As Schools Reopen, Beware These Five Bad Management Approaches

Not all schools are blessed with excellent management teams (a million teachers just rolled their eyes and said, “No kidding.”) But while schools can succeed in spite of bad management in the good times, in times of crisis, bad management can really derail the whole train. Trying to launch a school year during a pandemic with little to no help from state and federal governments will test every school district’s leadership team. Here are the management styles most likely to lead to disaster.

Just Hold Still And Maybe Nobody Will Notice

In some districts, the standard management response to a new crisis or controversial decision is to simply keep everything quiet and under wraps. In this management theory, the actual problem isn’t the real problem—the real problem is the public finding out about what’s going on and then saying things about it, in the news, on social media, or (worst of all) in phone calls to the administrator’s office.

We don’t have to imagine how this would look during current pandemic re-openings. In Paulding County, Georgia, the school district achieved sudden viral status for cramming mostly-not-masked students into crowded halls against CDC recommendations. Administration’s reaction? Clamping down on students for showing the world what is actually going on, and threatening any student (or, allegedly, teacher as well) who posts anything that portrays the school in a “negative light.”

Management that focuses on avoiding bad optics will be disastrous during this Covid-19 autumn. Principals and superintendents who favor this style will feel the urge to hide results for staff or students who test positive. At the very moment when families and staff desperately need those leaders to solve problems, their first impulse will be to hide the problems, instead. So far in 2020, that’s not working well for anybody.

There Is No You In Team

Good school district plans are going to be complicated and filled with building-specific details. It will be impossible to craft these plans without teacher input, and even harder to implement without teacher participation. It will require a team, and some superintendents and principals aren’t very good at the whole team thing.

If your district’s plan was designed by a committee of administrators, it will be loaded with blind spots and problems that teachers could have anticipated. That’s doubly problematic, because every spot that the committee missed will signal to staff that the plan can’t be trusted as a whole.

Staff members know the difference between a leader who really sees them as part of the team and an autocrat who just says the words. Your school’s staff will bring plenty of history back with them when school re-opens, and that will affect how well everyone pulls together. The biggest problem with even benevolent top down management in crisis is that the autocratic leader has to be right 100% of the time. That’s a big ask; if your district has never been built on real teamwork, managers had better figure out how to get it done quickly.

Floating Without A Rudder

For some school leaders, there is no vision beyond “Keep on doing what we’ve always done without rocking the boat.” Most of the time, staff doesn’t necessarily mind this—it gives them the freedom to use their own best judgement and do their job with minimal interference. But whenever there’s a problem, it can be scary to be riding on a driverless bus.

A school leader’s job is to make it possible for teachers and staff to do their very best. That can’t happen if they are managing crisis conditions on their own, particularly if the crisis is completely unlike any ever before encountered. If your school’s plan is, “We’ll just show up and do our thing and hope for the best,” that plan is not going to last past the first hour on the first day.

The only time this will end well will be when somebody with real leadership talent steps up to do the floating administrator’s job.

Firefighter

Over the course of a career, it is easy for school administrators to become firefighters, reactively attacking whatever conflagration just erupted somewhere in the building. But Covid-19 autumn re-opening is going to involve so many fires, all at once, mostly unlike any fires the administrator has ever put out before. This style of manager will be overwhelmed by the end of the first day, and their frantic running back and forth will just lend an air of panic and chaos to the proceedings. (Note: Even worse if they’re a shouter.)

Data Driven

Nothing about how we ended up at this point has anything at all to do with being data driven. Nor are most schools being given any tools that can be used to collect useful data for this re-opening. This means that the data driven administrator will have to either A) make up data, B) use bad data or C) abandon their data-loving management style. None of these options are going to be pretty.

If your administrator can’t make a decision without leaning on a batch of numbers splayed on a spreadsheet and just doesn’t know how to lead based on personal, professional judgment, they will be incapable of making useful decisions during this re-opening.

Note

All of this still applies if your school’s re-opening is going to be virtual.

More note

All of these philosophies come with an overlay of management's emotional approach. In other words, your principal can be a data driven rage addict, or a data driven passive-aggressive twit.

Important note

Really poor administrators will display more than just one of these five styles.

Another note

The plan that your district submitted to the state probably doesn’t have anything to do with any of this. It’s a piece of paperwork meant to satisfy the state’s requirement, and may well have no relationship at all with reality.

The Only Bright Possibility

Many bad administrators are about to out themselves in the weeks ahead (and many very good ones are about to shine, as well). If your administrator turns out to be one of the lemons, don’t just blame Covid-19. Believe the evidence of your eyes and start looking for a way to trade up, fight back, or work around.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

TX: Why Vouchers For Private Schools Are A Bad Idea

Texas is a happy playground for charter operators, but fans of school voucher program using public taxpayer dollars to fund private school tuition-- well, they're been mighty disappointed on a regular basis. Even as US Senator Ted Cruz (yes, he's really from Texas) has tried to help push the Betsy DeVos voucher plan, a state-level program has been shot down again and again.

Mind you, they don't give up, and they keep coming back with assortments of bad arguments, like "vouchers will help rescue poor and minority students." You know-- "school choice is the new civil rights," say folks like Donald "I Haven't Recognized The Old Civil Rights Yet" Trump.

And every once in a while, a story comes along to help remind us why public tax dollars for private school tuition is a lousy idea.

Welcome to The Covenant School in Dallas, Texas. It's a highly-rated private religious school, with fancy things like a 7-1 faculty-student ratio. It get high marks for all sorts of things--except diversity. The state has a 38% Black student population, and Dallas itself has some segregation issues (only 6% of the Dallas Independent School District student population is white). Covenant's student body is only 6% Black. And with a tuition rate of $19K, not just anybody is going to be the "right fit" for this school.

But it turns out that Black students aren't the only group of students under-represented at Covenant.

Meet Devin Bryant. This 17-year-old student appears to be quite the school asset-- straight A,  "popular, well-behaved student, talented artist and gifted athlete who has made significant contributions" to the school's program. We know that's true because the school's headmaster said so himself, in the letter explaining why Bryant was just expelled.

Because Devin Bryant is gay.

Bryant, who has been a Covenant student since kindergarten, came out last October in an Instagram post (kids these days) and was scheduled to have a meeting with school officials last spring, but then pandemic madness hit. But this fall, when the seniors were painting their parking spaces, Bryant painted his to include mention that he is gay, and two days later, he was expelled.

Mom, who has been sending students to Covenant for twenty years, called to plead her son's case. Here's a part of the conversation with the headmaster that she shared with Dallas Voice:

“Are you a Christian?” she asked him. “Jesus would not do what you are doing.”

 He told her, “I’m doing what Jesus would want me to do.”

Yes, she signed a code of conduct agreement that included a "no gay" clause, which suggests that gay students could remains students in good standing at this Christian-ish school if they were willing to lie about it and keep on lying.

Now, none of this is all that unusual in the religious private school world, and it's a private school, so they're mostly free to do all the discrimination that they imagine Jesus wants them to do. But in states with voucher programs, your tax dollars are funding some of these places (yes, even if it's a tax credit scholarship education savings account accounting tricks bullshit program).

Note also that with a $19K tuition bill, nobody is going to this school strictly on a voucher. That voucher money will go mostly to students and families who already attend.

So good for you, Texas, on holding the line. Keep holding it. I'm pretty sure it's what Jesus wants you to do.

DeVos Continues Transformation Into Arne Duncan

Arne Duncan said many not-so-swift things, often revealing his true attitudes about the dismantling and privatization of public education. But one of his truly revealing moments came in 2010 when he famously argued that Hurricane Katrina was "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans." For the many Black teachers who lost their jobs to Teach for America tourists, and the families who have had to navigate a fully privatized but never organized system of charters and private schools, that may sound a bit wrong.

Betsy DeVos came into the office billing herself as a sort of anti-Duncan. The feds would not impose on state control of schools. The department would not be the national school board. Right off the bat in her confirmation hearings, she made it quite clear that she could not imagine a case of discrimination against students that would move her to take any sort of action whatever.

But since the pandemic hit, she has become really comfortable with using the levers of the department to push her own policies for vouchers and defunding public education. Using department rules to rewrite laws passed by Congress and using the federal purse-strings to extort compliance--Betsy DeVos has become increasingly comfortable with those tools, using them just like Duncan did.

But now she's added another Duncan touch-- saying the quiet part out loud. In an interview with Wharton Business Daily, DeVos characterized the coronavirus pandemic as a "good thing." Like Duncan, she's happy to see all the destruction because she's hoping it will let her rebuild her way.

Public schools are too "static," says the woman who has declared they had better all open up in a traditional brick and mortar face-to-face format, or else. Public schools are too "one-size-fits-all," says the woman who has never spent time inside a public school. Public schools can't be "nimble" and "pivot," says the woman who supports giving billions of dollars to charter and private schools that demonstrate an alarming habit of nimbly pivoting from "open" to "closed" when they face any kind of challenge.

P.S. She has also rebranded her Education Freedom tax credit school voucher bill as the School Choice Now Act, which I guess is a nimble pivot from one name to another for a bill that can't get Congress to pay much attention at all. This insistence that everyone else be a nimble pivoteer, while you are ceaselessly beating the same drum and paying zero attention to your critics is another Duncan hallmark.

Trump Demands Patriotic Classrooms

Trump's education agenda is, well, terse. Eleven words, two items. And the second of the two is "Teach American Exceptionalism."

Monday, Trump expanded on that idea, saying that the nation needs to install "patriotic education" in schools. It's his plan for quelling rebellion in cities and countering "lies" about US racism (i.e. the "lie" that it exists). Gotta counter that "left-wing indoctrination" that all those indoctrinaty teachers are up to all the time (in between, you know, collecting lunch money and checking masks and updating web-based assignment materials).

As reported by Politico, here's the Trumpian solution to all our problems:

Children must be taught that America is “an exceptional, free and just nation, worth defending, preserving and protecting,” he said.

“The only path to unity is to rebuild a shared national identity focused on common American values and virtues of which we have plenty,” he said. “This includes restoring patriotic education in our nation's schools, where they are trying to change everything that we have learned.”

"To change everything we've learned" signals that in the spectrum of Trumpian policy ideas, we are in that folder labeled "Grampaw Hates This New-Fangled Thing."

What is American Exceptionalism, Anyway? 

I put a subheading here so that you can skip this history lesson portion of this post if you wish.

I'll also note that "American exceptionalism" is one of those phrases that ignores that "America" is two continents, North and South, containing a large number of nations other than the United States. It is just like American exceptionalism to assume that we are so much more special that we can just appropriate the name of the continent for just our nation.

That is the basic meaning of American exceptionalism-- that the US is special/better, inherently better, stronger, and more moral because of our special background and our special history and our special values, and that gives us a certain authority, moral and otherwise, in the world.

The roots of the idea run deep. The Puritans considered themselves to be God's chosen people, and they wanted to establish a "city on a hill." It fit nicely with the Puritan's problematic dichotomy-- everyone's a sinner and nobody deserves to go to heaven, but on the other hand, I'm one of God's chosen people so that kind of makes me better than you and gives me the right to tell you how to live."

Many authorities credit de Toqueville with the origin of the idea, and Joseph Stalin (yes, that Stalin) with the actual phrase, apparently in response to US communists who
insisted that this country was an exception to the way communist rules usually played out.

American exceptionalism, in general use, is just vague enough to be adaptable. It's nationalism wearing a cool Halloween mask, We're special (better) because of how we're founded, and we're special (better) because of our form of government, and we're special (better) because our history is a tale of virtue triumphing again and again, and our very special (better) nature means that we are born to be a world power, a major leader, and a shining example to al other countries.

Yes, But, Trump?

The very slogan "Make America Great Again" runs counter to American exceptionalism, because exceptionalism is premised on the idea that we are great, always great, burned-into-our-dna great. So we couldn't be un-great and in need of re-greatification. The pitch seems to be that evil lefty Democrat radicals have somehow diluted our greatness with their bad behavior and, particularly, their repeated insistence that we are racist and inequitable, and they've brought in a bunch of Those (not white) People to further spread that evil propaganda, and Those (not white) People who are not really part of our heritage are also putting a cramp in our greatitude.

Is it possible to find lots of lefty rhetoric to back up the notion that the left hates this country? Yes, certainly. Does all of this smell suspiciously like a retreaded version of the 1960s arguments around slogans like "My country, right or wrong"? You know--back in the days when Trump was using his bone spur to avoid putting his life on the line for this great and exceptional nation.

The problem with that argument has always been the lack of any room for nuance or complexity. Has the US grown and prospered in ways that are unique to some special US genius? Of course not. Are there plenty of things to be proud of anyway? Absolutely. Are the areas for vast improvement? Without a doubt. But the American exceptionalist view is that the country is perfect, the best in the world (though "best" remains a fuzzy term), and to so much as suggest that we might be #2 or #7 is considered anti-American. Or worse yet, detrimental to Trump's re-election chances.

So, teachers. 

So calls like Trump's are for teachers to stop bringing up all those Bad Things. Teach the right values, the right history. You're allowed to bring up bad things in our past as long as you explain how we exceptionally fixed the problem ("We used to have slavery, but then we fought the war and that was never a problem again ever"). Teachers are commanded to foircibly yank us back to the fifties when there were no problems because straight white guys got to decide everything and everyone who wasn't a straight white guy just stayed in their proper place.

There are plenty of things to love about this country-- the way we set out a batch of principles and have spent centuries trying to live up to them, the tricky balance of a three-headed republic, our cultural ability to absorb and synthesize, our opportunities to advance (even if they've been shrinking). And we could really, really, really use some civics education, because too many people have too small a grasp of the wheels and levers of our government.

But none of that means we should embark on some sort of North Korean style "education" initiative to forcibly embed some jingoistic version of blind nationalism into each and every young brain. Among our exceptional American values is the idea that demanding unquestioning obedience and idealization of the state is a Bad Thing. We should preserve that value. Patriotism, like any other kind of love, is meaningless when forced and stupid when it's blind.

ME: Pandemic Excuses More Uncertified Teacher Replacements

On August 26, Governor Mills of Maine issued an executive order that any warm body with any kind of college degree (or maybe even without) may be certified as a teacher.

The executive order actually has three parts. One gives instructions on how to count attendance if you want your state subsidy. One gives some loose instruction on facility disinfection. And one expands the eligibility for emergency teacher certification. Because of the "emergency shortages in essential school staff," 

DOE may issue an Emergency Teacher Certificate to an individual how holds a 4-year postsecondary degree or the equivalent in work and/or academic experience as determined by DOE.

Certification may also be issued to any college student enrolled in a teacher prep program. Also, they'll accept teacher certification from any other state. 

These emergency certificates will last only for this school year--at least, that's the deal for the moment. They have to be mentored, and the state isn't waiving criminal background checks. 

Maine has been doing okay-ish on the Covid front, though they just experienced a new outbreak cluster, thanks to a church and a rural wedding that largely ignored state guidelines. But they've still got a shortage of teachers willing to work under current conditions. That situation is not new--only the coronavirus part is. Maine's solution is understandable, but between the race to implement teach ing software and to grab any warm body to stick in a classroom, the pandemic is not exactly a boom for the teaching profession. At least Maine's warm body order has an expiration date.

ICYMI: This Month Can't End Too Soon Edition (8/30)

Sometimes you're just really ready to get to te next chapter, or just the next page. Not an uncommon feeling these days, even though it's not clear that the next chapter will be any less troublesome than this one. We'll see soon enough. In the meantime, here are some readings from the week.

As Teachers Livestream Classes, Privacy Issues Arrive   

From Sarah Schwartz at EdWeek. And no, she's not talking about those evil teachers who are worried that distance learning will lay bare their terrible indoctrination plans.

Teachers shot during training sue Sheriff's department   

Remember the teachers who were shot with non-lethal but really painful and scary bullets during an active shooter drill? They've decided to take it to court.

Money for nothing  

This op-ed from the York Daily Record looks at how PA cyber schools are hoovering up all the aid, because profiting from a crisis is fun, even if it screws over public schools.

Masks are optional; spaghetti straps are banned.  

From The Lily. These girls called their school on the whole "we can't require students to wear masks but female skin will be outlawed with the full force of school rules" baloney.

Another loss for Betsy DeVos; a win for students.

Another editorial about DeVos's recent court losses, which aren't news at this point, but this piece from the Los Angeles Times editorial board is still worth a read.

A perk for some neighborhoods: first dibs on top schools

From the New York Times, a look at yet another system that keeps NYC schools among the most segregated in the country.

Education Malpractice?  

At Dad Gone Wild, another example of how some professional education disruptors manage to cash in creatively.

Black Families Don't Need "Fixing"; They Need Better School Financing  

Andre Perry at EdWeek with the dismaying facts and figures of just how much we underfund Black schools and education. 

Frog and Toad Tentatively Go Outside After Months of Self-Quarantining

From McSweeneys, a gentle spin on two favorite characters on a new adventure.

Brookings Makes A Bad Pro-Charter Argument

Mona Vakilifathi graduated from the4 University of California, San Diego, with a BS in political science and government back in 2009, and she's been working policy jobs ever since. Over at Brookings, she has some thoughts about Democrats, charter schools, and ed policy, and while she seems to mean well, she has missed a few spots here and there. I've read it so you don't have to.

Let me get the answers from you!

She opens by repeating the reformster narrative that charters divide Democrats along racial lines, citing the "research" from DFER showing that Black voters want charter schools. The poll (from May of 2019) is another one of DFER's attempts to push the narrative in a pro-charter direction. That poll was particularly riddled with questionable technique and spin. And most of the Black Democrats want charters "data" has come from people trying to push charters. So her premise is problematic.

She also offers a quick history of recent "evolving politics"by citing Trump and DeVos as charter supporters, however, DeVos and Trump have left charter schools behind, throwing their weight behind voucher programs like the DeVosian Education Freedom voucher program. This may be because DeVos has always preferred the idea of tax dollars going to private (religious) schools, and Trump's use of vouchers as a way to draw Catholic support.

And she brings up the old "Albert Shanker liked charters" line, skipping the "and then he realized they were turning out to be awful" part. But her definition of charter schools simply identifies them as schools with "greater policy discretion." There's a great deal of complexity, including the reformster belief that charters can unleash the magical power of market forces, that she skips, other than offering this line from the Vast Understatement Hall of Fame: "As the charter school movement evolved over time, charter school advocates prioritized charter school growth with little attention to how charter schools might benefit traditional public schools..." That's a feature, not a bug, in the market forces conception of charters. Vikilifathi is talking Shanker when she should be talking Friedman.

She notes that charters don't seem to do much better than public schools when it comes to student achievement, by which she means scores on a narrow ill-designed two-subject Big Standardized Test. I'll just go ahead and fix that for her from here on in.

She specifically identifies Democratic opposition to the Charter Schools Program, but a desire to rein in that program is not necessarily about opposition to charters, given that the CSP has thrown at least a billion dollars of taxpayer money into a pit of waste and fraud. Vakilifathi has some ideas about how the CSP can be put to better use.

She pulls this nugget from the body of research-- that charter schools manage higher test scores  than public schools in urban communities. She sails past some of the obvious explanations-- creaming, pushing out low-scoring students, self-selecting for involved families, intensive test prep, longer school hours, and whittling down cohorts without backfilling empty seats (for examples of all these in action, see Robert Pondiscio's How the Other Half Learns  about Success Academy).

Vakilifathi seems to believe that charter schools might know some magical secret to learning, and her policy suggestions are built around that assumption. She proposes that the CSP be amended to do the following.

1) Prioritize federal funding to charter schools that will innovate, experiment, and identify best practices. In other words, she wants the Obama/Duncan notion of charters as laboratories of learning. She wants charters to commit fiddling with ways to improve test scores for low-income, racial/ethnic minority, or special education students (it might help to first require charters to accept special education students). The charter also has to submit to "rigorous, empirical evaluation of the policy intervention for broader dissemination." In other words, they must break down their secret formula to share.

2) The USED must publicly disseminate the results. Show how they made the secret sauce, and share it with all other schools. Include what they did, how they did it, and the improved test scores that they got out of it.

3) USED must give low-scoring public schools to help them implement the special sauce. The public school announces it wants to try East Egg Charter's special sauce, files out an application, gets a grant. They, too, go under the sciencey microscope to see how well that policy idea raised test scores at the school.

In short:

I argue that charter schools provide a unique opportunity to identify evidence-based best practices to improve low-performing traditional public schools because of charter schools’ rich variation in state regulatory exemptions, charter school practices, charter school accountability policies, and student enrollment. Democrats should consider amending CSP to incentivize charter schools to revert closer to its original intent as laboratories of traditional public schools to improve low-performing traditional public schools and student performance.

So, there are several reasons to be less than excited about this idea.

1) Charters are unlikely to be excited about it. Since the movement is largely premised on the notion of unleashing free market forces--well, in that context, this proposal makes as much sense as telling MacDonald's that they have to show Wendy's how to make fries.

2) Vakilifathi's use of BS Test scores as a measure of achievement disqualifies the whole business right there. The tests are a lousy measure of student achievement and school effectiveness-- which are two entirely different things that Vakilifathi just sort of lumps together. Either way, the Big Standardized Test is not the measure to use, unless you want to re-organize schools around standardized test results instead of education.

3) Vakilifathi makes the unfounded assumption that the methods used "successfully" at East Egg Charter can be transferred whole cloth to West Egg Public High School and work just as well, as if the specific situation of the school is not a major factor is student achievement. Hell, as any classroom teacher can tell you, I can't even transfer the methods I used five years ago into today's classes. Hell, lots of times I couldn't even transfer the methods I used third period into sixth period.

4) There is zero reason to think that the charter world, populated primarily by education amateurs, knows anything that public school systems don't already know. Charter success rests primarily on creaming student population (and the families thereof), pushing out students who won't comply or are too hard to educate, extending school hours, drilling tests like crazy, having teachers work 80 hour weeks, and generally finding ways to keep out students with special needs that they don't want to deal with. None of these ideas represent new approaches that folks in public education haven't thought of.

5) If charters were pioneering super-effective new strategies, we would already know. There is a well-developed grapevine in the public education world. If there were a charter that was accomplishing edu-miracles, teachers all over would be talking about it. Teachers who left that charter would take the secret sauce recipe with them, and pretty soon it would be being shared across the country. After decades of existence, charters do not have a reputation in the education world for being awesome--and there's a reason for that. Puff pieces and PR pushes may work on the general public and provide fine marketing, but that's not what sells other teachers.

Short answer-- if charters knew something really awesome and impressive, public school teachers would already know and already be copying it.

6) Rigorous empirical evaluation only measures certain sorts of data friendly things, and we are talking about a wide variety of human beings in a web of complex relationships. You can only get so far trying to, say, do a rigorous empirical evaluation of why two people are best friends. But it will only scratch the surface (and it will not tell you the secret to making two other people become best friends).

7) We've sort of tried all of this (see Obama/Duncan administration). There's even a whole federal website of "What Works" that supposedly provides evidence about a random assortment of programs and materials. You probably haven't heard about it because not that many folks find it useful.

Vikilifathi's idea seems sensible enough on paper, but it just doesn't translate to the actual world of charter schools these days. We're going to need better ideas than this; however, that's a discussion that may best wait until after November.