Distance Learning and Compliance Culture

Compliance culture in the classroom has always, always been a problem.

This is the teacher who demands compliance, in fact, grades on compliance. Most folks have a story about That Teacher--the one who wouldn't accept a paper because it was ten minutes late, or who took off a letter grade because the paper had the "wrong" heading on it. 

For some people, compliance is practically the whole point. No Excuses charter schools are founded on the principle that students need to learn to comply with every action in every moment of the school day. Just this weekend, a USA Today op-ed suggested that if students aren't given zeros for late work, that's a failure to hold those students to standards of excellence. 

Students have to learn compliance, the argument goes (though it rarely uses the term "compliance"), because out in the Real World, students will have to learn to meet deadlines and expectations and basically do as they're told promptly and "correctly," and the longer the argument goes, the more you can see that compliance culture is often meant for Those Peoples' children. But it is also true that life involves deadlines and expectations and most of us don't grow up to live in the world of do-as-you-please. Compliance has its place (like on your face, over your mouth and nose, too, please).

The problem with compliance culture in the classroom is that it loses the plot, falls off the track of what te classroom is actually for. If I see a low score for a student's essay, I expect that to mean that the essay was poorly written or argued, not that the student used the wrong size margins and put her heading on the wrong side of the header. If a student fails calculus, I expect that to mean that he couldn't master the skills and knowledge involved in calculus, not that he didn't turn a bunch of assignments and was late to class many days. Tying grades to compliance issues inevitably means punishing some students for things over which they have no control while requiring them to worry more about rule-following than intellectual attainment.

Education is about building relationships. You do not build relationships--at least not healthy ones--by demanding compliance above all else.

Distance learning in particular (and really, ed tech in general) adds more layers of compliance to student work. Students have to use the correct format for a project, then send it through the "correct" channel, just for things to work. Assignments come time-stamped. Students (and their frustrated parents) now have several layers of technology with which they need to comply.

This is no time for teachers and schools to double down on compliance culture. If a student throws up her hands and finally submits an assignment via email instead of through Canvas or the designated Google app, that student deserves credit for perseverance and not a grade penalty for failing to comply. Did the parent finally crack at 2 AM and email a picture of the completed worksheet instead of sending it through the proper channels yesterday? Hallelujah! The assignment was turned in, and you can now do what you meant to do, which is use the worksheet to assess how well the student has grasped the concepts you were trying to teach.

I get that this can become hugely frustrated and labor intensive for teachers as you try to make sure that you've located all the different submissions of a particular assignment from all the various channels through which they arrived. But at some point (maybe many points) you have to take a step back and ask yourself if you are assessing command of the material or rewarding compliance. 

As the stories roll in about the avalanche of failing grades, I have to wonder how much of that failure is a failure to comply with a dizzying new complex of techno-based requirements. 

Sometimes compliance culture is driven by administration, and sometimes by the classroom teacher (though it always requires the teacher's cooperation to function). I accept that some compliance issues have a place in a classroom (I can't easily assess the skills of a student who never hands in an assignment), but compliance culture cannot be the center or foundation of a classroom, and that is triply true under current conditions. Distance learning comes with its own set of hurdles and obstacles, most of them unfamiliar and challenging for many students and their families. In the battle between students and those obstacles, teachers should be backing the students-- not the obstacles. If you are deleting assignments just because students didn't submit them the "correct" way or because they have a late time stamp, you are not demanding excellence--you're just being a jerk. 

Teachers are supposed to be helping students become their best selves while learning how to be fully human in the world. It's about building up people, not programming robots. 

Donors Choose Monday: Mice

I donate locally when I can identify a need, and for a few weeks I've also been donating to teachers across the country on Donors Choose, because it makes me feel slightly less helpless in these crazy days. I've been blogging about it here to encourage you--if you can--to offer some help to someone. Maybe you know of worthy causes or programs local to you. But if you're just not sure where you can help, well, here's my cause of the week.

This is a chance to give students individual mouses for photo studio class in Stamford, CT. If you've tried to do photo editing with a touchpad, you know how useful a mouse can be. This is a large, rural high school and I'm envious that they have a visual arts program like this. As a yearbook advisor, I would have been delighted to have someone in the building training photographers instead of doing it all from scratch myself. So this is a project I'm happy to support. 

Join me in supporting this project. Or support some other project at Donors Choose. Or support something in your community. Give to a food bank. Contribute to your library, or a local theater, or some vital local business that is currently struggling. Do what you can. 

ICYMI: So It's Really December Edition (12/6)

Still trying to take care of all the places the cold gets into our house, because apparently the season is serious about things. Still counting down to the magical day when I can go many days at a time without asking, "Well, what has the President done today?" But there are still some good things to read from this week, so here's your list.

How DeVos May Have Started a Counter-Revolution in Education   

Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire in the New York Times explaining how Betsy DeVos has broken up an unspoken treaty between conservative and liberal ed reform folks, and how that may open the door to some actual steps forward.

Are We Compassionate Enough In School?

A hell of a question, posed by guest writer Matthew Fleming over at Ed Week. Pretty cool little piece about some of the things that create fatigue and burnout.

Behaviorism, Surveillance, and (School) Work  

Audrey Watters was a speaker at the #AgainstSurveillance teach-in, and here's what she said. As always, informative and infuriating, including enterprise software, Skinner's box for babies, and test proctoring. 

Anti-Affirmative Action Group Hopes Conservative Supreme Court Will Finally Give Them A Win  

Now that the Supreme Court has been tilted a bit further rightward, all manner of folks are getting ready to take a run at SCOTUS to get their favorite reactionary cause pumped up. So here come Students for Fair Admission, ready to stump for favored admission status for white guys. From the Root.

Rundown Schools Force More Students To Go Remote   

Hechinger Reports with a good look at how some schools were hit extra hard by the pandemic because they'd already gone years without decent maintenance. Let critical resources decay, and they can't sustain an extra hit--go figure. 

VCs Are Pouring Money Into the Wrong Education Startups

Venture capitalists, or vulture capitalists--take your pick, but they're making sure this mess doesn't go to waste. WIRED takes a look at where the money is going.

A Soccer Club and $1.2 Million for a charter school

We mentioned this here at the Institute back when the grant was first issued, but now Carol Burris at the Washington Post has even more details, and the rest of the story (which is that these amateurs didn't even get their school approved). Just our tax dollars--well, not so much "at work" as "being wasted."

Worse than Betsy DeVos: The disturbing story of 2020 school board elections

Jeff Bryant has looked downticket to discover that in many school board elections, pubic education was not the winner. From Alternet.

Online exam monitoring can invade privacy and erode trust at universities  

A Canada-centric look at the rapidly spreading ugly mess that is tecno-proctoring. Short form: it's bad.

Texas high school senior suspended for painted nails  

I'm always leery of these sorts of stories, because there is often another side of the tale that the school isn't free to tell. But I can't think of another side that would make this any less stupid. Sometimes public schools put dopes in charge, and they make dopey policies.

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.