Mrs. Gates Still Doesn't Get It, Still.

Last week the New York Times decided to offer one more glowing portrait of Melinda Gates, unintentionally underlining the work of rich folk critic Anand Giridharadas and explaining, again, that she doesn't get the problem of Gates riches in education.

She opens with an Emerson quote from her valedictory high school graduation speech about success being the knowledge that one person has breathed easier because you have lived. That quote, writes David Gelles, "is still ringing in her ears." 

“That’s been my definition of success since high school,” she said. “So if I have an extra dollar, or a thousand dollars, or a million dollars, or in my case, which is absurd, a billion dollars to plow back into making the world better for other people, that’s what I’m going to do.”

This is such a Giridharadian quote-- note that she gets her vast wealth is absurd, but her thought is that she should "plow back" the money rather than contemplate, critique, and act to change the system that allowed her top extract that much money in the first place. These are our modern philanthropists--they can grasp that they have a shit ton of money, and even consider that they ought to do something useful for it, but they can't question that they deserve to have it in the first place, that it is, in fact, theirs theirs all theirs. Philanthropy is swell, but philanthropy set up so that they control their money and remain the arbiters of what should and should not be done with it.

The interview focuses primarily on the medical stuff, and there are plenty of reasons to question the Gates involvement in the medical world (here's a good piece to start with). 

Asked about disinformation, she views social media as the culprit, and somehow talks about that without sharing any culpability with technology to enable such baloney spreading. She knows that she and Bill have been the target of conspiracy theories, and she just figures that because people are afraid and "looking to point to somebody or some thing or some institution." She's certainly not wrong, but I note that she doesn't include "vast multinational corporation" on the list, nor suggest there's anything they've done to attract this sort of attention. 

Gelles asks the "does big philanthropy have too much power" question, Here's the first part of her answer:

I think that’s a critique that is well worth listening to and looking at. In our philanthropic work, there isn’t a single thing that we don’t work on in partnership with governments. Because at the end of the day, it is governments that scale things up and that can help the most people. There is a healthy ecosystem that needs to exist between government, philanthropy, the private sector and civil society. And when you get that ecosystem working at its best, no one party in that ecosystem has too much power.

I object here. If your philanthropy can "partner with" a government, as if you're pretty much equals, you have too much power. If you are on an equal scale with government, the private sector, and civil society, you have too much power. And there's another unspoken thought here--modern philanthropists may give up money, but they don't give up power. 

The second half of this answer is where education pops up:

You know, if Bill and I had had more decision-making authority in education, maybe we would’ve gotten farther in the United States. But we haven’t. Some of the things that we piloted or tried got rejected, or didn’t work, and I think there’s a very healthy ecosystem of parents and teachers’ unions and mayors and city councils that make those education decisions. I wish the U.S. school system was better for all kids.

Yikes. I mean, yikes. First of all, it's not "some of the things"-- all of the things that the Gates have tried in education, from small schools to the Common Core, have failed. Yes, they got rejected, in the same way the average person rejects stewed liver covered with toad wart dressing--they were bad. (And lets not forget that sometimes, rather than being rejected, the Gates just walked out on projects in the middle, leaving someone else holding the bag.) And whatever their many problems were, the biggest problem was not that Bill and Melinda Gates didn't have enough power over the system. Note also that her "very healthy ecosystem" includes pretty much everybody. If everyone else had just let the Gates be in charge, it would have been fine! Yikes. After all this time, all this money, and all this failure, she still doesn't understand that when it comes to education, they are amateurs who don't know enough about how education works and who don't bother to talk to actual experts (without checking to make sure they're sympathetic and then handing them a big pile of money first, which tends to blunt the critical faculties --looking at you NEA and AFT). 

She's asked about changing the tax code so that Bill pays more, and she thinks that's a good idea because if you benefit from the system in this country "you have an obligation to give back," and again, that is markedly different from recognizing that you have an obligation to not take so very much in the first place. And she's not done underlining that blind spot. Asked about how she reconciles her enormous privilege with "the acute suffering that so many people are experiencing," she says this:

It’s something I’ve pondered a lot. There’s no explanation how you get to be in this situation of privilege. There’s just none.

Well, yes, there is. Your husband made a bunch of pointed business decisions, and made some financial decisions, and now you're richer than the entire planet. Yes, it took a whole complex network of luck and timing and fortune to tee up your husband's work, but Bill Gates has worked very hard at becoming absurdly wealthy. 

This is the part where that headline about "letting her heart break" comes in. She visits poor people in far away places, hangs out with Mother Theresa, and cries a lot, and then contemplates what the person shares with her and "what I learned and how do I plow that back into the work to try and make the world better." Again with the plowing back.

And look, I get it. She could be spending her days shopping for designer dresses and ordering gold-plated toilets and the Gates Foundation could be spending millions of dollars on garish portraits of Bill to mount in one of his ninety-five country clubs. They could be strikingly evil people shamelessly basking in pools of liquid silver. They could be dumping their money into dopey projects like missions to Mars. I also get that being incredibly wealthy probably has unavoidable effects on how you perceive the world and how your own immediate world treats you. 

Hubris doesn't always come with ugly swagger, and lacking a clue about critical items doesn't always look like bell-gong dopiness. And no matter how rich you are or are not, it's human to want to Do Good Things without making yourself uncomfortable, both physically and emotionally. And sometimes carelessness looks poised and pretty.

But boy would I love to read a Gates profile in which either of them said, "You know, we just realized that we just don't know enough about education to be meddling with it. We have a lot of damage that we've done and need to make up for, and we're sincerely sorry about that. We have learned that we don't know the magic solution to making schools better for all students, and so we're going to step back and get out of the way of the serious professionals who have devoted their entire adult lives to that work. We plan to just shut up and listen to them." 

That would be a fun profile, but I'm not holding my breath. 

OH: Ed Disruptors Want Their Big Test

Aaron Churchill, the Fordham Institution's Ohio research director, popped up in the Columbus Dispatch today as a "guest columnist." It's worth noting that his job is "aimed at strengthening education policy in Ohio," which is of course not the same thing as improving education and certainly not the same thing as supporting public education. Churchill's previous job was program manager at Junior Achievement in Western PA; his college degrees are in History, Exegesis, and Public Policy and Management. 

It helps to understand that Fordham is all in for school choice, that they in fact operate some charter schools in Ohio. Which explains a lot about Churchill's arguments here for making sure that Ohio administers the Big Standardized Test this year. The headline is "Don't cancel K-12 testing when we need data more than ever" and "we" is doing a lot of work here. But as testocrats keep pushing schools to waste precious time and money on testing this year, it's useful to understand what those testophiles are after.

Churchill opens with a quick recap--pandemic, closed schools, big mess, the usual. And in the midst of this, some folks are pushing to waive state assessments again this year. 

"Huge blunder," says Churchill. Analysts predict big learning loss, "yet without state tests nobody can measure the size and scope of the damage. How many Ohio students have been knocked off course — and just how far off course? Which student groups have struggled most? Are the losses widespread or do they vary from community to community?"

This begs the question--who wants to know, and what will they do with the information? It can't be teachers, because they'll have a strong sense of how things are going in their classroom, even their school, long before any spring test. 

"Ohioans," says Churchill, "be left in the dark." More importantly, "state and local policymakers won't be able to effectively target resources in recovery efforts." I have a radical thought about this--state and local policymakers could ask the actual educators working in the schools. But they haven't done so in the past. And they also haven't targeted resources in recovery efforts in the past.

Remember, Ohio is the home of HB 70, a bill that said that if a school's test scores were too low, they would be targeted for extra help and resources--ha, no, just kidding. School districts that had low test scores would be targeted for takeover, turnaround, and the option of charter conversion. The bill has yielded a handful of disasters, and highlights how, once again, test-centered school evaluation ends up not as a signal for leaders to send in the troops and the resources, but as a homing beacon for vultures. It's a fitting policy for the state that earned a reputation as a wild west for charter schools (the massive ECOT scam and scandal is just one example).

Timely state exam data would animate action, and empower leaders and parents with the information they must have to tailor effective interventions.

Well, it won't be particularly "timely" if the test is in the spring. But the inclusion of "parents" here suggests that the "timely intervention" Churchill has in mind is supporting charters and choice. 

He offers some examples. Like tutors. Or local charitable organizations "might seek ways to supply extra support to students." It's entirely possible that a couple of decades of ed reformster nonsense has made me a bit cynical, but this smells like another voucher argument to me. And I can't help noticing that none of Churchill's examples or arguments say anything about getting public schools the resources and support they need to support student learning. 

His final point is that parents deserve "to know where their children stand in respect to state academic standards," and he's not wrong, though there's an argument to be had about how useful those standards really are. Pandemic schools have, in some cases, eased up on some requirements. Whether or not the BS Test provides any useful answers is another topic to debate (spoiler alert: it's not). 

Churchill winds up for his finish by citing a survey given by Ohio Excels, a lobbying group that is largely hostile to public education, so I feel comfortable ignoring any of their survey results.

Churchill pronounces the urge to cancel the BS Tests misguided, because with out it, Ohioans will be flying blind, but that's unlikely. And I'm not disagreeing with Churchill just because I think he mostly wants those test scores to goose the market for school choice and target public schools for further "disruption." Beyond that, we have the issue of students' actual education. This year has already been chopped into bits, with time and education lost to the problems of pandemic learning. Classroom teachers (largely without classrooms) are examining every single thing they choose to do closely, because time is short and precious and if something isn't going to deliver more education to those students. BS Tests, and the test prep necessary to get students through them, will not deliver more education for students.

BS Tests don't educate. Instead, they are the educational equivalent of the manager who demands that you keep providing detailed reports and presentations about the progress of your project, and then wonders why you're not getting the project done faster. Nothing should make it into the pandemic classroom that does not provide educational bang for the buck--and BS Tests require many bucks and provide barely a meek pop for students. Provides great tools for education "disruptors," but for actual students, not so much. We can find better things for students to do with their time this year.

More Important Than Biden's Ed Secretary Pick

There are plenty of reasons to focus attention and concern on President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for Secretary of Education. After all, VP Biden was part of the administration that gave us Arne Duncan as secretary, a choice universally panned by teachers. Public education advocates are hoping that Biden will give us a career educator with the leadership chops to manage a federal department that has been up against the ropes for a few years.

But the department needs more than just a solid secretary at the helm. It needs a mechanism in place that will help it hear teachers.

Education policy discussions in this country suffer from too many loud voices of education amateurs. Yes, the department needs the benefit of people who understand the system in DC, as well as the massive financial business of student loans and grants. The world of higher ed needs to be represented. But the education department also needs to benefit from the insights of actual education experts, the practitioners in the field. Public school teachers. And not just one at the top—lots of them.

The future secretary, whoever she might be, should have ready access to a panel of actual public school teachers. It should be a large, diverse group, including teachers from rural and urban public school districts, teachers of all disciplines and grade levels, teachers of all races. The group should be convened electronically on a regular basis, and should be on call in the event that the department finds itself in need of expertise on a particular issue. Every report and white paper churned out by advocacy groups and think tanks should be run past this panel of people who can answer the question, “Would this really work in the field?”

The department has had teacher “fellows” in the past, just a handful of teachers selected in part to put a teacher face on department ideas. And while recruiting teachers to come physically work in DC has its appeal, that’s an idea for the pre-internet age. There is no reason for the secretary not to have a broad network of practicing public school teachers at her fingertips, accessible by screen, phone and email.

Members of the network should not be screened based on how well they agree with the administration’s preferred ideas. Nor should they be rounded up by way of any one source (e.g. the unions). They should be career educators; nobody who spent two years in a classroom beefing up their resume under Teach For America qualifies.

The department needs to be infused with the voices of the country’s actual education experts—teachers. I hope whoever sits in that office in DC builds that support network. It’s time for the department to rely on real expertise.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

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.