplomatic, that public schools are not a choice that needs to be on the table. Not a priority.

The Gates Team Wants To Swing For The Education Fences. Maybe There’s A Better Way For Them To Play.

It says something about Bill Gates that after using the expression “swing for the fences” in the title of his foundation’s annual letter, he also feels the need to explain it:

That’s a phrase many Americans will recognize from baseball. When you swing for the fences, you’re putting every ounce of strength into hitting the ball as far as possible. You know that your bat might miss the ball entirely—but that if you succeed in making contact, the rewards can be huge.

It also explains why, after twenty years, Bill and Melinda Gates have yet to get near the fences on education. 

The Gates legacy in education includes several expensive whiffs. There was the small schools initiative, on which he spent $2 billion, and then there was the initiative for improving teachers, which was less expensive, but no more successful. And then there’s the Common Core standards, behind which Gates threw an immeasurable amount of money and influence. All created far more disruption and expense than anything resembling success.

All of these were, in fact, swing for the fences initiatives—attempts to hit a home run that ultimately stirred the air over home plate.

Educators have watched the Gates’ take multiple times at bat and wondered if they have learned anything yet, but the annual letter from the foundation namesakes rarely offers any hope. And perhaps the swing for the fences mentality is a good model of the problem. Take this observation from Melinda Gates about achieving success with their education initiatives:

The fact that progress has been harder to achieve than we hoped is no reason to give up, though. Just the opposite.

In other words, I keep going to the plate, swinging with all my might, and missing. My solution is not talk to a hitting coach or take a step back and look at what I’m doing; the solution is to just keep doing it, only harder.

Melinda Gates bemoans the fact that there is disagreement on what works and what doesn’t in education, and that’s partly correct. There are plenty of things we know don’t work, but there is also a very wide range of things that may or may not work for any given teacher with any given student on any given day. Education is messy work, and if your intent is to neaten it up and standardize it so that everybody is doing everything the same way, you are doomed to disappointment. You have to watch the pitcher, know the situation in the game, and keep your eye on the ball so that you can make a split-second decision based on all the elements of that actual moment. There is no standardized swing that will get you a home run with every pitch.

But when Bill Gates takes over the letter’s narrative, we are back in familiar territory. He revisits the Common Core and as has become his wont, he admits it was a failure, sort of.

We bet big on a set of standards called the Common Core. Nearly every state adopted them within two years of their release. But it quickly became clear that adoption alone wasn’t enough—something we should’ve anticipated.

It’s not that the standards were flawed, or that the very idea of imposing a national set of top-down standards was flawed. They just didn’t swing hard enough. So they created a market guide so that schools could pick the correct instructional materials. And they looked for ways to better “support” teachers (”support,” teachers learn in many professional development sessions, is a euphemism for “correct” or “re-educate”). And now they are shifting to a new version of scaling up.

The old version of scaling up is to take a solution from one spot and take it to market everywhere. Now the Gates wants to push locally adapted solutions “tailored to the specific needs of teachers and students in the places we’re trying to reach,” to network schools so that they can share, so that they can have “opportunities to learn from each other.” This would sound more hopeful if it were not teamed up with statements like 

...many teachers didn’t have access to the resources they needed to meet the new expectations. So, we looked for ways to provide more training and help them adjust their practice.

This suggests that the focus is still on trying to fix teachers rather than help them, on trying to impose expectations from above, just using a more customized imposition to help develop more localized compliance. 

In other words, the Gates Foundation still dreams of fundamentally transforming the entire US education system—swinging for the fences. And that desire to completely transform the system (a system in which they have no real expertise) remains the most fundamental flaw in their approach.

Every kid who picks up a bat dreams of that moment—a mighty swing, the hefty crack that kicks back up your arms, the triumphant trip around the diamond. Watch the littlest players step up to the plate, maybe even close their eyes and swing with all their might. And miss. And miss, and miss, and miss, and miss. “Look,” says a coach. “Just ease up. Keep your eye on the ball, get the bat out there, and just meet it.”

The power of your swing means nothing if you don’t meet the ball where it is. Here’s my suggestion for Bill and Melinda Gates. Take a year off from education (a gap year, if you will). Spend it traveling the country, talking to teachers—and not just ones that have been carefully vetted. If you aren’t hearing from critics, then the gap year is failing. Don’t pitch your ideas; instead, just keep asking one question: “What can we do to help you?” That’s it. Just keep asking and listening for a year. Then instead of swinging blindly for the fences, you can meet the ball where it is. Maybe you’re destined to only hit a double or a single, but those win games, too—certainly more than big expensive strike-outs

Originally posted at Forbes.com   

ICYMI: Losing An Hour Edition (3/8)

Surely it's about time to end this whole Daylight Savings baloney. Because as I sit here this morning, it hardly seems worth it.

But here's some reading from the week:

Voucher Programs Undermine Religious Liberty  

The Baptist Joint Committee posts this piece in opposition to voucher programs being used to drain public schools and send money to places like Baptist private schools.

Colonists  

Uncharted is a blog allegedly operated by a former charter school teacher, and it offers some stark and stunning looks at the inside view of charters. This piece is about the realization of a racist system inside the school.

City Fund Spending  

The City Fund is the latest organization, featuring many of the same old players, that is out to privatize public schools. Thomas Ultican breaks down some of the organizational and financial connections that are in play for this group. It's not pretty.

No More Middle Ground

Shane Phipps has pretty much had it. This Indiana teacher points out that the legislature just floated a Florida style law that would let charters steal part of the income from a funding levy passed to support public schools.

Trump's Education Policy Is A Chance for Democrats  

Jennifer Berkshire has been traveling in Trump country and noting that his supporters are also big fans of public schools. Will that have implications for the fall election? The Nation has her article.

How The DeVos Rules on Sexual Assault Will Shock Schools  

Betsy DeVos thinks schools and universities are too hard on men accused of sexual assault, and she's about to "fix" that. Politico looks at some of the implications of her coming rules shift.

Betsy DeVos's Problem with Numbers  

DeVos made a visit to the Senate to talk about then budget, and as usual, her talking points included some items that were counter-factual. Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post breaks down the baloney.

100 Years of Teacher Bashing

Have You Heard reminds us that "reform" via shaming and blaming teaches has a long, rich history.

How Will Schools Handle a Pandemic Without Nurses?

Jersey Jazzman crunches some number, builds some charts, and points out that one in five US schools has no nursing coverage. There are details, but the bottom line is that this may not be the best place to be heading into a pandemic.

Black Students Are Being Penalized for their Hair, and That's Bad for Everybody

CNN looks at this issue from the "Wait, Aren't We Living in the 21st Century Filers." An angrifying school trend.

The Complexity of Performance Tasks

It's spring musical season here in NW PA, and I am back in a small way playing in the pit orchestra for a production of Seussical being put as a co-op between my old school and a neighboring high school. This is an annual enterprise I was part of for years. I've been doing school and community theater in a variety of capacities for almost forty years now, and it's still pretty exciting.

There really isn't a much purer version of a performance task than performing arts work. But they're also as reminder of how complex performance tasks really are.

First, there's the actual preparation for the task. Whether we're talking music or theater, there's a wide range that a teacher/director can land on. On one end of the scale, we get very specific preparation for this very specific task. On the other end of the scale, preparing for this task while also noting the larger ideas and principles behind whatever you're doing. For example, you can teach a young actor how to play this one character, or you can teach her about the acting that can be used in this one particular application. You can teach your band how to play "Nobles of the Mystic Shrine" or "Take The A Train," or you can use those pieces to teach them about the stylistic features of playing marches or swing.

It's a challenging choice because sometimes, given the limits of time and aptitude you're working with, you may get a better final product by providing less actual education. You can see this in the world of performance competition, where you will find, for instances, band musicians who can deliver a dynamite precision performance of this year's show-- and nothing else.

But then we get to the performance itself.

A stage musical involves a gazillion moving parts, and every one of those parts effects the other parts.  Folks like to talk about all the magic and mystery of theater, but for magic to happen, a lot of basic nuts-and-bolts mechanics have to be taken care of first. We have to move two set pieces and six actors through this tiny space in two seconds-- how exactly are we going to do that? Where do each of the twenty actors on stage need to stand for this picture to work for the audience? How do we get all the lighting effects we need with just six circuits and ten lighting instruments? Should you pick up the prop with your left hand or right hand? Where is the best place to take a breath on that song, and should you lift your arm ten bars in or wait another six? How do you make that movement now that you're wearing a costume with a giant hat? An awful lot of rehearsal time is spent on things that are neither magical nor fraught with feelings.

And all of these things are interdependent, like a ten million piece game of pick-up sticks. One actor's new line reading changes another actor's reaction. Adjust one thing, and ten others need to be re-adjusted. And that includes adjustments that have to be made on the fly in performance. There are a million relationships, a million strings tied to each other; pull on one, and a thousand others move. And they all need to be as flexible and loose as string, because otherwise when adjustments are needed, things just break instead.

You make choices of necessity and new features present themselves. Like many high school productions, we occasionally switched genders of characters to accommodate the available acting pool. Sometimes that gets really interesting; there's a different vibe to Beauty and the Beast when Belle has a crazy inventor mother instead of a father. And sometimes the available student talent is, well, still developing. Your job as director is to find a way to make that student look good out there (there is a special corner of hell for directors who send their young performers out on stage to embarrass themselves).

Then you toss in the audience, and everything changes yet again. This is particularly tricky with comedies, because after six-to-eight weeks of rehearsal, your cast has forgotten that the show is funny. Holding just the right amount for audience response is yet another factor, and almost impossible to prepare for because every audience is different (and that in part due to the mix of individuals in it).

On any given night, all the factors can line up in unexpected ways. A few years back, our high school production was the Addams Family, and during performance a series of performer choices and reactions combined with a really warm audience to absolutely stop the show. You couldn't make it happen on purpose if you tried, and I've only seen it happen twice in all these years. It was just a perfect pure moment, but only in that moment could it be created. All the priming and preparation and skill and tech and etc etc etc make it possible, but nothing could make it certain.

Year after year I watch these beautiful complex performances unfold and a part of my teacher brain asks, how could you possibly grade the individual students in their performance task? There are so many factors involved, and so many of them are outside of the student's control. Yes, I can point to certain performers and say, "She's really solid" or "He's absolutely awesome." But matching the right performer to the right role is crucial--and it's the director's job. Someone who does a great job as the Cat in the Hat might make a terrible Horton.

So I could sort the students into accomplished, developing, and just getting started, but I wouldn't be confident that I was absolutely right. I could just grade that particular performance, which is more in line with a performance task assessment, but again-- there are a uber-gazillion factors. How would I even start to create a rubric or score guide?

There are a couple of options, and they're problematic.

I could pretend that each of the factors can be assessed in isolation, as if they are unconnected to te rest of the performer or the circumstances and people surrounding her performance. But that's incomplete at best and distorting at worst; after I break performing into all these items, how do I weight them. Should "accurately repeats lines in script" carry the same weight as "moves fluidly on stage" or "conveys emotions convincingly." And how do I even assess things like "conveys emotions convincingly"? And what do I do with a list of 600 different "skills"?

I could simply reduce the assessment to a few measures and throw out the rest, focusing strictly on things that can be objectively measured. Her performance was flat and lifeless, but she said all the lines just as they appear in the script, and she hit her blocking marks and moves with integrity, so she gets a 4 or a proficient (or whatever we're pretending isn't another name for an A).

I am assured by some folks who would know that there are professional psychometric test folks who ably deal with these issues. But my experience at the classroom level is that such instruments are not making to the local school level.

These aren't just problematic because they provide an incomplete or even inaccurate measure of a complex task; they become problematic because they then drive the task itself. If these shows were all about the grade, actors would be tempted to go through the process with the rubric in hand, focusing on what "counts" and ignoring what doesn't. And because a performance task assessment is inclined to cut out the complex and subjective measures, that rubric ends up pushing a shallow and mediocre version of the task. As I pointed out to my own students over the years, when discussing the performance task of writing, you can make zero mistakes and still produce mediocre work.

Of course, real performance tasks are assessed by audiences in the moment. Last night we opened; the audience laughed, applauded, sat in moved silence, and at the end of the night, as casts do, our actors presented themselves for a public assessment which the audience delivered loudly and enthusiastically (which, like most authentic assessment, does not lend itself well to comparing this performance to other performances of other shows in other places).

The cast was excited and proud, and as always, there has been plenty of personal growth. It's one of the ironies of high school theater-- students learn a lot about themselves by pretending to be someone else. I don't know how you put that on a rubric, either.

Schneider's Indispensable Guide To Research

I call her the indispensable Mercedes Schneider. When I entered the blogosphere, hers was one of the first names I learned, because I kept coming back to her blog to get the information that wasn't anywhere else. I have (I hear) a reputation for cranking out a lot of writing, but Schneider posts almost daily, writes books, and carries a full time teaching load. And her posts are usually the result of actual research (unlike some of us who just hop online and shoot off my mouth). Schneider is prolific, but she also brings hard facts and serious sourcing to her work. If you are not following her blog, you should be.

All of that is why I was excited to see that she has another book out. And while her other books have been detail-packed looks at what's going on with ed reform, this new book, A Practical Guide To Digital Research: Getting the Facts and Rejecting the Lies is a thorough look at how to go cyberdigging, looking at both the techniques and the tools that can be used to uncover whatever truth is lurking out there. Because she provides plenty of examples and demonstrations of how these tools and techniques have worked for her, Schneider also gives us a sort of greatest hits collection. Remember that time she figured out who the secret donor to Education Post was? Or just how much out-of-state money was sneaking into Massachusetts to support raising the charter cap? Or how the Louisiana ed chief was quietly married to the head of an organization that te ed department deals with?

There's an astonishing amount of information out there that is hidden--but not really hidden all that well. Schneider is an expert in uncovering those nuggets of information that some folks wish would stay hidden.

Schneider gives away her secrets here, and and does so in a clear, concise manner that can be followed and understood, even by someone whose computer skills are limited to turning on the machine. Yes, there are things in here that more experienced netizens already know, but still plenty more to learn. It is a practical guide that lends itself to being used like a handbook or manual; to that end it is short, clear, and well-organized. It is a series of lessons from a top-notch teacher in book form, as well as a chance to peek over her shoulder and watch her work.

And while this is clearly about education reform issues, these techniques and tools would be perfectly useful in a broad assortment of areas.

The book is available now, and you should get a copy or yourself, and a copy for the other activist in your life. The information is practical and useful and, in this day and age, indispensable. I recommend that you buy this.

New Book Argues Christian Right Worships Power

Katherine Stewart is an author and journalist who specializes in issues surrounding te separation of church and state. She has a new book coming out-- The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism, and a recent interview at Salon captures some of the highlights.

It's always interesting to see what happens when someone whose main beat is not education takes a look at education issues. Stewart has looked at educational issues in the past where they relate to church-state separation, and here she comes again with this statement from the interview:

We also have to recognize that the role of public money is absolutely huge. A lot of the calls for "religious freedom" that characterize much of the activism of the movement today are often seen, rightly so, as a demand that conservative Christians should be able to discriminate against LGBT Americans, nonreligious women and members of the religious minority groups. But even more than that, activists have their eye on a vast potential flow of public funds in the future. This is one of the reasons why the calls for religious freedom are just like this ever-louder drum beat that we're hearing in so many places.

This agenda has been made really explicit in the field of public education where activists are determined to expand access to public funds in the form of vouchers. They've actually placed a key voucher case before the Supreme Court, which they hope will allow a greater funnel of funds in their direction.

The United States spends something like $700 billion a year on K-12. So Christian nationalists realize that, if they can get their hands on a small portion of that in the name of religious liberty, the money will flow without end. So when you look at the larger demands of the movement, it's not just about these culture war issues, it's about public policy, foreign policy, and it's about money.

There's also some stuff about abortion as an issue that reminds me of several things I've read about Prohibition and how that single issue united voters in a bloc that was then deployed against other issues by leaders who basically said, "Since you're with us on this signature issue, follow us on these other issues as well."

Her main thesis is that the current version of the religious right is far more interested in political power than, well, anything. You may or may not buy her arguments, but the book looks to be an interesting discussion-starter.