How Do We Achieve Effective Classroom Transparency

A Pennsylvania rep just offered up yet another proposal to reveal the inner workings of school classrooms by requiring schools to post textbook lists, curriculum, and lesson plans. It's another one of those endlessly repeating cycles of education, currently being goosed along by the anti-indoctrination crowd.

Because the initiative is coming from a whole host of bad faith actors who are simply looking for ways to intimidate teachers and strip mine school content for any "proof" that schools are teaching something from the ever-lengthening laundry list of complaints that started with That Race Stuff and now includes mentions of sea horse sex--anyway, because that's the crowd pushing this, there's a knee jerk reaction among educators to resist it.

But here's the thing--the desire of parents and taxpayers to know how their children are being taught and their money being spent is a perfectly legitimate desire (that's why it is so effective for the anti-public school crowd to harness it). There have always been, and will always be, some folks who are asking these questions in good faith. Taxpayers fork over perfectly good money for this, and for parents, school is the first significant part of a child's life where the parent must give up control, which is a scary thing. 

It is not enough to say, "Just trust us, and no, you can't see within the black box." Parents and taxpayers are entitled to see.

The challenge has always been how to see effectively and without derailing the process. The Big Standardized Test is a great example of ineffective accountability-- it interferes and warps the thing it's trying to show us, and doesn't even provide a good look at what we're trying to see.

So how do we do it?

Live video?

Some folks want to strap body cams on teachers or live video feeds in the room. I've heard from plenty of teachers who say, "Sure. Let them see how their kid actually behaves in class," and there is a certain appeal to teachers in having a video record to contradict student claims about how the teacher did something mean to them. 

In my teaching days, I would have been perfectly happy to have parents come sit in my classroom, but I'm not sure that would have been fair to the students. The live camera feed idea is a non-starter simply because it is a huge violation of the rights of the other students in the classroom, particularly because to provide any transparency for parents, the video would have to be stored somewhere so they could watch at their convenience (I'm not seeing anybody getting an hour off from work so they can watch their child's fifth period math class). I am not in any hurry to advance the surveillance state, and any such video system would immediately draw the attention of a hundred "We'll monitor student behavior to spot potential problems and academic issues"--oh, wait-- those companies are already at work.

Post it all on the internet?

The more popular plan is some version of the PA bill-- get everything posted on line. The challenge here is the definition of "everything."

Too little, and there isn't any real information for parents and taxpayers. If schools just post textbook lists, that doesn't tell you what is actually in the book or which parts the teacher actually uses. Too much, and you push teachers into a Dilbertized universe where they have trouble getting their actual work done because they're so busy creating reports about their work. Too much also buries parents and taxpayers under a mountain of paperwork that takes forever to sort through. 

There are practical limits as well. If the law demands that I post in August the exact text of the worksheet I'll be using in May, well, I simply can't do it. I could never have posted a year's worth of lesson plans at the beginning of the year, and any teacher who does is either lying to you or is not a particularly awesome teacher. Nor do most teachers' lesson plans look like something other folks can read, but are often in shorthand and language that makes sense mostly to them; a lesson plan posting requirement will also come with a lesson plan rewriting-into-plain-English requirement (except for passive aggressive teachers who simply post plans that civilians won't understand).

It makes far more sense to post materials week by week, as the year develops. Many schools already do some version of this with Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Blackboard or Google Classrooms, internet platforms that are used by teachers to communicate with students, but which can be easily opened up to parent access as well. That rollout of material will be far more accurate than an entire early report, and as a bonus, rolling it out in real time means that parents wouldn't need to devote an entire week just to reading through it all. As a bonus for this approach, a lot of teachers just spent some pandemic pause time becoming more proficient at using these kinds of platforms. If school districts wanted to open these platforms up to read-only access for taxpayers, they could do so.

The system will be effective and information-heavy to the degree that it doesn't require a buttload of extra work. Not a month goes by in which teachers are not required to add some new duty prompting them to reply (aloud or silently) "And when am I supposed to do that? What other thing should I stop doing to make time for it." I point this out not to say "Wah, poor teachers" but because the teaching day is a zero sum game that was maxed out decades ago, and if you want something done well, you have to provide people the time to do it. Given the choice between grading papers, prepping lessons, or preparing a report that most parents and taxpayers are never going to look at, teachers are unlikely to drop everything and devote time to getting their lesson plans posted.

There's always talking

There is also an option of actually talking--to teachers, to students, to administrators. E-mail, phones. It can be done.

There will be hard parts

There are people out there who are trying to make political hay out of the threat of Evil Teacher Indoctrinators, and we have already seen multiple tales of them finding indoctrination where none exists. Their intent in demanding teacher scope and sequence and lesson plans and text are clear--they are going searching for indoctrination, and they are going to find it. They will be far louder than the people who dip into the stuff and find it, well, mostly boring. 

There are also people who just don't trust public schools, and no amount of transparency will change that. 

Schools need to be transparent anyway. I worked for some administrators during my career whose reaction to every possible problem was to try to hide from it and build walls. That trick is not only wrong, but it never, ever works.

Will school districts be called upon to justify the presence of some materials in their curriculum? Maybe--but they should be able to do that. Even if the accusers stop listening after they make their accusation, there's a wider audience than that small mob. 

Do it anyway.

School districts need to adopt workable transparency both because it's the right thing to do and because it's the only way to deal with the current manufactured panic. 

There is a cycle of distrust, particularly in high schools, in districts where teachers rarely hear from parents except when they want to complain about something and parents rarely hear from teachers except when their child is in trouble. It's a hard cycle to break, and an easy cycle to exploit. Regular communication helps. Transparency helps. 

The goal of some of these folks is to break things, to make the gears grind to a halt, to keep public schools from working, and in some states and communities, I don't know if anything will stem the tide in the short term. But as long as these folks can point at the school walls and claim that something mysterious and sinister is going on in there, they have an advantage.

Public schools absolutely have to be defended right now, vigorously and vocally. Opponents are doing a good job of shouting down and intimidating other voices. Defenders and school district leaders have to stand up, and it's hard to use secrecy and opacity as tools for defense. 

So open the doors, tear down the walls, and let parents and taxpayers see just how work-a-day, unexciting, and ordinary the inside of a school is. Give them a good look at the sneaky indoctrination of participial phrases and the periodic table. Let them see the ordinary awesome process of student learning. And if some must squawk, let all the public see the diversity and sexy sea horses that they are squawking about. 

In the meantime, may legislatures please not pass one-size-fits-all laws that create busywork for schools without providing real information for parents and taxpayers who actually want it. 

Bipartisan School Choice Is Over

This has been coming for a while. After the bipartisan launch of No Child Left Behind and the desire to advance bipartisan support during the Obama administration (and into the presumed Clinton administration thereafter), a kind of deal was worked out between the right and the left, and school choice was presented as a hybrid that could appeal to both right-tilted free marketeers and left-leaning social justice advocates (profiteers, as always, are both politically agnostic and financially opportunistic).

Strike up a debate about school choice and you were as likely to hear about the power of competition and the free market as you were how school choice would finally bring equity and uplift to children trapped in an inequitable system.

But then the truce began to crumble. Trump and Betsy DeVos didn't help--suddenly certain policies were toxic for lefties. But the fault lines were noted even earlier. In 2016, Robert Pondiscio (AEI) drew some reformy ire by saying out loud that the left and right were not getting along any more. A year and a half later, Kate Walsh (NCTQ) was wondering if the movement had lost its way, citing a new orthodoxy that required reformsters to Be Performatively Sad about certain past failures. 

Many observers have followed this dissolving partnership (Jennifer Berkshire has covered it exceptionally well-- try here and here) looking at the causes. Part of the issue has been that Democrats were always the junior partners; school choice has been near and dear to conservative hearts for generations, while Democrats were brought into the fold more recently. Often they were simply Democrats of convenience, as typified by Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a group whose creation hedge funder Whitney Tilson described thus: 

“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job... In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…”

Democrats came into school choice on the theory that choice would bring improved education results and lift people out of poverty. Technocrats thought disruption--moving fast and breaking things--would revolutionize education. But none of that happened. Years--decades--passed and test scores didn't rise and charter schools didn't provide genius new education ideas and the gaggle of education amateurs running about didn't actually have any great successes and poverty was not erased.

For folks sitting on the right side of the aisle in the school choice chapel, that was not a problem. They could easily pivot from discussing results to extolling the value of choice itself. Freedom, liberty, choice--all are their own reason for being and injecting those qualities into the school system is a net good, regardless of the results.

You can see the effects in recent choice victories. There have been a host of them in 2021, and they are all about vouchers and expanding existing programs and pushing toward the literal holy grail of public tax dollars going to private religious schools. Charter schools were never a right-side priority. Watered-down choice, charter schools were a foot in the door, a compromise with Democrat neoliberals. But true believers like DeVos were never real fans (we forget now that charter advocates were not excited about her nomination, requiring her to make nice when taking office). Charter schools live attached to the public system (like symbiotes or parasites, depending on how you feel about them), while vouchers simply grab sustenance before it ever gets to the public system. Charters look to expand the public system, and have staked their future on demanding to be called "public" (they aren't); vouchers are out to replace the public system entirely, just as Uncle Miltie Friedman envisioned. 

If you want a more official declaration of the death of bipartisan choice, look no further than this recent report by Jay Greene (University of Arkansas now at Heritage Foundation) and James D. Paul (Education Freedom Institute). This report is pretty brutal. "Does school choice need bipartisan support?" might as well be entitled, "Buh-bye Dems: Who needs you?"

"We do not suggest that anyone should be excluded from the education reform coalition," they conclude. "But advocates for choice should be clear-eyed about the types of lawmakers who have historically done the heavy lifting on the house and senate floors." And as the report lays out, those are Republicans. It is not worth it, the report suggests, to craft policy to attract Democrat votes and in the process, lose dependable GOP support. Only three times in 70 did a state legislature need Democrat votes to support private school choice which, the report notes, "has historically been a Republican priority."

Further evidence of which way the choice wind is blowing? Greene and Paul recommend that policies should be designed to "increase the constituency for school choice and reflect the values of legislators who have been responsible for the existence of such programs." In other words, dance with the guys what brung you. And the policies mentioned are vouchers, tax credit scholarships, and education scholarship accounts (aka "vouchers, another kind of vouchers, and a third kind of vouchers"). The word "charter" does not appear at all in the report.

Bipartisan school choice is over, and it's going to have an effect on how choicers make their pitch and craft their policies. We'll want to pay attention.

One More Story About The Extra Challenges of School Right Now

This is what educators are up against right now.

Last night was school board night in my county. At one board meeting, the board was subjected to a certain amount of ranting about masks, including assertions that asymptomatic children do not spread the disease. One board member thanked them for speaking out.

Just up the road from me, the Oil City School District was supposed to have its regular meeting.

Two attendees at the meeting wore "Freedom over Fear" t-shirts and refused to put on their masks.

So the board recessed for an hour to allow an attempt to sort out the masking. The two did not leave or relent, so the board canceled the meeting and rescheduled it as a Zoom meeting later in the week. 

Both had attended previous meetings. Only one spoke. Previously, that speaker asserted that covid isn't real. 

That speaker is a high school student.

Fifty one teachers were there to show solidarity as they questioned the board about covid sick day policies; like many districts, this one now requires teachers to use up their own sick days if they contract covid. They didn't get to stand together as a group to address that concern.

And some of them had to be in school today, dealing with that student and others like him.

If we were in a state like North Carolina, how quickly do you suppose the family would turn a teacher in to the state for trying to "indoctrinate" their child into believing that disease that has killed almost 700,000 people in this country is not real, and that he needs to follow the dictates of the state and wear his damn mask? How does this work in a district where the board agrees with the student? And how many students are being told, indirectly or directly, that they should not respect or listen to the educators at their school?

It's one more obstacle thrown in the path of people who went into this line of work because they wanted to teach children.

There is a desperate need right now for parents who do not feel anti-vax/mask/etc to speak up in school board meetings, letters to the editor, and anywhere else. But they can see that speaking up invites attacks, and so a vocal minority is shouting down the rest. And teachers hunker down for another long year, or start looking for the exit.

PA: Cyber School 101

As is often the case in education, some people are just now noticing something that's been going on for a while. In this case, it's the financially destructive and educationally suspect nature of cyber schooling. So I'm going to try to collect the basics here in one post, suitable for sharing with anyone who's just arrived at the party.

Before we start, let me add the usual caveat--cyber schools (or "virtual schools" as they're sometimes called) are a great option for a non-zero number of students. Anecdotally, you can always find a kid for whom cyber education worked. But we're going to look at the larger picture, and there are issues. Sooo many issues.

The basics. A cyber school is a privately operated charter school that exists as an online connection. Students typically are given a "free" computer, and do their school work by logging in and completing lessons online. An online teacher, out there somewhere, checks the student work and may provide some instructional support. In Pennsylvania, a parent can place their child in cyber school at any time for any reason. Reasons range from a program that fits the student needs to a parent who's tired of being threatened with a truancy fine. Many districts also use cyber schools for "credit recovery" aka make-up classes to get enough credits to graduate. Students typically average only two years in cyber school, with many either returning to their home district or just never graduating at all.

Cyber schools are paid with public tax dollars, typically "billing" the student's home district. The costs are huge--Pennsylvania reimburses cybers based on the student's home district's per-pupil costs, and not what it actually costs to educate students via online school. In most districts, a "regular" student might land in the $10-15K range; Tom Wolf's proposal, from reality-based numbers, would give cybers a flat fee of $5,950.  (The numbers are even worse when you look at special needs students, but that's a rabbit hole for another day).

Taxpayers are massively overpaying for bad cyber schooling in PA. The profit margins are huge; cyber charters are rolling in money, while districts get clobbered and research suggesting that poorer districts get clobbered most of all. The cost in tax dollars is huge; in 2016-2017, $463 million in taxpayer dollars went to Pennsylvania cyber charters.

Cyber charters are largely founded and operated by businessmen, not educators. K12 (now Stride), one of the cyber giants, was founded by a Goldman-Sachs investment banker and funded by junk bond king and convicted felon Michael Milken. (K12, like several players in the field, has been caught misbehaving multiple times.) Another major cyber chain is a sub-business of Pearson, the textbook publishing company. 

Results? The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University generally favors charters and choice, but their research results about cyber schools is pretty harsh. Cybers were found not just to be weaker than the home school in academics, leaving students half a year behind in English and a full year behind in math*-- in effect, a student would be just as far ahead to stay home and play video games for a year. In Pennsylvania, no cyber charter has ever met the state PSSA or Keystone testing benchmarks for academic performance

The picture is so bad that in 2016, the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers--people whose whole business is to promote charters--issued a report saying that virtual charters were in big trouble.

Back then, there were 135 cybers operating with 180,000, with the majority in the big three states for cybers-- California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. One quarter of the cybers enrolled 80% of all cyber students, meaning that most cyber students were in "schools" of over 1,000 students. Student-teacher ratios in cyber schools can get pretty high, though cybers tend to be pretty coy about the actual numbers.

There are operational issues. Student attendance is just a matter of logging in each day. More can be done--Minnesota actually implemented an aggressive and effective cyber-truancy program. But in PA, we're not doing it.

Oversight of charters is minimal. When Nicholas Trombetta used Pennsylvania Cyber School to funnel $8 million tax dollars to himself, it was federal authorities and not the state that finally caught him. Two years ago the Philadelphia Inquirer discovered that of Pennsylvania's 15 cyber charters, 10 were operating with expired charters. Cybers are not even subjected to audits. Multiple attempts have been made by members of both parties to tighten the rules so that cyber charters would be subject to, at least, the same rules as everyone else. But cyber charters lobby hard, and spend plenty of money in Harrisburg (a national pattern). Some states are pushing back against bad cybers, but in PA, there's still no progress.

The pandemic has, of course, given a big boost to cyber enrollment, and they are not above using anti-mask panic to help lift their numbers. Pennsylvania districts do have an option to try to stem the cost-- they can set up their own in-house cyber school, which has the dual benefit of keeping the money in the district and keeping students from falling too far behind academically. 

It's a mess, and it's draining small rural districts like the ones in my area. I often share this factoid--almost ten years ago, my old district closed an elementary school in hopes of saving about $800K. Their cyber school costs that year? About $800K. And to add insult to injury, as school boards try to deal with this large (and unpredictable) loss of revenue by cutting programs, the public slams them for doing a bad job of managing taxpayer money. This primer is for those folks. 

*Measuring education in years and months is extreme oversimplification, but I'm trying to keep things simple here. 

Teaching Lessons from Community Theater

I've been directing school and community theater productions for a long time, and I've learned a lot, much of which directly parallels the work of a teacher in the classroom (there are plenty of ways to frame teaching, but for me it has always largely been performance). Here are a few.

Don't Waste Time Pining for the Cast You Don't Have

In professional theater, you can afford to be picky. In community/school theater, not so much. You get what you get, and that's what you have to build a show out of. You can't try to lead the cast as if they were other people with other skill sets; you have to take them where they are and build from there.

Sometimes this leads to great things you hadn't really planned for. Every community theater director has a tale of gender-switching a role, pretty much always turning a male character female (because way too many roles are written for men, and men are not what you have an excess of in community/school theater). And it turns out that some changes strike cool little notes--for instance, when Belle in Beauty and the Beast has a wacky inventor mother rather than a wacky inventor father, it strikes some interesting deep notes. 

But you absolutely work with the cast you have, not the one you wish you had. And you don't view the cast you have as "less than"-- just different from the one you imagined. Ditto for your class. It's a toxic waste of time to be frustrated with your students because they aren't other students (e.g the awful "Last year's kids didn't do this")

You Don't Do It Alone

I've never worked a show in which I did not desperately depend on the work of costumers, tech folks, set designers and builders, and all the people working hard but invisibly as the show runs. Teaching often looks, and feels, like a solitary profession, but in the classroom you are leaning on the work of other members of your department, your students' previous teachers, the school's support staff, the special ed department, the building administrative assistants, and, if you are fortunate, your administration. 

On stage and in school, you have to learn who you can trust and depend on, and for what, and how much. Building a support network is hugely useful.

Big Ideas Need Practical Support

In community/school theater, it's not just about the actor's performance. You have to answer questions about how we'll build that piece, how we'll light that moment, how we'll store those set pieces off stage (fun fact--the awesome community theater I work in has little wing space and only enough fly space to "hide" something that's no more than seven feet tall). Failing to figure out the nuts and bolts has sunk many a production, and many a lesson. "That will just happen, somehow," is never a plan. Even if you think you've bypassed the problem by staging Our Town or some minimalist production design, you'll find you never really have.

Leave Room for Things To Happen

I've seen directors micromanage shows, telling every actor and every production staff member exactly what to do, detail by detail. It's a rough way to go--it robs everyone else of their agency, and it means the quality of the production rests entirely on the auteur being right about everything, all the time, every time. It also requires the director to exert, even waste, a great deal of energy and power bending everyone else to his will. It creates a toxic environment, an environment that people will walk away from. This kind of thing persists only because of the persistent myth of the awesome genius whose brilliant vision redeems his toxic behavior. 

We have the Visionary CEO model of school management, the goal of "teacher-proof" classes that script a teachers every word and move, and the classroom of the "genius" teacher who demands total compliance from every student. 

All of these are problematic for the reasons given above, but there's one more issue to consider. As a director, I find that when I leave room for actors and crew to create, imagine, extend and just generally fill in the spaces, wonderful things happen. It's a tricky balance-- you can't just say, "Everyone go out on stage and move around the way you feel like moving," but you have to leave some space for what they want to bring to the moment. 

The more one insists on total control in a classroom, the less opportunity there is for real things to happen, for students to bring a direction and energy to the classroom that allows learning to erupt. Doesn't mean the teacher just sits back and does nothing--as with all things in a classroom (and life), balance is needed. Total control does not offer healthy or robust balance.

Success Doesn't Always Look The Way You Thought It Would

If you are adamantly welded to one vision of a scene, you will miss other opportunities that present themselves as you work through the process. I believe this is pretty much a major rule for life, so on stage and in a classroom, it make sense to me that it would also be true. This doesn't mean you can't hold fast to things that you value, but every vision can be tempered with time, experience, and circumstances that you didn't foresee.

In community theater, it's great to have big ideas and to push the envelope of what your space can handle. But it's practical to have a Plan B (and possible Plans C through Z) because maybe that cool set piece won't work properly or something won't get built because the set guy had to spend the week on a family emergency (because everyone in community theater has a job and a life outside of the theater) or your lead won't be able to learn to juggle after all. So you move on to your next plan. And that's okay. 

If You Focus On Your Objective, You Are Hard To Derail

So this weekend, we used fog for our production of the Wizard of Oz, and it worked successfully all week--and then on opening night, it set off the fire alarm. Blaring honks, flashing lights, and the actors just kept doing their thing, and so the audience, with almost no hubbub, sat there. If you know what you're doing, and you keep focused on doing it, you are hard to move off track. True in the classroom as well. I never could quite understand teachers who were flummoxed by, say, an administrator popping in. Keep your eye on that destination and keep pushing toward it.

Everyone ought to do a little theater, on stage or behind it. It provides some useful perspective and some helpful lessons.

ICYMI: Curtain Up Edition (9/26)

 The challenge of mounting and opening a full sized show in the age of covid is--well, in a couple of weeks I'm going to lie down and take a huge nap. And maybe I'm a little behind on my reading. But here's some stuff for this week.

School hasn't changed in 100 years. So saith TFA.

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider on the Teach for Awhile version of the popular unchanged education idea...

Whatever happened to the classroom of Tomorrow?

Those of us of a Certain Age recall Apple's big education idea. Larry Cuban looks at where that actually went.

Is the big test headed for the big crash?

Dad Gone Wild with a look at the Big Standardized Test on the ropes.

To achieve educational justice, we need more black teachers

I suspect that there are many areas in which Sharif El-Mekki and I disagree, but I see no flaws in his continued argument that we need more Black teachers in our classrooms. Here he is making it again, this time in EdSurge

Questioning Valor Charters

Cult-style SEL and a big bucks charter chain. Nancy Bailey blogs about what is going on with this set of aggressively marketed charters.

The myth that better schools will reduce inequalities in wealth

Somehow, Larry Cuban makes not one but two rare appearances on this list today. This piece is a thoughtful look at one of the major tensions in education, between public good and private advantage.

Teachers are not okay

Steven Singer talks about wear and tear and stress in the education trenches.

Almost unlocking a mystery of SAT scores

So close. Sooooo close!!

Covering the release of SAT scores this year, WTOP news noted two results and put them right in the headline: 

Va., Md. SAT scores rise, but number of test-takers plunges

It's the "but" that tells us that somehow, they didn't manage connect the dots, which is a shame, given there were only two.

Of course, they mean average test scores rose, and understanding averages is important here. It has always been important when reading the latest stories about SAT scores.

Any high school teacher can tell you-- "Let me pick who gets to take the SAT, and I can give you dramatically higher test scores in just a single year!" Because averages.

This year we measured only 5th and 6th graders for height, instead of K-6, and we find the average height of children in our school has increased. We did a survey of car prices; last year we surveyed all dealers, but this year we surveyed only Lexus dealers, and we find that the average price of a car has gone up. 

We've spent years marketing the SAT's flagship product to all students (in some states, we've snookered the government into requiring it), so as we add students who might not have been inclined to take the test to go ahead and take it, the average score is affected. That's how the results for every sub group can go up even as the overall average goes down. 

Now throw in a pandemic year in which students who are having a rough time just don't take the test, leaving it only to those who are well-buffered from the pandemic (and whose buffering is the same sort of socio-economic background that is an advantage on the test) and voila!! Instant increase in average score.

What we have here is just one more example of why test scores from the pandemic are not worth a thing. They can't be compared to any year, they can't really be normed accurately, and they just kind of mean nothing. But we're still going to be subjected to stories that can't manage to draw a line between two data points.