Teachers and the Toll of Disinterest

The closest I ever came to leaving public education was almost twenty years ago, when I was the president of our local union, and we were on strike.

It was a challenging time. The contract negotiations started with stripping (a technique where the district proposes to gut the contract so that they can pretend to make concessions later by agreeing to only partly gut the contract, which of course involves them giving up nothing). The lead negotiator said publicly, "We have the money. We just don't want to give it to them." And my phone never stopped ringing.

This is a small town, and while I'm not exactly a public figure, I'm pretty easy to find. And so people called to offer their thoughts on the contract negotiations and the strike.

The worst were not the raging teacher-haters. It was the other folks, some of whom I knew personally, who wanted to explain calmly and rationally why teachers had no right to expect things like good pay and decent benefits, how they should simply accept what the board offered and be happy they were so much better paid than fry cooks and convenience store clerks. 

I had to stare into the abyss of--well, I can't even call it disrespect--disinterest. It's always a little background buzz that you learn to ignore, that buzz of all the people who really don't much care about public education and think that teachers are a glorified over-paid bunch of women who should just hush up and do as they're told. As I said, usually a background dark hum, and certainly not what everyone is thinking. But for a few months, I had to look straight at it, including all the people who "really respect the work that teachers do, but..." By the time the contract was settled and things were mostly back to kind of normal, I was looking at alternative paths for someone who wanted to teach.

I can hear that buzz gain now, in the increasingly hostile noise about re-opening schools and those damned teachers' unions and dammit teachers, just get the hell back to work. 

You can't find a better example of the increasingly common genre than yesterday's Washington Post, in which Matt Bai observed that teachers are servants and they should start acting like it. Yeah, he said "public servants," but do you think that really makes it any better. "You guys are servants, but, you know, the noble kind."

Bai continues to point out, "Hey, all our other servants are back to work, so what's your problem." Also, I hear that the 'rona doesn't really bother schools. And those poor black kids need you-- doesn't that trigger your noble serving impulses?

Somehow, things like the decidedly non-union charter schools that are also operating at distance doesn't come up (though those schools are often described as "operating at remote" or some such terminology, while public schools are described as "closed," as if nothing is going on. And the business of well-to-do white folks using Black children as leverage has been addressed well elsewhere, but please note that when schools open, lots of folks stay home--it's almost as if some parts of the populations don't trust assurances that everything is safe and under control. And where private schools are open, you might want to look at the money being spent and care being taken to insure they open safely.

I'm in a small town/rural corner of the world, and this is how things are going. Two local districts are 100% open buildings right now. This has less to do with any improvement with local pandemic figures and more with a desire to start a new nine weeks face to face. For ventilation, well, one district suggests that windows on buses and in classrooms be cracked open. At another local school, a student who gets tested for Covid might trigger anything from a stay-home-till-we-see order for classmates to nothing at all--not even a notification to the teacher that her class may have a case. A local superintendent was in today's paper touting "improved morale," though some of his actual teachers report that a peppy speech did not really alter their mood. Meanwhile, vaccinations are few, far between, and random in their dispersal. 

We have known now for a year that it would take an extraordinary investment to re-open school buildings safely. We didn't do it, and it's hard to attribute that to anything other than indifference and disinterest and the oldest education motto in the world ("We could do the right thing, but it would hard"). 

So as was the case after Sandy Hook and Parkland, teachers have to contemplate that part of the population (including, it should be said, some of their professional peers) that says, "Yeah, some of you may have to die, and we'd rather you stopped whining about it and just got back to work." It's not just the possibility of death or illness that takes its toll; it's the realization that this is how some people see you--a servant who just doesn't deserve all that much concern. 

Look, these are hard times with a surfeit of really noisy data and no attractive choices. But if teachers appear to be a bit shell-shocked by some expressions of disinterest in their lives and work, know that a snappy pep talk is not going to fix it. 

ICYMI: Bernie Meme Week Edition (1/24)

I'm not a huge fan of pomp, but I do love a good meme explosion, and I'm fond of getting government out of the hands of people who actively, purposefully try to make it fail, so all in all, not a bad week.

Before the list, let me give you your semi-regular reminder that sharing stuff is powerful. It makes bloggers think, "Hey, I'm actually reaching people" and it makes news organizations think, "Hey, we should do more coverage like this." So if something here speaks to you, pass it on!

How education embedded inequity 

In IAI News, Cristina Groeger looks at the much-beloved notion that more education will fix our equity and poverty problems and determines that, no, actually it does the opposite. \

Betsy DeVos and the Politics of Fear

One of the best DeVos post-mortem out there. At Salon, from friend-of-the-institute and historian Adam Laats.

Biden Ed Department Looks To Ditch College Accreditor

Yeah, the one with the big rubber stamp that accredited, among other scams, a "university" with no faculty or students. We could probably go ahead and shut those guys down.

To Sleep, Perchance to Sue...

Blue Cereal Education takes us back to the not-so-long-ago court case that tested the notion that a religious school can hire and fire teachers at will, even for reasons that would be illegal for any other organization. 

William Franz Public School--A Must-Read for Those Who Think They Know New Orleans  

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider looks at a book that chronicles an important chapter of New Orleans education (and it might look familiar to a few other locales as well).

Gov. Bill Lee to Sacrifice Third Graders to Help Him in 2024  

Tennessee is excited about joining the states that use third graders as fodder for firing up test numbers to create the illusion of success. Schools Matter looks at the story, and you can find more from Andy Spears at Tennessee Education Report.

Yes, some charter schools do cherry pick their students. It's not a myth.

At The Answer Sheet, Kevin Welner pops in to lay out what the research shows about cherry-picking of students by charters. Spoiler alert: they do.

Joe Biden has a golden opportunity to strengthen public education.

Jeff Bryant at Alternet with an optimistic take on what the Biden administration could do next.

America's education story in a pandemic anecdote 

John Warner at Inside Higher Ed, pointing out some parallels between the handling of the pandemic and the treatment of public ed.

Schools Are Not Props for a Hollywood Production  

Francine Matthews-Flores is a mother of a son in the LAUSD system, and she has seen some ugly stuff pulled to promote charter schools. Waring--if you are a Kristen Bell fan, this story will make you sad.

GPT-3 is the world's most powerful bigotry generator 

Oh, look. The AI program that does such magical work with fake language use also turns out to generate a lot of bigotry. 

Should charter school board members follow state ethics rules?

Kate Royals writes in Mississippi Today on a question that you might have thought had obvious answers. But no-- in Mississippi, there are charter operators and advocates arguing that ethics rules shouldn't apply to charter boards. Because reasons.

High Stakes Testing Town Hall--Sign Up

Is there a debate about this spring's Big Standardized Test, exactly? On one side, you have pretty much everyone who has actual direct knowledge of education and teaching pointing out the many reasons that going ahead with 2021's spring edition of the BS Test is a waste of time and money (I've been offering my two cents on the subject here and here and here and here and here, for example). On the other side, you have various newspaper editorial boards, leaning heavily on "research" by testing companies that stand to lose money if the test boom finally collapses.

But with the new administration, everyone seems to sense a window of opportunity, with secretary-designate Miguel Cardona being seen as someone who does not have strong inclinations one way or the other. So now is a good time to make some noise and spread the word-- this year is not the year to trot out the BS Test again.

Next Tuesday, the folks Bob Schaeffer and the folks at Fair Test are holding a national on-line town hall. The National Town Hall on Suspending High-Stakes Testing in Spring 2021will be 
held January 26 at 6:00 EST, and it features a powerhouse line-up of education speakers:

U.S. Representative Jamaal Bowman, New York -- House Education Committee
Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig, Dean, University of Kentucky College of Education
Dr. Lorrie Sheppard, Distinguished Professor of Education, University of Colorado
Dr. Jack Schneider, Asst. Professor, Leadership in Education, University of Massachusetts
Dr. Lisa Escarcega, Colorado State Board of Education
Roberto Jiménez, School Committee Member, Chelsea, Massachusetts

MCs will be Bob Schaeffer, Executive director of FairTest, and Ilana Spiegel, University of Colorado Board of Regents.

There are so many reasons not to give the tests this spring, but probably the biggest is that there is no good reason TO give the tests, and with districts already strapped for time and/or money, so many more important, more useful, and more educational things that teachers could be doing. 

You can register for the town hall here. Doesn't cost a cent, and if you miss it, the meeting will be recorded and put up on Facebook. Make some noise. Of all the actions that the new Department of Education could take, nothing would be simpler to implement or more far-reaching in its positive effect. Let's get this right.

FL: Voucher and Privatization Endgame in Sight

Florida's legislature is at it again, joining in a national trend of using the pandemic crisis to fuel school voucher initiatives. 

Manny Diaz, Jr., (R-Hialeah) has spent his career chip chip chipping away at public education in Florida, and yesterday he returned with another bold idea. 

Florida has allowed choice programs to grow like an unweeded garden, but Diaz's new bill proposes to collapse five "scholarship" (aka "voucher") programs into just two Education Savings Account (ESA) programs. So Family Empowerment, Hope, Florida Tax Credit Scholarship--all under one roof now, along with the newly condensed Gardinier-McKay programs for students with special needs.

We'll look at the bill more closely in a minute, but let's pause first to admire the cynicism behind this proposal to further gut Florida's public school system. Here's Diaz making his pitch for why he heard the call to propose this bill:

During the past year, our scholarship families let us know that they wanted programs that were easier to understand and simpler to navigate. They also told us that they wanted more flexibility so they could give their children access to high quality education while continuing to keep them safe during the pandemic. This bill represents our effort to respond to those concerns and improve all our school choice programs by making them more family friendly. I am very proud to have my name attached to this bill

Senate President Wilton Simpson also noted that the state's system of programs is "pretty confusing," and you might think this has to do with the way that Florida GOPpies have rolled them out piecemeal, using various student groups, like the poor or those with special needs, has contributed to the patchwork nature. You might look at the Hope Scholarship, a program that was nominally set up to rescue bullied students but turns out to be more about Rep. Byron Donalds' desire to "leave his mark" than actually help bullied kids, which it turns out it isn't actually doing particularly well. 

But no--Simpson has another theory about why the system of vouchers that has been implemented by the legislature is a slapdash mess: “This patchwork system is largely the result of years of legal challenges from school choice opponents who have attempted to thwart every effort to actually give parents a say in how their children are educated.” Really? Because mostly lawsuits about Florida's voucher systems have run into a buzzsaw of voucher-backing money and well-financed opposition, as well as unfriendly courts. Now, if Simpson wanted to sat that the patchwork system is the result of Florida carefully dipping its toe in the school voucher water a little bit at a time so as to avoid getting called out on violating the state constitution, I'd say that was a more accurate take, but of course it wouldn't allow Simpson to blame somebody else.

So here comes SB 48, designed to expand the eligibility for programs, combine them, and put them under ESAs and folding in Tax Credit Scholarships. There are a few other wrinkles as well.

It also reduces oversight by the state--previously the outfits overseeing the tax credit scholarships had to be audited annually, to make sure they were spending public tax dollars appropriately; now they would be audited only every three years. That's important, because an ESA is like a debit card given to parents, and history tells us that without some oversight, the tax dollars carried by that debit card can end up spent on....well, in Arizona they discovered about $700,000 in ESA money on beauty supplies, clothing, and even attempts to just grab the cash.

Publicity touts "adding flexible spending options" as well. The vouchers can be used for the following: instructional materials (including digital devices); curriculum; tuition for full or part-time for everything from postsecondary courses to a "home education program" to private school to virtual school; fees for tests (SAT, AP, industry certification); Florida's prepaid college savings programs; contracted services, including classes from public school; part-time tutoring services (from someone who has certification or has just ":demonstrated mastery of subject area knowledge"); summer school or after-school ed fees; transportation (under $750). So, a whole lot of things other than just a voucher to go to school somewhere.

This fits with another piece of the proposal (which is really an amending of existing law); the consistent strike-through of "eligible nonprofit scholarship funding organizations" and replacing it with "K-12 education funding." This gets us back to tax credit scholarships, a type of voucher most recently pushed by Betsy DeVos. In the classic TCS, a wealthy donor gives some money to fund vouchers. That money is counted against their tax bill (in Florida's case, 100%), so give $10K to the voucher program, pay $10K less in taxes (and the state gets $10K less in revenue). So far, tax credit programs have involved a middleman to complete the process of laundering the money. Pat McGotbux gives $10K to, in Florida's case, Step Up for Students, who in turn award the voucher to parents (or, in some cases, to a school on behalf of parents). That extra laundering step has protected states from any charges of violating the separation of church and state, of giving tax dollars to a church-run school. But thanks to Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue and a host of "religious freedom"-friendly judges installed by That Last Guy, states are no longer quite so worried about that whole church state wall thing. However, the proposed law still allows for a robust, profitable business in the scholarship funds management biz (there's a whole section on how to qualify).

This also dovetails nicely with the "flexibility" touted above; the dream for ESAs for many ed privatizers and profiteers is the "unbundling" of education. Why go to the trouble and expense to put a whole "school" on the market when you can target more tightly--get in the math class biz, or the art class biz, or the ELA biz. Instead of sending a child to school, parents can assemble a variety of educational "resources" and just put it all on the ESA card. Where the law used to say "A parent who applies for a Family Empowerment Scholarship is exercising his or her parental option to place his or her child in a private school," it now says "...exercising his or her parental option to determine the appropriate placement or the services that best meets [sic] the needs of his or her child." (l. 2316-2321)

So it makes a dark sense that the bill wants to swap out "give the money to some specific entity created to manage these funds" to "just give the money to something we'll vaguely call K-12 education." 

This also makes another significant swap-out. For "we promise to provide a free and appropriate education for your child" it substitutes "we promise to give you a credit card with some funds on it and thereby wash our hands of you--good luck in that free market, parents." The law includes a requirement that the state department of education "shall develop guidelines for a parent guide to successful student achievement which describes what parents need to know about their child’s educational progress and how they can help their child to succeed in school." So, here's an ESA credit card and a handy guide pamphlet--good luck, parents. Meanwhile, the market floods with fraudsters, profiteers, well-meaning incompetents, and high-gloss edu-businesses that you can't afford with the funds on your ESA. 

There are other bits and pieces--lawyers will have a dig through this if it becomes a law. But some other tidbits. Students who receive free or reduced price lunches can get funding to attend a school other than the one they're assigned to by residence. More follow-up on reported bullying incidents. Operators of scholarship-funding organizations have to pass background checks. At one point it talks about some rules that apply "if the scholarship-funding organization provided the majority of the scholarship funding to the school," anticipating, I guess, some close, chummy relationships between those two parts of the edu-biz-ecosystem. And just in case you thought I was exaggerating, there's a paragraph about how the scholarship funding organization may distribute the funding, including debit cards and electronic payment cards. You can only contribute to tax credit scholarships up to 50% of your total tax bill.

All of the usual folks like this bill. Americans for Prosperity (the Koch-funded group that helped turbo-charge the Tea Party) says that "the public health crisis reminds us that a crisis should never be wasted when it can help provide cover for our policy goals." Ha, no! Just kidding. Skylar Zander of AFP said that the health crisis reminds us that one-size-fits-all system does not meet the needs of every child, which I guarantee you will not be what he says when the subject of forcing every child to take Florida's odious Big Standardized Test, or their foolish third grade retention law, comes up. And, of course, Jeb Bush, the mac daddy of Floridian public school disruption, tweeted about how much he likes it. 

Somehow the Democratic vice-chair of the Senate Education Committee only heard about this via an aid on Tuesday, two days before the bill debuted. 

"This is a huge, huge problem that they’re about to do this in a COVID year, with all the budget constraints,” Jones, who is vice chairman of the Senate Education Committee, said during Tuesday’s Democratic caucus meeting. “We’re going to have to fight like hell on this one." I am not sure what it looks like when a Floridian Democrat fights like hell. Florida's teachers did a little better:

“What the world has learned during this pandemic is the importance of public schools to a functioning society, but one of the first bills out the gate this year in Florida undercuts public education. Parents want lawmakers to invest in and support public schools. This bill does the opposite, and would drain away more resources from the schools that educate the great majority of our state’s children,” FEA president Andrew Spar said in a prepared statement.

But, in an editorial choice emblematic of Florida, the FEA quote is the last paragraph in the news service release about the bill, and was cut off of many repeats of the story.

This, for many choice fans, is getting close to the end game. The dream-- rich people pay fewer taxes and only support the schools they want to support. Wealthy people still have access to all the choices they want, while everyone else gets to pick through a free market morass in search of do-it-yourself education for their children. Education becomes mostly privatized edu-business, and the public schools remains in some markets to do their underfunded best with the "customers" that nobody wants. But hey. Lower taxes. Less paying for the education of Those People. Put Jesus back in charge of more education, even if that means the education is not very good, aggressively exclusionary, or even abusive.

We'll see what happens. Pay attention. Because Florida remains on the cutting edge of disrupting public education into oblivion, the model which other states that hope to be the very worst still aspire to follow.

Meet Your Dead Teacher

 Well, this was going to happen sooner or later

HI EXCUSE ME, I just found out the the prof for this online course I’m taking *died in 2019* and he’s technically still giving classes since he’s *literally my prof for this course* and I’m learning from lectures recorded before his passing

..........it’s a great class but WHAT

— Aaron Ansuini 🪴🌱✨ (@AaronLinguini) January 20, 2021

I used to tell my students that I would teach until I died, and then have my body stuffed and mounted with animatronics while old tapes of my teaching played. Turns out that I didn't do that, but it was still a thing someone could do.

If you think teaching is the act of pouring Knowledge Stuff from one container into another, I guess this makes sense. And I can imagine the administration salivating over the prospect of a "teacher" who requires no pay, no benefits, and no lengthy hiring process to acquire.

The weirdness that the poster talks about is, I think, a residue of the natural inclination we have to think of ourselves as in a relationship with our teachers. Hell, forty-some years later I still have a warm spot in my heart for Julius Sumner Miller and his videos of physics demonstrations which, though we were clearly watching a recording, seemed live and real and for us in 1974. So finding out that a person you think has been, in some way, sort of, really talking to you--well, they're actually dead. That's a little disconcerting, like taking a step backward and having your foot meet air rather than floor.

Practically speaking, why not. Is Khan Academy going to take down videos of "teachers" who die? Of course not.

But it's a reminder of what's wrong with this kind of "education," a kind of teaching that involves no relationship, like a performer stepping out on stage in front of nobody. No connection. No seeing who the students are, how they're reacting, what they feel, how well the lesson is landing.

There are reformsters who seem to believe, or at least want others to believe, that this kind of one-way lecture-only type of education is typical. It isn't, and hasn't been for decades. Because education runs on relationships. Except that that's expensive, so why not cram a few hundred students in a hall or have some mook deliver a canned lesson or just have them watch some videos, even videos recorded by someone who's now dead.

The weirdness of how this feels tells us a lot about education. After all, we watch movies and listen to music from dead people all the time. Some of us become obsessed involved fans, trying to dredge up every piece of information we can to feel closer or more connected to the dead performer. Others of us just watch or listen, relating only to the art and not the human behind it. Or we identify with the audience that was there for the work (hence the pervasive love of live audience recordings).

But in education we expect more than that. As students, we expect to be seen, and we build some sort of relationship with the teacher in front of us, a unique semi-professional one (yet personal enough that as students it can still rock the foundations of the universe when we discover a teacher wearing jeans or shopping for groceries).

As far as I know, nobody is trying to capture dead K-12 teachers yet, but much of the curriculum that teachers are required to write and align and record in painstaking detail in digital formats really is, literally, about reassuring staff-strapped administrators that if Mrs. McTeachalot dropped dead tonight, somebody could come in and do her job just like her tomorrow. And of course a great deal of robo-grading and robo-teaching is based on the notion that we can swap out live tissue for dead circuitry (and so far, it mostly sucks).

I've known teachers, now passed, who taught brilliant lessons, but I don't know how they could ever have been captured. The lessons, year to year, were tweaked in the planning to match the students of that year, and tweaked in the moment to match the immediate reaction. Captured in digital amber, they simply wouldn't be the same. 

And so it becomes radical to assert that teaching is a job best left to the living. 21st Century education, indeed.

Maintaining Classroom Discipline (1947)

God bless the internet. Here's a little 13 minute instructional film from 1947 for teachers about how to maintain discipline in a classroom. Watching it, you notice some things that are clearly from another place and time, as well as casual sexism and an all-white batch of students. 

But after you get past the old-timey yuks, it's notable that some of the message still holds up. In particular, the notion that respect is a better classroom glue than fear, and that treating students like low-life scum doesn't work nearly as well as treating them like actual human beings. The relevance of that lesson is, sadly, driven home by the comments section, which mostly focuses on how the movie students are so much better than Kids These Days. 

I would hope that if there's anything different in the country today, it's that it is once again okay to be kind, and that the solution to problems is not to simply overpower those who oppose you.

It is one of the basic lessons of human interaction that one can find playing out in a classroom--trying to wield your authority like a club creates more problems than it solves, and open contempt for the people you work with is a terrible approach for virtually anything at all, from running a classroom to leading a country. Today seems like a fine day to draw a breath, roll some tightness out of your shoulders, and embrace your kinder nature.

Oh, That Poem

I am not a huge fan of pomp; I recognize the need to mark occasions, especially occasions of great change. There's really only one thing I want to carry away from today, and I'm embedding it here so that I can always find it. Amanda Gorman's presentation of her own poem was simply perfect. 

 

 "There's always light, if only we're brave enough to see it, if only we're brave enough to be it."

 Yeah, I'll take that.

Here's one good profile of the youngest poet to ever speak at an inauguration. There will be plenty, I'm sure. There will also be plenty of folks telling you what she said, but it's the 21st century, and if there was ever a moment that you should simply see and feel and absorb for yourself, this is it.