The Single Biggest Scourge of Education Reform

Privatization? Profiteering? Vouchers? Charters? Teacher-proof classrooms? High-stakes testing? 

No, these issues, in their worst forms, all have their roots in the same soil, the same fertile ground from which all rotten education fruit grows.

Amateurs.

The current flap flying under the banner of critical race theory panic is just the freshest example of people who really, truly don't understand how schools actually work. Take this really ignorant tweet from CRT-panicker-in-chief Christopher Rufo

Every statement there reveals a huge lack of understanding about how schools work (though I particular like the idea that voters via state legislators set curriculum). That is not how this works. That is not how any of this works.

The problem of amateurs futzing around in education is not new. Everybody went to school, so everybody thinks they're an expert. That leads to a common edu-amateur phenomenon-- setting out to fix something that was true in schools 20-40 years ago, the reform equivalent of announcing that you've worked out a patch to help Windows 98 work better. 

And we have school boards, a system by which local amateurs are put in charge of local school districts. While this can often cause teachers some frustration, it's still a good system. It provides accountability to the taxpayers and requires educators to remember that they have to communicate with civilians. And the board hires actual educators (usually) to run things for them; when a board tries to micromanage a district, it never ends well.

The modern education reform movement has been powered primarily by people whose biggest problem is that when it comes to school, they don't know what they're talking about. Bill Gates is arguably a pretty smart guy and certainly a savvy, cutthroat businessman, but he has demonstrated at great length how little he understands about how actual schools work. Many of these edu-amateurs, like David "Common Core" Coleman, wear their lack of expertise like a badge of honor, particularly back in the early days of modern ed reform when part of the theory of action was that teachers have failed and therefor their expertise is invalid and should be ignored.

Teach for America pushed not just the idea that any person (from the right college) could become a teacher, but that any such person could become an education expert. They've sent thousands of amateurs out in the world to lead school districts, consulting forms, entrepreneurial endeavors, even state departments of education--all based on two years in the classroom (two years that they knew would come to an end, thereby freeing them form the need to really come to grips with their rookie teacher issues). 

We also see lots of people whose expertise is the ins and outs of bureaucratic policy discussions who think that their experience gives them understanding of how a classroom actually functions. It doesn't.

There are people in the education reform world who have actual knowledge of schools and classrooms. You can spot them because while you may disagree with them on matters of policy or philosophy, they don't insist on saying ignorant things (like the legislature controls curriculum). Also, it's possible to understand how schools and classrooms work if you make the effort to learn and talk to people who know.

Some modern ed reform isn't really about education anyway. Voucher advocates, for example, mostly advocate for freedom (either the freedom for parents to choose or the freedom for private operators to profit from public tax dollars, depending on where you stand). 

But if you think competition in the free marketplace, either between schools (for funding) or teachers (for merit pay) is going to improve education, you don't understand how schools work. Hint: there are no teachers out there saying, "I know how to do better, but I'm going to hold onto that secret till someone offers me a bonus."

If you think high stakes testing is a good measure of education, you've never looked at an actual test, and you've never spent time in a classroom with students taking that test. If you think those tests are necessary in order for teachers to know how students are doing, you don't understand how a classroom works or how testing works.

If you think the individual issues of teachers can be "fixed" by giving teachers a script or a strict set of standards-based teacher-proof materials, you don't understand how a classroom works. 

If you're deeply opposed to unions (and by extension the teachers in them) because you imagine they have these awesome powers and are up to all manner of deep, nefarious schemes, you don't understand who teachers are, what unions do, and how widely varied the teaching force is.

And if you think teachers can indoctrinate young minds to believe whatever you either do or don't want them to believe, then you don't understand how a classroom works. 

There isn't a single failed initiative of the ed reform movement whose failure was not met by thousands of teachers rolling their eyes and thinking (or saying), "This is not a surprise." Sometimes reformsters will announce that they've figured something out (like Chris Barbic, discovering that Tennessee's Achievement School District plan was not going to work), and every teacher who already knew that thing will just bite their tongue (well, most will bite their tongue--some of us blog because our tongues are already tired). So much could fail could have been avoided if someone had just asked teachers, or even just asked the person pushing the idea, "How do you know this will work?"

I'm not saying that teachers are the be-all and end-all of educational information, or that there is nothing that teachers can learn from civilians. That would be problematic; we don't need to live in a world in which only teachers can determine or speak about education. But right now we are a million parsecs away from that world, the pendulum having swung too far into a place in which wealthy, well-connected amateurs hold forth on the theory that their ignorance is as valuable and valid as teacher expertise. 

Sure, if you're a cynic, you'll argue that this is beside the point, that many reformsters don't care about the question of expertise because their true concern$ are el$ewhere. But it remains true that behind all the bad policy ideas, bad practices, bad standards, bad mandates, bad culture war arguments is that one unifying thread--people whose understanding of how schools actually work is hugely, vastly, epically divorced from how real schools in the real world actually really work. 

Is Teaching About Control?

I knew I was going to hate this piece as soon as I read the first sentence.

In their training, teachers are taught to control the classroom.

This piece appeared on NBCThink, a kind generally guest op-ed page the website runs. It was written by Peshe Kuriloff,  who is a retired professor of education who is now a self-employed consultant. She's got a BA and an M.Ed from Harvard and a PhD from Bryn Mawr. And somebody at NBC (probably) gave this crazy-pants piece the title "A Covid school lesson: Teachers don't have the power they think they do."

I was educated a billion years ago, and I've had numerous student teachers in my classroom throughout my career, and I have no idea what the heck she's talking about. I have never encountered an education professor who asserted that total control of the classroom (which is an odd turn of phrase because, after all, controlling a room is easy enough but then there are all these students in it) is the goal or, as she says, the measure of teacher success. Who teaches that? Did she teach that to her future teachers? (Survey says no)

In reality, however, the idea that teachers hold power over students and can bend them to their will is a misunderstanding of the nature of power in schools, as well as teaching and learning.

Who has that idea? Yes, the anti-indoctrination crowd thinks teachers can bend minds to their will, but that's just one more sign that they don't know what the heck they're talking about. 

There were certainly total control teachers aplenty back many decades ago. But now is not then. I've written about schools that throw weight into asserting their authority, but that pretty much never works. Sure, there are pre-teachers who vastly over-estimate their power as a teacher. If they're at all smart, it takes them about a week to figure out that's not happening. And there are certainly control freaks who make it into the classroom, but they burn out rapidly.

There are some good points in Kuriloff's piece:

The testimony of teachers who have been asked about pandemic learning demonstrates that surviving remote education required unprecedented collaboration, solid relationships between teachers and learners and students stepping up as problem-solvers. Teachers primed to seek those outcomes felt much more successful than those who relied on traditional assumptions about power and control.

Certainly. That's true in every non-pandemic year as well.

But virtually every student teacher I ever had had to learn how to exercise authority. For so many teachers, the first years are marked by a painful awareness that you are just playing teacher in front of young humans who could realize at any moment that you don't have any power over them except for the power they grant you. Classroom imposter syndrome is the worst. My first teaching job involved students who were one year younger than I, and I was never not aware that if they all decided to stand up and walk out, there wasn't a thing I could do about it. Raise your hand if you have that teacher nightmare where your class is spinning out of control and you can't stop it.

You exercise authority in a classroom through a couple of factors.

1) Know what you are doing and what you are talking about. I don't mean that you never commit or admit errors, but you need to mostly have command of the content and an actual plan. 

2) Show respect. There's a classic question about whether you'd rather be loved or feared in a classroom--pick respect. And you get it by knowing what you're doing and showing respect to your students. This, incidentally, covers all of the methods course and theory stuff about making learning student centered and sharing authority and all the rest of that stuff that sounds so complex but really boils down to "treat students like they are intelligent human beings whose time is valuable."

3) Always be moving toward something. It's not about making them stop talking so you can move on. It's about moving on.

I'm traditional. The whole "I learn as much from them as they do from me" makes me cringe, because if you aren't more knowledgeable than your students, what are we paying you for? And students need a safe space, and that includes a space in which there's a competent adult who knows what's going on. 

But traditional doesn't mean autocratic power tripping, and it hasn't for sixty or seventy years, so I'm not sure what the perceived audience for this piece was. Most of her lessons are not new lessons. Yes, pandemic distance learning underscored the value of relationship (and the degree to which it depends on physicality). But otherwise, nothing to see here.

A Systemic Tale

They hated tall people.

They were the ruling class in this country, and they were all 5 feet tall or shorter. There were tall people among them, mostly as servants or laborers, because the short ruling class hated them and barred them from the same kind of freedoms that the short rulers enjoyed.

This was reflected in many aspects of their society, including the architecture. In those long-ago days, the ruling class built a fabulous capitol building, a seat of power and government, in which every doorway was no taller than five and a half feet. The law of the land required those short doors. In some private homes there might be a tall entrance ion the back, for the help, but most major public buildings--hospitals, schools, stores-- were built with short doorways, both for entry and through the inside.

But as time passed, and some critical historic events occurred, and society just got smarter, and many of the laws were struck down and attitudes shifted. It was rare that you'd hear someone openly say how they hated the tall folks.

But the buildings were still there, unchanged. The old capitol building, the schools, the hospitals, all still had short doors. And though building codes had changed, some people still built their houses with short doors. "We like," they would explain, "the classic traditional look." 

Nobody who worked in the capitol hated tall people, but tall people still had to scrunch and stoop themselves to get in there.

Tall folks would launch movements to have the doors enlarged to accommodate tall folks. 

"Why do you have to make it all about height?" complained some short folk.

"We just want to be able to walk through those doors," said some tall folks.

"Well, everybody wants to walk through those doors. Why are we just talking about what you want?" said some short folks.

"We want to change the way doors are made in this country," said some tall people.

"Why are you trying to erase our history?" said some short people.

Some tall people became so frustrated that they brought tools and tried to break down the tops of the doorways. "You'll never get people to listen to you if you go around behaving like that," said some short folks.

"Can we at least talk about the history of how these doorways were designed, and what effect prejudice and bias led our buildings to be built the way they are?" asked some tall people.

"Why are you trying to make me feel guilty and uncomfortable," replied some short people. "I didn't build these doorways. The people who did have been dead for years. It's not my fault I can walk through these doors without hunching over." 

"But why not fix the doors?"

"Look," said some short folks. "I don't know what you want from me. I contribute to a group that buys head protection for you people. If you work hard and adopt the proper posture, you can pass through these doors just as easily as the rest of us." 

"But the system--"

"There is no system. There's just a bunch of doors built by my dead ancestors in every public building. This is so damn frustrating. If you don't like the doors, do something about it--but not that violent thing where you try to bust them."

So the tall folks knelt next to the doorways.

"No, not like that," said some short folk.

The tall folk had prayer meetings around the doors.

"That's too noisy," said some short people.

The tall folks built some buildings of their own with doorways seven feet high. "Why do you have to be so divisive," said some short people, who felt really uncomfortable walking through the tall doorways. And other short people, who loved tall people just as well as they loved anyone, tried hard to understand why there was so much chaos and argument and wondered why everyone couldn't just get along. But even after the builders of a prejudiced, biased building are all gone, the building remains.

No, I don't have an ending for this story, and yes, I know the metaphor is an imperfect one. You can take me to task in the comments. 

ICYMI: Fourth of July Edition (7/4)

Here's hoping that you are busy with some combination of friends and family today that leaves no time for the weekly collection of readables. But just in case, here's the list.

How Do You Fight Hot Air

Tired of reading CRT pieces? Me, too. But people keep writing good ones. Here's an op-ed in Washington Post by Karen Attiah, writing about one school district leader many other folks will wish they worked for.

White Evangelicals and CRT

If your question is, how did white evangelicals end up cranky about CRT, this is a good procedural explainer, from Religious Dispatches.

No, school choice is not the answer to critical race theory

Yes, I'm putting up something from school choice advocate Robert Pondiscio, and yes, I think it's worth reading, because in it he calls out a lot of tactical reformster nonsense. Edit--"nonsense " on reflection is a bit stronger than I intended. But this piece is an honest assessment.

Why the critical race theory fight is harder for educators than the common core battle

Many observers, including moi, have pointed out some similarities between the right-wing attack on common core and the right wing attack on CRT. Andrew Ujifusa at EdWeek does a really good job of looking at the parallels and differences between those two battles.

Clint Smith's radical faith in Americans

An interview of author Clint Smith by Anand Giridharadas about Smith's new book. It's encouraging and interesting.

From viral videos to Fox news

If you're curious about how CRT blew up exactly, this explainer from the Guardian has some good explainy parts.

Honesty on Critical Race Theory

Diane Ravitch discusses the topic du jour in the NY Daily News

The Handmaid Teacher's Tale

Nancy Flanagan reflects on the dystopian novel and the world we are living in. As always, worth the read.

Green Schools: Are they child friendly and public?

I had not really been paying much attention to the green school movement at all, so this explainer from Nancy Bailey was very useful.

Muzzling America's Teachers is What Orwell Warned Us About

Steven Singer looks at the troubling rise in teacher gag laws in response to--well, you know.

Using the SAT for school grades? What justifies that baloney?

Accountabaloney with yet another bright idea in Florida--using SATs to grade schools.

Moms For Liberty And The Unified Theory of Far Right Grievance

Anti-maskers. Anti-school closings. Anti-vaxxers. Anti-something-vaguely-lumped-under-critical-race-theory. 

If it seems as if these folks are all actually the same people coming back with new signage every couple of months, join me as we take a look at Moms For Liberty.

MFL was launched at the beginning of 2021 by two Florida women, both with school board experience.

Tina Descovitch  ran for Brevard County School Board in 2016, with a signature issue of her opposition to Common Core. Descovitch ran on two decades in business and a degree in Communications, as well as serving on the executive staff of a US Army Commanding General. She won that election overwhelmingly, taking 48% of the vote in a primary election field of four. Then she lost in 2020. She stayed active in local school politics; after a big dustup over LGBTQ+ policy in Brevard County, she was mailed an envelope full of poop.

The co-founder is Tiffany Justice, who won a school board seat in Indian River County in 2016.  In 2018, the Indian River chapter of the NAACP asked the board to rein her in; she was accused of dominating African American Achievement Cor Committee Meetings and in those meetings violating board policy and open meetings laws. She was a reported victim of cyber-bullying by a district employee. As a board member she was agitating by October of 2020 for a mask-optional policy for students in the district, which earned her some attention from Parental Rights Florida, the wing of yet another of these groups, and I'm not going down that rabbit hole other than to note that the Parental Rights national board president is James Mason from the Homeschool Legal Defense Association and the board includes Grover Norquist and John Rosemond. Justice is no longer a member of the Indian River board.

Justice also stayed active in her district, post-board. Justice in particular has some big feelings about mask wearing, demanding some exceptions be made by the school for her son and her. Justice also wanted to be allowed to stop into her son's classroom without the 24 hour notice required by district policy.

The two launched their new group in January of this year in their home counties, agitating about mask wearing and getting school buildings re-opened. At some point, they decided to go national. Their big pitch has been parental grievance. From a profile in February:

“The balance of power in education has dramatically shifted away from parents and communities to unions and bureaucrats,” said Descovich.

“Moms for Liberty is fighting to restore the role of primary decision maker for children back to parents by helping them organize and amplify their voices.”

They've expanded their reach and their mission "to stoke the fires of liberty." You can find them and their many local branches on Facebook. Some of those local groups aren't exactly bursting at the seams, but a couple boast huge numbers and a great deal of posting.

But their portfolio of grievances has expanded as well--now they are on the front lines of organizing against public school "indoctrination" as well as monitoring school boards and making sure that the correct American history is taught. They offer a plan for educating your friends and neighbors about the Constitution. They say they have a plan "to turn this ship around."

The local chapter model has let them unleash some formidable ground troops. In Tennessee they have landed hard against the Wit and Wisdom book series for a huge list of offenses for everything from "social justice" (which they know is just a sneaky way to get CRT in there) to reading selections they just think are too bloody for children. And they want you to know that "we have a bullying problem, not a racism problem."

Their national voice is expanding as well. Quisha King (some outlets call her "Keisha") runs a consulting firm, has a degree in business marketing, and was a regional engagement coordinator for Black Voices for Trump, but she's often billed as just a concerned Florida mom. She's a member of MFL, sometimes referred to as a board member, though their board membership is not listed anywhere I could find. Ron DeSantis has quoted her, and national news outlets like her. And she just picked up national press for calling Rep. Ilhan Omar a liar on the subject of CRT.

Occasionally MFL calls itself nonpartisan, but these are clearly conservative culture warriors. And if you have suspected that all of these culture war complaints are tied together, this group has clearly gathered them all in one basket, a unified field theory of far-right grievance. 

Watch this MFL chapter chair from Seminole Florida talk to her board and quickly tie it all in a bow. 

I heard someone say a great awakening is usually preceded by a rude awakening. 10 words that could surely be the mantra over our country the last 16 months. 18 months ago the majority of parents naively believed school boards were set in place by their vote for the sole purpose of protecting their rights and values inside public schools. March 2020 changed that. Suddenly facing lockdowns and mandates parents found themselves in a massive rude awakening. As devastating as the consequences have been, I actually thank God for this rude awakening, because without it we would not have a great awakening. Ironically you and school boards across the country, while masking our children, found your hidden motives and operational methods being unmasked....Today it's about masks. Tomorrow it's about isolating and segregating the unvaccinated. Then it's CRT being disguised as equity training to skirt new state legislation. The list of offenses has become the proverbial elephant in the room.

Well, no. Also, I can think of a few other purposes for school boards, like, say, education stuff.  But then she goes on to threaten the board because their day is passing and the newly awakened-but-not-woke parents will rise up and get rid of them. The sense of grievance, of victimized by the Grand Conspiracy comes through the MFL website's call for joining as well:

Are you tired of feeling like you are alone in your concerns for the future of your children? Do you try to speak to community leaders about your concerns and your voice goes unheard? There is power in numbers and the purpose of our organization is to fight for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents.

Are there deep pockets backing this outfit/ There's no evidence I've found, and while they have been picked up by the Trumpist hard right ecosystem quickly, that could be backing or it could be that they're just the perfect group to promote that narrative. And this is no group of June Cleavers--these are smart, professional women. MLF has been picked up as part of the professionally astro-turfed Parents Defending Education, but MLF appears to have arrived a few months earlier.

Time will tell. Mothers for Liberty is worth watching because when it comes to white disenfranchised disenchantment, the raging culture wars, and the belief that the public school system is a dark conspiracy between unions and elites, these folks are the total package.

Language Generating AI Still Lacks I

You may remember that last year, a piece of language simulation AI software appeared touted as the next big thing. OpenAI rolled out GPT-3. The claims were huge. It can write poetry. Various writers wrote pieces about how realistic it was. It can write computer programs--well, actually that was less unbelievable. But the other claims were looking somewhat shaky already, including some linguistic trips into a verbal uncanny valley. 

Unfortunately, turns out that it also makes racist jokes, and backs up white supremacy. OpenAI signaled some of those issues back in May of 2020.

Since then, more problems. GPT-3 was being used to create child porn. It was, as Wired recently put it, "foulmouthed and toxic." This is not a new problem; you may recall when Microsoft created an AI chatbot that had to be shut down because it turned racist and abusive.

There's an unsettling message in all of this that I have rarely seen acknowledged. AI language software works by sampling huge amounts of human language and imitating the patterns that it sees. If these language AI programs are essentially distilling all the human language that's fed them, what does that say about all of our human communications? When you boil down every sentence written in English, do you get a grimy ugly abusive residue of slime? And if so, does that mean that slime trail is the undercarriage of all our communication?

Computer whizzes aren't asking those questions--they're asking more immediate practical questions like "How do I get this bot to be less racist?" 

That's the subject of a recent Wired article--"The efforts to make text-based AI less racist and terrible," which is an article we should all be reading in education if for no other reason than to remember that, among its many shortcomings, language-generating AI is racist and terrible.

Here are some of the attempts being made according to that piece. 

OpenAI researchers are going to fix GPT-3 by "feeding the program roughly 100 encyclopedia-like samples of writing by human professionals on topics like history and technology but also abuse, violence, and injustice." So, a big diet of bland, boring writing, some focused on problem topics so that it's sample base is tilted toward boring stuff, I guess. That may work--it has been tried with some marginal success to offset GPT-3's anti-Muslim bias.

Another approach is to give GPT-3 more toxic text, and then when it spews it back, label the bad examples as "bad" so that it can learn.

All of this underlines the issue behind AI language generation, which is that there is no actual intelligence there--just a prodigious ability to fake language behavior based on a huge bank of samples. Every advance in this field, including GPT-3, is mostly about figure out how to get the software to handle more samples. Wired talked to UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik who studies human language acquisition in order to apply lessons to computers.

Children, she said, are the best learners, and the way kids learn language stems largely from their knowledge of and interaction with the world around them. Conversely, large language models have no connection to the world, making their output less grounded in reality.

Wired also collected the most awesome quote on the subject from Gopnik:

The definition of bullshitting is you talk a lot and it kind of sounds plausible, but there's no common sense behind it.

This would include many of the folks trying to sell schools and teachers super-duper software "powered by" or "incorporating" or "driven by" AI. It's still a machine, it still doesn't actually know anything, and it still serves as a dark mirror for some of our worst linguistic behaviors. 

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NC: Another Way For Charters To Hit Taxpayers

With all the CRT fooferraw and voting suppression and a world of other hurts coming from legislatures and courts, it would be easy to miss this latest wrinkle from North Carolina.

Durham is already awash in charter schools, but as we've seen many times, the wisdom of the invisible hand of market forces does not include charters looking at a saturated market and saying, "We might as well not" and certainly not "Adding more schools to this already over-saturated community will just cause a ton of disruption for the students." 

Anyway, Oak Grove Charter Academy, a new charter to be operated by for-profit CMO National Heritage Academies, set out to create a new charter school in Durham County. The two districts most likely to be hurt by the new charter opposed the application, and the city of Durham was none too keen on it, but since the state board of education can authorize charters no matter what local taxpayers want, Oak Grove Charter Academy was approved. 

The school, now called North Oak Academy, intended to incorporate its property into the city of Durham and then as to be hooked up to the city water and sewage supply. The city was not inclined to help out. From the News & Observer

“Let’s just say it’s no secret that I believe that charter schools have been detrimental to Durham Public Schools in many ways,” Mayor Steve Schewel said at the November meeting. “I think they have been re-segregating, and I think that they have also really taken so much of the good parental and professional energy out of our public schools.”

National Heritage Academies asked again. Council said no again. National Heritage Academies threatened a lawsuit and warned that this would make their charter a martyr to the cause. One council member tweeted "I just love bad faith arguments. Also threats."

Enter the North Carolina legislature. At the end of June, the House voted  to approve a bill that require municipalities to extend water and/or sewer service to charter schools that ask for it.

So if this makes it past the NC Senate, taxpayers in North Carolina will have to fund infrastructure for charter schools they never asked for, or even opposed. Just one more way that charter systems create private profit at public expense.

Okay, I missed a pertinent line in the most recent version of the bill (which, because the bill process is kind of hilarious, actually started life as a bill for putting carbon monoxide detectors in public school buildings and has since been amended) indicating that the property owner will have to pay the cost of extending the service. Of course, the charter funding comes from the taxpayers, so the taxpayers are still paying for all of this, as well as the cost of managing a that-much-larger system, but my original implications were incorrect. H/t to Kristopher Nordstrom for pointing me at the correct language.