Maybe Everyone Doesn't Think Schools Suck

Does it seem as if the Anti crowd-- the one demanding that schools re-open, that masks be discarded, that discussions of race be shut down, that the unions are trying to indoctrinate children, that school board members need to be intimidated--does it seem as if they are a large group, a rising wave that represents the majority?

Maybe not.

A new Axios-Ipsos poll indicates that US adults mostly think that local schools have done a good job with this mess.

There's not really a lot of surprise here. It has always been a routine finding that people think their own schools are just fine, while it's that darn national system that's in trouble. Years and years and years of insistence has convinced people that US schools are failing, but that continued drumbeat can't quite drown out their actual experience with their own school.

Same thing here. Note that non-parents have less confidence in how schools managed the pandemic than actual parents. Even two thirds of the Republicans show some support for how schools have handled the pandemess. Though it's also worth noting that the support is mostly lukewarm.

There were other results not included in the chart that are also worth noting.

The biggest opinion break came down to age, with respondents older than 65 the most supportive (78% good) and those under 30 the least supportive (62% good).

If I were a political strategist, I would look at that wide band of lukewarm support and see folks that could be moved. I would imagine that if I made a large enough, loud enough noise, I could herd them in the direction of my choosing. I would see a block of people who could be lost by a boneheaded move by a public school--either a real one, or a carefully amplified one.

So this survey (which like all surveys must be taken with a block of salt) is both good news and a cautionary piece of information. 

ICYMI: Project Time Edition (11/7)

 Here at the Institute we have a project brewing, and it's taking some actual time to prepare. But I still collected some reading for you this week.

Why my book has been removed from school shelves

An LA Times op-ed from Christopher Noxon, author of Good Trouble: Lessons from the Civil Rights Playbook, which has drawn some attention in Virginia for being about, you know, Black stuff. 

Loraine Superintendent deemed a hero

A fairly encouraging story in a dreary week, not the least because here's a superintendent who regularly drives the school bus.

Moms for Liberty- Williamson County is a hell of conspiracy theories and petty complaints

There's a new blogger in Tennessee, and he went and signed himself up as a member of MFL so he could see what he could see on the inside. Turns out it's not encouraging.

The demoralization of the American teacher

I'm not agreeing with all of this piece by Shane Trotter in Quillette, but it's still a good read with some worthwhile observations.

Self-care versus Sustainable Leadership

You should be reading Nancy Flanagan regularly anyway, but I'll just keep recommending her stuff. 

Virginia was not about education...but Democrats need to be.

Mitchell Robinson at Eclectablog directs some righteous anger at the Democrats and their continued failure to stand up for public ed.

Youngkin's campaign was about something sinister

Jan Resseger offers an analysis of the ugly subtext of the new governor's campaign

When should racism be taught in schools

CBS actually caught so much grief over this terrible headline that they have since changed it. But the article that comes with it is a pretty good look at CRT panic.

PA school funding on trial

Later this week, a trial will kick off challenging Pennsylvania's lousy funding system. This is a good explainer of what the big deal is.

Anti-Hillary group rebranded as anti-CRT group

CNBC has the story of 1776 PAC, which turns out to be an old anti group with a new mission.

This is a story about milk, but also about what happens when the press doesn't do its job.

This is a great piece from Parker Molloy, spinning off the CNN coverage of milk prices this weekend (don't worry--if you missed that mess, the article brings you up to speed) but also about what happens when the press lets people go on being angry about things that haven't actually happened.

More Rough Days Ahead For Public Ed

The post-mortems are rolling in this morning. Some mild suggestions like this one from Ross Douthat: "Democrats probably need a new way to talk about progressive ideology and education." Some chortling Twitter feeds about how CRT panic is a winning issue.

However you parse it, it seems reasonable to assume that a whole bunch of GOP politicos have, in the wake of the Virginia governor's election, will conclude that a winning strategy is to treat public education as a punching bag. Filled with indoctrinators! Naughty books! Race stuff! A bunch of commie lesbians turning your kids trans! A scam to make the unions rich! And, of course, they suck at educating children!

We'll hear it all from various candidates for the next three years because, as of right now, it appears to work. There are, of course, alternative explanations (e.g. Virginia has, 11 out of 12 times, elected a governor from the party out of national power). But this seems like a simple one, and it's easy to do, and the ground troops are already in place in the form of a hundred anti-CRT/masks/vax/closed schools groups. Brandishing the dirty book can be the 21st century's wave the bloody shirt. I'm afraid we're in for three years (at least) of calls for banning books and regulating teacher speech.

It will also look like a winning strategy because Democrats haven't a clue how to push back. 

This is more than the usual on-brand Democrat fecklessness. Democrats will have a hard time pushing back because it has been almost a generation since they actively attempted to defend public education. 

What's remarkable about the infamous A Nation at Risk" report is not how thin it is--though it is thin. Here's Tamim Ansary writing about it in 2007:

Naturally, I assumed this bible of school reform was a scientific research study full of charts and data that proved something. Yet when I finally looked it up, I found a thirty-page political document issued by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, a group convened by Ronald Reagan's secretary of education, Terrell Bell.

The report was a hatchet job, and yet no Democrats piped up to defend public education. Democrats helped sell No Child Left Behind as a bipartisan slice of baloney. Obama and both Clintons pushed the neoliberal notion that public education needed to be busted up and sold for parts. Democrats have enthusiastically joined in the various attempts to turn the manufactured assertion that "US public schools are failing" into conventional wisdom, a thing that everyone says even though they have no actual proof. 

So there's a certain ironic justice, a bitter karma, that Democrats suddenly find themselves facing a political punch in the face because they don't have the language, the background, the knowledge, the experience to simply defend public education. When the left-right détente to "reform" education broke up and the right determined they could just go on by themselves, the Democratic establishment couldn't figure out how to pivot, and now they're caught flatfooted, out of touch with real parents with real concerns, and clueless about what public education really needs. I suppose I should feel some schadenfreude over watching people take a beating because they can't figure out how to take a convincing stand against things like book banning and attacks on public education. Except...

Except it's public education that's going to get beaten up. Fox and OAN and assorted privatizers will double down on the idea that parents just can't trust the schools or the people in them and teachers, who are already staggering through Year 3 of One Damn Thing After Another, will be further dragged around the block by people whose only interest in education is how many votes they get from punching it, followed by privatizers and choicers who will, correctly, see this as an excellent opportunity to pursue their own goals. 

I suspect it's going to be brutal. We might describe it by saying that if any foreign power leveled this kind of attack against a valuable public institution, we'd call it an act of war. But while these political firestorms rage, teachers and parents will still, somehow, be trying to educate and raise children in the midst, and my heart goes out to all of them. I can only hope that some politicians will actually see value in stepping up as champions for public education and buck the prevailing political winds. 

Replying to Moms for Liberty: What about These Books?

 This exchange turned up on my Twitter feed.

How do you propose that parents handle the books they are finding in the school libraries? I’m not totally disagreeing with you, but they are finding these books everywhere and they are upset. Can you blame them?

— Moms for Liberty (@Moms4Liberty) November 3, 2021

 I'm going to try to answer this question, because I think it's a legitimate one. 

Caveats first. Yes, the MFL tweet is kind of a non-sequitor. And yes, there are plenty of reasons to suspect that Moms for Liberty is a group at least as interested in being political players as they are in safeguarding children (e.g. this outburst at one of their events). But I'll engage with anyone who appears to be making a good faith effort to discuss issues. Also, I'm a parent, and I get the kind of gut-level nervousness that comes with entrusting your child to people who may or may not share your values. So I'm going to attempt a serious answer to what may or may not be a serious ask.

This is my reply to Moms for Liberty.

What should a parent who finds "these books" in the school library do?

Step one, in all times you're dealing with a school, is to assume good intent. Start with the assumption that the school is staffed and run by people who value children and helping them grow to be their best selves, who went into education because they did, in fact, want to teach children. If you start out with the assumption that public schools are actually a sinister conspiracy to indoctrinate children or an elaborate scam being run to fill the coffers of teachers unions, it will be hard to find any basis to move forward. 

Also, assuming ill will and searching for gotcha's will lead you to make absurd accusations. If you assume evil intent and the whole purpose of your search is to "catch them" being evil, you might as well withdraw your child and enroll in some private school now. But in general I believe that it is always better to search for understanding rather than confirmation of your already-formed beliefs, in part because you will always find confirmation, whether it's there or not.

Next. Have friends or people you trust outside your bubble with whom to check your work. I have to believe that if the lady who objected to the sexy seahorse book had turned to someone outside the group and asked if she was really seeing something objectionable or not, someone would have told her to calm down. 

If you are certain in your heart that you do not want your child exposed to a certain book, you should next check the chain of command in your local district. Probably the most common mistake made by parents with a school complaint is addressing that complaint to someone who has no power to address the complaint. So who oversees book acquisition for your school library? Is there a procedure in place to challenge a book? What the circumstances under which a child goes to the library--with a particular class, or during a study hall, or barely ever (some students go a long time without ever seeing the inside of a library)? If your circulation system is computerized, is there a way to monitor what your child checks out? Are some books in the library kept in the back room and available only on request (school libraries do this for a variety of reasons)?  Can you file a request with the librarian that your child not be allowed to have access to certain books? 

When you identify the people involved, talk to them. Make yourself available for a human conversation (e-mail and texting often lead to misunderstandings of tone in charged conversations). Share your concerns, and listen to their response. If you are unhappy with the outcome, then move up through the chain of command. 

Please note: all of the above is in reference to access to one of "these books" for your own child. When you want to ban access to the book for all students in the school, we're entering a whole new conversation. You do not like it when you feel that the school is substituting their judgment for your own parental judgment; how should your neighbors feel when you insist on substituting your own judgment for theirs?

What we've seen so far on the lists of "these books" range from books that probably cross the line for a lot of folks to books that are primarily objectionable to racists. The demands to get rid of books (e.g. I Am Rosa Parks) that are simply an accurate portrayal of historical events in which white folks did not handle themselves very well are not supportable. I'm willing to listen to someone's explanation of why they are bad for children, but I honestly cannot imagine what a good explanation would be. Some of these may very well make some children sad. It's not clear to me why that is a bad thing.

The list of "these books" has become really broad and wide, with some of it way into Chinese Communist re-education camp territory, and the longer this wrangling goes, the more conservatives are twisting themselves into pretzels trying to not look racist while still backing racist book bans. Since the new governor of Virginia won a campaign by attacking a major novel by arguably the greatest American author in recent history, I'm not confident that this is going to end any time soon.

The thing is--banning a book is huge, huge deal. Having it pulled from a school library in an attempt to keep it away from students is a huge, huge deal. Not only that, but it doesn't work. The good people of Boston banned Huckleberry Finn (too much friendliness between a white boy and a Black man), and they turned it into a best seller. I guarantee you that the books that have turned up on these current banning lists are now being sought out by the students MFL wanted to protect.

I see a huge irony in your current movement. Many of your folks are also anti-vax and anti-mask, arguing that simply letting students be exposed to the virus will not be a problem because natural immunity and their own strength will protect them. And yet when it comes to "these books," the approach is to prevent exposure at all costs. 

I taught high school and middle school English for 39 years. Students mostly grow up to be the people their parents set them up to be. Sometimes that means they grow up and hold onto their parents' values every step of the way. Sometimes they grow up and their experience leads them to move away from their parents' values because they see a world that does not match what their parents described. But books from the school library rarely, if ever, have a role in that process.

So I guess the last big step I'd offer is to trust your children. Talk to them about the books in question. If you have raised them well, with a string foundation in morals and decency, nothing they see in a book that they found in the school library is going to suddenly alter their world view. And if you have tried to raise them with a stunted, fragile worldview, nothing you can do will keep that from being shattered by the world at some point. 

As with many issues in the country, involving politicians who care far less about student well-being than about identifying an issue that can win them some votes--well, those folks are not going to help. Unfortunately, they're about to be all over this, and that's not going to help anybody. 

Classroom Management Secrets

This question has popped up a couple of times on my screen lately:

Which is the more essential classroom skill set - subject matter and pedagogical expertise OR the ability to “manage” behavioral issues?

It's a trick question. The ability to "manage" a classroom is rooted in subject matter and pedagogical expertise.

If you have ever wrangled toddlers, you probably know this simple trick--always be moving toward something. When I'm out and about with the Board of Directors, it's a losing proposition to say, "Okay, time to stop jumping off that log." It is never time to stop jumping off that log, and saying that it is simply opens a whole debate about when, if ever, such an imaginary time could actually come to pass. Instead, the winning proposition is, "Okay, let's go look at fire trucks." Do that, and log jumping will end on its own.

In other words, always be moving toward something rather than away from something.

In teacher school, this concept is expressed as "Focus on what you want them to do, not what you want them to not do." 

This makes many layers of sense. For one, the direction to stop doing something is always a step or two removed from your actual objective. Presumably you want students to "stop talking" for some reason, so why not move directly to the main thing you actually want-- look at this diagram or finish writing your sentences or tell me how this widget should be adjusted. So ask for that. "I'm not going to start class until everyone is quiet," is not the threat that you think it is.

But being able to move toward something requires you to have a firm grasp of what you want to move toward. Everyone has their favorite teaching metaphors; one of mine is thinking of teaching as helping students navigate a large territory, covered with forest and ponds and hills and any number of features. A teacher is a guide to that territory, and the better you know the territory, the better you can serve as a guide. You have to know what's there, the many ways to get from one point to another, and the various pitfalls that one might encounter. 

What are you trying to teach, why are you trying to teach it, and how are you trying to teach it. Know the answers and push forward, keeping your eye on the target just like a driver keeps their eyes on the road. 

It's not an easy balance to maintain. Push forward too fast and students are left behind. Too slowly, and they get bored waiting for you. Either way, issues will develop.

Really, classroom management is not like organizing activities for some strange alien race. Young humans have low tolerance for the same things as grown humans. Wasted time. Pointless activities. Demands for compliance for compliance's sake. Disrespect. These things draw out the contrary behavior in grown humans; why should young humans be any different? 

Yes, there is a world of classroom management techniques that are worth knowing. But everything is rooted in Knowing What The Hell You're Doing, both in your grasp of content and your lesson design. This is why tying teachers to a script or a tightly defined program is a recipe for chaos, and that's why so many schools that do such tying team it up with a heavily enforced demand for student compliance, a heavy-handed attempt to beat down the problems that they have asked for in their instructional design.

Deep content knowledge. Sound instructional design. Respect. Those three pillars undergird the whole business of classroom management. They look different depending on the teacher and the students, but without any one of them, you'll simply be trying to right the structure with a patchwork of classroom management techniques and compliance demands. 

ICYMI: Spooky Edition (10/31)

The Board of Directors will be out scrounging for candy dressed as a member of Koo Koo Kangaroo and a Construction Guy. I will be on the front steps of the Institute handing out candy to costumed wanderers of all ages. Hope you are having a fun evening wherever you are.

Where Facts Were No Match For Fear

Not actually about education, but certainly provides some insights into the kind of stuff we're seeing these days. The New York Times looks at an attempt to raise tourism in Montana.

Why we are suing Pennsylvania over school funding

Yes, that's happening in PA, and will probably provide a lesson of one sort or another for activists in other states. On The Morning Call.

This is the problem with ranking schools

I never get tired of watching people chastise US News and their crappy ranking lists. This time it's Ethan Hutt in the Washington Post.

Methods for comparing school site spending (and correctly making charter school comparisons)

Bruce Baker at School Finance 101. I know, it doesn't sound very sexy, but it's awfully useful for making comparisons that are actually valid.

A look at the groups supporting school board protesters nationwide

Anya Kamenetz at NPR giving a good overview of all these various outfits stirring the pot these days. 

Grit has been called the secret to success. New research says maybe not.\

Inc. has some unsurprising news--grit might not be the great be-all that Angela Duckworth and friends suggested it was.

Need teachers?

Nancy Flanagan looks at the staffing problems faced in districts across the country. Gee, what could the problem be?

Texas law due for a rework

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial board has a few thoughts about the poorly-written Texas gag law that led to a call for both-sidesing the Holocaust 

A Gay Music Teacher Got Married. The Brooklyn Diocese Fired Him.

This story from the New York Times explains how a religious school can get away with this, and will continue to.

The GOP's grievance industrial complex invades the classroom

Jennifer Berkshire in The Nation offers more perspective on the current dust-up across the country that has drawn a target on school districts.

Schools facing critical race theory battles are diversifying rapidly, analysis finds

This NBC piece from back in September is worth revisiting because it offers an answer to the question, "What do all these up-in-arms districts have in common." The answer may be that white folks have become less of a majority there.

Matt Krause’s campaign for attorney general comes with a reading list

Texas state rep Matt Krause has a list of 850 questionable books that he wants schools to reconsider. He's also running for state attorney general. Great opening line in this Texas Tribune piece-- "Book bans don't really work, except in politics."

Critical race theory: a case study in appropriation

From Friend of the Institute Barth Keck at CT News Junkie, a great reminder of how we got here. They said what they were going to do, they said they were doing it, they bragged about how successful they were at doing it, they said they'd done it. 

Your new Glenn Youngkin-approved AP English curriculum

Alexandra Petri is a national treasure. Sharp satire at the Washington Post.

The Sentences Computers Can't Understand

 Alternate title: Reason #451,632 that computer software, no matter how many times its vendors call it AI, should be allowed to assess student writing. Though you can also file this under "reasons that content knowledge is the foundation of literacy."

Our ability to use language is astonishing and magical. Now that the Board of Directors are 4.5 years old, I've again lived through the absolutely amazing spectacle of human language development. There are so many things we do without thinking--or rather, we do them with thinking that is barely conscious. And this is where software is still trying to catch up.

Meet the Winograd Schema. It's a collection of sentences that humans have little trouble understanding, but which confuse computers.

Frank felt crushed when his longtime rival Bill revealed that he was the winner of the competition. Who was the winner?

The drain is clogged with hair. It has to be cleaned. What has to be cleaned?

It's true that if a student wrote these in an essay, we might suggest they go back and punch the sentence up to reduce ambiguity. But for English language users who understand rivals and winners and competition and hair and drains and clogging, it's not hard to understand what these sentences mean. 

Well, not hard for humans. For computers, on the other hand. 

It's always important to remember that computers don't "understand" anything (as my professor told us in 1978, computers are as dumb as rocks). What computer can do is suss out patterns. Software that imitates language use does so basically (warning: gross oversimplification ahead) by just looking at giant heaps of examples and working out the pattern. When you read that GPT-3 is better than GPT-2, mostly what that means is that they've figured out a way to feed it even more examples to break down. When engineers say that the software is "learning," what they mean is that the software has broken down a few thousand more examples of how and when the word "hair" is used, not that the software has learned what hair is and how it works. 

This type of learning is how AI often wanders far astray, learning racist language or failing to recognize Black faces--the algorithm (really, a better name for these things than AI) can only "learn" from the samples it encounters.

So AI cannot read. It can only look at a string of symbols and check to see if the use of those symbols fits generally within the patterns established by however many examples it has "seen." And it cannot tell whether or not your student has written a coherent, clever, or even accurate essay--it can only tell if your student has used symbols in ways that fall within the parameters of the ways those symbols have been used in the examples it has broken down.

Essay assessment software has no business assessing student essays. 

As a bonus, here's a good little video on the topic from Tom Scott, whose usual thing is unusual places, but who also dips into language stuff.