ICYMI: Spongebob Edition (3/6)

 I'm coming off a week of working as the pit conductor for a local high school production of Spongebob: The Musical, which turns out to be actually a great little show, hilarious and silly and yet with much to say about friendship, science denialism, and how folks react to a crisis. And the music is great. It's not for your average high school--the technical requirements are considerable--but my old friends are talented leaders and they have a well-developed network. It was all a reminder of how rich and complicated the whole business of developing student theater can be, and how it gives some students a fantastic growth experience that helps them bloom and become the talented humans they can be (and none of it is useful for raising scores on the Big Standardized Test). 

But that was my adventure. Here's your reading from the week.

New teacher certification exam Will hurt Texas education

You know what Texas doesn't need? It doesn't need to add edTPA to its teacher requirements.

Georgia mailer backfires

Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children tried to boost vouchers in Georgia, using her time-honored technique of threatening the people on her own side. It didn't go well.

Why Public School Supporters Need to Keep On Pushing Back Against Laws Banning Discussion of “Divisive” Subjects at School

Jan Resseger looks at some of the news surrounding the wave of gag laws sweeping the nation.

Don’t Expect Your Students to Attend Your Funeral

At The Educator's Room, Jeremy Adams with a hard look at some of our romantic notions about teaching.

Why Teachers are Dropping Out

At The Nation, Jennifer Berkshire takes the unusual step of talking to actual teachers about the ongoing exodus from teaching.

Indiana Senate Kills CRT Panic Gag Law

Some good news; Indiana shot down its latest attempt at micro-managing teachers.

Lock and Load and Learning Loss

Nancy Flanagan looks at the rise of smack talk in society, and schools.

High School Newspapers are a thifty way to teach civics

Andrea Gabor at Bloomsburg looks at student journalism can become a doorway to civics education

Teaching the War in Ukraine is Fighting the War at Home

Steven Singer, current events in the classroom, and the Charge of the Light Brigade

Sad news from Florida

Scott McLeod reports on a student protest against the Don't Say Gay bill, and the administrative punishment that rained down on it. "Hand in that Pride flag, kid."

The One Where Pinky and the Brain Hire a Henchwoman

Tennessee continues to be a microcosm for all the worst parts of privatization, and TC Weber continues to bring the receipts for all the self-serving conflict of interest and profiteering. 

In Loco Parentis

Blue Cereal Education to parents-- I don't really want to raise your kid.

Detroit teachers have been through a lot. I’m still standing.

First person account at Chalkbeat from Dorothea Williams-Arnold

WV lawmakers push for larger control of education policy

West Virginia is poised to become one more state where the legislature wants to squash local control of schools.

College Board Vs. CRT Panic

The College Board is a for-profit company that makes a bundle selling products that make teenagers look smart as well as establishing itself as a gatekeeper for college entrance. It is amazing to me that some folks are still tricked by that name into thinking this is some sort of non-profit college entrance agency. Nope. The College Board has made some huge mistakes, including hiring Comon Core architect David "I'm no education expert" Coleman to be the Big Boss. They've gotten so many things wrong (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, for starters) that it seems fairly newsworthy when they get something right.

You can be excused for scrolling past the page entitled What AP Stands For, assuming that the answer is "money" or "market share" or "branding," but in fact it's worth a look. Some of the seven items might cause you to hiccup (like #1-- AP stands for clarity and transparency), but let's skip down to three other items:

3) AP opposes censorship. AP is animated by a deep respect for the intellectual freedom of teachers and students alike. If a school bans required topics from their AP courses, the AP Program removes the AP designation from that course and its inclusion in the AP Course Ledger provided to colleges and universities. For example, the concepts of evolution are at the heart of college biology, and a course that neglects such concepts does not pass muster as AP Biology.

4) AP opposes indoctrination. AP students are expected to analyze different perspectives from their own, and no points on an AP Exam are awarded for agreement with a viewpoint. AP students are not required to feel certain ways about themselves or the course content. AP courses instead develop students’ abilities to assess the credibility of sources, draw conclusions, and make up their own minds.

As the AP English Literature course description states: “AP students are not expected or asked to subscribe to any one specific set of cultural or political values, but are expected to have the maturity to analyze perspectives different from their own and to question the meaning, purpose, or effect of such content within the literary work as a whole.

5) AP courses foster an open-minded approach to the histories and cultures of different peoples. The study of different nationalities, cultures, religions, races, and ethnicities is essential within a variety of academic disciplines. AP courses ground such studies in primary sources so that students can evaluate experiences and evidence for themselves.

In particular, look at #3:

If a school bans required topics from their AP courses, the AP Program removes the AP designation from that course and its inclusion in the AP Course Ledger provided to colleges and universities. 

Yes, they include an item to insist that there's no indoctrinatin' going on in AP, but that's a restriction that cuts both ways, given that the CRT panic crowd has been legislating requirements such as one requiring that teachers say only nice things about the Founding Fathers. 

But that #3 is a tough stand--particularly when you realize that to enforce it, the College Board would have to cut into its own revenue stream. I especially look forward to some legislator during debate of one of these many gag laws pointing out "If we pass this, no school in the state will be able to offer AP history." 

Whether the College Board will actually back up its tough talk remains to be seen. But for a company that manages to get so many things wrong, this is a welcome change of pace. 

KY: The Panic Comes For Dolly Parton

Dolly Parton is a national damn treasure, but one Kentucky state senator had the guts, briefly, to express concern about Parton's signature philanthropic effort being a piece of the Great Indoctrinatin' going on in America.

Stephen Meredith was a hospital CEO before being elected to Kentucky's senate in 2017. Wednesday he was in committee discussing SB 164, a bill for creating a state partnership with Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, one of the best examples of thoughtful, useful, not-trying-to-take-over-a-government function philanthropy you'll find. The Imagination Library puts books in the hands of children 0-5. Once a month, a free book arrives addressed to your child. The Board of Directors has been signed up since birth; the books are wonderfully curated, selected for age appropriateness and an absolute model of blending classic and new and diverse books. It is literally one of the best things a wealthy person has ever done.

But Wednesday, Meredith had some concerns. Noting that the bill had "age appropriate" in the language, he wondered "if that shouldn't include subject appropriate as well"... "given today's environment."

Sigh. Okay, I don't know Meredith, so maybe what he meant to suggest is that they needed to head off crazy-pants CRT/LGBTQ protestors so they wouldn't descend upon the bill. But he did note that he's heard about "inappropriate literature" given to pre-schoolers. And he also notes that "players change over the course of time, and things get shifted," so I guess he's worried that Indoctrinators might somehow take over Parton's program.

Stella Parton, Dolly's sister, was having none of it, and on Thursday morning she was on Twitter calling him out:

I'm outraged this morning that anyone, let alone a GOP Sen. Meredith from the grat state of Ky. Would question my sister Doly or even insinuate something sinister about the "Imagination Library" for children. Appalachian people have been maligned as uneducated and to have a Senator from Appalachia state even think this much less say anything derogatory about this incredible program is an outrage!! I would like to see your IQ score Sen. Meredith along with at least a dozen more of you GOP nimrods. The next you know, you will be trying to burn children's books.

Most new outlets have edited her response down a bit. As you can see, she was pretty pissed. She also accused him of using the phrase "indoctrinate the children," which he didn't. The whole blow-up was enough to make Dolly Parton trend on Twitter Thursday.

Meredith told a news reporter, "I'm disappointed, but you know, that's social media today." In the end, he did vote for the bill.

If nothing else, the flap suggests that there are limits to what folks can say in their pursuit of anti-indoctrinatin'.

Learning Loss and the Big Standardized Test

On Twitter yesterday I posted a thread that seemed to touch a few nerves, so I'm sharing it here as well.

You want to talk about learning loss? Then talk about all the learning lost to high stakes testing. 1/

— Peter Greene (@palan57) March 1, 2022

Not just the test itself, but the time spent in test prep and just plain learning how to take that kind of test and speak the test manufacturers' language. Plus the pre-test tests (to see how well we're on track for the test) 2/

— Peter Greene (@palan57) March 1, 2022

People who have not been in the classroom for the last couple of decades have no idea how much education time has been eroded by high stakes testing. 3/

— Peter Greene (@palan57) March 1, 2022

Want to address learning loss? Never mind tutoring and summer school. In most schools. you could add 6-10 weeks of instruction just by completely scrapping the Big Standardized Test. 4/

— Peter Greene (@palan57) March 1, 2022

And it wouldn't cost the taxpayers a cent. But it would make test manufacturers and the Data Gods sad. "But we need the data to address the problem," say testocrats. 5/

— Peter Greene (@palan57) March 1, 2022

It's a Kafkaesque bad office joke--let's make people spend more time drawing up reports on how the job is going so that they spend less and less time actually doing the job. 6/

— Peter Greene (@palan57) March 1, 2022

Note also that we have the research telling us the data collected doesn't help improve test scores https://t.co/OG4TdXbMRQ 7/

— Peter Greene (@palan57) March 1, 2022

And test data isn't any good at improving teacher evaluation, either.https://t.co/Fs3pO6Kj2S 8/

— Peter Greene (@palan57) March 1, 2022

It is amazing to me that twenty-some years on, we are still here. Responders included a huge number of teachers telling stories of the time lost to testing and test prep, plus a much smaller assortment of people saying things like "But how will we know how students are doing" and "If you just teach 'em good, the test scores will take care of themselves." 

How can we be a whole generation down the road and still be wasting time on the Big Standardized Test as if it were a valuable data-gathering tool that told us Many Useful Things about education? How can the backbone of our educational accountability systems be a bad test that, in its high-stakes threats, brings more damage than help? 

 

Catalyze Challenge: Throwing Money At Edupreneurs

It's another one of those things that helps you realize that some reformsters are operating in just another world entirely.

Meet the Catalyze Challenge. It's a grant competition that "supports innovation in career-connected learning that meaningfully bridge education and career." Its analysis of the need is the same old same old-- "Ourt education system promises economic opportunity for all--but right now, too many students graduate high school and college without the resources, skills, and support to thrive in their careers."

Press about the initiative says it's about how "to help foster new learning models." The idea is to fund "education entrepreneurs" aka education flavored businesses. And if we look at the funders--well, it's a familiar roster.

Sponsoring partners are the Joyce Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Charkes Koch Foundation, and American Student Assistance. Koch has loaned Brennan Brown, their director of Education Partnerships, as an advisor. Brown's previous education experience is teaching at Northwood University for a decade. Northwood is located in Midland, Michigan; they're home to the DeVos Graduate School of Management and annually award the Richard DeVos Young Entrepreneur Award to honor the Amway founder who was "a true friend of Northwood University."

The challenge has two tracks. For Accelerate Award you can score up to half a million dollars; the Ignite Award goes up to $50K. There's a lot of talk about unlocking career success for students, equity, scalability, career identity development, post-high school pathways, and being groundbreaking (at one point the term "moonshot" crops up.

The implementing partners include good old NewVentureFund, a kind of venture philanthropy/lobbying/consulting supposedly-left-tilted outfit, connected to The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and considered by some to be a dark money group, and they appear to indulge in plenty of the same sort of faux group and astro-turfy sponsorship we know and love from other sources, and they themselves come under the umbrella of DC-base Arabella Advisors.

But the lead operational group appears to be Common Group, a "social impact consulting firm." They partner with groups including the Charter School Growth Fund, The Walton Foundation, Education Quality Outcomes, Christensen Institute, and, of course, the Charles Koch Foundation. Their team rings all the familiar bells. Alicia Bolton, the Program Manager is a product of the Broad Academy and worked in the Obama/Duncan Ed Department before becoming the Director of Caree Education in DC schools.  The Principal, Colleen Miner,  spent three years at McKinsey. Senior Advisor Rachel Wexler lists herself on LinkedIn as a "social impact consultant, change agent, and executive coach; she's worked for Penn Foster Education and Pearson. CEO George Vinton started out as a Client Director for Unipart Expert Practices (consulting firm) before getting a Masters in Education at Harvard and starting Common Group in September of 2020, in San Francisco.

There are a thousand rabbit holes to go down here, but the pattern is already there. The usual reformster social engineering philanthropy along with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, professional consultants and people who think that someone can be unironically called a Change Agent.

This is the second round of these awards. School districts are allowed to apply, but in fifteen previous winners there are no public schools in sight. There are three initiatives for using digital remote materials to rural schools including the Crowder College initiative to "reshape the narrative about career opportunities in rural America to include a flourishing digital workforce"), a couple of IT programs (one provides BlPOC students a chance to "get real-world experience doing web development and social media marketing for mission-driven organizations), some tech-based interny things, and lots of tech-based distance programs. Lots and lots of computer technology based stuff, much of it connected to a particular geographic area, and some of it looking suspiciously like elevated language wrapped around fairly pedestrian and redundant programs; a couple of these sound suspiciously like "We'll give them some software that lets them look up different careers." 

But then, that's the kind of stuff when you have a pile of money driven by people who don't actually know much at all about K-12 education, and/or are most interested in pushing ideas of their own, and who harbor the underlying bias the public education needs to be hit by "break things and move fast" rather than reinforced and supported, that the solution for educational progress must somehow be wrapped in the entrepreneurial spirit. 

This is just a sample of what's out there, and probably not the most harmful thing that anyone is pushing, but a couple of million dollars represents a pretty large opportunity cost. After all these years, you'd think they would get better at throwing money around, but the signs are not good. 

Burnout and Moral Injury

I never had a name for it. But there was a frustration, something like anger and a kick in the gut, that I was being required to do things as a teacher that I knew were bad practice, not just useless in achieving success, but detrimental to my students.

I first encountered the term "moral injury" in writing about the medical field (in an article no longer accessible on line). But I recognized it immediately from the last many years of my teaching career, and I think it's a useful concept to add to the whole "Is it low morale, or burnout, or what?" It has roots in work with soldiers and veterans and is sometimes connected to PTSD.

Here's a useful definition from Psychology Today:

Moral injury is the social, psychological, and spiritual harm that arises from a betrayal of one’s core values, such as justice, fairness, and loyalty.

Or this one from Syracuse University's Moral Injury Project:

Moral injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.

There's no question that teachers do not deal with the kind of intense moral stress experienced by a soldier bearing arms in the field of battle. And I am naturally dubious about attempts to give Things That Happen In Life a fancy nametag and scholarly attention. But I still think the concept of moral injury is a useful model for teachers (and others) in understanding why the work they took on with such high hopes and great dreams has begun to make them feel bad.

I used to make my students a promise every fall--that I would never knowingly waste their time and that everything I asked them to do would have a useful purpose (and that I was prepared to explain that purpose). Then came the Big Standardized Test, and I was told that I should emphasize how very important these tests were --except, of course, they weren't. Certainly they weren't important for the students' learning. I was required to break my promise--to waste their time--and expected to lie to them about it, or, alternately, act counter to the directives and leadership of my bosses. Either way, I was going to run counter to core values about my professional role.

With time, there was more. "Here are some 'coaching' books," they said. And there they were--pages and pages of short article excerpts paired with multiple questions. Workbooks that served no purpose except test prep. Days of teaching lost to test prep tests--tests that had no purpose except to target students who might fall on the line between proficient and not, so that we could hammer them with more test prep and maybe get our numbers up. 

And all of this wasn't just a waste of their time (and mine), but it crowded out things that would have been, in my considered professional opinion, useful and worthwhile. Most of my career I worked to become more efficient each year and thereby squeeze just a little more educating into my 178 days, but in the last years in the classroom, I switched to damage control, to minimizing the erosion, no longer asking what I could add, but what I could cut with the least damage (while simultaneously trying to gauge just how insubordinate I could afford to be). 

Moral injury is said to have multiple effects, including depression and "serious distress." My last few years on the job, I was just angry most of the time (just go back and read this blog from the years before I retired and see how permanently pissed off I was--not that I'm all sunshine and cream now, but back then it was on another level). 

We can call it burnout or low morale or moral injury. Burnout suggests that something inside the teacher just couldn't take the pressure, without looking at where the pressure comes from. Low morale suggests that administrators aren't having enough pep rallies. Both of those terms nod to the unique stress these days that come from a nation of people and politicians yammering about how awful teachers are. And all that is before we pile on the issues related to teaching in a pandemic.

But moral injury points to another source of stress--teachers being asked to operate contrary to their professional values. About the only attempt to address that has been to try to get the teaching profession to change its values, to try to crank out new teachers who believe that aligning to the standards so that you can more effectively teach to the test--that's what good teaching is. I'm not sure how effective they've been in selling this new model of teaching values, but it certainly doesn't seem to be a model with great recruiting power, as witnessed by the steady drying up of the teacher pipeline. 

Teaching is not simply some kind of technical job; it has a strong moral component that requires teachers to bring their values to work. When the job, either on the national or building level, requires them not just to leave those values outside the classroom, but to actively violate them, then you get the kind of massive job dissatisfaction we're seeing these days. 

None of this may fix anything, but it may be useful to give it a name.

Study: Test Data Does Not Help Students Raise Test Scores

Today in "Things Teachers Have Been Saying For Twenty Years But Are Now Being Verified By Research," we present Heather Hill, a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. 

Hill has recently publicized some of her recent study which somehow combines the obvious with dubious conclusions. Here she was at EdWeek back in 2020:

Question: What activity is done by most teachers in the United States, but has almost no evidence of effectiveness in raising student test scores?

Answer: Analyzing student assessment data.

This practice arose from a simple logic: To improve student outcomes, teachers should study students’ prior test performance, learn what students struggle with, and then adjust the curriculum or offer students remediation where necessary. By addressing the weaknesses revealed by the test results, overall student achievement would improve.

Oh, look--the sun is rising in the East

Well, the "simple logic" was never simple nor logical. Or rather, this is what teachers already do with their own testing. What was actually proposed was that students take a poorly designed test, followed by providing teachers with very little data, much of it bad, in order to raise test scores. Teachers knew pretty much immediately that A) this was not going to work and B) wasn't even that great of a goal.

Hill has some thoughts about why using test data hasn't improved anything. They are not great thoughts, and we get the hint in the very next sentence.

Yet understanding students’ weaknesses is only useful if it changes practice.

Hill is not the only researcher to note the "problem" and mis-diagnose the "solution." Hechinger recently talked to Hill and two other researchers who "explained" that "while data is helpful in pinpointing students’ weaknesses, mistakes and gaps, it doesn’t tell teachers what to do about them."

So here are the issues that these researchers have missed.

1) Raising test scores is a lousy educational goal. There is no research to suggest that raising a student's score will improve their life outcomes. Nor is there any research to suggest that the tests are actual measures of educational quality or actual student achievement. This is a good time to recommend, yet again, Daniel Koretz's The Testing Charade. Testing data continues to be exemplified by that story of the drunk searching for his lost car keys not where they were lost, but under a streetlamp because the light is better there. 

2) The tests yield little useful data. Testocrats love to talk about these tests as if they yield all sorts of rich data. They don't. Their validity--aka their ability to measure what they claim they can measure--is unproven. And multiple choice questions are great for machine correction, but not great for measuring any level of deep understanding.

More importantly from the classroom teacher standpoint, the tests are a black box. Teachers are forbidden to see the questions or the answers, and so the data is just a score. In my own classroom, with my own tests, I would operate much as Hill describes-- give the test, then break down the wrong answers to see exactly what kinds of mistakes students are making. None of that is possible with the Big Standardized Test--from those I would get things like a single score on "Reading Nonfiction." Test manufacturers have whipped all sorts of pretty graphs and colored charts, but the data is still meager and thin.

3) I can't just walk by one of the assumptions of this whole approach is that teachers either can't or won't do their jobs, and so some system of carrots and sticks must be devised to get them to do the work that they signed up for. Hill suggests a picture of teachers who just keep doing the same thing over and over, as if teachers are not motivated or capable of searching out other techniques and approaches. 

Hill is correct in noting that the infamous Data Meetings imposed on teachers by all sorts of data-loving administrators aren't helping. Again, not news. But when you've got bad, thin data that you're supposed to apply toward a pointless goal, what can you expect.

Data-loving testocrats have all along insisted that those darn teachers just don't want to use data properly. But teachers collect, crunch and act on data on a daily basis (though they don't always turn it into numbers and charts). What testocrats seem unwilling to admit, accept, or even see, is that the BS Tests offer little useful data for the process. 

Likewise, the whole "someone should show teachers the better way to teach these things they aren't teaching" always seems to break down when it's time for edu-amateurs to show teachers how to do their jobs better. Hill says that "teachers need to change their approach to address student misunderstandings," as if all teachers use one approach, though she names neither the approach they use or the one she thinks they should use. 

Nevertheless, it appears this earthbound equine will continue to be reflogged. Hill's appearance in Hechinger was prompted by a presentation at the "newly formed" Research Partnership for Professional Learning, yet another group dedicated to fixing teachers. Members include Teaching Lab and TNTP, and sponsors include The Walton Family Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So expect what we've had for decades--attempts to explain the failure of beloved high-stakes standardized testing data-driven eduication, blaming everything except the fundamental flaws in the approach.