Moral Distress and Teaching

 I've run across this new-to-me term several times in the past few months-- moral distress. It wasn't developed for the teaching profession, but lots of teachers are going to recognize what is being described here.

Andrew Jameton gets most of the credit for drawing the moral distress picture, looking at the world of nursing. This piece from the AMA Journal of Ethics lays out his ideas pretty succinctly and points the way to broadening them. Here's the basic definition:

Moral distress, according to Andrew Jameton’s highly influential definition, occurs when a nurse knows the morally correct action to take but is constrained in some way from taking this action.

This is immediately recognizable for anyone who has been in the teaching world for the past few decades. "Stop teaching all those full literary works," some of us were told, "and start drilling these short excerpts with multiple choice questions instead." Pull these kids out of their electives and put them in test prep classes instead. Stop worrying about their education and their life after school, and start worrying about their test scores instead. 

Honestly, moral distress in teaching can't be blamed solely on education reform. There have always been those moments. The time a supervisor told you that you needed to stop counting spelling for a student's work--including his spelling tests. The students you were required to pass because the front office wanted that kid out of there. I was in a meeting with a special ed supervisor once, debating the scores for a student in my class, and I lost my cool and snapped, "Look, why don't you tell me what grade you expect the student to get in my class, and I'll just fudge the numbers to get that." Without a hint of irony, she told me that would be very helpful. Beyond the special events, most teachers carry in a dark corner of their heart the catalog of times that they failed to provide a student what she needed.

So, yeah, the moral tensions of teaching have always been present. But ed reform ramped the whole business up by creating a set of goals that teachers know are wrong. Working the student over until she spits out the test score that the school administration wants from her--that's not what anybody went into teaching to do. 

This article lays out three stages of moral distress--indignation, resignation, acclimation. It strikes me that those of us who made ourselves barely-sufferable over the past many years simply never moved on beyond indignation, though I suppose a certain amount of acclimation is necessary in order to get things done.

I wrestled often, particular in the last decade or two of my career, with the stress of being required to do things that I knew were simply educational malpractice. Some, like coaching students to do the kind of writing that makes for high test scores, were not just about NOT teaching the right things, but actively teaching wrong things, things that would never be of any use to the student. For most of my career, my growth as a teacher was about pushing out against my own limits, finding ways to get one more ball in the air each year. The last few years, I felt stymied-- I was no longer getting one more ball in the air, but was trying to figure out how to lose as few balls as possible (har) because my administration was requiring me to carry an anvil at the same time.

"Well, just refuse," is common advice offered by people (specifically, people who don't teach). But it's tiring to go and fight every day, to fend off an angry dog with one hand while trying to engage positively with students with the other hand. And refusing is insubordination, which puts your job on the line. And so you keep computing the moral calculus, the complicated four arm balance between then good you can do while you're there, just how bad the requirement is, how well you can mitigate the damage, which choice will let you keep looking in the mirror. 

Right now teachers are struggling with a different moral distress as they are confronted with the demand to Get Back To Work (as if distance learning isn't work) even if the school's conditions haven't been improved one iota since this pandemess started. 

I don't know of any particular solution for moral distress beyond making choices that you can personally, morally live with. But now you've got a name for it. 

PA: Chester Upland School District On Verge of Charterization

I don't usually do this, but I've spent a ton of time working on a Forbes.com piece about a PA school district that is on the verge of making history by becoming the first district in the state to be fully charterized. It's a big complicated story, but it hits on many of the classic problems. The charter funding death spiral. The long term effects of de facto segregation; this school district shares a border with one of the wealthiest, top-rated districts in the state. 

And while we're all listening to testocrats argue that the spring test must be given because that's how states identify need and target resources--well, Chester Upland test scores have been screaming "help us" for a long time, and the state hasn't sent jack or squat in targeted resources--just a long string of disruptive, failed takeover attempts. 

So this is a story that's important and worth reading, and I'm hoping you'll click on over and take a look while it's still fresh. 

AZ: Teachers Slapped Yet Again

Arizona is one of a handful of states that owe a debt to Florida; were it not for the Sunshine State, Arizona would be a strong contender for State Most Hostile To Public Education. And now their governor is sticking it to teachers yet again.

Arizona has a long-standing problem with convincing teachers to work there; they are one of the states that was recruiting folks from the Philipines to fill teacher positions. Their teacher pay stinks, and their actual money spent on students stinks as well (in 2015, per pupil spending was at $3400). Governor Ducey turned to public education demolition experts like Paul Pastorek (obliterator in chief of New Orleans schools) and Joel Klein. 

Arizona is a great playground for charter profiteers (just gut public schools to make privatized options more attractive). They have long hemorrhaged teachers from their workforce, even as they keep electing lawmakers like the GOP House Leader who claimed that teachers were only working second jobs so they could buy boats and bigger houses. They tried and failed at merit pay for teachers. Oh, and they're one of those states that fake-dumped the Common Core.

So it should not have been a surprise in 2018 when the state's teachers put on their Red4Ed shirts and walked out in staggeringly large numbers. It had a large-but-not-large-enough-to-replace-the-governor impact. And it made some GOPpies like Kelly Townsend mad enough to try to slap a gag rule on teachers across the state (after trying to sue them). 

But Gov. Ducey was pushed to at least admit out loud what was obvious from the facts and figures--Arizona's teacher pay sucks. In fact, back in 2018 he was promising a 20% raise spread over three years. That didn't happen. That half-assed attempt at a serious raise was still better than the latest proposal.

Ducey just announced that "it's time for a raise for Arizona teachers."

His budget proposal called for a teacher raise of 2% over 5 years. 

Also, somewhere in there he threw in some threats about how the state would only pay schools for butts in seats--none of that distance learning stuff. His office tried to clarify that Ducey just meant that if students changed their enrollment to a different school (AZ is an open enrollment state), the money would follow the student, which is how things normally work there anyway, so why highlight it in the State of the State address. For educators, it sounded like a threat, and that seems like a correct read. Because everyone knows that distance teaching is like being on vacation. SMH.

But back to that raise. 0.4% raise per year? It seems kind of like a joke. Well, not a joke. A deliberate insult, like leaving a dime as your tip at the restaurant. 

Ducey also took a speechifiying swipe at Prop 208, a measure passed last November that funds teacher raises by putting a tax on income over $250,000. Ducey has indicated that high taxes make rich people sad and he would like to lower them. 

Maybe it's not fair to say that Arizona's leaders are hostile to public education, but they certainly aren't serious about supporting it or strengthening it, and they certainly do come up with lots of ways to express disrespect for the teachers who work in public education. 

Did DeVos Get A Raw Deal

In today's National Review, Rick Hess is suggesting that Betsy DeVos got a raw deal, that attacks on her "have taken a torch to the basic standards of public discourse and democratic civility." 

Hess acknowledges some of the issues surrounding her as legit ones:

During her tempestuous tenure in office, DeVos evoked strong feelings among her critics. Many disagreed vehemently with her views on school choice, religious freedom, and government regulation. They profusely criticized her talk of “factory-model government schools” and often deemed her ill-prepared for the role. Many thought she should never have agreed to serve under Trump, or else should have resigned in response to his earlier provocations. These complaints are legitimate and fair grounds for tough-minded debate.

But Hess finds attacks on DeVos go above and beyond that, and often "curiously unmoored from what she has actually done in office." Here he has a bit of a point. DeVos somehow entered popular culture pictured as a fool and a dope; I've argued before that while it may be fun to imagine DeVos as the dimmest kid in class (you may have seen the "Dere Mr. Presidne I resine" meme floating about), I don't think it's a particular fair or accurate caricature of her.

Hess also hints at another argument in DeVos's favor when he alleges that most of her critics can't actually point to awful things she's done. She messed with Title IX rules. She cut the Office of Civil Liberties off at the knees. She consistently sided with predatory for-profit colleges over defrauded students (you've probably already forgotten her plan to sic the IRS on borrowers). But many of her noteworthy actions were notable for her failure, like her repeatedly thwarted attempts to steer extra stimulus dollars to private schools, just part of the DeVos Ed Department's record-breaking 455 lawsuits. 

It did not help that she was uniformly terrible at articulating her ideas. Arne Duncan may have stunk as a secretary of education, but he could, occasionally, sound like a guy with a vision. From her terrible confirmation hearing appearance to her terrible 60 Minutes interview to her various terrible Congressional hearing appearances, DeVos showed that thirty years of practicing checkbook politics really doesn't prepare you to make your case to people who are not either already in agreement or hope to be beholden to you. She was the queen of the non-answer, which added to the myth of her dopiness. I've argued before that the real explanation is some combination of her checkbook advocacy past and her conservative Christianist faith. She was also a good soldier for Trump, and spent some time looking at the underside of the bus; the annual theatrics of an education budget that zeroed out the Special Olympics budget which she would dutifully defend until Trump stepped in to un-zero it, all of which smells very much like the standard Trumpian arsonist firefighter shtick, where he would create a problem so that he could heroically solve it. 

But let's face it. Far fewer people were interested in understanding DeVos when it was easier to just hate her.

Hess wants to argue that she was a mostly-unknown outside-the-box candidate that was held to a double standard; he suggests that Miguel Cardona is not being held accountable for Connecticut schools in the same way DeVos was blamed for Michigan and Detroit's schools. But there is no double standard there. Cardona has barely been in office a year. Hess argues that DeVos never held a position of authority in Michigan, but that's disingenuous--DeVos spent decades using her fortune to bend Michigan lawmakers to her will. Remember this classic DeVos quote on her family's political spending:

I have decided, however, to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect some things in return.

Betsy DeVos deserves plenty of blame for her failed experiments in Michigan.

Was that enough reason for folks (at least folks outside of Michigan) to take such an intense dislike to her? Probably not. But DeVos engendered plenty of ill will on her own.

She was a fine example of the outsider myth. In a soft, fuzzy exit interview with Hess, she said that because she didn't know all the things "you 'can't do'" she came in with "fresh eyes and a laser focus on rethinking the ways we approach all aspects of work at the department." It's a pretty thought, but as many folks pointed out early on, DeVos was spectacularly unqualified for the job-- had never held down a real adult job, never spent time in a public school, never run a large organization, and the ones she had run she ran via her fortune and political clout, so she'd never had to sell an idea to a boss or a peer. I say that not to argue she's a terrible person, but to point out that these, plus the general insulation of living one's entire life swaddled in wealth, meant there was no reason to think she had any of the skills needed for the job. "outsider status," is not a qualification. I don't want my brain surgery performed by someone who has "fresh eyes" because they have spent all their time outside the medical field.

DeVos never disguised her contempt for public education, for the "government schools" that she views as a "dead end," and she repeatedly struck out against the "education cabal" or even the "unholy mob." There were some attempts to at least look interested in public schools, like trading visits with Randi Weingarten, or her disastrous visit to a DC school where she criticized teachers for being in "receiver mode." But mostly she conveyed the message that there wasn't anything she didn't know about public schools that she needed to know. She called education an industry, compared it to Ubers and food trucks, and just showed in a thousand little ways that she doesn't get it. She became noted for her smug smirk, and although I've been a pretty dedicated DeVos tracker for these years, I can't turn up a moment of humility or an admission that she had anything to learn; certainly, like her boss, she's not one to say, "I made a mistake." 

Perhaps DeVos is in part the victim of really bad timing. At this point, teachers and other actual education professionals have just about had it with well-heeled well-connected amateurs swooping in to say, "I don't really know anything about how your job works, but I am still going to tell you all about the many ways you suck," and she seemed like the ultimate unvarnished personification of that attitude. So maybe she's taking the heat for a lot of other people. 

She became identified with that smug smirk (less in evidence the longer she was in office) and a quality that looks, at least to me, like the classic Christian "I am in the world, but not of it" stance, but comes across as an aloof elitism. When she claimed her resignation was an act of protest, not cowardice, maybe educators should have given her the benefit of the doubt, but why would they--she has never given them that benefit, never, in fact , suggested that she had an ounce of doubt in her belief that public education should be dismantled and replaced with religious private schools. She has been clear--the folks who work in public education are the enemy.  

All of that can, I think, explain the vitriol directed at her. I'm not going to try to argue that it justified it--that takes us down a whole other dark philosophical road. But I will make one more observation. There is an obvious power differential between cabinet-level officials of the federal government and, say, classroom teachers. DeVos was in the leadership role; the job of setting a tone for her relationship with the education world was with her. She could have made critics, like me, eat our words by working hard to understand the landscape, learning about public schools, offering support, even just using language that built bridges. She could have displayed grace and humility. Instead she used the bully pulpit to punch down. Civility requires more than thinly veiled insults issued through clenched teeth. 

Yes, given her disdain for everything that she was set in charge of, DeVos did remarkably little real damage during her tenure; her ineffectiveness mitigated her worse instincts. And yes, Trump could have put Ivanka or Eric or his favorite pretzel vendor in charge of the department so maybe we didn't live through the worst possible scenario. But Betsy DeVos came to DC to break things with a smile on her face and self-righteousness in her heart, and if those things decided to push back against being broken, well, that seems only right and well-earned.

Donors Choose Monday: Ukuleles

 Okay, this has turned out to be more sporadic than I originally planned. Bt I'm still committed to making regular attempts to supporting public school teachers in small ways (beyond just yapping about policy issues). Yes, Donors Choose sometimes includes requests for funding that absolutely should be coming from the local district, and no, I don't have any way of checking to see if the teacher is an admirable professional and not a putz. That's all right-- I'm still going to keep doing it, and encouraging you to join me. 

Teachers should have support and assistance, and Donors Choose remains a not-bad way to do that. So.

This week I've picked a school in the Waynesboro, VA system. Wenonah Elementary is a Title I school and Ms. Gilmer is a first year music teacher who is trying to round up a set of ukuleles. I am a sucker for ukes, though I can't play myself, and for programs that give students a chance to become musicians, a skill that can enrich the entire rest of their lives. Don't care if it raises test scores, and I don't care if it's not on employers' list of in-demand skills. Being able to make music is a life-altering existence-improving activity, and ukes are a great tool for elementary kids.

So you can go to this page and chip in. Doesn't have to be a lot, but it's an easy way to support a new teacher and her students.

ICYMI: Well Aren't We Off To A Grand Start Edition (1/10)

Well, that was a week, wasn't it. What a hellacious shitshow (sorry, Mom). But despite the the dumpster fire burning brighter than ever, we still have things to read, because while governments may rise and fall and grind to a halt and play stupid games with stupid insurrectionists, you know what still keeps on keepin' on? The post office and public schools.

Republican Cowards Betsy DeVos and Ted Cruz  

Yes, there's tons to read about Betsy DeVos on her way out, and you've probably read all of it, but you might have missed this take from the politics editor at TeenVogue, the surprise source of solid political commentary these past four years. No punches pulled.

Betsy DeVos's Greatest Hits

Okay, just one more. Valerie Strauss at Washington Post has a nice synopsis of DeVosian specialtude over the past four years. 

Will pandemic impact further reduce teacher pipeline?

Maureen Dowd in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, saying nothing that will surprise you, but with details and reporting to make it a little more real.

You literally just did history

Chalkbeat talks to Colorado's teacher of the year about teaching in times that get extra interesting.

Stupid and Clumsy from Grief  

Lisa Eddy blogs about her week. It's personal and moving and a fine piece of writing.

Voucher Vultures Face FBI Raid  

While other things have been happening, the FBI raided some members of the TN House GOP over a plot to pass Gov. Lee's voucher scheme in 2019. Andy Spears has the story.

Do schools spread Covid

For a change of pace, try this reasonably balanced look at what we know, courtesy of Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat.

Reform PA cyber charter authorization and funding

Eric Wolfgang with an op-ed in the Courier Times, repeating what we all know-- PA's cyber-school rules need to be overhauled with a flamethrower.

Reforming Educational Authority

Andy Smarick is a reformster, but he's also a classic conservative and as such brings some interesting ideas to the table. You'll disagree with parts of this, and it's not a short easy read, but it's a useful perspective on what has happened to the way we run school systems.

Unlearn Chait's False Opinion About Charters

Jonathan Chait once again was given space to unleash his opinion about charter schools (without any accompanying caveat that his wife is a charterista). D. Julian Vasquez Heilig pointed out the many problems with Chait's piece, using the clever weapon of actual facts.

ExamSoft's proctoring software has a face-detection problem  

Yet more crappy student surveillance software in action. The Verge has the story. Three guesses what sort of faces the software has trouble with.

The Ridiculousness of Learning Loss

John Ewing at Forbes with a fully-exasperated explanation of why the learning loss panic is bunk.

Kafka Narrates My Online Teaching Experience

From the New Yorker. You can use a laugh this week.

Watch Out: K12 Has Changed Its Name

Back in November, when most of us were pre-occupied with a few other things, K12, Inc, the giant cyber-school company, went and gave itself a new name-- Stride, Inc. The rebranding came with some new acquisitions, but underneath it all, K12 is its same old self.

K12 is a big fat for-profit cyber-edu-biz operation-- in fact, the biggest and fattest. They were founded by Goldman-Sachs banker and McKinsey alum Ronald Packer with financial backing from junk bond king Michael Milken, who Wikipedia calls "convicted felon, financier and philanthropist (and, fun fact, he was pardoned by Donald Trump in February of 2020). Andrew Tische (Loews) and Larry Elison (Oracle) also tossed some venture capital in the kitty. Oh, and Dick DeVos, too. K12 was launched in 2000, with William Bennett as the public-facing face of the company. Packer is still the CEO of the company.

You'll note that  none of the top names in the company have actual education expertise, but that's okay, because K12 is a for-profit company that sells an education-flavored product, not an actual school.

Over the years, K12 has been caught in all manner of naughty behavior. Here's a fairly brutal shot they took from the New York Times way back in December of 2011 detailing how K12's schools are failing miserably, but still making investors and officers a ton of money. Former teachers routinely write tell-alls about their experience, like this more recent guest piece on Anthony Cody's blog. In 2012. Florida caught them using fake teachers. The NCAA put K12 schools on the list of cybers that were disqualified from sports eligibility. In 2014, Packard turned out to be one of the highest paid public workers in the country (as in, people paid with tax dollars) in the country, "despite the fact that only 28% of K12 schools met state standards in 2011-2012."

That low level of achievement is the norm-- so much the norm that even the bricks and mortar sector of the charter world pointed out that cyber-schools are deeply terrible. In Pennsylvania, K12 (like all our other cybers) has never earned a satisfactory rating. But what cybers do have going for them is the huge amount of charter lobbying money being spent in Harrisburg. In fact, K12 and Connections have spent more money on Harrisburg than on any other state in the union. That might fit in with the same discussion involving PA being the most cyber-friendly state in the union.

The election of Trump in 2016 fed some investor exuberance in the cyber sector, with K12 showing fairly spectacular growth. By which I mean stock value growth--their actual attempts to educate students and behave ethically were as bad as ever. Earlier that same year they got in yet another round of trouble in California for lying about student enrollment, and during the Trump years they still had trouble keeping all of their schools open. And they even had one school staff unionize. In 2017, they made Kevin Chavous President of Academics, Policy and Schools; Chavous a former politician, helped launch DFER, served on the board of Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children, and helped Bobby Jindahl whip up a voucher plan for New Orleans.

The pandemic has obviously been a help to K12, but still--well, they landed a big lucrative contract in Miami-Dade county (after a big lucrative contribution to an organization run by the superintendent) and made such a technomess out of it that Wired magazine wrote a story about their "epic series of tech errors."

So why rebrand now?

The company PR says that Stride, Inc, reflects its "continued growth into lifelong learning" regardless of students' ages or locations. The company has already acquired Tech Elevator, a coding bootcamp provider, and MedCerts, which does certification training for healthcare and medical fields. Meanwhile, the K12 portion of the business had been renamed Fuel Education, and is now K12 Learning Solutions. The whole shuffling was done, according to a spokesperson, "to further simplify the brand structure and to better align with the company's core K-12 offerings." Totally nothing to do with criticism of the brand by, well, everyone. 

And they are still bearing down hard on their primary product, and by "primary product" I mean "marketing." Here's the Valdosta Daily Times running, unchecked, a piece about an EdChoice (you know--the choice-promoting advocacy group that used to be the Friedman Foundation, as in Milton Friedman) survey discovering that 70% of parents think online learning is awesome (news to the hoards of folks demanding that school buildings reopen) and going on to cite the awesomeness of Stride products specifically. Here's an actual paragraph from an alleged news story:

“What the coronavirus pandemic has laid bare is our nation’s dire need for more effective online learning options,” said Jeanna Pignatiello, Stride’s Senior Vice President and Chief Academic Officer. “Thousands of students, families, teachers, and school districts across the country have turned to Stride K12-powered schools to find high-quality, personalized learning solutions that meet their needs during this unprecedented time. And the evidence is clear—these are programs that work.”

Meanwhile, the new Stride website promises "Inspired learners. Empowered educators. Prospering partners." Want to place bets on which one of the three they will actually deliver?

So if you hear about Stride, Inc, in your neighborhood, be aware that it is the same old K12 wolf in a swiftly stitched-together set of sheep suits, with far less interest in actually educating students than in grabbing some of those sweet, sweet tax dollars.