Why Teach Literature Stuff: #6 Not For These Reasons

When I was teaching, and I had extra time on my hands, I would reflect on the work--the whys and hows and whats. So in solidarity with my former colleagues, I'm going to write a series about every English teacher's favorite thing-- teaching literature, and why we do it. There will be some number of posts (I don't have a plan here).

Also, it would be nice to write and read about something positive, and I don't know anything much more positive than what teachers do and why they do it.

There are so many reasons that people think teachers teach literature, including, I have been told, "to make students miserable and bored." That's not it and, seriously, it's a bad sign. If you are boring all of your students, you are doing it wrong. Maybe you're expecting the work itself to do the heavy lifting, or maybe you aren't into the work yourself. If it's the latter, well-- part of your job as a teacher of literature is to find your own way to an exciting and interesting core of the piece. If you absolutely can't, the work probably shouldn't be on your reading list.

But then, "because it's on the list" is one of those bad reasons for teaching something. Even the AP test gives a list of several dozen works and still offers the option of substituting another work of similar heft. And granted--sometimes the way to figure out the how/why of teaching a work is to attempt to teach it.

Because the list itself is often a collection of bad reasons, from "we've always taught this" to "the community expects students to have read this work." If you're not careful, the list becomes comfortable, and once you get too comfortable teaching a work, you are on the edge of lazily going through motions.

And certainly, please, God, no, because "this stuff will be on The Test." It's the worst reason to teach anything, in part because it is fundamentally backward. You should test what you taught, not teach what you expect to test.

Don't teach something for reasons other than the actual values in the work. "Because it has been a classic for three hundred years" is not a great reason, but neither is "because this is a hot new contemporary work." If you as a teacher cannot find a way to see an exciting valuable core in the work, it shouldn't be on your lesson.

The teacher excitement and engagement thing is a critical factor that can overwhelm many others. I don't know many people who have any business teaching Paradise Lost to high school students. I'm sure I couldn't have. But I worked with a woman who just loved that work, top to bottom and front to back, and so she made it live and breathe for her students (who at the end of the year put John Milton on trial in front of actual local lawyers--always quite the show as they called characters from the work as witnesses).

There is one caveat here-- if your excitement about the work is linked to one single interpretation, one single set of Correct Gets for students to glean, then maybe you shouldn't teach it. If you can't tolerate your students wandering about and discovering all sorts of Wrong Things, to the point that you feel you must grab them by the nose and drag them to the Stream of the Single Truth, then maybe you need to let this one go.

If you are teaching K-12, you students are not studying literature for the same reason college English majors do, and you should not be trying to reproduce the work of your favorite college lit professor. If you don't see the value in literature even for people who will not spend their lives neck deep in the language and imagery and technique and shock and awe of great literature, then you need to back up. If literature only matters to the people who make a career out of literature, well, then, I'm not sure I can make a case for teaching it to K-12 students.

Literature, like art and music and maybe even math and science, exists not just for the specialists, but as a means of enriching the lives of people whose existence is mostly about something else. That has to be your guiding principle in a K-12 classroom; if your attitude is that you are trying to reach the future English majors and everyone else is just kind of dust on your boots, you're doing it wrong. My high school band director was awesome, and I say that not because he produced a bunch of professional musicians (though he did) but because he produced a huge number of people who are not professional musicians, but for whom music provided enormous enrichment to their lives. That's how I felt about literature when I was still in the classroom.

Arne Duncan Smells Katrina 2.0

Arne Duncan said a lot of silly things while he was secretary of education, but perhaps most infamous was his notion that was that Hurricane Katrina was "the best thing" to happen to education in New Orleans.

But now he's starting to make similar noises about the current pandemic pause. Here he is in an interview at the 74:

I don’t want us to go back to the old normal. And there’s a whole bunch of things that this time allows us to think and to challenge. Can we think about the fundamental school year and calendar year? Can we think seriously about not seat time, but about competency? Can we think about what should truly continue to be online and learn virtually, and what should be done in a physical building?

He had a similar moment on Twitter yesterday:

Now is the time to reimagine education.
Now is the time to end massive inequities.
Now is the time to close the digital divide.
Now is the time to give every child in America the chance to learn anything they want, anytime, anywhere.

You will notice that the line about "the chance to learn anything they want, anytime, anywhere" sounds an awful lot like Betsy DeVos's repeated call for learning anywhere, any time. There were some fairly spicy replies to that, but actually the smartest response might have come from Benjamin Riley, head honcho of Deans for Impact:

Respectfully, no. Now is not the time to reimagine education, not when teachers and parents are crushed with unanticipated responsibilities. We need to provide support, full stop. I'm with you on closing the divide, but this moment will exacerbate inequities -- already is.

Duncan's idea to have the Big Reimagining Discussion right now makes a certain kind of sense if he imagines that such a conversation would take place in thinky tank and government board room, far away from actual teachers and students and parents, which has always been his way. Duncan shares several traits with DeVos, and one is a deep mistrust of teachers and public education, a sneaking suspicion that they are Up To Something and trying to hide their various failings. So it makes sense that as he smells Katrina 2.0, he would see this is a chance, while everyone in the actual professional education world is busy trying to make things work, to gather together the Movers and Shakers and Reimagine Education some more.

Duncan certainly isn't alone in his breathless hope that this is the moment that education-via-internet finally captures the hearts (and markets) of the US. There are other ed reform veterans who have a more clear-eyed view. Here's Robert Pondiscio's piece soberingly titled, "No, This Is Not The New Normal."

Kids will go back to brick-and-mortar schools—yes, even “government schools”—at the earliest possible moment. Most of them want to go. Their parents mostly want it even more strongly. The act of sending our kids every morning to a place called a school is a cultural habit formed over many generations. It persists because we value it, not for want of a better idea or a more efficient delivery mechanism for education. 

Well, yes.

I keep hoping that Duncan will retire to some quiet basketball court somewhere, or at least to some corner of the globe where people are uninclined to give him a platform, or at a bare minimum would make him share that platform with educational professionals. Of course, that last option would have to wait until the professionals aren't too busy trying to do the actual work that Duncan likes to pontificate about.

Demonstrating Why Business Ideas Don't Help Public Education (Example #3,244,781)

As always, let me say up front that I don't hate the free market and business, and that I believe there are things that they do pretty well. But the free market does not belong within six-to-ten feet of public education (or health care or basically anything that involves taking care of human beings, but let me try to retain some focus here).

We are living through yet another demonstration of the ways in which market-based approaches fail, and in some cases, fail really hard.

Long Term Preparation Is Inefficient But Essential

Back when I was a stage crew advisor, there was a pep talk I had to give periodically to crew members, particularly those working in the wings as grips or fly. "I know that you sit and do nothing for a lot of this show," I'd say, "but when we need you, we really need you. In those few minutes, you are critical to our success." In those moments we were talking about, every crew member was occupied; there was no way to double up or cut corners.

Emergency preparation is much the same. It's economically efficient to, for instance, keep a whole stockpile of facemasks or ventilators. Big-time businessman Trump justified his cuts to various health agencies by citing business wisdom:

And rather than spending the money—I’m a business person. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.

This turns out to be just as smart as disbanding the fire department and figuring you'll just round up personnel and equipment when something is actually on fire. It doesn't work. And as we have witnessed, it leaves you unprepared to deal with the critical moment when it arrives.

But the market hates tying up money in excess capacity or emergency readiness, because you're spending all that money on capacity that isn't being used this second. Are those guidance counselors and school nurses seeing students every single minute of the day? Well then, we should be able to cut them back. Are we sure that every teacher is teaching the maximum number of students possible? Couldn't we just put some of those students on software? This is why so many business heads are convinced that public education is simply filled with waste--because there seems to be so much excess capacity in schools.

But in many schools, there's not enough excess capacity. When a student is in the middle of a crisis, we should be able to respond immediately, whether it's a personal crisis, a medical crisis, or an educational issue. The response should not be "tough it out till the counselor is on duty tomorrow" or "we'll just wrap that in some gauze until the nurse comes in three hours from now" or "I know you need help with the assignment, but I can't take my attention away from the other thirty-five students in this classroom." And that's on top of the issue of preparedness, or having staff and teachers who have the capacity--the time and resources and help-- to be prepared for the daily onslaught of Young Human Crises. When wealthy people pay private school tuition or raise their own public school taxes, this is what they're paying for-- the knowledge that whenever their child needs the school to respond, the response will come immediately.

Sure, you can cut a school to the bones in the name of efficiency, but what you'll have is the educational equivalent of a nation caught flatfooted by a global pandemic because it didn't have the people in place to be prepared.

Competition Guarantees Losers

Ed Reformsters just love the bromide about how competition raises all boats and makes everyone better. And yet, the pandemic's free market approach to critical medical supplies doesn't seem to bear that out. States are being forced to compete with each other  and the federal government, and all it's doing is making vendors rich. This is free market competition at its baldest-- if you have more money, you win. If you have less money, you lose. At some point, if it has not already happened, some people in this country are going to die because their state, municipality or medical facility will not have enough money to outbid someone else.

The free market picks losers, and it generally picks them on the basis of their lack of wealth. The notion that losers can just compete harder, by wrapping their bootstraps in grit, is baloney. It's comforting for winners to believe that they won because of hard work and grit and not winning some fate-based lottery, and it also releases them from any obligation to give a rat's rear about anyone else ("I made myself, so everyone else should do the same").

A system built on picking losers and punishing them for losing is the exact opposite of what we need for public education. You can argue that well, we just want free market competition for schools and teachers, but if that kind of competition is in the dna of the system, it will stomp all over students as well, just as all free market businesses pick customers to be losers who don't get served because they aren't sufficiently profitable. Kind of like a low-revenue state or old folks home that can't get its people necessary supplies because they don't have enough wealth to bid with.

"Compete harder" just means "be richer." It is not helpful advice.

Expertise Isn't Always Marketable

May I introduce, once again, Greene's Law-- "The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing."

Now sure, marketing can sometimes be based on actual quality or expertise. But that's not always the best way to sell your stuff, and we are living through a yuge demonstration of the results of a focus on marketability over actually knowing what the hell you're talking about. It gets us things like a movement by anti-vaxxers to replace Dr. Fauci with a miserable quack. It gets us Fox News and an endless parade of ignorant talking heads who can sell the heck out of their ill-informed answers to the current crisis. It gets us officials whose scientific illiteracy informs a parade of bad decisions because they pick based on what appeals to them, based on their deep distrust of "experts."

Letting these kinds of forces loose in public education is not now, nor has it ever been, a good idea. The notion that schools should be devoting time and money to marketing themselves is a dumb idea. It's not just the waste-- it's the tendency of the marketplace to favor what is sexy and truthy and appealing to biases over what is actually recommended by actual experts.

We are living through the kind of mess created by devaluing expertise. Public education would not be helped.

None Of This Is New

These are not new reasons to reject free market businessized thinking for public education (and, for that matter, for private education as well). But we are living through a full-scale demonstration of what happens when you try to apply free market business-ish philosophy to the care and support of actual human beings in a functional free society. We can do better than this.

Florida's Troubled Cyber School Launches Alaskan Spinoff

So Alaska's teachers were just getting themselves set up to handle distance learning, when their governor pulled the rug out from under them. He'd had a chat with everybody's favorite failed Presidential candidate and education-busting former governor Jab Bush, who suggested that Alaska would be an excellent fit for Florida's Virtual School.

No, really. I wish I were making this up. But I'm not--in a stunning display of one-size-fits-allness, Alaska is now a client of Florida's cyber school.

Dunleavy should know better-- the man's pre-politics career was in teaching. But Dunleavy has been the target of a recall campaign having taken an axe to, well, nearly everything. That included whacking the heck out of education-- 21% off the K-12 budget and a whopping 41% chopped out of the University of Alaska system. Education just needed to get more efficient, he explained.

Not the Everglades.

And what could be more efficient than a cyber-school business that has been through one mess after another (not that Florida's public ed-hating legislature cares-- they're seeing if they can't use the current crisis to get FLVS to take over the whole business).

The above links, it should be noted, only get you to the problems with FLVS that are publicly discussed. Talk to Floridian teachers (off the record) and you hear all your worst fears about cyber-school confirmed. Tests taken by heaven-only-knows-who, including voices that can be heard in the background when doing a "live" hookup. Technical issues.

One would think that, since FLVS has been in business since 1997, a prospective customer might ask around, check with folks, ask your Alaskan teachers to contact Florida teachers about how the whole thing works. Instead, Dunleavy just sprung the whole business, complete with a half-million dollar contract, on Alaskans. Teachers were not consulted.

The contract promises a "turnkey global school online" which includes "highly qualified teachers." FLVS doesn't give a refund if the enrollment is low, nor charge more if it's high. And they will train up to 50 Alaskan teachers to cyber-teach. Well, they'll provide some live webinars and some consultations. But some of them sounds super, like the one where teachers "will benefit from this session on how to provide grading feedback that is meaningful and strengthens the learner-teacher bond," or the one where "teachers learn techniques and tools to encourage even the hardest to reach students."

And just so we're clear on what's going on here, training may start as late as June 1, and "teacher professional development will be ongoing until February 2021."  It appears that Alaska is not looking at a coronavirus stopgap, but a whole spin-off business. Yay, disaster capitalism. Ka-ching.

What Florida knows about the unique challenges of Alaskan education is not clear. And just for the record, again, let it be noted that cyber-schools have largely failed, in fact failed so hard that even brick and mortar charter advocates have called for major reforms. And scandal-plagued FLVS is taking this on in the midst of trying to massively increase its own capacity in Florida from 200,000 to 2,700,000.

The alarms should be whooping loudly in Alaska. Remember, boys and girls, do not take your education advice from Florida or Jeb Bush.

FL: Court Delivers Another Blow To Public Education

Florida's HB 7069 is the gift that just keeps on giving. Or rather, taking. This cobbled-together Frankenstein's monster of a bill included a variety of methods for draining the blood from public education, and one of its most astonishing pieces of legalized theft was just upheld by the court.

The bill was shepherded through by then-House speaker Richard Corcoran; he's now the state's education head honcho. The most famous portion of the bill was the Schools of Hope, a name that only makes sense if you mean that these schools give hope to privatizers and profiteers. Schools of Hope are the ultimate use of the tactics of weakening public schools and then publicly labelling them failures; this program encouraged edu-biz entrepreneurs to open up charter schools right next door to "failing" public schools, thereby tapping into a ready-made market. The program is already targeted for expansion by including Trump's "opportunity zones" and by expanding the definition of "failing" for schools. It's a fine policy for a state legislature that is absolutely devoted to gutting public education and letting privateers feast on the pieces. Schools of Hope are the anti-Samaritan law, a law in which the state finds struggling schools beaten and lying beside the road (and by "finds" I mean "helps beat up") and then, instead of calling for assistance, waves over a bunch of vultures.

But schools of hope might not be the most audacious, astonishing attack on public schools.

While plenty of Florida legislators have close personal connections to the charter school industry, they were also careful to reach out to other charter folks to make sure the 7069 shopping list was complete. As reported by Gary Fineout, a reporter who was all over this stuff:

Rep. Michael Bileca, a Miami Republican and chairman of the House Education Committee, said legislators met with charter school operators and asked what it would take for them to set up schools in the neighborhoods now served by traditional public schools. He said one answer was that they needed help paying for new buildings to house the school.

Lo and behold, HB 7069 included a provision that required public schools to share tax dollars. Not just in some wimpy little "dollars follow the child" dribs and drabs, but some substantial theft from the taxpayers. Let's say the taxpayers of Auldfarte County, Florida, decide to raise their own taxes in order to, say, upgrade some of their crumbling schools; every charter school in Auldfarte County is entitled to a cut, just by virtue of existing. 7069 is not the only law that codifies this kind of thievery in Florida, but 7069 started the ball rolling with its mandate that taxpayers must share capital revenues with charter schools.

In general, Senator Linda Stewart pretty well captured the nature of the bill at the time:

The legislation you signed today gives to the charter school industry a free hand and promises them a bountiful reward. It allows corporations with no track record of success, no obligation to struggling students, and no mandated standards of accountability to flourish, with the sole obligation to their shareholders. Not the public. Not to well-intentioned parents desperate to see their children succeed – but to a group of investors who have made a business decision to add these companies to their portfolios because they are interested in making money.

The law was adopted in May of 2017, and over a dozen school districts immediately sued. Corcoran's office pretended that the main point here was that they were out to deny elementary students recess (7069 included a minimum recess requirement) which is both cynical political spin and an admission that the charter-boosting parts of the hastily passed bill can't really be defended on their merits. The school districts' argument was that they were now responsible for funding schools over which they had no control or oversight. The Florida Department of Education argued, "Pshaw!"

The lawsuit has been winding its way up through the courts, losing initially and shedding a few districts at each level of appeal. Now the state supreme court has decided not hear the case, the argument being that the Florida constitution only grants local control to school districts up to the point that the state feels like taking it away. (I'm old enough to remember when conservatives liked the idea of local control, but apparently not in Florida.) So the law stands.

So if you are a taxpayer in Florida, you can now be secure in the knowledge that money you give to the state to benefit your local public school system will only partly end up there, the rest diverted into the pockets of whatever folks have gotten themselves into the charter school business. If you're the school board members elected to make sure that money is used well, you can now be secure in the knowledge that you have no power to actually fulfill your duty.

This is Florida, the home of Florida Man, but also the state that Betsy DeVos and others like her consider an exemplar of ed reform. And it is also the home of the taxpayers who keep electing these varieties of crooks. Perhaps it's time to start running a pool on just how long it will be before the state shuts down public schools entirely.

Happy Easter

I love Easter, love it better than Christmas. I have decades of Easter traditions piled up, and of course, today, none of them will happen.

I love tradition, but on the other hand, tradition can become an enabler, a means of just sleepwalking through life. I love tradition, but I always told my yearbook students that they were not allowed to make any decisions about the book "because that's what we did last year."

So I'm going to try to see today as a reminder to be mindful and deliberate, to strip off the tradition and get back to thinking about why they were a good idea in the first place, what values and ideals and goals they helped express and embody, and get back to those foundational things. It's probably a useful exercise for all of us in this weird pandemic time. It will certainly be a valuable exercise when we are trying to get back to whatever we're going to do.

It's also useful for people of faith, because the last many yeas I've seen my faith hijacked by people who are more focused on venal petty earthly power than on the great I Am, the Creator of all that is or was or will be. I can barely recognize my church any more. So there's that to chew on.

So take the day off. I mean, really off, because even if you haven't had to work, you've still been doing the work of fretting and itching and worrying, so drop that today, too (I know--easy to say). Whatever your faith (or absence thereof), take a day to breathe in and out and in again. Eat something tasty. Call someone. Hug someone. Sit with some quiet and grab hold of your own potent human core, the parts that help anchor you to this world and move through it. I often say that education is about learning to be fully yourself, to understand how the world works and how to be fully human in it. Pretty sure working that out is the gig for our lifetimes.

Love and peace, readers. I'll get back to the rest of it tomorrow.

What Do We Want To Measure When We Get Back?

I have railed against this for years, but now it's apparently time to take the railing up a notch.

Lots of folks are worried about--or at least pretending to be worried about--the notion that students may lose a step or two during the coronahiatus, and that's reasonable concern. Every teacher knows that September, not April, is the cruelest month, the month in which you discover just how much information just sort of fell out of students' heads under the warm summer sun. This pandemic pause is undoubtedly going to set some educational goals back.

Coronadonuts?

But which goals? Exactly what kind of ground do we think we're going to lose?

Cue all the folks who like to treat "student achievement" and "test score" as synonyms. Here, for instance, is a paper from the folks at testing company NWEA projecting what the COVID-19 Slide (which would be a good name for a dance) will look like. As a piece of research, it is really, really scrambling to be anything better than a best guess, and while I don't fault them for that, because what else can anyone do except make a best guess, NWEA's people have buried their guess under layers of language like this--

To provide preliminary estimates of the potential impacts of the extended pause of academic instruction during the coronavirus crisis, we leverage research on summer loss and use a national sample of over five million students in grades 3–8 who took MAP® Growth™ assessments in 2017–2018.

Sarah Sparks at EdWeek reported on this as an analysis of "student achievement and growth data,"  but it's not. It's just not. It's an analysis based on projections taken from test scores on the infamous MAP test, but setting aside any debates about the efficacy of the MAP test for a moment-- we are just talking about tests scores in two subjects. That's it.

It's a sloppy corner that an uncountable number of education journalists continually cut, but dammit-- test results are not student achievement.

Look, there's no shame in the folks at NWEA taking a wild-ass guess because nobody has data for anything like this. And there's no shame (well, maybe there's some) in talking about test scores on narrowly focused standardized tests. But say what you mean. Use the right words. Don't grab a bunch of figures about the price of oranges and start making declarations about how to grow apples. Words mean things, even in 2020. Particularly as a journalist, you should use the exact, correct, accurate word. And "student achievement" is not the exact accurate phrase to use in place of "test score."

This matters right now, first of all, because it mis-represents what people have on their minds. "Will my child fall far behind on the content? When will she learn the rest of her physics stuff? How will the school band survive all this? Will she get the knowledge and skills she'll need in college? How will she stay in touch with her friends? How will she get better at writing when she's doing so little? Is she going to get enough education to succeed in the future?" The list of parent and students goes on and on and on and I'll bet you dollars to coronadonuts that very few parents have, "Oh my God! What if her standardized test scores drop!" near the very top of their list.

But it especially matters because when schools head back, folks in charge are going to need to make some decisions about what is really important, what really needs attention. If we keep letting people pretend that "test score" is the same as "student achievement," the new school year will be immediately mired in test prep test prep test prep. The wise thing to do? Scrap the test for at least another year and focus on actually educating students.

Resources like time and focus and money and emotional fortitude are going to be limited, and policy makers, actual educators, and people with education flavored products to sell are going to be locked in debate over where those resources should be focused. "Getting test scores back up" should not be the answer. Let me remind you that even many of the reformsters have finally concluded that the Big Standardized Test isn't really telling us anything useful about students' futures, and students' futures should be the number one priority going back, and that means focusing on actual education and not test scores.

Yes, that will be hard to measure. For folks worried about that, I have just one question:

Which is more important-- getting students what they need, or getting them what can be most easily measured?

In fat and happy times, we could bat these questions around and take a miniscule comfort in the belief that maybe teachers could somehow do it all, both education and test prep. Teachers have been screaming for two decades that it's not so, that imperative to drive up math and reading scores was crushing education like a unicorn in a trash compactor. But now the time for pretense is over. Next fall, students will be shell-shocked and out of practice at doing school; some will have found a way to stay on top of things, and some will have thrown up their hands and quit months and months ago. Some schools will be financially strapped. Teachers will be pulled in a dozen directions. And for all we know, some sort of coronaviral restrictions will still stand in the way of "normal."

In fact, we don't know what "normal" is going to look like, which means this is the perfect time to redefine it. For two decades, we've allowed "normal" to mean "education centered around test results which, despite a dearth of evidence, we will pretend are reliable proxies for everything from student achievement to teacher effectiveness." That's a bad definition of "normal."

So let's take some words back, and some education as well, and in the meantime, every time you see someone try to use "student achievement" as a synonym for "test scores," call them on it. Because it should be normal for words to mean something.