Teacher Job Satisfaction Hits Bottom

 That's the headline we're seeing all over, based on the results from an Education Week/Merrimack College teacher survey

The survey was conducted between January 9 and February 23 of this year, with a sample of 1,324 teachers. And the chart that everyone keeps zooming in on is this one--

--which admittedly is pretty ugly, though it needs to be said that the Merrimack survey is in its first year, and all the other chart data comes from the old MetLife Survey of the American Teacher. I'll admit my misgivings--can a 1,324 sample really capture the full range of what's out there in the teaching profession with all the different districts, states, ages, disciplines involved? But these folks do this kind of thing professionally, so I'm going to (cautiously) take their word for it. 

While the satisfaction chart is the one that will be discussed at length, there are others that jump out at me. For instance, look at this chart dealing with teachers' perceptions of their own control and influence:

Not a single area had over 50% strong agreement. Barely 50% showed any agreement that they have control and influence over what they teach. And a teeny tiny 5% strongly agree they have control and influence over policies in their workplace. Which is nuts. This chart describes a profession in which folks largely have little or no control over the most critical aspects of their work, a profession in which their professional judgment counts for diddly squat. 

The survey covers many of the usual suspects (51% strongly disagree that they are fairly paid), but if you want to see the roots of teacher dissatisfaction, look at that control and influence chart.

Respect data is broken down by within school, by students' parents, and by general public. Males generally feel more respected than females, and far fewer feel respected and seen as a professional by the general public than by parents--not a huge surprise.

There are some intriguing breakdowns of data in the survey. One segment looks at topics that deserve more media attention, broken down by political party and urban/suburban/rural jobs. On the item of "inequities in our schools due to issues of race or poverty," suburban and rural teacher are split. Democrats in those areas are seventy-some percent in agreement that more coverage of the topic is needed, but in Republican teachers are around 27% in agreement. However, in urban districts, while Dem numbers stay the same, 60% of GOP teachers agree more coverage is warranted. The topic that most needs more media attention, according to all subgroups-- teachers' working conditions and school climate.

There is also data about how teachers spend their time, and what they wish they could spend more time on. 31% would like to spend less time on general administrative work; 29% would like to spend more time on individual planning and preparation. According to the survey, teachers report spending over fifty hours per week in total; the surprise result here is that teachers at schools with over 75% free/reduced lunch students report 52 work hours, and teachers at schools with under 25% free/reduced lunch students reported 57 hours.

55% said they were "not very" or "not at all" likely to tell their younger self to pursue teaching as a career. 

There's more to chew on here (and if you want to see it yourself, you have to register for a copy) and maybe after Easter I'll sit down to chomp away-- but these are the highlights. Watch for lots of repackaging of these results in the days ahead.

MAGA And Social Isolation

It is easy to think of MAGA in terms of everything it hates, the many things it strikes out against. It's even easy to slip into the habit of making fun of it. Sure, MAGA, go ahead and call for a boycott of Disney, because I'm sure that will totally bring that gazillion-dollar multinational conglomerate to its knees. 

But I'd suggest we view the MAGA anti-ness through a different frame, another way of seeing what's going on and why even a call for boycotting Disney is a bad sign for the country.

The MAGA enemies list is also a Do Not Trust list, a list of people and things that good MAGAs should not talk to, listen to, engage with.

Do not trust Disney.

Do not trust Democrats.

Do not trust public schools or public school teachers.

Do not trust the news media.

Do not trust maskers and vaccination advocates.

Do not trust non-Christians.

Do not trust books. 

Do not trust any non-MAGA entertainment media.

Do not trust any sort of democratic process.

Do not trust anyone who is not a True American.

And if we have any other individuals we need to add to the list, we'll just tag them as "communist" or "pedophile." 

Taken all together, this is not simply the behavior of a movement that wants to reshape society. It also bears a striking resemblance to the behavior of a controlling, abusive partner, whose tactics begin with cutting the target off from all their other family and friends, repeatedly driving home the message, "You must only trust me, only talk to me, only get your directions from me." 

Much of this can be created by amplifying legitimate concerns that people already have. Parents have always been, and will always be, apprehensive at the prospect of handing their beloved children over to someone else's care. Elections always seem like a crapshoot, a foregone conclusion beyond the control of individual voters. And our country has always fostered a strong thread of anti-egghead distrust of folks with too much book learnin' (who in turn do themselves no favors by hiding behind layers of opaque argle bargle). 

But it takes an extra effort to ramp this up, to deliberately attack people's trust in the institutions and relationships that help society function.

The implications of such a concerted effort to bar people from all these parts of society are many. One is that the people raising, amplifying, and even manufacturing the problems (CRT! Commies! Fake news!) are not looking for solutions. Anything that sows more chaos and distrust serves their purpose, but they have zero interest in solving the problems in any kind of positive or healing fashion. Trying to engage in discussion is hopeless, because the discussion isn't really about whatever topic is being discussed, but about the subtext which is "These People can't be trusted!!" 

MAGA is not conservatism. It pretends to be, mostly by holding up an imaginary vision of society from 60 years ago as its ideal, but most principles of conservatism are nowhere to be found. Individual responsibility? No, individual power. Small government? No--huge government, but only in our hands. 

Trump didn't create MAGA--he just named it and harnessed it. But these movements carry their own cancer wired into their dna. In an authoritarian movement, power doesn't come from principle, but from an individual who ascends to a cult of personality, and they only way to advance in such a system is by pulling down whoever stands in the way of your own elevation. Watch the GOP primaries where candidates try to out-MAGA each other, attacking each other far more viciously than any Democrat has the guts to do. When Trump finally dies, the unholy hell that will be unleashed in the scramble to take his place will be incredible to behold.

In the meantime, schools have to somehow function in a world in which many of the students and parents they serve have been taught not to trust them, not to listen to them, and to always assume the worst of them. This is not a fun world to work in. The hope is that trust is best built person to person. People don't personally know their tv anchor, the authors of books in their library--but they know their child's teacher. 

It's tempting to approach MAGAs as dangerous, antagonistic buffoons, but it may be more accurate to approach them as folks who have been kept locked in the basement and told that everyone outside of their household is dangerous (though mixed in with them, the same people who kept them locked in that basement). Maybe "forgive them, for they know not what they do" may be a bridge too far, but it's worth a thought.

MAGA keeps a lot of people scared, convinces a lot of people that there's a big, dangerous crowd that they dare not buck. MAGA's ranks have been swelled by non-believers who aren't ready to stand up yet, and things like the Disney boycott call are in part for their benefit. Listen only to MAGA, and pay no attention to those Other Voices suggesting that this (whatever it is this week) is wrong, scary, bad and even nuts. If you can't make them loyal, at least keep them isolated, because if I keep you locked in the basement, I don't really have to convince you to agree with me. 

Choice vs. Culture Battles

Some school choice fans are pretty steadfast in their belief in free market dynamics and in the need to let all parents choose as they see fit. But as the culture debates heat up, a whole group of choicers are turning out to be less committed to choice than to other things. Note these three stories.

In New Hampshire (in a story that we've looked at before), the Croydon community had actually installed a pretty robust choice system that allowed parents to choose any public or private school in the area. But it was expensive, and the Free State Libertarians who run much of the town's boards decided to cut the funding for the district in half. This means that most of the choice that parents in the district previously enjoyed are now are available only if the parents can afford to chip in a pile of money themselves. This will be a particular challenge as the town does not have its own high school. But it turns out that choice for parents is not as big a deal as cutting taxes and getting government out of the education biz. As I've often argued, school choice--particularly the voucher brand--is too often not about empowering parents, but about saying to them, "We cut you a check. Educating your children is now your problem, not ours. Good luck."

In Alabama, Tim James is a candidate for governor, and part of his platform is that public schools are failing and "school choice must be available for the parent and guardian of every student." Further, he says, "we need options tailored to each child's needs." 

Well, not each child. Turns out that Alabama is home to a unique charter school, the Magic City Acceptance Academy, a school that accepts all students but puts a special emphasis on LGBTQ-affirming atmosphere and programs. James has targeted this school in a campaign ad; the principal of the school says James is "scaring the hell out of our kids." James is using the school as a target, saying that as governor he would "have opposed the formation of this school and would have vetoed any budget that funded it." He charges the school with "exploitation" of children and "not education." 

So school choice is not as important as clamping down on that LGBTQ stuff. Or, as the James campaign calls it, "perversion." Meanwhile, the school has hired some extra security.

In Georgia, two bills tried to make their way through the legislature this year, and they tell us something about the collision of culture warriors and choice.

One was a version of the education savings account bills that have been cropping up across the country. As with most of these bills, it included a non-interference clause saying that just because a school was getting taxpayer dollars via voucher, that didn't mean that the state had any authority telling them what to do.

The other was a version of the standard anti-CRT and Don't Say Gay language with one striking difference--SB 613 sought to extend prohibitions against discussion of gender roles and sexual identity to any "private or non-public" school receiving voucher money. This clearly does not go well with an injunction against state interference in how voucher-accepting schools can be run, but apparently in Georgia the thinking is that the state should leave private schools alone when they want to discriminate against LGBTQ students, but it should interfere if the private school wants to demonstrate acceptance of those students. 

As the culture battles continue, I expect we'll see more of this-- choice is great, but only if it includes the acceptable choices. Parents should have the right to choose--but not those choices that accept LBTQ students are human beings or that teach all that Black Stuff. In the end, for some folks, school choice is really just another mechanism for imposing their preferred culture on everyone else, an Orwellian option in which "choice" actually means "no choice at all."

Video: CRT Panic: What's Behind It

Here's a ten minute explainer from More Perfect Union, a left-tilted outfit that produces videos with a labor union focus. You may or may not agree with everything here, but it's a good quick job of connecting dots between the Critical Race Theory panic, and particularly benefits from the inclusion of a guy who used to work for the Goldwater Institute setting up this very sort of initiative.

Yes, Lesson Plans. But--

I don't think a week goes by that I don't find someone on the interwebs arguing that writing out lesson plans is a big fat waste of time. I'm not convinced.

I've worked with too many student teachers and even beginning teachers who really needed to write lesson plans. They were stepping in front of a class without really figuring out what exactly they were doing, why they were doing it, or how they would know that they had accomplished it. Their lesson plans were basically "Cover chapter 3" or "Go over punctuation rules." A written lesson plan is a good way to figure out what you're going to do, particularly at the point of your career where you don't have any of the elements of a lesson programed into your brain well enough to use them reflexively.

Also, it's appropriate for teachers to give some account of what they're doing in the classroom.

That said, here are some ways to do written lesson plans that don't do anybody any good.

Detailed explanation of standards alignment. Whether it's Common Core or your state's renamed Common Core or some original state standards, there are administrators who love this alignment baloney. It isn't helpful for the teacher in designing or delivering instruction, but folks in the main office love it for providing a paper trail of "proof" that your school is totally hitting all the standards, or for doing some kind of alignment study to identify "gaps." Either way, it's bureaucratic paper shuffling, not actual lesson preparation.

Mindless adherence to a particular template. If the teacher is asking "What can I use to fill in these blanks" instead of "How do I want to design this lesson," they're wasting their time. This crops up especially if your district uses some digital lesson plan platform, thereby guaranteeing that the lesson plan will not be in a location or form that is at all useful to the teacher (unless she prints the lesson plans out on paper). 

So much detail that a semi-literate chimp could deliver the lesson. Because no amount of detail will make that possible, unless the teacher involved is a Instructional Deliver Meat Widget. This is why your lesson plans get shorter as you gather experience; you no longer need to write out the full details of how you introduce the usage unit. Yes, maybe there will be a substitute in for you, but let's face it--they probably aren't certified in your area, anyway, and you're going to end up creating some foolproofish sub plans separate from what you would do if you were there.

Note: Beware administrators who demand this kind of painful detail; they're spending too much time thinking about how they could eliminate dependence on actual human employees.

Just copying over the instructions from the canned teaching program. First, if the detailed lesson plans are already in the canned teacher-proof program that your district bought and now insists you implement "with fidelity," why should you be copying it over? What is the point? Second, if that's what your district is doing, leave and find a better job. That is not teaching, and shame on your administration.

Playing administrative cat and mouse. This is when the whole "turn in your written lesson plans" thing is just administrators playing gotcha with staff, trying to catch them not planning the right things or violating some valuable paperwork rule. I consider these situations fair game for writing any old thing on the plans, and if you're ever called on it, just explain you had to make some changes on the fly. This is Dilbert territory, where you lose time doing the job so that you can make a report on how the job is going. It wastes the time of every single person involved, so the goal is to waste as little of your own time as possible. 

The dust collectors. These are the lesson plans that teachers are required to write, secretaries are required to check off, and which nobody ever actually looks at ever again. This is some Kafkaesque baloney happening at some schools. 

You may have noticed the underlying theme here-- lesson plans are most useful when they are useful to the teacher. Include what you find useful in the format that you find useful. Everything else is no help in actual classroom teaching, and classroom teaching is supposed to be the point. 

I have long suspected that a school's lesson plan policy is a canary in the administrative coal mine, an indicator of whether administration is focused on helping teachers do the best job they can, or focused on treating teachers like large children who have to be made to jump through hoops to Keep Them Honest, whether the center of the school's work is in the classroom or in the front office. 

SCOTUS Will Take On School Prayer

Later this month, the Supreme Court will take on the case of Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. If you have not been paying attention to this case of the praying coach, you should take a look, because once again the court is contemplating smashing holes in the wall between church and state.

The case comes from Washington State, where high school football coach Joe Kennedy made a practice of taking a knee for a brief prayer at the end of games. He started the practice when he was hired in 2008, along with motivational prayers for the team, and the district let it go while it was small and quiet. But then he started taking his knee in the middle of the football stadium, while players were still on the field and fans were in the stadium. It became quite a Thing, with players (sometimes from both teams) joining him for the prayer and, reportedly on one occasion, so many folks rushing the prayer that they knocked over marching band members. The district told him to knock it off and tried to find a compromise (he was offered another location), but Kennedy decided he would Take A Stand and keep at it anyway. Here's how Vox describes the next stage of this mess:

What followed was a circus. Kennedy went on a media tour presenting himself as a devout coach who “made a commitment with God” to performatively pray after each game. Good Morning America did a segment on him. Conservative media ran with headlines like “High School Coach Bullied Into Dropping Prayer at Football Games.” By the end of the month, 47 members of Congress — all Republicans — wrote to Leavell in support of Kennedy.

The district put him on administrative leave. Kennedy decided to take the case to court. He lost on the lower levels, but he had established a Cause. In the meantime, he did not reapply for the job, though conservative media like to report that he was fired from coaching at the school. 

Kennedy acquired legal representation from First Liberty Institute, a Texas-based legal outfit specializing in cases for the Christian Right. They ran the case up to SCOTUS, but in 2019 the Supremes sent it back to the minors, because more facts needed to be developed, but Justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh indicated that they didn't much like the lower court ruling against the former coach.

But he hasn't given up. Fox has had him on numerous times, where he explains that he has to fight for what is right and what is right for America. Besides his high powered legal firm and the above-mentioned 47 Congresspersons, Kennedy has drawn support from folks like Mike Pence and Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita.

The lower court ruled, essentially, that Kennedy was working as a public employee and therefor his private First Amendment rights didn't apply, which ironically is much like the argument conservatives make when they say that teachers can't just teach whatever they choose or read whatever they like in a classroom (I should note that essentially I agree with them). 

Defenders of the former coach argue that the prayer wasn't mandatory, which is a baloney argument. Reminds me of how high school teams have "optional" practices during the pre-season, and every player understands that these practices are only optional if you don't care whether you get to play or not. Coach Kennedy never waved his players onto the field to join him--he didn't have to. As one atheist player complained, he felt the need to participate in the prayer because he wouldn't get to play as much if he didn't. 

The SCOTUS objections to the lower court ruling, written by Alito, is even more bonkers, suggesting that the coach was "plainly not on duty." I don't know how they do things in Washington, but here in my neighborhood if a coach got in his car and went home five seconds after the final whistle, leaving his teenaged athletes to get themselves in and out of the locker room and on their way, that coach would be having a Come To Jesus meeting the very next morning.

To me (and plenty of other folks), Kennedy's behavior is a clear Constitutional violation. But the way things are tending these days in SCOTUSLand, I'm not confident that we aren't going to see a newly invented right of public school employees to exercise their right to evangelize whenever they wish. 

There are so many problems here. Sooooo many. Let's start with the teaming up a right to freely practice your religion as a school employee with the recently-created right to exercise your religion by denying service to people to whom you object--will public school teachers not only be able to start classes with prayers, but also refuse to teach LGBTQ students? 

There's also the Be Careful What You Wish For element. How about a coach who lays out his prayer rug on the fifty yard line so he can kneel toward Mecca? How about a coach who wants to honor the team victory by sacrificing a live chicken on the field? And you can bet that the Satanic Temple will be ready with more of the sorts of challenges they have presented in the past.

And what about students who aren't Christian? If the court decides to open more religious floodgates, there are plenty of administrators and teachers who will sail happily through them. I know-- I used to work for and with them. In 1997, a district just up the road ended up in court because an atheist student sicced the ACLU on them over prayers at graduation. It was ugly--adults in the community accused the student of doing Satan's Work. The student won, further cementing the idea that graduation prayers could happen only if student initiated (wink wink, nudge nudge). And yet, with that clear local legal precedent, I listened to superintendents open sixth grade graduations with a prayer-- and not just a bland generic God prayer, but an explicitly Jesusy prayer. All of which reminds me of my former student who suffered through a year of an elementary teacher who tried to convert her from Judaism. 

If Kennedy wins, things will get ugly in many corners of the country. But there will be much rejoicing among the people who believe that Christians need to "take schools back." 

Meanwhile, I'm sure I'm not the first person to suggest that Joseph Kennedy and his supporters check out the Book of Matthew 6:5-6--

5 “And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 6 But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

SCOTUS is supposed to be looking at the case later this month. Stay tuned. 

James Blew Wants To Squelch Title I

James Blew has made a career out of ed reformsterism. He was director of Student Success California, part of the 50CAN reformy network, the Alliance for School Choice, and he served a stint as president of StudentsFirst, the national reform advocacy group founded by Michelle Rhee, former DC chancellor and ed reform's Kim Kardashian. He was the director of the Walton family Foundation's K-12 "reform investments" for a decade. His background is, of course, not education, but business, politics and "communications."

In July of 2018, he rounded that career in dismantling public ed by going to work for Betsy DeVos as Assistant Secretary for Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, where he continued that work. After that, he became a roaming consultant and then launched the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies ("America is under siege by radical activists and teacher union bosses. DFI exists to fight back.")

Blew pops up occasionally at Education Next, the publication of the right-tilted Fordham Institution thinky tank, most recently to complain that the Biden budget wants to spend too much money on education, specifically, Title I. 

Blew has articulated some special positions before, like the time he argued that schools aren't systematically racist, they're just a system that reinforces racism, and then extended that thought to say that, actually, schools are the source of racism. But this piece is a good concise example of the arguments being made now around Biden's education spending.

Blew is honest about his ideal funding arrangement right up front, as he introduces the idea that Biden's view of the federal role in education funding is all wrong:

Looking critically at it will help explain why Betsy DeVos and other thoughtful conservatives advocate block-granting the whole amount to states without strings, and then weaning them off federal funds completely over time.

Federal spending on education should be $0.00, so the budget proposal's big numbers are Bad. Having expressed his real reason for the objection (the feds shouldn't spend money on education), he will now try to construct some other arguments.

For instance, Now Is Not The Time because we have A) inflation, B) war and C) all those relief dollars that schools are "swimming--some would say drowning" in. 

But the big line item is Title I, and that's what Blew really wants to talk about. He wants you to know that 90% of districts and 60% of schools see a piece of this action. 

That’s based on the education department’s definition of “economically disadvantaged,” in case you thought Title I-A was directed to the less than 20 percent of American children who live in poverty.

Respect to Blew, whose snark game is strong. He also notes that "education department politicos" talk about the large asked-for increase 'defensively." They note that Biden promised to triple it (I can confirm that during the primary, Dem candidates got all caught up in a contest of Title I multipliers; given a long enough primary, we probably would have seen promises to increase it a gazillion times). 

But Blew is unimpressed. Title I is "immensely popular"--well, 'among public-school employees." It's aimed at children that "our K-12 system has historically failed to educate" and is helpful for "if nothing else, assuaging guilt." It "flows painlessly from federal coffers," and finally, "compliance and management of Title I creates more than a few jobs." Blew says "Title I has a good brand, especially among public-school employees." 

If you don't yet get that Title I is kind of a scam, Blew goes on to claim that "economically disadvantaged students are, sadly, still ill-educated today pretty much as they were in 1965." He is not going to offer any evidence for that assertion.

Blew offers some explanation of the tactics behind Title I. Democrats, of course, back it because they count on the "powerful labor unions" to get them elected. Meanwhile, the GOP worries they'll get "smeared" if the dare oppose the popular brand. 

Blew also notes that Biden is holding back some Titel I increase to reward states that take certain equity measures, and I don't disagree with him as he calls out the feds for using money to manipulate states. He also points out that the Biden administration probably will claim to have tripled Title I by counting both the budget increase and the emergency relief funding. Probably true. 

In the end, Blew dismisses the proposed education budget as pandering on behalf of "political allies," claiming that "money is being thrown at just about everything his political allies could hope for" and that "this administration values its political allies without regard for student outcomes or stewardship of taxpayer resources." And he's upset that the expenditures don't "encourage the changes that our students need and deserve," which is a little at odds with his opening argument that federal spending on education should be $0.00 (nor is it clear how a budget of $0.00 can be used to push changes).

Look, I'm no huge fan of the feds, who have a bipartisan talent for getting education policy Really Wrong. Blew complains about the status quo, but at this point the status quo has been largely created by reformsters, as well as an endless game of political football far more informed by gamesmanship and messaging than actual knowledge of or concern about education. 

But this far right framing of public education as a giant scam concocted so that teachers can be used to funnel money to the unions which in turn only to grab more money and use it to elect Democrats is both tiresome and completely divorced from the actual reality of actual teachers working in actual classrooms to educate actual students. It treats the pursuit of a decent, equitable public education system as a grift and gets in the way of the conversations we need to have, like how to best serve the underserved students in this country.