We’re About To Hear Many Suggestions About How To Reshape Education. Here’s How To Sort Them Out.

The vast majority of the nation’s schools have pressed pause due to the current pandemic. In many areas they will stumble through the remainder of a year that will little resemble an ordinary year. This is already prompting many folks to declare this a golden opportunity to reconsider some of the traditional features of U.S. schooling. 

If we’ve got to have school without grades, without desks and rooms, without set hours for meeting anyway, why not consider how to play with these features to create better school systems? Lots of folks have thoughts. Some of the ideas that emerge will be useful and worthwhile, some will be opportunistic profiteering, and some will be baloney.

Here are some clues to sorting the educational wheat from the opportunistic chaff.

Who is pitching the idea?

Teachers know the system better than anyone; they are, in fact, the leading experts on public education in this country. Most teachers have spent their entire career thinking and talking about how to make the system better serve students. They’ve already started talking about how this crisis could present opportunities (here’s one such conversation in action). 

When you’re considering a hot new idea for education, consider the source. Look the pitcher up—do they have any educational training or experience at all. Note: if they spent two years in a classroom before starting their career as an educational entrepreneur or thought leader, that doesn’t count. And if their bold idea just happens to involve a program produced by a company they run or invest in, well, that doesn’t necessarily mean their idea is a bad one, but it certainly is reason to examine the goods carefully.

Has the idea been field tested?

Is there any evidence that this bold new idea might work? Has anyone ever tried it? Do we know how that went? And if formal research is cited, did it come from a peer-reviewed third party study, or was it in-house research by the same folks selling you the solution?

Check also to make sure that the evidence matches the bold idea. Folks trying to sell computer-guided lessons have often cited a forty-year-old study about the benefits of having a tutor, as if having a personal human tutor is the same as doing worksheets on a computer screen. 

Does the idea fit the problem? 

Some folks do an excellent job of identifying an issue, but then take a huge leap to get to their proposed solution. No matter how compelling and clear their statement of the issue may be, you should still press for an answer to that most critical question, “And how, exactly, does your idea fix that problem?” 

Are computers involved?

Advanced computer technology has opened up many possibilities in education. But ed tech’s defining characteristic continues to be its tendency to promise far more than it can deliver. Ed tech promoters have learned that parents don’t get very excited about proposals that sound much like “We’ll have your child sit and work at a computer screen for hours.” 

But often that’s exactly what a pitch for “personalized learning” or “adaptive instruction” or “putting the emphasis on learning instead of seat time” actually mean—spend more time working at a computer screen. While such an approach will probably improve someone’s bottom line, there is little evidence that it will improve a student’s education.

Does the idea sound fully formed and polished? 

If it does, that’s a bad sign. The U.S. education system is complicated and complex, with millions of moving parts. Most of the current “solutions” are the result of compromise and experimentation over decades. Anyone who claims to have a new solution that is quick, clear and simple to implement is either delusional or selling something. Any useful ideas that come out of this period of opportunity will have rough edges and questions that can’t be answered until we give it a try—and they won’t be good answers for everyone. When it comes to education, one size will never fit all.

The current pandemic creates opportunity for change, both for educators and for disaster capitalists. It will take some care and attention to make sure we’re listening to the right voices.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

ICYMI: It's Not Normal Until It's Not New Edition (4/19)

In other words, there's no such thing as a new normal. But here we are anyway. Have some reading to pass the time.

My Transition To Emergency Remote Teaching

As always, I would like to be as smart as P. L. Thomas when I grow up. Here, while reflecting on his own transition, he offers insight on what is or is not right with remote teaching.

A Dozen Good Things That Could (Just Maybe) Happen As A Result Of This Pandemic    

Nancy Flanagan has some optimistic thoughts about where we could end up when all this is done.

No, Everyone Is Not Homeschooling Now  

From the blog a Potluck Life, a few thoughts from a homeschooler about how to just relax about this whole schooling at home thing.

Are charter schools public or private?

Jan Resseger takes a look at the recent attempts by charter schools to identify as public or private depending on which designation brings in the most money.

David Berliner: Hoe Successful Charter Schools Cull and Cream

Berliner is one of the top academics looking at ed reform. Here he is guesting at Diane Ravitch's blog to offer some insights into how, exactly, charter schools control which students they serve.

Teachers Could Retire In Droves

Andre Perry looks at what might happen if teachers decide that this is just the last straw and looks like a good time to finally retire.

What Teaching Looks Like Coronavirus  

Well, I'll be. Some reporters at NPR decided to talk to actual teachers about the effects of the pandemic pause. Imagine that.

Google classroom app flooded with 1-star reviews

Students have one way to voice their opinions during crisis schooling.

No, this is not the new normal  

Robert Pondiscio checks in at the Fordham blog with some level-headed thinking from the reformster side of the tracks. No, remote learning is not about to become the primary form of US schooling.

Screens and worksheets aren't the answer

Rae Pica takes to Medium to stand up for sensible education ideas for the littles.

What a Global Pandemic Reveals about Inequity in Education  

Christina Torres on Medium to alk about the big fat underlining of inequity that has occurred under the current crisis.

Online Learning Should Return To A Supporting Role

The New York Times offers this from David Deming: "Winner-take-all economics and cost-cutting may make many in-person lectures obsolete, but the best education continues to be intensive, expensive and done in person."

Why Teach Literature? The Whole Collection

I created a series of posts about the teaching of literature, and they ended up being sprinkled here and there. I thought I would just pump them out one after another but after I got started--squirrel!! So for those of you how enjoyed them, I'm putting this up to collect links to all of them in one place so that you can get to them more easily, should you ever wish to.

I know these aren't as entertainingly crabby as some of my stuff, and appeal to a more narrow audience, but I still like the exercise of thinking about what to teach and why. It's easy to get caught up in the day to day mess. Nice to step back and look at the bigger, more important picture behind the rest. So here they are:

Why Teach Literature Stuff: #1 What Is It?

Let's define our terms before we start.

Why Teach Literature Stuff: #2 Humanity

Because we all want to know what it means to be fully human in the world, and it takes a lifetime to even start to find out.

Why Teach Literature Stuff: #3 Knowing Stuff Is Useful

It's really handy to have a bunch of knowledge stuffed in your head.

Why Teach Literature Stuff: #5 Language Is Power

If you want to control your world, language is Tool #1.

Why Teach Literature Stuff: #6 Not For These Reasons.

There are bad reasons to teach a work of literature.

Why Teach Literature Stuff #7 Everything Is Reading

Because there's nothing to teach that isn't reading.

Why Teach Literature Stuff #7 Everything Is Reading

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.

Well, actually, everything is history. But history is reading, so there you are.

Being able to read, then interpret and understand and make sense from what you've read is the most universally useful skill that exists. Today more than ever, as we have collapsed back to the text-based medium we call the internet. Even reading an image or a video is reading. And writing, which is the only means available (okay, maybe not the only) for reaching out beyond the physical bonds of your own body and somehow connecting with other humans-- writing is also reading.

You interact with other humans, socially or at work, and you have to read them, parse their words, draw conclusions about their character and intent. Reading.

You have to do the same thing with nothing but the written word to go on. You're on social media or email or even, God bless you, opening an envelope and lifting out a piece of paper with marks on it, and you have to sift as much meaning and sense from those marks as you can. Reading.

You wade into the world of current events, filled as it is with the folks whose intentions are more reliable than their understanding, traveling cheek by jowl with confused amateurs and ill-intentioned bad actors. All mixed in with a smattering of people who know what the hell they're talking about. And nobody--not a soul--who you can just trust completely 100% of the time. How do you sort through all that? Reading.

Words are a fundamental part of what makes humans human. Reading and writing make me feel just as vibrant and alive and energized as drawing breath on a long run or standing at the top of a sky-lifting hill or even-- well, never mind. Reading is fundamental to who we are and how we function in the world.

Figuring out how to solve a problem, change a tire, balance a checkbook. Reading.

Being touched by fellow humans in the darkest of times. Reading.

Spending a lifetime grappling with the nuances and complexities of how to be a citizen, friend, parent, neighbor at this place in this time. Reading.

And reading is a skill, a mental muscle (and not, as some would presume, a collection of handy tricks that, once checked off the list, are equal to any puzzle) that must exercise and grow to stay well. One of my fundamental beliefs about humans is that we are either moving forward or losing ground; there is no standing still. So we are always exercising those reading muscles, need to be stretching and growing them.

Reading is uniquely, foundationally human. We were driven to create it as surely as we were driven to harness fire and cleave to each other. When we take it for granted, view it as drudgery, we close our eyes to one of the most amazing things that makes all our other amazing things possible. Try to imagine a world in which humans don't read; it certainly wouldn't look like the world we live in.

Everything is reading. It's a big damn deal.

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.