While the Institute is away at a corporate retreat, far, mostly, from the interwebz, I've arranged for some dips into the archives.
The most-read thing I've ever published, with close to a million hits on HuffPost. As noted, I would have been a little more careful if I'd known this was going to be so widely read.
The Hard Part
They never tell you in teacher school, and it's rarely discussed elsewhere. It is never, ever portrayed in movies and tv shows about teaching. Teachers rarely bring it up around non-teachers for fear it will make us look weak or inadequate.
Valerie Strauss in yesterday's Washington Post put together a series of quotes to answer the question "How hard is teaching?" and asked for more in the comments section. My rant didn't entirely fit there, so I'm putting it here, because it is on the list of Top Ten Things They Never Tell You in Teacher School.
The hard part of teaching is coming to grips with this:
There is never enough.
Wednesday, July 22, 2020
Tuesday, July 21, 2020
Archives: Teacher Merit Pay
While the Institute is away at a corporate retreat, far, mostly, from the interwebz, I've arranged for some dips into the archives.
Again from seven years ago, and again, still completely applicable today.
Why Teacher Merit Pay Is Stupid
Sometimes we forget the obvious, so let me spell it out. Here's why teacher merit pay will never make sense.
Again from seven years ago, and again, still completely applicable today.
Why Teacher Merit Pay Is Stupid
Sometimes we forget the obvious, so let me spell it out. Here's why teacher merit pay will never make sense.
Monday, July 20, 2020
Archives: Defending Music Education
While the Institute is away at a corporate retreat, far, mostly, from the interwebz, I've arranged for some dips into the archives.
An important idea to bring up, now that districts are looking for things to cut.
Stop "Defending" Music
Today I ran across one more xeroxed handout touting the test-taking benefits of music education, defending music as a great tool for raising test scores and making students smarter. It was just one more example among many of the "keep music because it helps with other things" pieces out there.
I really wish people would stop "defending" music education like this.
An important idea to bring up, now that districts are looking for things to cut.
Stop "Defending" Music
Today I ran across one more xeroxed handout touting the test-taking benefits of music education, defending music as a great tool for raising test scores and making students smarter. It was just one more example among many of the "keep music because it helps with other things" pieces out there.
I really wish people would stop "defending" music education like this.
Archive: Schools Don't Serve Businesses
While the Institute is away at a corporate retreat, far, mostly, from the interwebz, I've arranged for some dips into the archives.
Hard to believe it's been seven years since the Gates Foundation mouthpiece set me off. But this still applies (and he wasn't the last to suggest this.
The Wrongest Sentence Ever In The CCSS Debate
At Impatient Optimists, a Gates Foundation website, Allan Golston recently wrote a notable piece entitled "America's Businesses Need the Common Core." It's a notable column, not because it has anything new to add to the discussion (it's a rehash of the usual pro-CCSS fluffernuttery), but because it contains this sentence:
Hard to believe it's been seven years since the Gates Foundation mouthpiece set me off. But this still applies (and he wasn't the last to suggest this.
The Wrongest Sentence Ever In The CCSS Debate
At Impatient Optimists, a Gates Foundation website, Allan Golston recently wrote a notable piece entitled "America's Businesses Need the Common Core." It's a notable column, not because it has anything new to add to the discussion (it's a rehash of the usual pro-CCSS fluffernuttery), but because it contains this sentence:
Sunday, July 19, 2020
ICYMI: Vacation Edition (7/19)
The Institute staff and board of directors are headed for a corporate retreat in a place where the internet doesn't really reach, so things will be quiet here for a bit. But before I go, here's some reading for you to do. Sorry for all the paywalls today.
There have been several recurriing themes in this week's coverage. For instance, lots of folks have noticed that Betsy DeVos's current stance on getting schools open, and using federal muscle to force it, appears to be a complete reversal of her long-held beliefs.
Here's Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat with a pretty good take. Erica Green at the New York Times also offered some DeVosian historical context.
But other folks focused more closely on just how bad DeVos is at her job. Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post wanted to know who the heck thought it would be a good idea to send DeVos out onto the Sunday shows. Jessica Calarco is at the New York Times wondering what the heck DeVos is thinking. And Charles Pierce at Esquire observed, among other things, that "the only thing DeVos knows about education is how to turn a buck on it."
Local dispatches have thrown the pandemic school issues into sharper relief. A Missouri school district wants parents to sign a waiver of liability for any illness of death that happens to occur. Ohio provides yet more examples of public schools getting funding cuts while charters hoover up some of that sweet small business loan cash. In Orange County, a "bold" idea to reopen school as if nothing unusual was going on turns out to come mostly from charter school fans. And from Wyoming comes this top-notch piece of reporting about a school board meeting that shows some of the attitudes and ideas roll out in unreal time.
Nancy Bailey blogs about some ideas for facing the new school year, and people continue to point out that it really will take some money to do this right, but the headline of the week award may go to The Nation, with their piece entitled "There are literally no good options for educating our kids this fall." Actually, for the "We've got the money; tough noogies for everyone else" crowd, there is one option-- hire teachers to come homeschool your kids.
In other news. Education Next has a brief of research that suggests that No Excuses schools have some problems (quel surprise!) just as KIPP decides that it's time for a motto change and Schools Matter has some thoughts.
I'll be back in ten days or so. In the meantime, check out the blogroll that I keep here, wear a mask, and be kind to each other.
There have been several recurriing themes in this week's coverage. For instance, lots of folks have noticed that Betsy DeVos's current stance on getting schools open, and using federal muscle to force it, appears to be a complete reversal of her long-held beliefs.
Here's Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat with a pretty good take. Erica Green at the New York Times also offered some DeVosian historical context.
But other folks focused more closely on just how bad DeVos is at her job. Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post wanted to know who the heck thought it would be a good idea to send DeVos out onto the Sunday shows. Jessica Calarco is at the New York Times wondering what the heck DeVos is thinking. And Charles Pierce at Esquire observed, among other things, that "the only thing DeVos knows about education is how to turn a buck on it."
Local dispatches have thrown the pandemic school issues into sharper relief. A Missouri school district wants parents to sign a waiver of liability for any illness of death that happens to occur. Ohio provides yet more examples of public schools getting funding cuts while charters hoover up some of that sweet small business loan cash. In Orange County, a "bold" idea to reopen school as if nothing unusual was going on turns out to come mostly from charter school fans. And from Wyoming comes this top-notch piece of reporting about a school board meeting that shows some of the attitudes and ideas roll out in unreal time.
Nancy Bailey blogs about some ideas for facing the new school year, and people continue to point out that it really will take some money to do this right, but the headline of the week award may go to The Nation, with their piece entitled "There are literally no good options for educating our kids this fall." Actually, for the "We've got the money; tough noogies for everyone else" crowd, there is one option-- hire teachers to come homeschool your kids.
In other news. Education Next has a brief of research that suggests that No Excuses schools have some problems (quel surprise!) just as KIPP decides that it's time for a motto change and Schools Matter has some thoughts.
I'll be back in ten days or so. In the meantime, check out the blogroll that I keep here, wear a mask, and be kind to each other.
Friday, July 17, 2020
Everything's Made Up (And Nobody Is Behind)
This is the opportunity we're missing, but to grab it would require us to look at things that some of us would rather not look at.
We can start with the notion that students are currently "falling behind." Well, now-- behind what, exactly? Is there some line scribed by the Hand of God in the intellectual sand that tells us, yes, a child who has been on earth 193 months should have crossed this absolute line on the One True Path of intellectual growth?
No, because it's all made up. The line that says "This is where they should be" is made up. In fact, the notion that there is a single path along which progress should be measured is also made up. Hell, this should not be news, because it wasn't that long ago that we moved all the lines, accompanied by declarations about rigor and challenge and other baloney that posited that making kindergarten the new first grade was somehow a good idea because it would push students "ahead" of that made up line on that made up path. none of this "ahead/behind" baloney is based on anything scientific or objective or rooted in anything except that some people with power decided "This is the rule we'd like to make up."
People are really struggling. There are so many nuts and bolts questions that are coming up in the face of whatever-the-hell is going to happen in a few weeks, like "If a teacher is sent to quarantine for fourteen days, does she have to use her sick days" and the thing about most of these questions is that they involve made up rules that were made up without any inkling that we would find ourselves here some day. The rules about how many sick days a teacher can have are made up. The rules about what they can be used for are made up. And the most important implication of this is that to deal with brand new situations, people will have to make up some new rules (which will also be made up).
My colleague Nancy Flanagan has observed repeatedly that nobody is coming up with solutions that are remotely outside the box, and I think she's right, and I think a big reason for that is a desire (which in times of uncertainty and general messiness inflames into a burning gut-level need) to hold onto the fiction that the box is a Real Thing, and objective Box of Truth that emerged fully-formed from a burning bush.
It's not. The box is made up.
Now, I'm not suggesting that "made up" means fake or false or stupid. We make up rules all the time, often for very good reasons. "Drive on the right-hand side of the road" is an arbitrary made up rule, but it's a very useful made up rule. Some rules are rooted in experience, the collectively learning of things that work and things that don't. Some rules are rules because they have always been rules, but those reasons are long lost to memory. Some rules are the result of expert judgment exercised by trained experts who have expertly studied the issue, and some are the result of that youtube video you saw last night.
We US citizens have an uneasy relationship with the made-up nature of rules. Our religious ancestors believed they were following rules literally handed down by God. Some of our founding fathers, following the Enlightenment ideas of the time, believed they were using reason and intellect to uncover the rules hard-wired into the universe. We were going to be better than those European royal mopes who just made rules up to suit their moods and self-interest (even if many founding fathers had trouble actually applying the rules they discerned to their own actual lives).
Making shit up is what humans do. I have what I call the 5% rule-- 95% of everything is just stuff that humans make up, and then, having made it up, examine it with great weight and import as if it had just fallen out of the sky and not out of a human head. We do things like decide a "week" will have seven days, and then ponder the deep significance of having seven days in a week. 5% of everything is actually important, actually matters, actually has weight and significance. The trick here is that none of us can agree on what the 5% is. Plus, if your 5% includes things like loving and supporting the people around you, well, then, that means going along with some of their 5%. It gets tricky.
Almost everything is made up, and that's not an indictment of it. The question is not, "Is this made up or not" because it probably is. The question is, "Is it made well, based on evidence and wisdom and good intent."
But I digress.
Pretty much everything about school is made up, an artificial construct created by parents and politicians and teachers and tradition--oh, so much tradition-- as well as a few decades of predatory profiteer activity. But in normal times, much of that stuff, from "students sit in a desk in a room" to "everyone eats lunch together in a big room" to "all students come at the same time and leave at the same time" works just fine. Some of it, from "this Big Standardized Test measures the intellectual growth and capabilities of students" to "anyone with a pulse can run a classroom," has been destructive. "Everyone needs to get back in the box, right now, and act as if nothing unusual is going on," seems like potentially a really bad idea.
We are clutching hard to our made up rules these days. I don't think it's just the pandemic. Nobody has personified the view that all these rules are just made up shit more than Donald Trump. We have held tight to our conventions about government and elected officials for what seems like ages, but Trump's whole life is about ignoring all rules and conventions. "It's not actually a rule," he says, "unless someone can actually do something to me for breaking it." For people who want to believe we live by laws and rules and not just a bunch of made up shit that exists only as long as we all agree to ac t like it exists, these have been really scary times.
And you know who make great rules followers? Who believe you just don't break the rules because you just don't? Teachers. It is one of their greatest weaknesses.
Back when I was a yearbook advisor, the first thing I told each new crop of student leaders was that when planning the new book, they were to ignore the old books. Imagine designing a book from scratch. What would you do? How would you do it? Even if you reach a conclusion identical to last year's book, at least you'll know you're doing it for a better reason than "That's what they did last year."
We could be doing that with schools right now, saying "If we were designing schools from scratch right now with zero rules in place, what would we do." Instead, the discussion (led mostly by non-teachers) is about how to keep as many of our made up rules as possible intact.
You would think reformsters would be all over this opportunity to get outside the box, but they've always been mostly about preserving the made up rules--just tweaking them to add a few that let privateers make a buck. It has always been a useful for tactic for them to act as if public schools are locked in a solid titanium box brought down by the gods and unalterable by human hands; that way, clearly, the only solution to supplant the public system with something else.And now even Betsy DeVos has dropped her noise about letting a thousand virtual flowers bloom and instead argues that school this fall should look just like every other fall.
If we started from scratch, one would hope that we decided that trained professionals in a setting that maximized student safety and provided education for every single child in the country would still be on the program. For me, that's the 5% of public education, and all the rest is less important, or only important insofar as it helps us reach those goals. (Charter and voucher fans are welcome to tell me how their favorite ideas would help, and I will go ahead an explain, once again, why they're wrong.)
But step one is to recognize that all of this stuff is made up, created by humans with a range iof intents and wisdom, and as humans we are perfectly capable of unmakimg it up and remaking something new up in its place. We can stop the stupid noise about where students are relatively to some made up standard and stop worrying about how a real pandemic response might require us to rewrite some made up rules.
We like the rules. We like the feeling of a solid earth under our feet. We like feeling that stuff came from some higher source than Made Up By Regular Humans. Just watch as July and August unfold-- I predict that the majority of school district administrators will wait to see what other districts do, and then adopt that plan, as if those other administrators have some pipeline to wisdom that local leaders do not. Shame on them. All the plans that come will be made up stuff. Have the nerve to make something up that best fits your local district. There is no box, and nobody is coming to save you with a Higher Truth. You're going to have to make something up.
We can start with the notion that students are currently "falling behind." Well, now-- behind what, exactly? Is there some line scribed by the Hand of God in the intellectual sand that tells us, yes, a child who has been on earth 193 months should have crossed this absolute line on the One True Path of intellectual growth?
 |
| No box. Also, no spoon. |
People are really struggling. There are so many nuts and bolts questions that are coming up in the face of whatever-the-hell is going to happen in a few weeks, like "If a teacher is sent to quarantine for fourteen days, does she have to use her sick days" and the thing about most of these questions is that they involve made up rules that were made up without any inkling that we would find ourselves here some day. The rules about how many sick days a teacher can have are made up. The rules about what they can be used for are made up. And the most important implication of this is that to deal with brand new situations, people will have to make up some new rules (which will also be made up).
My colleague Nancy Flanagan has observed repeatedly that nobody is coming up with solutions that are remotely outside the box, and I think she's right, and I think a big reason for that is a desire (which in times of uncertainty and general messiness inflames into a burning gut-level need) to hold onto the fiction that the box is a Real Thing, and objective Box of Truth that emerged fully-formed from a burning bush.
It's not. The box is made up.
Now, I'm not suggesting that "made up" means fake or false or stupid. We make up rules all the time, often for very good reasons. "Drive on the right-hand side of the road" is an arbitrary made up rule, but it's a very useful made up rule. Some rules are rooted in experience, the collectively learning of things that work and things that don't. Some rules are rules because they have always been rules, but those reasons are long lost to memory. Some rules are the result of expert judgment exercised by trained experts who have expertly studied the issue, and some are the result of that youtube video you saw last night.
We US citizens have an uneasy relationship with the made-up nature of rules. Our religious ancestors believed they were following rules literally handed down by God. Some of our founding fathers, following the Enlightenment ideas of the time, believed they were using reason and intellect to uncover the rules hard-wired into the universe. We were going to be better than those European royal mopes who just made rules up to suit their moods and self-interest (even if many founding fathers had trouble actually applying the rules they discerned to their own actual lives).
Making shit up is what humans do. I have what I call the 5% rule-- 95% of everything is just stuff that humans make up, and then, having made it up, examine it with great weight and import as if it had just fallen out of the sky and not out of a human head. We do things like decide a "week" will have seven days, and then ponder the deep significance of having seven days in a week. 5% of everything is actually important, actually matters, actually has weight and significance. The trick here is that none of us can agree on what the 5% is. Plus, if your 5% includes things like loving and supporting the people around you, well, then, that means going along with some of their 5%. It gets tricky.
Almost everything is made up, and that's not an indictment of it. The question is not, "Is this made up or not" because it probably is. The question is, "Is it made well, based on evidence and wisdom and good intent."
But I digress.
Pretty much everything about school is made up, an artificial construct created by parents and politicians and teachers and tradition--oh, so much tradition-- as well as a few decades of predatory profiteer activity. But in normal times, much of that stuff, from "students sit in a desk in a room" to "everyone eats lunch together in a big room" to "all students come at the same time and leave at the same time" works just fine. Some of it, from "this Big Standardized Test measures the intellectual growth and capabilities of students" to "anyone with a pulse can run a classroom," has been destructive. "Everyone needs to get back in the box, right now, and act as if nothing unusual is going on," seems like potentially a really bad idea.
We are clutching hard to our made up rules these days. I don't think it's just the pandemic. Nobody has personified the view that all these rules are just made up shit more than Donald Trump. We have held tight to our conventions about government and elected officials for what seems like ages, but Trump's whole life is about ignoring all rules and conventions. "It's not actually a rule," he says, "unless someone can actually do something to me for breaking it." For people who want to believe we live by laws and rules and not just a bunch of made up shit that exists only as long as we all agree to ac t like it exists, these have been really scary times.
And you know who make great rules followers? Who believe you just don't break the rules because you just don't? Teachers. It is one of their greatest weaknesses.
Back when I was a yearbook advisor, the first thing I told each new crop of student leaders was that when planning the new book, they were to ignore the old books. Imagine designing a book from scratch. What would you do? How would you do it? Even if you reach a conclusion identical to last year's book, at least you'll know you're doing it for a better reason than "That's what they did last year."
We could be doing that with schools right now, saying "If we were designing schools from scratch right now with zero rules in place, what would we do." Instead, the discussion (led mostly by non-teachers) is about how to keep as many of our made up rules as possible intact.
You would think reformsters would be all over this opportunity to get outside the box, but they've always been mostly about preserving the made up rules--just tweaking them to add a few that let privateers make a buck. It has always been a useful for tactic for them to act as if public schools are locked in a solid titanium box brought down by the gods and unalterable by human hands; that way, clearly, the only solution to supplant the public system with something else.And now even Betsy DeVos has dropped her noise about letting a thousand virtual flowers bloom and instead argues that school this fall should look just like every other fall.
If we started from scratch, one would hope that we decided that trained professionals in a setting that maximized student safety and provided education for every single child in the country would still be on the program. For me, that's the 5% of public education, and all the rest is less important, or only important insofar as it helps us reach those goals. (Charter and voucher fans are welcome to tell me how their favorite ideas would help, and I will go ahead an explain, once again, why they're wrong.)
But step one is to recognize that all of this stuff is made up, created by humans with a range iof intents and wisdom, and as humans we are perfectly capable of unmakimg it up and remaking something new up in its place. We can stop the stupid noise about where students are relatively to some made up standard and stop worrying about how a real pandemic response might require us to rewrite some made up rules.
We like the rules. We like the feeling of a solid earth under our feet. We like feeling that stuff came from some higher source than Made Up By Regular Humans. Just watch as July and August unfold-- I predict that the majority of school district administrators will wait to see what other districts do, and then adopt that plan, as if those other administrators have some pipeline to wisdom that local leaders do not. Shame on them. All the plans that come will be made up stuff. Have the nerve to make something up that best fits your local district. There is no box, and nobody is coming to save you with a Higher Truth. You're going to have to make something up.
Thursday, July 16, 2020
FL: The Broad Outlines of the PPP Cash-in
So it turns out that all you have to do to get some charter and voucher schools to admit they're businesses is just wave some sweet, sweet business-purposed money at them. We've heard the individual stories from here and there about this, but a friend of the Curmudgucation Institute sent along an astonishing piece of data crunching.
I don't have a handy way to attach a spreadsheet to this post, but you can do the work yourself if you want to head to the Small Business Administration site then start looking up other info for your state. I'm going to give you the big sweeping picture here. Just how many schools edu-flavored businesses had their hands out in Florida?
Charters
There are around 658 charter schools operating in Florida. At least 102 signed up for a PPP small business loan. Loans are okayed for a range of monies; the highest top amount a charter was okayed for is $5 million. River City Academy, Doral Academy, Youth Co-op Inc, Discovery Education Services, and Odyssey Charter School Inc were at the top for these biggest loans (minimum is $2 million).
Private
Almost 400 private schools declared themselves small businesses. Of those, about 140 were just private schools, with the rest actually private religious schools (if they didn't call themselves religious, but had religious language all over their websites, they were counted as religious).
Of the non-religious private schools, about half (75) are also voucher schools. So not only grabbing taxpayer dollars via PPP, but also living on taxpayer dollars via one of Florida's many voucher programs. But of the 250+ private religious schools, only about 35 schools aren't taking vouchers. Everybody else on the list is double-dipping for Jesus. That makes roughly 300 voucher school signed up for PPP loans. In all fairness, I should note that Florida has something like 2000 voucher-accepting schools, so plenty are apparently happy to single dip at this time.
Other
There are some other edu-flavored outfits lined up for money as well, including some consulting firms.
Special Award
Special recognition goers to the Academica chain, a massive money-grabbing machine of edu-business, with schools in several of these categories. But it looks like at least ten of these beneficiaries are Academica properties.
Some grand totals
If every charter school on the list got only their minimum amount, that would add up to $47,850,000. If every private religious school got bottom dollar, that would be $96,450,000. So, a lot like real money. And you should remember that while PPP loans are loans, not grants, they all contain an option for forgiveness under certain conditions. So that's almost at least $1.5 billion in taxpayer dollars (or it may be more accurate to say taxpayer's grandchildren's dollars) to help keep some education entrepreneurs afloat in Florida.
I think I would admit to being a business for that kind of money, too. In the meantime, as soon as the institute's COO teaches me more about excel, I'll get back to this pile of info.
Charters
There are around 658 charter schools operating in Florida. At least 102 signed up for a PPP small business loan. Loans are okayed for a range of monies; the highest top amount a charter was okayed for is $5 million. River City Academy, Doral Academy, Youth Co-op Inc, Discovery Education Services, and Odyssey Charter School Inc were at the top for these biggest loans (minimum is $2 million).
Private
Almost 400 private schools declared themselves small businesses. Of those, about 140 were just private schools, with the rest actually private religious schools (if they didn't call themselves religious, but had religious language all over their websites, they were counted as religious).
Of the non-religious private schools, about half (75) are also voucher schools. So not only grabbing taxpayer dollars via PPP, but also living on taxpayer dollars via one of Florida's many voucher programs. But of the 250+ private religious schools, only about 35 schools aren't taking vouchers. Everybody else on the list is double-dipping for Jesus. That makes roughly 300 voucher school signed up for PPP loans. In all fairness, I should note that Florida has something like 2000 voucher-accepting schools, so plenty are apparently happy to single dip at this time.
Other
There are some other edu-flavored outfits lined up for money as well, including some consulting firms.
Special Award
Special recognition goers to the Academica chain, a massive money-grabbing machine of edu-business, with schools in several of these categories. But it looks like at least ten of these beneficiaries are Academica properties.
Some grand totals
If every charter school on the list got only their minimum amount, that would add up to $47,850,000. If every private religious school got bottom dollar, that would be $96,450,000. So, a lot like real money. And you should remember that while PPP loans are loans, not grants, they all contain an option for forgiveness under certain conditions. So that's almost at least $1.5 billion in taxpayer dollars (or it may be more accurate to say taxpayer's grandchildren's dollars) to help keep some education entrepreneurs afloat in Florida.
I think I would admit to being a business for that kind of money, too. In the meantime, as soon as the institute's COO teaches me more about excel, I'll get back to this pile of info.
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