The Jingle Bells Effect And The Canon

So, if you need a little something to jumpkick you into the season, here's a playlist challenge for you.

Yes, that's roughly 76 minutes of various versions of "Jingle Bells," carefully selected, curated and ordered for your listening pleasure. 

"Jingle Bells" is a curious song to become a Christmas standard, mostly because it has nothing to do with Christmas but is instead the mid-19th century ancestor of songs like "Little Deuce Coup." It was written by the guy who would be J.P. Morgan's uncle, and who skipped out on boarding school to join the crew of a whaling vessel before later joining the losing side of the Civil War. 

Nobody has any great explanation for why, exactly, this song has persisted, but I have a theory. I think "Jingle Bells" is one of that special sub-group of songs that survives because it's fun to play. 

Most musicians have had that experience. I can remember always thinking that "Moondance" was a kind of "meh" song, until I was out on a gig and called on to play it, at which point I discovered that I would be happy to play that thing all night. The structure is just fun to work around, to play and play with. "Jingle Bells" is like that--it's deceptively simple, but for many musicians, playing it just leads to more ideas about what you can do with it. It can spark you to do really good stuff. There's something in it that persists even as you translate it into a dozen different idioms.

I thought about that effect this week as I watched the canon wars flare up again in tweeterland. As usual, people both for and against swapping out pieces of revered literature got ugly and defensive and angry, and the argument seems, in many ways, beside the point because it leaves the teacher out of the equation, treating her as if she's a neutral conduit. But that's not the case.

Some of the debate about the canon is really a debate about why we're teaching literature at all, which is one of the great unsolvable debates of the teaching profession. Do we teach it to foster cultural literacy, or as content by which to develop reading and writing skills, or as a window on different cultures and times and places, or as an entryway into fundamental philosophical questions, or to acquaint students with certain universal content that everyone is supposed to have in their bag of tricks? Yes, maybe. (This was where David Coleman's Common Core lost the thread-- Coleman believed we read in order to develop a narrow slice of reading and writing skills, and I'm not going back there again right now except to point out that Coleman was circumventing a broad, deep body of debate within the teaching world which is one more reason you shouldn't get your national standards thrown together by an amateur). 

All literature exists at the intersection of the author, the words on the page, and the reader. In a classroom, multiple readers are involved. The teachers job is to show the student why the reading is interesting, worthwhile, even exciting. If, as a teacher, you don't have a good, solid, believable answer to the question. "Why are we reading this?" then you should not be teaching that work. All the "ought to" reasons in the world, from "this is an important part of the classic canon" to "this is on all the anti-racism reading lists" won't save you if you, the teacher, don't see a bright shining something in that work that makes you want to teach it to this particular roomful of students, something that speaks to you and that you believe will speak to them (even if you have to interpret a bit). That is part of your job as a teacher (one of those "they don't tell you about this in teacher school" jobs)-- to find your own way into works so that you can find the core of your own passion to teach it, and then find a pathway for your students past the language and the ideas and the detritus of another time and place and culture to that Thing.

For precisely this reason, there is no single work that should always be taught by every teacher to every student. For this same set of reasons, every school should have staff members who are right out of that school's community, and also staff members who are from other communities. For that same set of reasons, teachers should sit down every year and ask themselves if they still want to play another chorus of Great Expectations, or is it time to play something else. 

And "because we've always taught this to those students" or "this is what's always been on the curriculum" are never good arguments either for or against a single work. If you can't think of a reason to be interested in the work, your students certainly aren't going to do that work for you. "Is there something in the work that you feel passionately will be a benefit to those students." That's the question. And yes, asking that question involves stepping back and examining your own biases and making sure that you're not indulging in some wishful thinking ("Well, of course everyone should love Moby Dick") or circular reasoning ("It's a classic because it's, you know, classic") or centering your own culture in ways that are unhelpful or damaging to students.

I've mentioned before my colleague who taught the seniors in our department for years. She taught Paradise Lost every year, to seniors, in May. You'd have to pay me a lot to slog through that musty old beast, and you couldn't print enough money to get me to teach it, but she did, every year. To seniors. In May. With a culminating project that required them to come back in on days after they were technically done with school and didn't have to attend. And when the project was being presented, half the students in the high school voluntarily begged to go watch. Paradise Lost. 

I don't know anybody else who could pull that off, but she loved that work so much and had such a handle on what she felt was in it for the students that she sold it. It was her "Moondance," her "Jingle Bells," and so though Paradise Lost shouldn't appear on anybody's high school reading list, it was hugely successful for her and for her students. 

Everyone has their own greatest hits list. I could teach a pretty mean Hamlet and did decades of Toni Morrison without ever getting an angry parent phone call, but for years I was required to teach Julius Caesar, and I stunk--it was like a song in a bad key with ugly key changes and I just couldn't find my way into it. And when I wasn't careful, I could end up pulling out something that I enjoyed playing just because I enjoyed it, without paying any attention to what I had to say to the audience. 

"Jingle Bells" persists, I guess, not just because it's fun to play, but because that shining something that draws musicians to play it shines through when they do, allowing that something to be made visible, and enjoyable, to (much of) the audience. So that's what you look for--that thing that speaks to you and speaks to the audience, and that's going to depend on the where and when of you and your audience as well. All of that strikes me as more important than allegiance or opposition to the canon.

Does Your School Suffer From Advanced Testivitis

In some quarters we seem to have cycled back around to the old argument that the Big Standardized Test provides an assortment of necessary data with no actual downside, so let's trot those puppies out here for this already-maimed year. I've spent a bunch of time talking about why the tests provide no actual benefit (here, here and here, for example), but let me take a moment to look at the other half of the problem.

Depending on your state and local leadership, your school may be suffering from the advanced stages of Testivitis, an untreated and damaging condition that is damaging to schools and the students in them. Here are the symptoms to watch for:

Upside Down School

Underlying most of the symptoms listed here is one major shift-- a school in the grip of testivitis is upside down. It is not run to serve the needs of students; it is run to get the students to serve the school's need for certain scores. And it will beat on those students like test-taking pinatas in an attempt to get the "right" scores to fall out. This apparently includes considering actions like requiring students to break pandemic distancing in order to come to school and take the test. 

Test Prep

It has long been a contention of BS Test manufacturers that their products cannot be "prepped" for, but what they mean is that you can't pre-load a list of facts to get students ready. Nowadays, test prep means getting students to be comfortable with the language, style and special tricks of the tests. 

That means lots of multiple choice question techniques, as well as learning about the ways that test writers will try to "trick" students with certain types of wrong answers. For instance, ELA tests in PA always included a question or two that involved a familiar word used in an unfamiliar context and a question asking the students to use context clues to determine what the word means. Not hard to manage if you're aware that questions like that turn up on the test and are meant to trick you. 

Mini Reading Instruction

A particular large and pernicious form of test prep. At some point in the last decade or two, your English classes started using drilling exercises that involved a single page of text followed by a short set of multiple choice questions. In the most advanced cases, these have squeezed out any number of full works, even complete short stories. In place of longer works, your students may read excerpted passages ("Here's a page from Romeo and Juliet"). But a large part of the class had dropped longer reflection on longer works in favor of mini-readings with dine and dash question sets. 

Practice Tests  

In schools with advanced cases of testivitis, students take several tests a year, often starting out in the very first week of school (which sets a real tone about the purpose of the school year). NWEA MAP test is a popular, but there are many out there. The purpose is always to get ahead of the BS Test results, generate some data, focus some interventions. By the time you're done, you'll have sacrificed a couple of weeks of instruction time to taking these things. You will also sacrifice classroom teacher credibility, because that's who's asked to sell these no-stakes tests to students. I used to promise my students at the beginning of the year that I would never purposefully, knowingly waste their time. Practice tests required me to add an asterisk to that promise.

Data Meetings

One by-product of all the testing is a bunch of data that teachers are required to sit and pore over, like searching tea leaves for clues about the future health of swine in Saigon. Often the data is so broad or incomplete that there is really nothing to be done except to shuffle the numbers around into different forms of graphs and charts. Sometimes the dance is all about finding a way NOT to say, "This is the part of the test that you aren't teaching to directly enough." 

But sometimes data meetings result in very bad news for students.

Targeted Interventions

In a heavily infected school, students will be sorted into three groups after practice test results are used to predict their probably BS Test results--students we don't have to worry about, students who are hopeless cases, and students who are close enough to the dividing line that we might be able to drag them up to acceptable scores. The first two groups may be left along, but that third group will be targeted for "extra help."

Maybe they'll lose a study hall or recess. Maybe they'll be pulled from electives like music or art in order to get extra test prep. At my old district, a middle school principle one year pulled all targeted students from history and science classes and stuck them with double periods of math and English. This is a full-on upside down school approach, with the long term needs of the students absolutely discarded so that the school's "need" for scores can be served right now. And in severe cases, those students who show little prospect of ever getting high enough test scores will be subjected to this targeting as well.

Ignoring the Data We Already Have

In advanced stages of testivitis, only test-generated data counts. In her classroom, what the teacher gleans from her own assessments doesn't count. She may be literally required to ignore the evidence of her own eyes and operate as if the test-generated numbers are the only real truth. Florida (a state whose schools are well into the advanced stages) demonstrated this by refusing to promote third graders into fourth grade because the only data available was their grades and classwork, which showed them to be excellent readers. But there wasn't any test data for them, so, declared the school, they must be retained. A lawyer for the state department actually argued that teacher-created grades "are meaningless." 

When your school has reached the point where only the Beloved Test Data should be believed, your testivitis is seriously life-threatening.

Preoccupation with Test Security

Teachers from testivitis-infested schools will recognize that up there where I described a type of BS Test question, I was actually breaching security. In advanced testivitis we find that, even more sacred than the school's need for scores is the test manufacturer's need to protect the sanctity of their proprietary materials. The argument is that it protects the accuracy of the test, but mostly it's about sparing the test manufacturers two problems. Teachers and students are sworn to secrecy; teachers are not even allowed to set eyes on test questions.

First, it spares them the embarrassment/responsibility for explaining their bad questions. For example, the infamous talking pineapple question of 2012, or that time a poet found she couldn't correctly answer test questions about poems that she wrote. Second, it saves them the expense of having to manufacture a bunch of new material instead of recycling the old stuff. The test manufacturers are pretty dogged about this; Pearson is known for monitoring and pursuing students who breach security on social media. I could show you another example, but a piece that I once wrote describing some test questions in broad, vague terms became the only post on this blog every taken  down by Google, done at the test manufacturer's request. 

This has only gotten worse, with a whole surveillance industry springing up to monitor test-taking by distance learning students. Note that all of this security and surveillance activity is far, far removed from the issue of assessing students' skills and knowledge. It's all about protecting the Holy Test.

Reorganization  

It wouldn't have occurred to me that this would even happen, but I saw it with my own eyes. 

There's a problem with the BS Test and 8th graders. Maybe it's test fatigue, or maybe it's just 8th graders being 8th graders (if you've taught them and spent years enjoying their glorious beautiful rebellious anarchic nature, you know what I mean)--but 8th graders tend to have lousy BS Test results. Which means if your district has a traditional middle school with grades 7 and 8, that school is an ugly blot on your test score picture. 

Solution? Re-organize your district so that your  8th graders are put under the same roof as a grade that gets better scores. Some administrator will come up with a publicly acceptable way to sell it, but the main idea, the idea that will cinch it for the board and other administrators, is that it will make the district look better on paper. It is truly the tail wagging the dog.

Testivitis was jump-started by No Child Left Behind and given a shot of disease-loving steroids under Race to the Top, and while ESEA is supposedly built to try to fight the infection, this disease has had decades to get fully rooted in schools around the country. Plenty of charter schools have been set up with testivitis built into their Day One DNA. 

The Covid pandemic has provided a perfect opportunity to treat this disease--or for the disease to fatally affect a school already reeling from pandemess. The Cult of Testing claims that administering these tests is now more necessary than ever; I will continue to argue that the reverse is true--that time is precious commodity right now, and that making distance learning work requires a fanatical focus on the needs of the students, and that allowing testivitis to run rampant runs counter to both of those needs. The BS Test has become like a cancer stealing resources in a body that is already starved for them. It's time to take the cure and cut this disease out of the body of education. 

Election Polling and the Big Standardized Test

From the Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal to the Atlantic and beyond, writers weeks after the election castigating the pollsters for yet another less-than-stellar year. But education writer Larry Ferlazzo moved on to another question—”Could Polling Errors in the 2020 Election Teach Us Something About The Use Of ‘Data’ In Education.”

He’s onto something there. Thinking about the Big Standardized Test from a polling perspective helps illuminate why the tests themselves, and the data-driven philosophy in education, have worked out so poorly.

After all, those big “measure everyone” standardized math and reading tests that states are mandated to give every year are similar to opinion polls—they are trying to measure and quantify what is going on in peoples’ heads. And to work, there are several things the data-gatherers have to get right.

Ask the right questions.

For an election poll, this seems simple enough. “Which candidate are you going to vote for?” But trying to fold in other information like political leanings, positions on other issues, the strength of the voter’s opinions—that gets harder.

For math and reading tests, this part is trickier. Imagine, for instance, you want to know if a student can find the main idea of any piece of writing. Could you measure that by asking just a couple of multiple choice questions? How many questions do you think it takes to figure out whether or not someone is a good reader?

The respondent has to care enough to make a good faith response.

Whether it’s someone who doesn’t want talk about their political choices out loud, or someone who is so tired of answering those damned phone calls that they just start saying anything, a poll cannot collect useful and authentic data if respondents don’t care enough to cooperate.

Ditto for a standardized test. Take the NAEP 12th grade results recently released to hand-wringing by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and others. High school teachers don’t get very excited about these results because the test is given to high school seniors in the spring. Have you ever met a high school senior in the spring? They are firmly focused on the future; a no-stakes standardized test is unlikely to be a major concern. Students currently in K-12 have been subjected to standardized testing every year of their educational careers. While bureaucrats, researchers, and edu-commentators may consider these tests critical and important, for many students they are just a pointless, boring chore. Students are not sitting there thinking, “I must be sure to do my very best on this so that researchers can better inform policy discussions with an accurate picture of my skills and knowledge.”

There must be a good data crunching machine.

Now, this may not actually matter, because the best model or equation in the world cannot get good results out of bad data. But if the model is bad, the results are bad.

In education, we have seen attempts to take test data and crunch it to do things like find “effective” teachers by computing the “value” they have “added” to students. This super-secret special formula has been disavowed by all manner of professionals and even struck down by a federal court, but versions of it are still in use.

One distinction of election polls is that eventually we actually have the election, and the polls are tested against cold, hard reality. Unfortunately, fans of the Big Standardized Test are able to argue on ad infinitum that the data are real and accurate and useful. We know that raising test scores does not improve student futures, but testocrats are still asserting that we had better get to testing during pandemic school or all manner of disorder will ensue.

Ferlazzo refers to one other problem of being driven by data that the polls highlight, citing an article by Adrian Chiles—”In a data-obsessed world, the power of observation must not be forgotten.” Chiles tells a story:

In 2017, after a nasty bump between a US warship and an oil tanker, Aron Soerensen, head of maritime technology and regulation at the Baltic and International Maritime Council, said: “Maybe today there’s a bit of a fixation on instruments instead of looking out the window.” There’s a lot of this about, literally and metaphorically.

For teachers, teaching driven by test-generated data is rarely more effective than looking out the window.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

Back On The No-Longer-Trailing Pandemic Education Edge: Digging A Ditch

I've been offering updates from my own small town/rural corner of the universe for just one more data point about how various school districts are dealing with pandemic education. We don't all need to write about New York City schools.

My region had a decent shot. In a county of 50,000 people, we had a total of 70 cases at the beginning of September. All schools opened for face-to-face instruction, with various precautions and protocols in place.

Things have gone south pretty rapidly. We just passed 1,000 cases. 

School districts had moved from face to face to hybrid elementary and distance high school. That lasted a few weeks, but there have been repeated multiple out breaks in schools. One district is still toggling between hybrid and distance--basically every time there's a confirmed case in the school, they go back to distance for a couple of weeks. Everyone else was in distance mode.

Last night several local boards (there are four districts in the county) met to decide what to do with the rest of December. The discussions were spirited but nuanced. Because we are so rural, there are some major issues with getting a wifi signal to some folks; there are a few hot spots set up, but (and this seems to escape some folks) a hot spot is basically a relay station, and you can't relay a signal you can't get. So folks who want to use the hot spots have to drive to them. Not everyone has vehicle access, and winter's moving in.

The local boards really struggling. Nobody thinks virtual school is best. Nobody. But now, really for the first time, people now people who have suffered or died from covid. Reliably Trumpy Facebook pages now get pushback against "this is all just a scam, you dumb sheeple" posts. 

"Look, I didn't have any names to put to this two weeks ago. Now I do," said one local principal to his board. "There's no easy answers. I'm riding the fence, too. Are we digging a ditch educationally? Yes, but we could be digging a ditch to put somebody in."

People are concerned about the uncertainty. Teachers are worried about safety (well, most are) and working to deal with the workload challenges of the various models. Teachers are sharing hacks, tips, pieces of software, materials, teaming up for online instruction. They have the advantage of having started the year face to face and building an initial relationship with students, but it's still tough. Tomorrow night, at her students' request, my wife is hosting a zoom hot chocolate party with her second graders, during which they will sip hot chocolate and show off decorations/pets/whatever at their homes.

People are concerned about the virus, about the viability of local small businesses, about staying caught up with the state's patchwork quilt of inconsistent rules. And what is anyone going to do about Christmas? This is likely to be a long month.

Is This How Post-pandemic Ed Tech Will Be Different

Andreesen Horowitz is a silicon valley venture capitalist investment firm looking to strike it rich in the ed tech world. That is more than enough reason to distrust them (here's just one article laying out how vc firms--particularly tech ones--are wrecking our world). But they want to play in the ed tech sandbox, which is another reason. But they have some thoughts about how ed tech will look after the pandemic, and it is always important to keep an eye on where the vultures are circling.

"Edtech's Answer to Remote Learning Burnout" comes from Anne Lee Skates and Connie Chan. Chan is a specialist in Chinese consumer tech investment, while Skates graduated from Princeton, started a failed company, went to work for McKinsey, and ended up with Andreesen Horowitz (she also came to the Us from Taiwan to become a violinist and performed a solo at the 49th Grammy Awards, so that's cool). No education background in either case.

As always with investment articles, this is less about prediction and more about selling. Consider this paragraph from the introduction:

Public schools’ budget limitations have created a surge in alternative avenues of education, for those who can access them: private schools, homeschooling, and supplemental education. Edtech companies targeting this market combine software and online distribution to help make teachers’ jobs easier and learning more engaging.

I love "for those who can access them" which sounds so much nicer than "for those who have the bucks." The teachers' lives easier and more engaging parts are a nice work of speculative fiction.

But the meat of this article is their predictions about six ways post-covid edtech will differ from what has come before.

Parents cut through red tape

The point here is that Ed Tech companies will sell more directly to parents and skip trying to sell whoever has the purchasing authority at the school district level. I would remind them that the big bucks are for those who can convince state legislatures to adopt their product (think Florida's Virtual School or the College Board's success in conning states into adopting the SAT as a Big Standardized Test to satisfy federal requirements). 

But for companies that don't have that kind of clout, the pharmaceutical model of selling directly to civilians ("Ask your doctor about Magicfixium"). Skates and Chan are predicting more families spending bucks on home ed tech and sales to learning "pods." Wealthy parents are going to buy ed tech. It remains to be seen how many will ditch it upon learning it's not very good.

Teacher will be free agents

"Edtech platforms give everyone access to the most talented, experienced and innovative teachers, unconstrained by geography (or public school salary caps)." 

Oh my. One example they cite is Teachers Pay Teachers. Are teachers getting rich from their innovations there? But Skates and Chan are sure that the very best instructors--"tailored to the needs of each individual child"--can be found in the "online marketplace." They also cite Outschool, where "anyone with expertise can create a class." Also, anyone without actual expertise. 

Where to start. Watching a video of a teacher teach is not a great instructional model. And as so many people can now tell you, communicating via video conferencing software is not a great substitute for a face to face relationship. "I don't ever want to go back to the classroom, because having class on Zoom is so much better," says pretty much nobody right now. 

Nor do I anticipate a great flood of teachers rushing to join the gig economy and become education Uber drivers. Some will be interested--specifically some who are married to a person with good benefits. But one of the compensations for less-than-spectacular pay in teaching is that the work is at least steady, and it comes with reasonably reliable benefits like health care and a pension. Skates and Chan duck around the fact that super-awesome best teachers would be subjecting themselves to the lousy pay and non-existent safety net of gig work. And much of this ed tech gig work is just like Outschool, allowing anybody to be a "teacher," thereby driving down the market price for a "great teacher." If teachers were making so much money beyond those "public school salary caps" at online teaching, the word would be spreading through the teacher grapevine like wildfire. It isn't. Instead, we're just hearing that some of these outfits (like teaching English to Chinese students at % AM our time) make a decent side hustle.

MOOCs get a makeover

Well, they'd have to, wouldn't they, because they were a pretty spectacular failure. But Skates and Chan say the next generation will be more "community-based, gamified, and interactive." Choose your own adventure lessons! Giving students agency! Live group educational experience--with cartoon characters! But here's the problem-- do you know how many cool interactive programs students burn through in a month? The biggies like Instagram may stick around for a year or two, but mostly my students would go from "Check this out!" to downloading to moving on to the Next Cool Thing in about 2-4 weeks. If you could figure out the program that would keep them engaged and excited for a full year, you'd be Mark Zuckerberg (but only sort of, because no self-respecting teen would be caught dead on facebook these days).

Math meets Minecraft (and Mickey)

Games! Fun! Insight! Legends of Learning! See above. 

YouTube gets unbundled

Videos! Sigh. They certainly have their place. But if I stood in front of a class and delivered a fifteen minute lecture/demonstration and wouldn't answer any questions except by just repeating the same thing over again, nobody would hail me as a pedagogical genius. Skatres and Chan mention how platforms are catering to "learning styles," and of course that's not a thing, but even if it were, you couldn't cater to a variety of styles by only using one medium. Yes, as they assert, kids watch YouTube, but that does not mean they'll watch or learn from you explaining fluid dynamics on a video.

Software frees teachers from after school drudgery

"AI isn't coming for teachers' jobs--it's coming for their busywork." Skates and Chan cite software like ClassDojo, which is a perfect example of how software adds more work to the teacher day, because the software has to be fed with attention and teacher input and regular monitoring because parents expect a response RIGHT NOW if they send a message. The authors also offer Google Classroom as an example of software that lets a teacher "digitally manage homework submissions that previously had to be printed, hauled back and forth to school, and manually tracked," and again (as someone who has worked with classroom) the not lugging part is helpful, but the hours spent inputting materials--the software can only "manage" submissions if you have shown it how--takes its toll. 

There's also a downside we need to talk about some time, which is that the time payoff does happen down the road--if the teacher decides to change very little of her instruction from year to year. Which is not a good thing.

There's also a handy graphic that captures much of what they predict:

As usual, there's a lack of knowledge of what currently happens in schools-- the old model assumes that 1:many lectures is the norm, and it isn't. And their faith in AI is badly misplaced. And their image of online tracking of, well, everything, underlines a concern that they don't address at all--just how much the Ed Tech market depends on the collection and sale of excessive, invasive data collection, and how the market will be affected as parents get smart enough to push back harder against it. 

Look, these are not education experts. These are venture capitalists trying to predict where the money should rush to next. The problem is that the rush of investor money skews the market. Here we are, say, in desperate need of hamburger and the investors have decided to back companies that produce gold-plated tofu, and so when we go to the store, there are aisles of gold-plated tofu, plus aisles of budget tin-plated tofu, and almost no hamburger. Worse, people who mistake market fluffing for actual predictions run out and buy the gold tofu for us because they heard that's what we're going to need. 

Ed Tech has so many problems, but the most fundamental one is that they read and write tofu articles like this one instead of going out into schools and asking teachers, "What would actually help you get your job done." Which leads to another issue, also captured in this article--when disaster strikes, instead of running to the scene to ask, "What do you need," they park themselves in their offices and ask, "How will we be able to make money from this?" 

The 2020 Edubook Christmas List

Time to go hunting for books for the people on your Christmas list, and I have some recommendations for you if there are people on your list who care about public education (and really, everybody should). 

Before we start shopping, let me also direct your attention to Bookshop.org, an online vendor set up to benefit local independent booksellers instead of, say, giving Jeff Mezos his next gazillion dollars. You can also use it to locate a local bookstore and then shop even more directly. 

Now, here's my handful or recommendations for this year.

Black Lives Matter In School

This book does not actually ship for another week, but based on the fact that it's edited by Jesse Hagopian and Denisha Jones, my copy is already on order. 

Know Your Price  

Andre Perry brings a really unique collection of hats to this work, from Brookings scholar to education journalist, and this work is an impressive distillation of it all. At some points, it's a powerful personal reflection on his own experience, and at others, a scholarly look at how Blacks in the US have had value systematically stripped from them in ways that have lasting financial and social consequences. This book is huge help in understanding the how of racism in not just abstract or social ways, but in concrete, practical financial ways. 

Schoolhouse Burning & The Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door

Schoolhouse Burning by Derek Black and A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door by Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider are two entirely separate books, but they make a perfect pairing. It enhances both to read them back to back.

Black is a legal scholar whose book traces the importance of education in this country as reflected in the laws and constitutions of the states. This book is a perfect response to those who claim that public education is not in the US Constitution and is not foundational to democracy and anyway we are a republic. A good, clear explanation of how we arrived at the present moment, and why an assault on public education is an assault on democracy.

Schneider, an education scholar, and Berkshire, an education journalist, together host the popular Have You Heard podcast. They have crafted a critical explanation of how the once-right-fringe idea of privatizing public education has become an accepted mainstream policy idea, and lay out the tools being used to further that cause. 

I've just reviewed both of these over at Forbes.com-- you can read those reviews here and here.

Slaying Goliath  

And if you want to make it a trilogy, here's the perfect follow up. Way back at the dawn of this year, Diane Ravitch published her latest book. Slaying Goliath focuses on the fight against education disruptors and the many signature battles of the last few decades. Highlighting the many aspects of the grassroots fight to preserve public ed and the forces arrayed against it in Ravitch's trademark scholarly firebrand style, this shows how the fight to preserve the bedrock of democracy can be won and argues passionately that it must. Ravitch's blog has long stood as the town square, the hub of the universe of public education supporters, and it gives her an unmatched view of the movement in all its forms.

Why They Can't Write

John Warner's book is admittedly of greatest use to those who actually teach writing in the classroom, but that's a subject near and dear to my heart, and this book says so many of the things I believe need to be said about teaching writing, and why it has become an endangered art, and how we could better approach it. 

A Practical Guide to Digital Research  

If you're buying a gift for someone who has been studying up on the basics of the education debates and who wants to be able to get in their and dig out information on their own, particularly to research local ed issues, this book is the berries. Schneider shares all the tricks of the researcher's trade for making connections between groups, following the money, and getting at the truth that is so often being concealed. 

And if we cheat a little and dip into last year:

Winners Take All  

Anand Giridharadas's book is now just over a year old, but if you haven't read it yet, you should. Everybody should. Beyond the red versus blue politics of our era, this book looks at how the elites trained in places like McKinsey have come to make such a mess out of this country. Really--everybody you know should read this book. And now that you've waited, you can get it in paperback.

How the Other Half Learns   

Robert Pondiscio's book about Success Academy shows that this charter juggernaut is both better and worse than you imagined. If you want a solid, serious look at how the grand dame of charterdom really does her thing, this book gives you a hard look, even with Pondiscio's preference for choice.

After the Education Wars   

From earlier in 2019, Andrea Gabor's book is still one of the best looks at the best and worst of education reform; the early pioneers, the big successes, and the big failures. Here's how to improve a public school system without breaking it down for parts and selling off the scrap. 

The Testing Charade

I'm reaching all the way back to 2017, but as arguments about standardized testing heat up again, this book still offers the definitive explanation of what is wrong with our test-centric approach, what is wrong with tests themselves, and why the testocrats' preferred path to drag us all down is the wrong one. Required reading for anyone who expects to be in an argument about the Big Standardized Test.

I could go on all day, and there is so much to choose form out there that I have no doubt missed some worthy choices, but you've now got enough of a list to get some shopping done, whether it's cyber-shopping today or in the weeks ahead. 

Donors Choose Monday: Expanding the Library

This week's project is exactly the sort of thing that shouldn't be on donors choose. 

Mrs. Gibson is an elementary teacher in South Carolina, and she's looking to expand her classroom library.

My students are living in a low income area where literacy is our focus in order to meet the needs they may not be receiving at home.

My focus is to bring in books that we help them connect with other cultures within the world and the school setting to help them become culturally competent and aware.

A classroom teacher should not have to go begging for books, and yet, here we are. I've made this comparison before--tips should not be a necessary part of a food server's income, but if I refuse to tip as a protest against the system, I'm just being a jerk and the people who get hurt are not the people perpetuating the system. 

So my dream is a world in which South Carolina funds public education properly and Mrs. Gibson and all the teachers like her have the classroom libraries they need. But in the meantime I can either complain about the problem or take a simple step to improve even one small corner of the universe. So I'm giving a tiny little donation to this project, and I encourage you to do the same.