FL: How To Punish A School Board

Miami Dade County Public Schools have been having some issues lately, and the public has them on the ropes.

They decided to hand their virtual schooling over to K12, the cyber school giant founded by Ron Packard with William Bennett as a public face and funding by junk bond king Michael Milken. It's an odd choice, given that a quick Google reveals the many, many problems with the business, from faking enrollment in California to faking teachers in, well, Florida. They've had a long run of disasters. At one point the NCAA said they wouldn't accept a K12 diploma. They are hugely profitable, and built some exuberance under the Trump regime, which helps them throw a big ton of money into lobbying.

In fact, throwing money into things may be the explanation for how they got the Miami-Dade job in the first place. Turns out that they appear to have made a $1.57 million dollar contribution to the Foundation for New Education Initiatives, a nonprofit to help fund programs for the district, and chaired by Alberto Carvalho, the district superintendent.

So K12 got the job, and failed hard. Hard enough that Wired magazine wrote about their "epic series of tech errors."

The rapid pivot to, and even faster pivot away from, K12 amounts to a case study in how not to deploy a massive new software project. It also illustrates how, in a few intense weeks of summer decisionmaking, a charter-school curriculum written by a for-profit company was chosen and installed, with little scrutiny, across one of the largest districts in the country.

It was every kind of disaster, and so the board voted to scrap it-- at 2 AM after a 13 hour meeting.

Why 13 hours? Because there's a funny rule in Florida--a school board has to allow the public to comment, and they can't take an action until the comments have been heard. 

So as the board wrestles with what comes next, they did what any school board in their position would do-- they announced a special meeting with very little notice and hoped that would help the public shut up a little.

No such luck. The board met to vote last night on a plan for re-opening schools. But first they have to listen to all the public comments left on the district's voicemail. And those should be done playing sometime this morning, because the public left over 18 hours of comments there. There were also 200 or so written comments, but those can just be placed in the record. 

Did the board stay up all night and listen? I'm guessing not. But I'll admit--I find the whole story pretty awesome. In Pennsylvania, boards have all sorts of tools for boxing public comments out, as do many other states. Imagine if your local board couldn't take action until they were done listening to the taxpayers. Heck, imagine if state or federal lawmakers couldn't vote on a bill until they had listened to every public comment. 

The notion of taxpayers being able to hold a school board hostage like this is kind of amazing and beautiful, but probably neither terribly efficient or effective, and I have no trouble imagining how this power could be used for evil. Still, it's nice to see the balance of power flipped, giving taxpayers an immediate and direct way to punish board members for bad decisions. Leave it to Florida to come up with something this spectacular.

Update: That meeting took 29 hours. God bless them. 

Lies Matter (Or, When People Show You Who They Are...)

From Merrick Garland to the seat of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, there is plenty to rage at, and much cyber-ink has been distance-spilled raging about it. But I was particularly struck by this piece at Slate by Lili Loofbourow.

She talks about some larger issues here, and I think there's a lesson for folks in the education world. She talks here about the effects of McConnell's cavalier dismissal of his own made-up rule from 2016:

He made quick work of the optimists on Twitter suggesting that he surely wouldn’t be so hellbent on total power that he’d risk destroying the country by breaking the precedent he himself had articulated. Wrong. He would. And anyone who took him at his word when he rejected Merrick Garland’s nomination was made a fool when he reversed himself on the question of whether (to quote the man himself) “the American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice.”

I want to pause here to note, humbly, that it is wounding to watch a public servant reduce those who take him at his word to fools. I mention that not because it “matters” in any sense McConnell would recognize but because it is simply true that this nation’s decline accelerates when the conventional wisdom becomes that believing what the Senate Majority Leader says is self-evidently foolish. The chestnut that politicians always lie is overstated—a society depends on some degree of mutual trust. One party has embraced nihilism, pilloried trust, and turned good faith into a sucker’s failing in a sucker’s game.

Naked power grabs are ugly, and infuriating when you're sitting powerlessly on the losing side of the grabbing. But lying is toxic. Take it from someone who poisoned chunks of his own life with lies years ago. Lying is destructive--it ruins trust, trashes relationships, makes it hard to move forward in any useful way. And trust is the foundation of everything, every bit of communication, right down to the foundational trust that when people use words they are making a good faith attempt to convey meaning and not conceal it. If words don't mean anything, we're just grunting hairless apes waving sticks.

Some folks like to get their lawyer on when discussing lies. It's not technically lying because I just spun it a little, because I just left a few details out, because the other party didn't ask the right question. The only reason anyone embarks on such explanations is because they know that "not technically lying" is, in fact, actually lying. If you are manipulating the facts in order to get somebody else to do what you want them to, that's lying. And it's always toxic.

Right now, a whole bunch of elected folks and vapid media farts are showing us who they are. They are showing us that there is no principle more important than grabbing what they want, and that includes principles like "words mean things" or "my word is my bond."

This needs to be noted and remembered for those days when these unprincipled liars start making mouth noises about what principles they think should be involved in decisions about public education. In the world of people who want to dismantle and replace public education, there are people who will say what they mean, and even as I think they are wrong, I can at least respect that they are acting out of principle. But these political mannequins who put principles on and off as easily as changing shirts--they are never, ever to be trusted or taken seriously. Their opponents--and, for that matter, their allies of the moment--forget that at their own peril. 

Will China Help Pay For Trump's History Project

This, believe it or not, is about the deal involving social media sensation, Tik Tok.
At first, the whole Tik Tok business looked like a basic old-fashioned shakedown. "That's a nice little tech biz you have there," said Trump. "Be a shame if anything happened to it." Okay, not really that subtle-- it was more along the lines of "I'm going to ban your business unless you give my buddies a cut."

Tik Tok is not an angelic app without issues; security experts have been saying for a while now that the app is just Chinese spyware with a video feature, collecting data for China. Trump said he would shut down the app unless a piece was sold to a US company. So Oracle, run by Trump buddy Larry Ellison, and Walmart, under CEO and Trump supporter Doug McMillon, have set up a deal to get a piece of Tik Tok action. ByteDance, the company behind the app, would transfer control to a new entity in which ByteDance still held 80%, and Walmart and Oracle had their piece of the action.

Trump gave his blessing, but threw in a surprise announcement--the new company is going to hand over $5 billion to help fund his super-duper patriotic American history project. This was news to some of the partners, but you know what they say--shaken down for a penny, shaken down for a pound.

Trump's grand history project, in which US students will, well, something:

We will stop the radical indoctrination of our students and restore patriotic education to our schools,” he said at the rally. “Patriotic education,” he repeated, describing it as teaching children “to love our country, honor our history and always respect our great American flag.”

The program has zero specifics, and the one concrete example of what the administration has in mind is pretty awful. So it may be that this is nothing more than empty campaign noise for the base; look for Trumpian history to premiere during Infrastructure Week.

But if it really happens, and this deal completes, and the partners fork over the $5 billion, that means that Trump's shiny new patriotic curriculum will be financed in part by China. Given that the Chinese have considerable experience in educating and re-educating citizens to properly appreciate the golden beauty of their history and the gift of their Beloved Leader, there seems like a sort of twisted poetry to that. And Trump's patriotic history could be just one more Trumpian campaign item that was made in China. 

ICYMI: One More Damned Thing After Another (9/20)

 Well, that week sucked. And there's a lot to read, too.

Let's start with something positive. Drum prodigy Nandi Bushell has been youtubing covers for a while, but a few weeks ago she challenged Dave Groh to a drum battle; it went two rounds, and then Groh finally upped the ante by writing her a song. So there's that in the world. Now on to the rest.

On Campus Testing for Distance Learners  
Oh, Florida. They agreed that parents should be able to keep their at-risk kindergartners at home. But test-lovers that they are, they may require those same littles to come in to take the kinder-readiness test. Because Florida... Accountabaloney has the story.

Proceed at Your Own Peril  
Dad Gone Wild checks in to see how things are virtually going, and reflects on how we keep asking everything from teachers.

When the Lights Go Out  
Grumpy Old Teacher provides a vivid picture of what it's like in the pandemic classroom. A nice piece of writing here.

No Way To Treat a Scholar  
Gary Rubinstein looks at one more way that Success Academy games the data and juices up their PR-- welcome to the 5th year high school program.

Selling the Future of Ed Tech  
Damn, but Audrey Watters is the best. Here's a look at some of the wacky ed tech treats that have been predicted for the future over the years. Fun, but deeply thought provoking.

How centrist Democrats paved the way for Betsy DeVos  
Have you heard talks to David Menefee-Libey about this sad bit of history, framing it intriguingly as a treaty between the left and right over charter schools. As always, you can listen to the podcast or read the transcript. Either way, Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire deliver a tasty slice of information in an entertaining sandwich.

Framing a new website forced us to consider public education's core principles  
Jan Resseger kind of gives away the game with her title. Friends of education in northern Ohio revamped their website, and it leads to a good reflection on what public education's really all about.

The Mighty Storm
I'm glad that Russ Walsh is back to blogging. Here he starts with the Galveston hurricane disaster of 1900 and works his way over to building reading comprehension.

Take It Easy on the Teachers, OK 
Nancy Flanagan takes through the taxonomy of pandemic school posts, including the ones that blame teachers, and she has some thoughts about those.

The difference between freedom and captivity  
Teacher Tom asks what adult sacred memories of childhood all have in common

Face-mask recognition is here  
Well, National Geographic wants your email to read this unhappy-making piece about facial recognition in general and the fact that your mask will no longer thwart it in particular.

DeVos Versus the IRS  
This is a bit wonky, but important-- it turns out that a revamp of SALT rules gets directly in the path of tax credit scholarship programs by limiting how much money rich folks can launder through this type of voucher program.

NC Judge backs $427 million to improve schools. Will anyone fund it.  
North Carolina has been working hard to bust public education. Here's one more battle on that front. From the News & Observer.

The pandemic and school building issues  
Pandemic responses are highlighting just what a rundown mess many US school buildings are. From Mat Barnum at Chalkbeat.

Betsy DeVos and the separation of church and state  
Nancy Bailey takes a look at the DeVosian view of the separation between church and state when it comes to education in the time of pandemic (Wall? What wall?)

The long history of politicizing history class  
Olivia Waxman at Time puts some historical perspective on Trump's demand that history be taught with a golden patriotic glow. We've been here before.

Ed Department has denied 94% of loan forgiveness applications  
Betsy DeVos can keep this up forever. Despite being scolded by Congress and spanked by the courts, she continues to avoid actually implementing the federal loan forgiveness program for students defrauded by predatory for profits.

I am only one person
Anya Kamanetz (NPR) said on Twitter that she has never had so many interview subjects cry during the interview. A look at how teachers (who are also parents) are coping with pandemic education.

When poorly veiled bigotry masquerades as choice  
Andre Perry at Hechinger Reports looks at how racists have always loved the word "choice"

An open letter to a parent afraid of anti-racist education  
Christina Torres is at EdWeek with a response to a woman upset and cranky about Black Lives Matter at school. I watched this twitter discussion unfold in real time before it was erased by the woman in question, and she was pretty nasty about the whole thing. Torres offers a more measured response.

Taxes on DeVos yacht could pay for school nurses
Katelyn Kivel at The Gander takes a look at just how much tax the family avoids by registering their yachts elsewhere. It's a lot.

The ends do not justify the means
Nobody has explained the problems with the science of reading movement better than Paul Thomas, who takes another swing here.

The epic screw-up of distance learning in Miami  
Wired has a great look at how Miami-Dade schools got themselves into such a mess by picking K12 as their distance education provider of choice. It's a tale of hubris and dumb. All it's missing is one little tidbit that you can find here--K12's large contribution to the superintendent's personal organization.

The 1776 Unites Curriculum Isn't So Great

During Dear Leader's call for more patrio-centric re-education, he referenced and Betsy DeVos praised the 1776 Unites project as an example of the kind of thing he wants to see in schools. So I went to look at it, and, well, it has some problems.

What Is It, And Where Did It Come From?

The "curriculum" has been launched just last week as an "inspirational alternative" to the New York Times 1619 project. The 1776 Unites initiative was launched back in February with somewhat stronger language about the 1619 project. It came from the Woodson Center, the organization founded by Black conservative activist Bob Woodson, who said upon launching that it was intended to counter the "lethal" narrative of 1619.

"This garbage that is coming down from the scholars and writers from 1619 is most hypocritical because they don’t live in communities [that are] suffering," he continued. "They are advocating something they don’t have to pay the penalty for."

So, not a fan. He pulled together an assortment of other Black conservatives, and in February the website was launched:

1776 Unites is a movement to liberate tens of millions of Americans by helping them become agents of their own uplift and transformation, by embracing the true founding values of our country.

The website includes a library of essays, with titles like "The Cult of Victimhood," "Living by the grace of God and the power of applying oneself," "Embrace black patriotism over victimization," "Slavery does not define the black American experience," and "The 1619 Project perpetuates the soft bigotry of low expectations." 

There's an awful lot of bootstrapping rhetoric on the site, the good old-fashioned "if you're poor it's your own damn fault" kind. But I'm in no position to evaluate the group's standing as Black activists or intellectuals; I am, however, comfortable evaluating the usefulness of their educational tools.

What's Offered In The Curriculum? 

Well, not a lot, actually. You need to sign up your name and info to get access to the download page--in fact, you need to submit that info every single time you want to go to the download page--where you will find three lessons. Two are about Black history, focusing on Biddy Mason and Elijah McCoy. The third is about "building character" and the Woodson Principles. The page hints at an intent to grow this effort that is "essential to building a resilient, patriotic population." 

But for right now, you've got just the three lessons.

Lesson One: Biddy Mason

There are several elements here, starting with a Power Point presentation of 18 slides. The images are a curious mix. On the slide about Biddy's early life, one photo is an actual photo of young Biddy, a copyrighted photo that belongs to the UCLA, Library Special Collections folks, but it's used without any acknowledgement or caption (I had to reverse Google it), while the other photo is of a mother with what looks like a newborn baby. That can't possibly be Biddy; a reverse search suggests its a stock photo from Getty Images taken by W. Eugene Smith; it's also uncaptioned and uncredited. This is an issue through the slides--some photos are credited, some are captioned, and several more are not. 

The actual content is thin and context-free. Her 1,700 mile trek to Utah, which ended up in California, is given a couple of sentences. In California, she sued for her freedom and won in 1856. The slide asks if you know what year the rest of the slaves in America were emancipated, and the answers 1863 which--well, no. The Emancipation Proclamation declared all slaves in the Southern states free, but did no such favors for the slaves in the border states. And since the proclamation was issued at the beginning of 1863, while the Civil War was still raging, it didn't actually do a thing--it couldn't kick in until the North had actually beaten the Southern states in question. 

The rest of Biddy's story, which the slides continue to tell in very broad strokes, focuses on the economics. She worked for wages and invested her money. Her purchase of property in Los Angeles, leading to considerable wealth, is attributed to her wisdom and not to any fortunate timing. The slides tout that she became one of LA's "first prominent citizens and most important landowners...during the 1850s and 1860s," which seems like a kind of loose reading if she only became freed in 1856, and even looser when you learn she bought her first property in 1866 (you don't learn that from this lesson). Her philanthropic work and large fortune ("about $8 million today") are emphasized. Students are asked what causes they would give money to, and what kinds of people "you would like to help in your life?"

Activities and Assignments   

Look up some famous philanthropists (Carnegie, Gates) and find out how they made their money and what they fund. Do some real estate research in your own town and figure out what you'd invest in. Which parts of the country are growing or shrinking, and which would make a good investment right now? If you had a million dollars, how would you invest it? Without using the words, the writer suggests a pair and share. At the end of your life, if there were a memorial to you, what would you want it to say? 

Are you noticing anything about what a$pect of Biddy'$ life is being focu$ed on here? Will it help if I show you the targeted 

Vocabulary List

Profit, Assets, Appreciate/Depreciate, Philanthropy, Investment, Interest/compound interest, Down payment

Critical Thinking and Discussion Questions  

What are some advantages she faced? What are some disadvantages? How about you? "How hard is it to maintain a positive mindset in the face of adversity?" Why do you think Biddy was generous to others, even after her life was filled with hardship? How would her life have been different if she had become discouraged? Note: there are no questions along the lines of "What if her owner had beaten her to death before she got to court" or "What if she had arrived in LAS too late to get in on the growth boom?" or "What if she had ended up in some place that was busting rather than booming?" There's also no attempt to encourage students to dig deeper past the paper thin outline of her life.

Like so many things that try to pass them off as critical thinking exercises, these aren't even close. Here's an important pro tip about critical thinking questions-- if you are trying to direct students toward a specific conclusion or realization, you aren't doing critical thinking. This is why Dear Leader's vision of a curriculum that tells one certain shiny story of America will always be anti-critical thinking.

Lesson Plan 

This isn't a lesson plan. There's a paragraph that manages to sum up the entirety of the actual content of the lesson  in a few sentences. There are some suggestions about when the lesson might be appropriate. Oh, and you can use it for Social and Emotional Learning, too, because it "highlights resilience, grit, determination, self-reliance and other positive inner resources and character traits." 

There's a "lesson prompt"-- "Have you ever wondered what happened to people who were born in slavery but were later freed?" And suggestions that you could use the power point, or watch some videos, and basically you could use the stuff in this packet. This is a lesson plan as conceived by someone who has never written an actual lesson plan ever. What exactly will the teacher do, in which order, following what time frame? Who knows.

Videos

Links to four youtube videos about Biddy Mason. All four, including the one that's only four and a half minutes long, provide far more depth and information than this lesson does. One is just a panel discussion, but all are informative. 

MC Questions

A bank of multiple choice questions to use. They are terrible. How did she win her freedom? Was she born free, moved to a free state, escaped and moved to the North, sued and won her freedom in court, or died as a slave. Some of the answers are ridiculous and could only be used to test if the students were conscious during the power point, and in this particular case, two answers are correct (she could only sue for freedom because she was in a free state). The other four questions are similar, though one is the only one to offer "All of the above," which is, of course, correct. 

Standards and Learning Objectives  

Four and a half pages of standards cribbed from a variety of sources, including CASEL, ASCA, NCSS, Common Core, and AP US History. They have stretched like crazy here. Just a few of the standards this lesson claims to meet--

From AP: 5.3.11.B The women's right movement was both emboldened and divided over the 14th and 15th amendments to the constitution.

From NCSS: 8 Science, Technology and Society

From ASCA: A:C1.6 Understand how school success and academic achievement enhance future career and vocational opportunities

CASEL: Stress management

CCSS: A whole lot of speaking and listening, for some reason.

The Learning Objectives list includes the student being able to: explain the difference between a slave state and a free state, define the vocabulary (not use it?), identify at least one financial investment opportunity, explain/interpret a quotation using their own words.

Lesson Two: Elijah McCoy

Worried I'm going to drag you through all that again? Don't worry-- the only thing done for McCoy is his 15 power point slides. Those include one that asks students if they've ever had a job, one that asks "what kinds of things need to be invented right now," and two oddly redundant slides that credit him as the basis for the saying "the real McCoy," a claim that a quick Wikipedia check would tell you is shaky, at best. 

Honestly, I've assigned slide-style presentations about important people over the course of my career; this looks suspiciously like the one done by the student who scanned one source, copied some random photos, and then did his best to squeeze out a few more slides for padding,

The Woodson Principles   

Okay, I was going to take a quick look at this, but the list of ten principles is mis-formatted on the power point slide and another slide asks if students know what a GED is. Woodson's ten principles look like any good unobjectionable corporate training list, but is this a good way to teach them? I think not. Moving on.

So Many Issues   

Fact-checking. Editing. Chopping the heck out of a couple of actually quite exceptional stories. McCoy and Mason really are impressive individuals with extraordinary stories. But these stripped down versions don't begin to do them justice. It's hard to know why--Mason's story is filled with people who stepped up to help her at critical moments, from helping her get her day in court to giving her a place to live when she was freed--have they all been excised to highlight "self-reliance"? 

It's extraordinarily unclear what the target audience is here. The tone and language feels like maybe fourth or fifth grade, but the standards lists high school standards. You are never going to capture high school attention with material this bland and thin. The exercise reminds me of beginning student teachers I would work with who knew they had some stuff they wanted to cover, but had no idea how they should exercise their own leadership and planning to make the lesson happen. "I'll go over some of this and then there will be a discussion, and the students will, you know, learn about all this other stuff that will just come up, somehow." Or maybe it's just the work of another bunch of people who don't have any real idea what teaching involves. Or maybe they were focused on what they wanted to say about the material that they treated the "curriculum" itself as an afterthought. And you can argue about the scholarship behind the 1619 Project, but there's no scholarship going on here at all.

In short, teachers should absolutely be teaching about Biddy Mason and Elijah McCoy. Under no circumstances should they use these materials to do it. And if Dear Leader is counting on 1776 Unites to create his super-patriotic curriculum or beat back the evil lefty forces of the 1619 Project--well, this sample indicates that it's just not going to happen. 

Is Betsy DeVos Flip-Flopping?

Betsy DeVos visited a private school in Grand Rapids that is currently open for face-to-face school, and she observed that not re-opening school buildings is a "tragedy."

This seems like a radical shift of direction for the secretary of education. For one thing, one of her mantras has been that we should fund students, not institutions or, presumably, the buildings in which those institutions are housed. DeVos has also been a huge advocate of computer-run education, insisting that the modern miracles of technology should set students free from traditional school-in-a-building.

But with the advent of the pandemic, DeVos seemingly shifted gears, going so far as to threaten public schools with funding loss if they don't open up right away. And here she was in Grand Rapids, praising a private school that opened up and sadly castigating public schools that haven't. 

So did Betsy DeVos suddenly change her mind? 

That seems unlikely; DeVos is nothing if not singleminded and focuses. Tales of her career in education reform do not include any sudden epiphanies that lead to a new shift or focus. So how to explain this sudden apparent 180 degree flip. Let me offer a couple of theories.

One theory is that she is simply following Trump's lead, and Trump on education (as with some other policy areas) is best understood as the cranky old grampaw who thinks the world would be a lot better if everything was the way (he thinks) it was Back In His Day. Though DeVos was not a Trump fan back in 2016, she has become a solid team player for her boss, one of the few who has never, ever suggested that some chunk of dumb just fell out of his mouth. .

But just as likely is that DeVos is doing what she has always done--taking whatever position best supports privatized education. Pre-pandemic, when public schools were open for face-to-face instruction, she could criticize them for not having changed for a century, for being the same old dead end, thereby promoting the notion that folks should get out of public school and into a private school with cool modern techy things etc etc etc.

But in the pandemess US, public schools have, in many cases, shut their doors and deployed all sorts of 21st century gimcracks and geegaws, she needs something else to criticize them for. If she can get them to open up in traditional style, then her old criticisms can still be used. Plus, since nobody on the federal or state leader has offered up the leadership, guidance, resources or money needed to make opening up in a pandemic really work, she has the security of knowing that more public school failures are sure to follow. And if they don't open back up, DeVos can (and has) criticize them for not providing Real Schooling, unlike these nice Catholic schools over here that are open for face to face instruction. Plus, failing to re-open helps DeVos leverage the idea that public schools should be defunded and families should just get education vouchers.

In short, there is no hypocrisy or flip-flopping here. DeVos has a few solid principles that stay in play. Anything that helps private edu-businesses is good. Anything that makes public schools look bad is good. The pandemic has provided several win-win scenarios for DeVos; they only look inconsistent if you aren't looking in the right direction.

Check Out "On Teaching" At The Atlantic

I've been poking through the thirty-three articles posted by The Atlantic as part of their On Teaching series, and it requires a little more recommendation than my weekly Sunday round-up. If you're only going to read one batch of articles this month, read these.

And if you're only going to read one article this month, start with the anchor essay, just published today. In it, Kristina Rizga writes about her two-year quest to answer the question, What is good teaching? The beauty of this-- and of the entire package-- is that she looks for answers by talking to actual veteran teachers. The focus of the project was the soon to be lost wisdom of the boomer teaching cohort. Check out this part-of-a-paragraph:

The majority of Baby Boomer teaching veterans—who just over 15 years ago constituted more than half of the teaching force—have retired or will retire in the next few years. “On Teaching” aimed to collect the wisdom of some of the nation’s most accomplished veterans to find out what has helped them bring out the best in their students. The 15 teachers I got to know closely—from rural Oklahoma to Mississippi, subarctic Alaska to suburban Arizona, California, Texas, Kentucky, and Michigan—told me that effective teaching depends on paying attention to students as individuals, addressing their needs with cultural sensitivity, and seeking the active support of peers. But they also told me that their capacity to teach successfully has been weakened by misguided, top-down policies, chronic funding cuts to public education, and growing structural inequities. To do their jobs fully, they said, they need basic resources—and they should be viewed as experts on what their students need.
The variety within the pieces is impressive, from "Why a Career and Technical High School Has a Genocide Studies Class" to "Teaching Theater Through Four Decades of Social Change" through "The Questions Sex-Ed Students Always Ask." There are several good pieces about the teaching of writing. And while several writers have contributed to the collection (Melinda D. Anderson, Emily Richmond and Alia Wong, to name three), the bulk of the work is from Kristina Rizga, one of my edu-journalism favorites. She is credited as the co-creator of this project, and her contributions (18 of the 33 pieces) are top notch.

The project doesn't deal with teachers who are necessarily famous outside their own corner of the world (which is how it usually is for most of us), but what's really striking about it is that it treats the teachers with respect. The writers act as if these teachers are actual experts in their field and worth listening to, and as such get to comment on many major issues in education, as well as tracing the influence of policy ideas in the last few decades.

This shouldn't be a big deal, but of course, it is. So many education journalists turn to bureaucrats, edu-preneurs, thinky tanks, and advocacy groups (okay, I may have been redundant there) when they want to write about education, as if all these barnacles on the great ship of US education know as much as the sailors sailing the ship. You can go days reading about education without seeing a single actual teacher quoted, while Mike Petrilli turns up in every other article.

Some of it, I'm sure, is practicality. You have a piece to get done right now, and teachers are all working, but the advocacy guys are right at their desks, ready to take your call. Edu-preneurs send you ten pitches a day, while actual classroom teachers send out, generally, zero pitches a day.

For years, I read and read and read and read about education, and even when you know better, you just become numb to the fact that writing about education rarely includes the voices of educators. To have a series of articles centered on those voices is just such a breath of oxygen.
My hat is off to Rizga, the other writers, and The Atlantic itself. I'll even take it off for the funders of this project, who are the same deep pockets we find elsewhere in education (Hewlett, Spencer, Gates) for funding something worthwhile for a change. The two year span spent on this project was time well spent. It should be a book, or a monthly series that runs forever. I'll leave you with the final paragraph of the anchor piece. Speaking of the teacher featured in this piece, Rizga writes:

Moore summed up the consensus among nearly all the veteran teachers I spent time with for the “On Teaching” project: “The people who set the policies for how we do education are not the people who do education, and the very best teachers are rarely invited to help shape the policies or the structures.”