Is There A School-Scripting Miracle In Kenya?

Short answer: no.

Now for the longer answer.

All of a sudden, the interwebz are buzzing, or at least humming mildly, with news of a highly-standardized education-flavored business that has been found accomplishing awesome things in Kenya, and, hey, maybe there's a lesson for schools everywhere in what they've accomplished. (You can find some of the gushing here and here.) The company is being unironically touted as a McDonald's. Yay?

This new enthusiasm is prompted by a working paper by some reputable economists (Guthrie Gray-Lobe, Anthony Keats, Noble winner Michael Kremer, Isaac Mbiti, and Owen Ozier)-- "Can Education Be Standardized? Evidence from Kenya."

We'll get to that in a moment, but let's set up a little context and history first.

About the company

NewGlobe is the corporation behind this operation, and Bridge International Academies is their product. (Actually, Bridge International Academies used to be the businesss, and at some point, fro some reason, they rebranded as NewGlobe.) We've looked at them on this blog before. 

Jay Kimmelman graduated from Harvard in 1999, launched an edu-business (Edusoft), sold it, and decided to make his mark in education more globally, opening the first Bridge Academy in 2009.

Kimmelman communicates his vision pretty clearly. On his LinkedIN page, the description of Bridge used to include this: "Bridge disrupts the education status quo by ensuring that every child, regardless
of parental income, has access to the education he or she deserves." But that word "deserves" cuts several directions, and it raises the question-- who decides what these children deserve? 

Nowadays his LinkedIn focuses on NewGlobe "supporting visionary governments to transform their public education systems at speed and scale" as the "world's leading cloud-powered learning solution for populations living on less than $2 per person per day."

The "cloud-powered" part is important to their model. Each Bridge teacher works with a Bridge-provided tablet, from which they get their highly-specific scripted instructions. Per the working paper, this is backstopped by supervisors who are supposed to check in "teachers" multiple times a day to make sure they're doing what they're supposed to be; these supervisors have scripts of their own, and  classrooms are built with large open windows on one wall so that supervisors can more easily check "teacher" work. Bridge often tries to downplay this lockstep standardization, as in this recent Education Next piece that tries to sell the model as just a bunch of supports and individual professional choices, but in this NPR piece from 2013, Kimmelman's co-founder and wife Shannon May, lays out the vision:

"If you were at one of the other 200 locations right now, you'd be seeing the exact same thing," she says. "In some ways, it is kind of the magic of it."

That "magic" of standardized lesson plans changes the role of the teacher. It allows Bridge to hold down costs because it can hire teachers who don't have college degrees.

Kimmelman himself has frequently compared the company to McDonalds or Starbucks and their model of standardizing and controlling the process so much that the individual meat widgets being employed don't really matter. The study notes that the schools use technology help standardize, "like many other firms, from Ford Motors to Uber."

You'll be unsurprised to know that neither Kimmelman, May, nor their other founding partner, serial entrepreneur Phil Frei (who has since moved on)-- none of them have actual background in education. It's no surprise that the vast majority of what's written about Bridge, both by itself and others, is focused on the business aspect. Take this paragraph from a 2013 profile in Wired.

The winning idea — basic education as a business — sounds counterintuitive, but it was central to planning for the couple and their cofounder, Phil Frei. For parents hovering around $2 in income per day, a potentially transformative education for their kids was just one of many things they couldn’t afford. The demand, however, remains enormous — the global market for low-cost private education is $51 billion annually. To meet the demand, May says, “we drive the price point low enough so parents can become consumers.”

From the beginning, not everyone was a fan. When Bridge angled to take over public education in Liberia, The New Dawn ("truly independent") of Liberia ran a headline about the government facing massive revolts over selling off the business of educating their poor:

International and local experts say such arrangement is not only a blatant violation of Liberia’s international obligations under the right to education, and have no justification under Liberia’s constitution, but will also deny indigents and poor access to quality education.

Eventually Bridge had to enter a new "partnership" arrangement in Liberia.

In Uganda, the government shut Bridge down. The BBC reported in 2016 that officials found problems with "teacher" absenteeism, as well as "teachers" not being able to pass basic literacy and math tests. Two thirds of the students didn't finish primary education. School buildings were unsanitary. After the government pulled the plug after just one year, Bridge took them to court--and lost. 

In 2018, the East Africa Centre for Human Rights, a Kenyan NGOI, filed formal complaints against Bridge, alleging that the Bridge violated national and international law with their operational model. 

A 2019 study in Kenya found Bridge to be an absolute mess. Officials who looked at the Kenyan Bridge schools “describe this method of teaching as ‘robotic’, ‘too controlling’, ‘disabling the teachers from using their creativity and innovativeness’, ‘neocolonial’ and representing a form of ‘slavery.’”

May's response to that critique, given in a friendly interview with Peter Coy, is special:

“I think of it like music,” May said. “There’s a certain order of notes. Those notes have been standardized. They’re on a clef. Piano or forte. The composer is guiding you.”

So there you have it. The lessons are in words, and the words are in a language, rendered in lines on a screen, so there you are. I'm not sure what her argument is here. Maybe it's that musicians have to follow the conductor and the printed music, so teachers should also be required to follow a single conductor. Musicians aren't really free, so teachers shouldn't be, either? But if we're after a music analogy, Bridge would be like requiring every musician in the country to only ever play the same piece on the same instrument at the same time. 

So, not great. But how are the test scores??

So the business model is using low-cost, mostly-unqualified "teachers" to deliver a scripted curriculum as a way to turn a profit serving poor Third World families. It is, admittedly, perhaps a step up from what might be otherwise available. At the same time, I doubt that any of the deep-pocketed venture money guys and philanthrocapilalists (Gates, Zuckerberg, the International Finance Corporation, even Pearson at one point have all ponied up $$) would allow their own children to be subjected to this form of edu-biz.

But back to why we're hearing about Bridge again. That study.

Some reformsters are excited, apparently, because maybe Bridge's work is a proof of concept for highly standardized education delivered by low-cost low-skill non-union widgets. Education Next's coverage has a more sedate headline now, but in the URL they're excited about the "McDonalds of African private schools."

The headline results are that primary students (eight grades) "gained 2.89 years of Kenyan schooling after being enrolled at Bridge for two years, an additional 0.89 years compared to pupils enrolled at other schools over the same period." Pre-primary students “gained 3.48 equivalent years of schooling, an additional 1.48 years compared to pupils enrolled in other schools.” That's based on Kenyan's five subject area tests (which raises the question of what kind of subject area tests is Kenya giving to pre-primary students). 

Let's start with the most obvious problem here: any time a study is measuring learning in time units, you know you're reading baloney. Days or weeks or years of learning are just a sleight of hand for making test scores seem meaningful. What the study actually finds is that test scores went up a little more for Bridge students than comparable Kenyan public school students. I'm not saying that's useless information, but let's talk about what we're really talking about. That will allow us to have the conversation we need to have about just how much we care about test scores (spoiler alert: way more than we have any good reason to). These are tests scores, not "dramatic learning gains."  Did I mention that the paper is by economists?

Also, don't be distracted by the phrasing of those gains-- it's the "additional" part that matters. but it's the bigger numbers that keep getting reported. 

We should remember, too, that getting big gains is easiest when you start in the basement. Kenya's education system has many, many problems.

Digging into the rest of the paper, one finds more of the same old information about Bridge. In Kenya, three quarters of the public and private school teachers have more than a high school diploma; at Bridge, the study found teachers were "younger, less experienced, and more likely to be novice (first-year) teachers" and only one quarter of them had more than a secondary school education. They were paid between one fifth and one third of average public school teacher, and worked longer hours, including Saturdays. Only 23% of Bridge's primary school teachers had a teaching certificate when hired.

Do these unprepared teachers get any training? The study reports that new Bridge "teachers" get a "ten-day training to introduce them to the tablet computers and provide instruction and practice on delivering lessons from the tablets as well as on entering student performance data." But thanks in large part to their low pay, Bridge's cost-per-pupil spending is one third of that in public schools. Ka-ching!

The study comments on Bridge's desire to operate "at scale" for one particular sector of the market. Again, other businesses provide the model:

Like McDonald’s, Walmart, and many other firms using standardization, Bridge is targeted to a mass market, not to consumers at the high end of the income distribution.

The report further notes, "the population served by Bridge tend to be non-elite." No kidding. But there attempt to scale through ordinary market means seems doomed. When the study was conducted, Bridge had 405 private schools; since the time of the study, they have closed 293 of them. The marketplace does not seem to want what Bridge is selling-- long hours, unqualified teachers, and "very basic physical structures." In 2017, says the report, almost half of the families that won the lottery for Bridge seats said, "Never mind."  But have no fear; Bridge moved to the model it has used in other countries of getting themselves hired by the government, rather than by parents, to help run public schools. Ka-ching!

And once again, as has been the case in multiple countries, Bridge failed at the basic job of keeping students safe, from unsafe building conditions to many teachers whose classroom management technique was a, literally, a big stick.

Peter Coy thinks Bridge is super duper, that they have "built a better mousetrap," which is one of the poorer metaphors for education I've read. Coy writes for the New York Times about--surprise--not education, but business and economics. He blames much of the pushback against Bridge on unions. 

Asked by Coy for a US analog of their approach of "rigorous public schools for low-income students," NewGlobe mentioned Success Academy (where the school carefully selects for families that fit their approach) and KIPP. KIPP is certainly an interesting choice; in recent years KIPP has seriously revamped its approach to focus on anti-racism. Co-founder Dave Levin wrote a letter of deep apology in June of 2020. 

There's a legitimate conversation to be had about Bridge's work in Africa, and whether or not it's a good idea to sell a bottom-shelf model to people who barely have access to any shelf at all, though if a Chinese company rolled into the Department of Education and said, "Let us have the contract for educating all your really poor people, but you can't regulate us at all," many people would have some words to say.

But to argue that Bridge has discovered something--anything--that can be used as a proof of concept or model for implementation in the US is baloney. Meanwhile, in 2013 Wired noted that  "The founders intend to be serving half a million children in 30 countries by 2015, and 10 million by 2025."

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.