PA: Mastriano Would Be A Disaster For Education

Doug Mastriano upset the GOP establishment by walking away with the Republican nomination for governor. Everyone else is going to have ample opportunity to be alarmed by this far-right Christian nationalist in the months ahead.

Mastriano is a hard-core MAGA as they come. He has been a huge promoter of the Big Lie, including a a staged hearing that allowed more air time for a parade of debunked Big Lie baloney (including a call-in from Beloved Leader). He has sworn that belief in the Big Lie will be job requirement #1 for his secretary of state. He got as bill through the PA Senate removing a residency requirement for partisan poll watchers (how could that possibly go wrong). Ban abortion completely. Unrestricted gun ownership. And his support from and for christianists is huge.

Based on all that, you can probably guess what Mastriano's ideas are about education, and I'm here to tell you that you haven't imagined anything radical enough.

In an interview, Mastriano laid out his plans. Here are some of the highlights.

Per pupil spending. Because per pupil spending varies from district to district, the average per-pupil spending estimates vary. According to the US Census, it's about $15,798. Conservative groups like to estimate it higher, the better to make the case for taxpayer relief. The right-leaning Commonwealth Foundation puts the number at $19,900. Mastriano is running with $19,000.

He would like to cut that in half. 

I think instead of 19,000, we fund each student around 9,000 or 10,000 and they can decide which school to go to, public school, private school, religious school, cyber school or home school. And the money goes to the kids. And I believe that would incentivize and drive down the costs of public education.

This idea--that about $10K ought to be enough, and by gutting spending we'll just unleash a storm of creative ways to "drive down the costs"-- is the same package that surfaced among the Free Staters of rural New Hampshire. It is, simply, nuts. There is no district anywhere in the state that is spending twice as much as it needs to just because it's not creative enough; that's why there's a long-standing lawsuit about adequate ed funding in PA winding its way through court. This is part and parcel of the far right initiative to end public education and replace it with taxpayer-funded religious schooling.

How would Mastriano accomplish this cut? By simply cutting property taxes to something between practically nothing and actually nothing. We don't need it, he argues, because private and charter schools are cheap. Vouchers will fix it. Just need a little "outside the box" thinking. This is less "outside the box" and more "dumb." We'll get into all the reason why another day, but for the moment, let's stick to just one-- since the state contributes roughly 35% of the funding for public education, ending property taxes would, in most areas, cut funding by more--in many cases way more--than 50%. Will the state be making that up? How?

Mastriano is heavy on vouchers all the way, insisting that by cutting funding, Pennsylvania will makes its schools better (based on "he just thinks so). He has some other thoughts about school quality as well

With the rise in broken homes in certain communities, more students are coming to school unprepared to learn. No amount of money is going to allow these schools to do what they cannot: fill in for disengaged or absent parents.

You know. "Certain communities." Those people.

There's more of the same. old baloney. Teachers get paid too much and schools are awash in money because of The Unions. So, trouble filling teaching positions not on his list of problems to address (but then, if everyone is schooling at home, on line, or in private religious schools, not a problem, I guess). 

Would his $9,500-ish vouchers pay for a good education? Charters cost more. The majority of private schools cost more. But people who had the resources to pay the difference would do fine. People with fewer resources (you know--in Certain Communities) would be stuck with whatever bargain basement education their voucher would fund. 

But that's the thing about vouchers. It's about the government washing their hands of parents, about saying, "We gave you a voucher. Your kid's education is now your problem. Go shopping in our unregulated market place, where schools may or may not be providing a good education, and schools don't have to take your kid if they don't want to! Good luck--it's your problem now."

Many observers are saying that Mastriano has no chance because he's too much of a whack job. But the signs in my neck of the woods say otherwise. And I'm sure we all remember the candidate in 2016 who was too whacky to have a shot. 

Still, Tom Corbett became a one-term governor because he was stuck with the blame for a $1 billion cut in education spending; Mastriano is proposing many billions more than that. That might be a problem for him. On the other hand, from books to LGBTQ issues to anything else they can come up with, the right has been pushing hard on the idea that public education can't be trusted. 

Columnist Will Bunch is concerned that more people aren't making a big deal out of Mastriano's education position, and I share that concern. Mastriano would be an absolute disaster for public education in Pennsylvania. I sure hope that people who care will be taking action in the months ahead.

ICYMI: Now We Are Five Edition (6/12)

This week the board of directors celebrated their most recent birthday. Also this week, they finished pre-school, and the CMO finished her year in the teaching trenches, so we are shifting into a whole other gear here at the Institute. Let's see what there is to read.

First North Dakota teacher named Albert Einstein Fellow from West Fargo Schools, but denied leave

Only fifteen educators get this recognition each year, but this teacher's district just sees a staffing problem--in other words, their problem. 

Tutoring our way to excellence?

Nancy Flanagan takes a look at what is actually necessary for a tutoring program to work (now that they're all the rage).

Clinton Democrats and Philanthrocapitalists

I suppose someone from a right-tilted school like Claremont McKenna College would be just the choice to dismantle the neo-liberal tech-loving reformster-plagued eduwonks of the Clinton administration. Lily Geismer has written the book, and Jan Resseger has the review for us here. 

Louisianna Legislature Unable to Address Gun Problem by Adding More Guns

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider takes a look at the unsuccessful attempt to sell more guns and put them in schools.

The pandemic's toll

Matt Barnum at Chalkbest looks at some numbers from the pandemic and concludes that child care workers were more likely to die from COVID than the average worker. There are tons of caveats here, but nobody else is even trying to run these numbers, and I consider Barnum the most trustworthy writer in the Chalkbeat stable.

We need to create pathways for Black teachers to stay

Jose Luis Vilson writing at Word In Black about the need to improve the terrible retention numbers for Black educators. 

Arts in the Apocalypse

Blue Cereal Education makes a case for the arts in education. #5 is my favorite.

The wheels on the bus

TC Weber reports on more shenanigans in Tennessee, like the education commissioners happy talk bus tour.

Signing Day

From a district just up the road from me-- what if students headed for blue collar jobs had the same kind of fuss made over them as students signing letters of intent for college sports?

Principal makes pit stop

My old school. A student couldn't be at graduation, so my old boss took graduation to him.

The Board of Directors in their birthday regalia

Charter Free Market Problems

When charter schools close, it's bad news. It's bad news for the school, it's bad news for the students and families, it's bad news for the public schools that have to suddenly absorb the displaced students. And it points to the trouble that charter advocates have selecting the right amount of Free Market Secret Sauce to include in the charter recipe.

The Network for Public Education report "Broken Promises" lays out some of the numbers. Looking at charter cohorts from 1998 to 2014, the report finds that 1,667 out of 9,413 charters (18%) closed within the first three years. By the end of five years, one in four charters have closed. When looking at schools funded by the federal Charter School Program (CSP), 12% of the schools never even opened, and when one adds in schools that closed, 40% of charters receiving those federal taxpayer dollars failed.

That closure rate has emerged as one of the major issues in the current drive to update CSP grant regulations. 

The stories appear with unfortunate regularity. Just today, two charter closure stories have crossed my desktop. One is from Philadelphia, where the district's charter school office is considering the closure of two charters even as the board is under fire for allegations of racial bias in its handling of charter schools. Meanwhile, NJ Spotlight has this headline: "Blindsided by decision to close school, families hope for a reprieve." 

These are typical stories. Charter shutdowns come in many flavors, from being shut down by authorizers to being closed up, sometimes suddenly and without warning, because operators find them no longer viable businesses. In some regions it is easy for authorities to shutter an underperforming school, while in others (looking at you, Florida) it is almost impossible to shut down even the most egregious actors. 

Charter supporters send out mixed messages about these issues. In response to the proposed rules changes for CSP, Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public [sic] Charter Schools, says, even as she contests NPE's numbers, that “The closure of some schools is actually an example of the charter sector working as intended” At the same time, she has also tweeted out support for Philadelphia parents protesting charter closings. The argument here will be that these are two different sorts of things, and that's fair. But this dichotomy of argument is often the case for charter supporters; when confronted by closure numbers, they argue that that's how it's supposed to work, but when it comes to closing a particular charter school, they will fight back hard. 

The modern charter movement has always embraced free market forces, arguing that parental ability to "vote with their feet" is all the accountability needed. But this caveat emptors all the work onto parents, who may not have the expertise to evaluate information that may not even be particularly accurate or complete, either because the charter operators are themselves amateurs or they are bad actors out to hide their misbehavior.

The missing link in many cases is at the authorizer end. States vary. In Michigan, for example, charters can go shopping for an authorizer who will wave them on through in exchange for a chunk of money. Other states, like Pennsylvania, limit authorization to school boards. Charter supporters don't like this system, feeling it gives too much control to their competitors, but if you're going to take a bunch of money that taxpayers gave to fund education, why shouldn't you involve the people who've been elected as stewards of those funds. 

But regardless of the authorizers, a rigorous application process is one of the best safeguards against failing charter schools. Do they have a plan? Do they have the necessary financial skill? Do they have an actual education plan? Is there any good, solid reason to believe that they have what it takes to survive? 

It's not just the chaos created by a charter shutting down. A failing charter is also short-changing students as it limps along on its way toward the end. Why allow weak entries in the charter biz to take down students with them? Let's cull the weakest, most ill-fitted candidates before they can waste a single minute of student time.

This seems like a basic safeguard, yet charter supporters argue often to "streamline" the process. Betsy DeVos's American Federation for Children annually ranks state programs in part on how easily such programs can be launched. The Yass Prize and the Center for Education Reform have adopted the idea of "permissionless," highlighting the idea that nobody should have to ask permission, that the enterprise should be "free to exist and thrive without dependence on regulatory bodies."

An unregulated charter industry will get us more of what we have--way too many charter schools closing and leaving families high and dry. Charter supporters waffling between "that's a feature, not a bug" and "don't you close that charter school" aren't helping, and could help stabilize their own industry by supporting some tighter controls on who gets into it. We know that some of the groups get this, or at least they did back when NAPCS, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and 50CAN came out in favor of stringer regulations for cyber charters. (As did the reliably reformy Fordham Institute).

Charter supporters are in a tricky spot these days; many choice supporters have cooled on charters now that they see path to abandon such half-way measures and go all in on vouchers. So the choice tide is rolling harder in the direction of free and open market "permissionless" school even as the feds are using CSP to create pressure for charters to act like the public schools they've always claimed to be. Charter fans are doing a high-wire tap dance in a tough cross wind. 

NY: Carl Paladino Is At It Again

It was 2014 when the Alliance for Quality Education and Citizen Action released a report that laid out in painful detail how Carl Paladino was getting rich in the charter school business. Paladino was running Ellicott Development, a large Buffalo area property development company, that was doing fine business with at least five major Buffalo charter school operators. Paladino was particularly fond of leaseback arrangements, and in least one case he was the sole investor in the charter school.

Paladino ran, successfully, twice, for Buffalo's school board, promising he would recuse himself from charter votes, only he latter clarified that to mean any deal in which he had a direct conflict of interest; as a board member, he actually promoted the heck out of charter schools. Paladino was charter schools' best friend on the public school board.

At the time, I called him a charter wolf in public school clothing, but that's not really accurate because Paladino made little effort to disguise himself. Asked by the Buffalo City News if he was profiting from his work with charters, he replied "If I didn't, I'd be a friggin' idiot."

Paladino's mouth was generally on racist, sexist autopilot, and the rest of the board often tried in vain to shut him up. In 2016 he released comments to a local newspaper, in which he wrote he wanted to see President Barack Obama dead of mad cow disease and first lady Michelle Obama “return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.” He acknowledged these comments were "inappropriate;" the standard Paladino non-apology apology generally is some variation on "I suppose it was a bad PR move to say that out loud." Finally, in 2017 the state education commissioner booted him from the board for disclosing confidential information about contract negotiations with the teachers union. Paladino claimed this was a violation of his First Amendment rights. Sure.

But Paladino, who had an earlier unsuccessful run for governor under his belt, just can't quit politics. When Chris Jacobs withdrew after committing the unforgiveable GOP sin of suggesting that maybe not everyone needs to own an AR-15 style weapon that has no use except to murder human beings, Paladino jumped into the ring, quickly pulling an endorsement from Elise Stefanik.

First, he shared a post on Facebook linking mass murders (like the one that had just happened in Buffalo) to various bizarro mind control. Called on it, he went first with the "wasn't me" defense, then moved on to the "I forgot" and landed on a combo of "It was written by a good buddy of mine" and "I didn't actually read the whole thing before I posted it" (which, in all fairness, is about 95% of the people who post things on social media) while throwing in a dash of "I don't believe all the things in the article." Which begs the question of which things he does believe, but okay--damage mostly contained.

The Paladino went on the radio to talk about the need to rouse people up, and his mouth went off again:

I was thinking the other day about somebody had mentioned on the radio Adolf Hitler and how he aroused the crowds. And he would get up there screaming these epithets and these people were just — they were hypnotized by him. That’s, I guess, I guess that’s the kind of leader we need today. We need somebody inspirational. We need somebody that is a doer, has been there and done it, so that it’s not a strange new world to him.

Media Matters caught the interview and published the quote. Paladino responded that implying his comments meant that he supports Hitler would be "a new low for the media." Because quoting his words is just really below the belt, I guess? He went on to say that he was wrong to mention Hitler. "I understand that invoking Hitler in any context is a serious mistake and rightfully upsets people," which is again a version of "That was a bad PR choice" and not "What I said was wrong."

At any rate, if you're in New York and thinking you've heard Paladino's name before, especially in conjunction with saying awful things, you probably have. For people who care about public education or just human beings in general, this is probably not the guy to vote for.

AL: Looking For Holes In The Teacher Pipeline

Alabama has actually done a decent job of breaking down and collecting the numbers on their teacher pipeline, and while they don't draw a huge number of conclusions from the data, it's an interesting pile of numbers that may offer some lessons for other states as well.

The state government's report on teacher recruitment and retention shows that the teacher-student ratio has been improving since a peak of 16.49-1 in 2016. That's fueled by a drop in the number of students (steady for the last decade, with a big COVID dip at the end) along with an increase in the number of teachers. But a closer look shows that Alabama's awarding of traditional teacher certificates is down-- Bachelor degrees are down 26% over the last 18 years, though Masters degrees are up over the last three. The increase in teacher numbers in Alabama is mostly (90%) due to alternative and emergency certificates; since 2014, the state has actually awarded more non-traditional than traditional certificates.

The report does show success for the Alabama Math and Science Teacher Education Program (AMSTEP), which pays post-2018 grads $2,500 federal student loan repayment per semester taught in Alabama, plus additional supplemental payments if they take a job at a hard-to-staff school. That lasts for a max of four years, and it appears to help, though so far only 61 teachers are using the program. All but 2 stayed in teaching, and 45 stayed in the same school. AMSTEP has yet to use up all its available funds. But yes-- fixing it so that beginning teachers have some help with their college debt is a good idea.

A less good idea is trying to beef up the alternative pipeline by making it easier to go that route; one suggestion in the report pilot an alternative certificate by doing online modules with Teachers of Tomorrow, an on line teacher certification mill. Also, maybe lower the class hours requirement for alt certification. 

One of the big problems with goosing the alternative pipeline is covered in Alabama's own report on teacher supply and demand. Alabama's turn over rate varies by district, with 18% on the low end and a staggering 32% on the high end. The report breaks down "ends" by voluntary and involuntary, and one of the intriguing but unaddressed pieces of data is that high turnover districts have a higher voluntary rate and a way higher involuntary rate (which is mostly about single year contracts that aren't renewed). 

Alabama is having a terrible time holding on to first year teachers--over 50% leave within their first three years, which is above the national rate of 44%. And the group that has the highest rate of turnover-- that would be the non-traditional certifications. Bachelor degree teachers are retained at a rate of 69%; master degrees follow closely with 65%. Alternative certs are retained at a rate barely over 50% (emergency certs bring up the rear at under 50%). 

So I'm not sure it makes sense to try to carry more water in the buckets with the biggest holes.

Nor do I think those are holes you can fix. We know that one of the best ways to retain a teacher is for them to have a successful first couple of years, and that means preparation and support. Folks who get an alternative certificate are getting less preparation for the job. It's like offering someone a chance to get to play on an NFL team by letting them skip all the physical conditioning or earing all those bulky pads. It may be exciting right up until the first play when they get hit hard.

These reports avoid addressing other issues, like, say passing anti-LGBTQ laws that require teachers to out students who think they might be trans, or passing anti-indoctrinatin' laws, Or Alabama's unspectacular teacher pay, though the report does make some targeted pay suggestions.  

It may not be within the purview of this report, but the absence of teacher voices is notable. The most obvious steps to pursue would include finding teachers who left the profession and asking them why. Alabama has a 25% "supply gap"-- IOW. 25% of the graduates who get teaching certification do not go and get a teaching job; someone really ought to ask them why not. 

Alabama has some good ideas, like spending $4 million on a teacher mentor program, and some bad ideas, like spending $822K on Teach for America (if there's anything that TFA is not set up to address with its "teach two years then go get your real job" model, it's turnover rates). They even tried to pass a Teacher Bill of Rights in order to build respect for the professions--but it was allowed to quietly die in the legislature. 

Thank You, Teachers

We're at the end of another road, another 180-day road trip over the Mountain of Education, and this is always a hard part of the year.

Teaching is about building relationships, creating a little classroom community. I've seen memes that call it like creating a little family, and I'm not sure I'd go quite that far. But whatever connections are built in the course of the year, once the school year crosses the finish line, all of those connections are done. At end of the year, teachers have to say goodbye. 

We know that the end of a relationship is hard. Adults do it now and then, and it's almost never easy. More like a little mini bout of grief and loss. Teachers do that every year, with between twenty and two hundred young humans. 

It's also the Season of the Second Guess. Did I cover enough? Did I get them ready for the next thing? Could I have done more for those students that were less successful? Should I have covered X instead of Y? Did I miss too many chances to give a student a needed boost? Was I pre-occupied and thoughtless at the moment I could have made a critical difference? Was I enough? 

Could I have done more, or done better? It's always a tough question to grapple with, because the answer is always "Yes."

That can only be worse in a year like this one. in which students carried gigantic steamer trunks full of  challenges and hurts and missed opportunities left over from last year's pandemess (and the year's before that), and then they had to process more terrible news from this year, and teachers had to try to manage all that in the midst of unprecedented levels of public attacks on teachers (They're slackers! They're indoctrinators! They're groomers! They're teaching that thing that I can't really explain, but oh boy is it bad! They're terrible at their jobs, but maybe we should make them carry guns!). 

And while many teachers are talking about this (some on their way out the door), most are not, because being a teacher means trying not to talk about the hard parts of your job, because then people will just say you're whining.

It's just a tough time in a tough year.

So, teachers, I have this to say to you.

Thank you. 

Thank you for pushing forward as best you could every day. Thank you for showing up. Thank you for trying to watch out for your students. Thank you for teaching and teaching and keeping on with the business of teaching, getting those students to grow in skills and knowledge and humanity, even when they came to you missing part of their foundation in everything from knowledge and skills to just remembering how to do school. 

Thank you for pushing on even when you felt as if you were pushing through a dark and trackless land. Thank you for every day when you gave something at school that you had hoped to save for your own home. 

Thank you continuing even on the days when it seemed as if so many people wanted to tell you how wrong you were, but didn't want to pitch in to help.

Thank you for all the hours that you poured into the work. Thank you for every small victory you scored, and for coming back after every defeat.

Thank you for putting your heart on the line.

Thank you for standing up. Thank you for hanging in. Thank you for pressing past all the endless Other Stuff to do the core of the work--the teaching. You students know so much more now than they did a year ago, and that's not nothing. Thank you for that.

For every one of you who stood watch over the rising up of parents' beloved young humans, thank you.

For every one of you who stayed to do the job, thank you (and for those of you who didn't, I get it, and thank you, too).

There is a special kind of drained exhaustion that comes at the end of a school year. May the summer fill you back up, and may the coming weeks bring you back in touch with everything that helps you feel the joy and beauty of being your best self, of being fully human in the world. 

Thank you.

High Quality Instructional Materials

When folks, particularly reformy folks, start talking about high quality instructional materials, I reflexively bristle. Part of it is that HQIM means, for some folks, materials that are aligned with the Common Core (either by name or under the various alias it has adopted). I also associate the term with curriculum-in-a-box, the kind of program that salespeople tout as teacher-proof, just as long as the school content delivery units present the program "with fidelity" aka "like mindless robots whose compliance is required and whose professional judgment is forbidden." 

But the truth is, I need to take a deep breath and return my hackles to their seated unraised position, because there is a conversation about quality materials worth having, albeit a more nuanced and complicated one than the one we're inclined to have (also, I'm pretty sure that "a more nuanced and complicated conversation than the one we're inclined to have" covers a huge number of education issues).

Because I know better.

The best instructional materials I ever had (not made by me) was a literature series by MacMillan-Scribner. A solid selection of literature, and a really great set of both questions for the selection and materials to create a unit test. The whole package was about 80% aligned with what I wanted to accomplish in the class. It saved me untold hours.

On the other hand, in 39 years, I never saw a grammar/usage/writing text that was worth the paper it was printed on. Most were simply dreadful, with explanations that were unclear and exercises that were too brief and often poorly focused. I depended on my own created materials for about 90% of my teaching in those areas. 

On the other other hand, there was my mentee who started her career depending heavily on Google as her teaching assistant, and not in a good way. We had too many conversation like this:

"I found a worksheet about this book/standard/lesson on line"

"Great. Why are you using this particular worksheet? How does it fit in your unit objectives?"

"It's about this book/standard/lesson."

There's still a problem with chirpy articles like this one (from EdReports, whose whole raison d'etre is certifying instructional materials as 100% common core fresh) that presume that if teachers just understood HQIM better, they'd realize that HQIM would make everything awesome. This is not true, either. 

And of course the entire conversation is muddied up by the term High Quality Instructional Material, which means whatever you think it means. So let me tell you what I think a piece of high quality instructional material looks like.

Accurate and Appropriate Content

I shouldn't need to bring this up, but every teacher has been there--you're working your way through new teaching materials and realize that the writers of the book got something wrong. Well, that's if you're lucky and vigilant; otherwise, the mistake will be brought to your attention by a student.

I know I may not be the person to fly the flag, what with my years of cranking out typo-riddled posts on this blog. But textbooks are expensive, and textbook companies are well-paid, so I don't want to open up a book and find a noun called a verb or Stephen Crane called a Romantic writer. I want materials created by somebody who knows the content and knows it well and not someone who is just plugging in stuff for a template (or--and I don't know how much this is an issue in other content areas, but in English it's a pain--is apparently working from an open copy of someone else's textbook and trying to copy it without actually violating copyright laws).

Nor do I want a textbook to include baloney like calling enslaved people immigrants or the USSR a Communist paradise or otherwise attempting to put a particular gloss on the content. 

And since time saving is one of the appeals of HQIM, the prospect of sifting through a haystack like Teachers Pay Teachers for some needle of high quality material seems like a problem. It may be my old-fartiness shining through, but TPT seems like an invitation to Just Grab Something without taking the time to find something good (and in that same time, could I not design something of my own).

Also--material that is grade/age appropriate. This is a hard one, given the wide range of end users. That's just one reason we need--

Flexibility

EdReports likes to say that the think teachers should implement materials with "integrity" rather than "fidelity." I agree at least half with this--no materials that demand to be implemented with fidelity are high quality, because what that actually means is that someone, somewhere, has decided that they know the best way to teach material to students that they haven't even met. The teacher is in the classroom; the book's authors are not. Note: anything with a script is not HQIM.

HQIM are adaptable, so that the teacher can use them to construct a lesson that's best for the class they're facing. EdReports actually cites some research to back this up, suggesting that  “'adaptation with guardrails' can actually help strengthen impacts on student outcomes beyond what is possible through program fidelity alone. In other words, learn the materials by sticking close to what the manufacturer suggests, then as you become familiar, adapt to suit. 

Implicit in all this is that HQIM provide more materials than you can actually use--because you're not going to use all of it. You're going to use the pieces that work best for you and your students, including making adjustment for achievement levels within the class.

Actual Support

Here's what teachers are used to getting: a PD session from some company rep who spent a couple of years in the classroom, then checked out for this sweeter gig. This person will suggest that you don't know what you're doing and will blow off any practical questions you want to ask.

Here's what teachers need, particularly with materials that are computer based: A person they can call who can actually answer questions and provide support other than reading from the same manual that the teacher already looked at on line. 

The Why

There is nothing more critical in a classroom than the why. The teacher has to know why they're covering the material, and it has to be a good reason and not "because someone told me to" or "it will be on the Big Standardized Test" or any of the other reasons that students hear, correctly, as "Blah blah blah no good reason." 

For HQIM, this becomes another aspect of flexibility. Instructional Materials cannot supply the why (pro tip: "Because it's in the book" is not a useful why) for the teacher, but they can be clear about what sorts of why the particular materials address. When a teacher goes to the materials bank, they need be able to search beyond "something about Hamlet." They should be dipping into the library looking for "exploring the themes of Hamlet" or "reviewing character relations in Hamlet" or "examining the plot sequence in Hamlet" and the teacher should be able to look for these specifics without having to read through every single piece of material to figure out what it's about.

A well-done teachers' guide can even help develop the why of a unit by suggesting possible ideas to explore.

A bad set of materials hides its why. The worst grammar/usage text I ever had offered terrible grammar exercises, and it was only after I was several chapters in before I realized that the exercises were all organized exceptions to or quirks in the grammar concepts, trying to test the students' grasp of the concepts with examples from the fringes--without ever giving students a chance to practice the basic core of the idea. 

Teacher enhancing, not teacher proof

No brand of instructional material can make a great teacher out of a lousy one, but administrative demands to follow a program with fidelity can make a mediocre teacher out of a good one (or a former teacher out of a good one). 

I know there are sales reps out there whose pitch, implicit or explicit, is "Buy our stuff and you will have a complete curriculum and a whole staff of teachers on the same page." And I have worked for a couple of administrators who totally bought that pitch. 

There are two problems. First of all, good teachers will be hamstrung, and lousy teachers will still be lousy (how to unlousify them is a whole other post). HQIM should save teachers time and trouble, not micro-managing them.

Second of all, imagine this--the company goes out of business and all of their materials suddenly vanish. If leaders in your district are suddenly saying, "Oh no! Now we have no curriculum!" then you never did, because teaching materials are not a curriculum. They should be used to implement your curriculum and enhance your teachers' work. It's like putting seatbelts in your school buses, strapping all your students in, and announcing that your focus is safety as you send a driverless bus careening down the road. 

Create your curriculum. Then select your books etc based on how well they fit your district's plan. Which means--yes--that some high quality instructional materials may conceivably be an excellent fit for one district and not so much for another. (Which takes us back to the old "Wait a minute--we can't have a whole bunch of different curricula higgledy piggledy all over the place," and that really is a post for another day).