In Seattle, A Tough Back To School Choice

Seattle's school board made a decision, just a few weeks ago, to re-open face-to-face school for pre-K, kindergarten, some special ed, and 1st grade students. It's a good example of the kinds of re-opening challenges that parents and teachers are facing, the kind of thing that is being pushed out as a "plan" by a major district.

Parents received an e-mail inviting them to complete a "survey" and commit themselves to either continuing at-home instruction via computer, or sending their child back for in-person learning on March 1st.

The e-mail was sent out January 5th. The decision must be made by January 10th. 

The e-mail includes a link to a FAQ page that is not, well, as helpful as it might be. For one thing, the tone is perhaps not unpleasant, but certainly brusque. For instance, on the matter of the deadline.

Can I change my decision after March 1?

The decision a family makes by January 10 will continue through the end of the 2020-21 school year.

What if I change my mind before March 1?

January 10 is the deadline so staff can begin to finalize logistics and schedules. If you have completed the survey but change your mind prior to January 10, please retake the survey before the closing date.

Some of it is just unclear. If you were facing this decision, you'd probably want to know how many people your child would be sharing a classroom with, but the answer to the question "how large will the classes be" isn't really an answer:

Kindergarten and first grade classrooms will support a 1:15 teacher-student ratio.

Okay-- but a classroom with six hundred students and forty teachers would fit that criterium. Preschoolers are promised a maximum group size of 6-10.

Will classrooms of students interact during the day? "All classroom cohorts will stay together throughout the day," is, again, not actually an answer. Lunch will be eaten in the classroom. Classrooms will have less furniture, but will remain "joyful and engaging." The district is working with architectural firms to create "cohort zones." Some plexiglass shields are now installed in the offices. They're still trying to figure out phys ed class and other specials.

Testing? Well. no. SPS will do health screening by "attestation" which is fancy talk for "put everyone on the honor system" and also for "a clever way to cover the district's legal butt." The health screening will be some version of parents and staff filing a statement saying "I swear that I'm perfectly healthy, as far as I know." This won't help when someone is asymptomatic, but it will help if anybody tries to sue the district for creating spreading events.

Busing? Students will wear masks and the windows will be open or "adjusted as much as possible to maximize outside air flow." When the bus gets back to the main lot, it will be wiped down. 

Will teachers be vaccinated? Again, a non-answer answer that the state health department has scheduled teachers for Phase 2 vaccination. Will that be before March 1? Who knows. But the district will provide teachers with masks. 

Meanwhile, the district is hiring 80 more custodians and two cleaning services. Three times a day wipedowns of "high touch" surfaces. And they say they've done evaluations and upgrades on all the HVAC systems and filtration. 

So the plan is one part actual plan, and a few parts a stated intention to have a plan that meets certain criteria but which doesn't actually exist yet. And parents have until Sunday to decide if they're okay with this, or not. 

It has some gaping holes, and while many districts had the same gaping holes last March, school leaders should be getting smarter about this stuff. Like, what's the protocol if a teacher or student becomes symptomatic during the day? What's the protocol if a class or a member of a class has been exposed to someone who tests positive? What has the district done about the huge increased need for staffing? For instance, if one first grade class becomes two (one in the building and one distance), do they intend to do the right thing and have a separate teacher for each? What's the substitute teacher situation look like? And, of course, what if community spread is bad in Seattle on March 1 (and teachers haven't been vaccinated yet)?

It's not the worst plan I've seen. The district just up the road from me just decided to go back in the building full time starting next week, and if you want to talk about a plan that is not actually a plan and having no contingencies for anything, they're right on top of it. 

And the need for a firm commitment from parents is understandable from a planning perspective. But if parents change their minds after the deadline, it's not clear to me what a district could do or how they can win the inevitable lawsuits. Maybe that's why their answer to "what if I change my mind" is so vague and off-point--because they know the real answer is "If you change you're mind, we'll have to let you do it, but boy will it be a big pain in our institutional tush." And it looks like that tush is in some pain already. We'll see how it feels on January 11.

About Teachers4OpenSchools

You may have run across a shiny new group on line that is agitating for teachers to be back in the classroom-- Teachers4OpenSchools.

The arguments are the usual ones, from the legitimate concern about mental health to the learning loss baloney. There's not much of anything new here, and not the kind of balance we find in a piece like this one.  But I'm always curious about these little pop-up goups, and the website is pretty opaque about who, exactly, is happening here. But poking around the site, I found two teachers who are apparently acting at least as spokespersons for the group.

One is NYC teacher Stephanie Edmonds, who runs the Youtube channel Class Disruption, where you can find vidcasts like this one, in which she explains what Ibram X. Kendi gets wrong about equity issues and also describes how lefties like emotional language "that may not exactly align with reality" while righties prefer reason and statistics and things that reflect reality (though she "doesn't subscribe" to the whole left-right thing). Power. Vibe. She's a little rambly. She was the president of her college's Libertarian Club. She wants unity and the media is hurting it. She's a history teacher who uses the 1776 unites materials. She has a very distinctive voice, sometimes. She's been a teacher since the fall of 2016.

Her compatriot is Catherine Barrett. We've encountered Barrett before, as a teacher voice on the Speak Out For Teachers website. Barrett a few years back was part of #RedforEd in Arizona until she became a GOP political operative for Doug Ducey, attacking the #RedforEd movement. She also turned up as chair of a group pushing a Classroom Code of Ethics in Arizona, proposed gag rule for teachers in the wake of #RedforEd; that proposal turned out not be an Arizona thing, but an anti-teacher move cooked up by activist David Horowitz and pushed out across the country. Speak Out For Teachers is a creation of the Center for Union Facts, a part of the bunch of dark money conservative groups run by Richard Berman, who  takes a scrappy win ugly approach to fighting unions. 

Right now Speak Out For Teachers is featuring on its page big bold letters proclaiming "Teachers Want To Get Back In The Classroom But unions are standing in the way."

So how did Edmonds and Barrett get together? Well, Edmonds has a big internet footprint, and Barrett is well-connected, so anything's possible. The stated goals of Teachers4OpenSchools are kind of rambly, from getting all schools open to empowering teachers to making a more equitable education system. And they acknowledge there is not a one-size-fits-all solution, though apparently their range of possible solutions does not include keeping buildings closed. 

There may be an argument to be made for opening some schools for some time under certain community conditions with certain supports and resources, but Teachers4OpenSchools doesn't look like the group to make it. 

MO: GOP Rep Tells Teachers To Take A Hike

So here's a jolly exchange from Twitter on Saturday.

Get a different job. No one owes you anything.

— Justin Hill (@HillForMissouri) January 3, 2021

That's Justin Hill, a Missouri GOP rep from the 108th district, showing his love and support for teachers in his state. He was a cop before running for office, so you'd think he'd know something about public service, but maybe not so much.

He's had a few ideas to offer before. While the Missouri legislature was working on some Covid relief, Hill decided to complain about feeding school students:

“Our school districts have become glorified lunch rooms,” said Rep. Justin Hill, R-St. Charles. “They’re not educating children, but they certainly are going to get money to hand out free food.”

The bill would give $75 million for the School Nutrition Services Program to reimburse schools for school food programs.

“This is an embarrassment,” Hill continued. “This is such an embarrassment; I am ashamed to even be having a vote for $75 million in food. When we have children sitting at home and their parents are at work, the children are playing, frickin’ Minecraft or whatever at home, and they’re not getting an education.”

Hill's not a fan of spending tax dollars. He also hung out with the Save Our Country Coalition, a hyper-right group formed by ALEC, FreedomWorks and Tea Party Patriots and headed by Art Laffer, famous wacky economist. Last fall, Hill joined that group in opposing federal spending to help prop up states.

Hill is himself an ALEC member (in 2018, he was their Legislator of the Year), and his runs for office have been backed by folks like Reed "School Boards Should Be Abolished" Hastings and the Missouri Club for Growth, plus David Craig Humphreys (a well-heeled MO businessman). And he's one of the reality-defying legislators still cheering on the January 67 challenge to Presidebnt-elect Biden's defeat of Beloved Leader, and is filing a resolution in the MO House calling on other states to investigate the imaginary fraud.

So as you might guess, that terse response to Ms. Piper (who is no stranger to some political wrassling) was not a one-off, and the conversation didn't get much better. Responding to another teacher, Hill argued that "everyone is struggling" and teachers shouldn't complain "especially while many are being paid while not working." Then this:

Consider starting a t-shirt business.

— Justin Hill (@HillForMissouri) January 3, 2021

It's excellent advice, since many Missouri teachers make less than folks working in retail. The state has a mandated $25K starting salary, and many school districts barely beat that seriously low bar. The bar might be so low in part because it hasn't been raised in fifteen years; Missouri teachers leaving the profession (or the state) cite the lousy pay as a big reason. Missouri consistently ranks near the bottom of states for average pay, and is next-to-last (thanks, Oklahoma) in starting pay. And as you can see, legislators like Hill are really, deeply concerned about this issue. 

Piper, for her part, responded to the t-shirt post with a cheery "You bet." You can order this shirt on Etsy right now:

The New York Times Adds One Plus One And Gets Three

You might have been excited yesterday if you saw a New York Times editorial board headline talking about "The Wreckage Betsy DeVos Leaves Behind" and thought that maybe, for a change, the greyest lady was going to stands up for public education. 

But then you read it.

Sigh.

There is much that they get right. They open by noting that the department has not just failed, but refused to lead, during the pandemic. It's a cruel irony that Covid arrived during the administration of folks who think that government should not do anything, ever, including helping keep its citizens alive. 

They also correctly note that there is a lot of undoing to undo, specifically in the area of civil rights protections where, again, it was DeVos's devout belief that government should not ever be helpful. 

They note a "striking" contract between DeVos and Cordona, offering the understatement "Ms. DeVos had almost no experience in public education and was clearly disinterested in the department's mission."

Then the board barrels boldly into the weeds.

They accept the NWEA's baloney pronouncements on "learning loss" as gospel, and from there it's just a short step to the usual arguments about why we must get back to the Big Standardized Test right away, because how else will anyone know how the students are doing. The board wants to gather data so that "the country" can "allocate educational resources strategically," except that is not what "the country" does ever, and as always, a good way to find out how students are doing is to ask actual teachers.

I am continually amazed at this argument, because what the heck do people think teachers do every fall? Seriously. Do they imagine that teachers just assume that all their new students know X, Y and Z because it's in the curriculum. Do folks imagine that teachers spend the weeks before school poring over BS Test results to learn where their students are? Because, no-- mostly the test results aren't available yet and because teachers are forbidden to see the actual question, all they get is the test manufacturer's "analysis" of the results, which is mostly hugely broad and unhelpful. 

No, in the fall, teachers use a large array of formal and informal assessments to figure out student's individual weaknesses and strengths. Teachers do this daily, and then they keep doing it all year. This remains one of the great, silly fictions of the BS Test--that the results are useful to teachers who would be lost without them. In reality, the BS Test is like a guy who shows up at the office of a general who is commanding thousands of troops on dozens of fronts and this guy--this guy shows up with a pop gun and announces, "I am here to win this war for you." 

The NYT board then swings back out of the weeds by noting that DeVos's affectionate support of predatory for-profit colleges was a bad thing and the new guy should get back to holding career-prep schools accountable for actually prepping people for careers.

The board remains firmly on the wrong side of testing. Let's hope the new secretary doesn't listen to them.

ICYMI: So I Guess This Is A New Year Edition (1/3)

 I'm not sure I've ever felt less enamored of our habit of celebrating the passing of an arbitrary line in the sand that we drew ourselves, but it's not the most terrible human activity, either, so carry on. Also cross your fingers and say a prayer for everyone going back to school tomorrow. In the meantime, here's some reading from the week.

The Bloom's Deception  

Greg Ashman challenges some common thoughts about the beloved taxonomy. Are higher orders really more important?

Remember This Year

Audrey Watters does a version of her annual review of the year piece, pulling no punches as always, and reminding us about ed tech amnesia.

An Idiot's Guide To the Philosophy of Education (Part 3)

Othmar's Trombone has been quiet for a while, but this week he popped back up continuing his series of irreverent looks at key philosophers of education, so here you go.

Yes, Virginia

This is a cool little piece about the annually celebrated girl who wrote That Letter and received That Reply. Turns out she grew up to be a teacher.

Pandemic Offers Opportunity to Reduce Standardized Testing  

That Josh Starr, CEO of PDK International, would write this piece is not exactly surprising, but that Education Next, the mouthpiece of the Fordham Institution axis of reformsterdom, would run it suggests that something's in the air right now. Let's hope. Also, add this to your bookmarked lists of good arguments for suspending testing.

The critical story of the "science of reading" and why its narrow plotline is putting our children and schools at risk.

The National Council of Teachers of English offers an excellent critique of the highly-popular-among-people-who-don't-actually-teach science of reading movement.

Penn State Hockey: Gadowsky away from family since July

My nephew is a sports writer specializing in Penn State sports. Here's a different kind of covid piece, about the university's hockey coach, who has sacrificed being with his own family in order to do the coaching job. One more cost of getting sports running so other folks can feel normal.

Trump's school choice executive order

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider explains why we don't have to give that EO another thought.

The President's executive order is vaporware

Here's a guest post on the reformy Jay Greene's blog, also explaining why we don't have to give that EO another thought. 

Amplify and iReady Claim Kindergarten and First Grade Reading Loss. Guess why.

Is it any wonder that much of the chicken littling about learning loss is coming from folks who hope to make a bundle "fixing" it? Nancy Bailey breaks down some of the baloney being sliced up.

St. Louis Public Education Theft Continues

Thomas Ultican looks in detail at the steady dismantling of St. Louis schools and where the situation stands currently.

Why the academic achievement gap is a racist idea.

This piece from Ibram X. Kendi ran back in 2016, but it poped up again this week and it is well worth a reread.

And finally, this tweet just made me laugh this week. If you don't get it, I can't help you.

I can finally cross this off my "to-do" list.#BetterLateThanNever pic.twitter.com/3rmfEiA3tv

— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) December 28, 2020

Why Students Should Learn To Use Tech Tools

Because some day you might be involved in a national-level effort to overthrow the results of an election, and you might have to file a legal document like this one...

I really wanted to save this somewhere so that I could pull it out as an example some day, because this is just a special kind of awesome. 

Another Round Of Teacher Bashing

Remember back in the spring (approximately ten years ago in 2020 time), when teachers were hailed as heroes for their tenacity and adaptability? Actually, if you're teacher, what you probably remember is hearing that for what often comes next. And sure enough, here we are.

The attitude bubbles up in lots of outlets, sometimes snide and subvocalized, and sometimes right up in your face. A perfect example of the in-your-faciness would be this piece from the very right-tilted Foundation for Economic Education. FEE never met a union that it liked, and the subheading of this article perfectly summarizes the unfortunately-not-unpopular idea they're selling about unions and teachers:

Their willingness to put children last and fight to keep schools closed has proven once and for all that teachers’ unions do not, in fact, have kids’ best interests at heart.

The argument is composed of just a few simple parts.

First, the assertion that it's settled science ("one of the first things we learned" says FEE) that Covid doesn't kill kids and that kids don't transmit it. But there's nothing settled about that science. Here's the CDC in August of this year:

Children are at risk for severe COVID-19. Public health authorities and clinicians should continue to track pediatric SARS-CoV-2 infections. Reinforcement of prevention efforts is essential in congregate settings that serve children, including childcare centers and schools.

As with everything else about the virus, there's a wide range of data out there. The science seems to land on something along the lines of "You can re-open school buildings, if we take proper precautions, including masking, distancing, good ventilation, and regular testing, and all of that only if community spread is largely under control." Teachers recognize this unfortunate construction from other sentences like "You can properly support all students with special needs, if Congress fully funds the IDEA that requires you to do so." Conditional "if" clauses have a tendency to vanish in education, and so all sorts of folks have shortened. "You can get back into the building if we give you the necessary support and resources" to "You can get back into the building." 

But the second part of FEE's argument (and that of many others) is that it's strictly teacher unions that are holding up the opening of buildings. Never mind that many non-union charter and private school buildings are closed, that school buildings are closed in states where unions have been effectively neutered, that school buildings are closed in other countries, and that many districts have closed buildings without even talking to their teachers or unions. Somehow, it's those damned teachers and their unions.

FEE uses New York City schools as their prime example, and I'm not diving down that hole because, in general, New York City schools and the New York City union are not examples of anything except themselves. The district is large and lots of media and policy folks live there, and so we hear a lot about them as if they represent national trends. FEE is also headed in its usual direction, which is to plug charter schools and they do so with vigor and the usual rack of charter fallacies.

They also skip one of the other usual features, which is to point out all the other professions that are also facing the pandemic, which is true enough, though one might well ask why so many people are being required to choose between their livelihoods and their health. Our whole response has been very US style; as with universal health care and gun violence, we insist that what we're doing is the best that could possibly be done while the rest of the world just goes ahead and does better. 

But I digress.

The level of bash, of demeaning insult, in this "selfish teachers close our schools" argument is huge. Because there are only a couple of possible explanations for the picture critics like FEE paint:

Teachers are stupid people who don't understand the settled science.

Teachers are stupid and also lazy people who went into teaching hoping they would have to never actually work and the pandemic shut-downs are their idea of a gift from God, and they want to stretch out this paid vacation for as long as possible.

Teachers are big fat liars who are pretending not to understand the settled science so they can milk the taxpayers while providing nothing in return.

Teachers should be martyrs who want to give up their entire lives for their students, and if they don't want to do that (or, incidentally, want to be well-paid for it), they're lousy teachers and terrible human beings.

Note that all of these include the assumption that distance learning is a big fat vacation. Also, people who chose teaching as their life's work don't actually want to teach. Also, as FEE makes explicit, teachers do not have students' interests at heart. They don't care about the kids at all (which adds to the assumption of their stupidity, because if you don't care about children, teaching seems like a pretty dumb career choice, but hey--maybe you became a teacher because you couldn't manage a real job). 

There are just so many, many layers of insult and bashing here. And trying to pass it off as "Well, we're just targeting the unions; I'm sure individual teachers are delightful" doesn't cut it. 

Of course, there is an alternative explanation for how teachers and their unions have been behaving during the pandemic.

It's possible that teachers, like other citizens, are unsure about what is true about the virus and what is not. And it is possible that in that context, teachers (like other citizens) have concerns about ending up struggling with severe illness, permanently disabled, or dead. It is possible that they've noticed things like the high transmission danger of doing things like sitting down together for an unmasked meal, spending extended periods of time in close proximity, and being cooped up together in a place with poor ventilation--all regular features of a teacher's day. It's possible that they know that pandemic distance learning is a dreadful model that requires twice the work with half the results (it's even likely that they knew this before all the kibitzers chimed in). 

And given the number of teachers in the country, it's possible that the teaching corps includes te same range of opinions as the general public--everything from "this is an overblown fake" to "I'm still bleaching all my packages." Which means that union leaders are hard-pressed to represent all of their local members.

"Schools should be fully open in person right now and the only thing keeping buildings closed are those damned selfish teaches" may be a statement that comes out of frustration, or it may just be another chance to hammer home the same old anti-union message. But it's not an accurate reflection of reality, and it's more teacher bashing, because there's no reading of this statement that isn't insulting. Worse than that, it gets in the way of a useful conversation about how to achieve what everyone--including and especially teachers and their unions--wants, which is to get the buildings open and the students back in them--safely--as soon as is safely possible.