Keeping Teachers Safe

I had two moments in my first year of teaching.

One was the moment when two students stood up and squared off to fight, and before the smarter part of my brain could intervene, I stepped between them. They were both a head taller and fifty pounds heavier than I, and they were damn sight more used to using fists to hammer out conflict.

The other was the moment when a student from another class period entered my room and stood chest to chest with me, describing in considerable detail how he was going to beat the shit out of me. Then he left, and I made it through the rest of the period before sitting down, shaking, at my desk. It ended okay; at the end of the day, he came back and sat down and talked to me at length about what was bothering him. But I kept the door to my classroom closed and locked for decades, and, weirdly, I have never, ever forgotten the date.

That was the 1979-80 school year. Things have not improved for teachers. 

Every teacher has some stories about dealing with violence in school. Sometimes it's student-to-student. Sometimes it's an act directed toward a teacher, even as simple as throwing an object. Sometimes it's just the threat, a student who spits out some language accompanied by a look that tells you that given the wrong circumstances, that student would be coming at you.

There's a nightmare that I suspect pretty much all teachers have, where somehow you have lost control in the classroom and things are spinning out of control as you desperately, fruitlessly try to get a handle on it. There's the knowledge that you have to work past when starting out, the realization that if your classroom of students decided to ignore you and collectively shut down the class, there's nothing you could do to stop it. You learn to wield authority, but you're aware that it's a construct, an illusion that exists as long as you and the students find it mutually agreeable to maintain it. 

And more than that. I say all of the above as a 6'1" male. I can't quite imagine how a classroom feels for a diminutive female. A teacher in a classroom is uniquely vulnerable, and yet you cannot let fear grab ahold of you because it renders you useless, even dangerous, as a teacher. It's one of those things that they don't teach you in teacher school (but you with any luck learn from your student teaching co-op)-- how to be calm and confident and large and in charge all at the same time.

These days, you can't be a teacher without being aware of the threat of violence. On top of the same old personal experiences, you hear (with shock) how young the attacker was, you see the news stories where the violence escalates and is rebroadcast on the net, you see the worst of the stories that escalate to actual murder. 

So it's not just the mass shootings. Those events get all the talk and generate the most shot, but teachers understand that these shootings are not disconnected balloons floating far above the earth, but the peaks of mountains of escalating violence.

Back in 2014, an American Psychology Association Violence Directed Against Teachers Task Force survey found that 44% of teachers reported an incident directed against them personally. A more recent iteration of that survey found numbers almost as high--and that was during the pandemic. Websites that usually focus on the wacky, fun side of teaching have published hard-edged articles about the issue. 

"Too Many Teachers Are Getting Hit, Kicked, and Punched by Students," writes the WeAreTeachers staff. "Student Violence Against Teachers Has Become the Norm and That’s NOT Okay" hollers the post at Bored Teachers. 

The issue exists at the intersection of many others, making it hard to implement. Like every single major issue in education, it requires balance between the many points of tension.

Fordham Institute, working from its own study, declares that "Lax discipline is bad for teachers," and they are not wrong. Teachers cannot do their best work in the midst of chaos. It is deeply demoralizing to work in a school setting where both you and your students know that no matter what they do, there will be no consequences. When folks argue that some level of discipline is needed to keep a school functional, they are not wrong. 

And it's not just to make teachers' lives easier; what is most annoying about that disruptive student is not the personal affront to teacher dignity, but the effect it has one the learning environment of every other child in that classroom.

But at the same time, these are students, children, and "school discipline" should not be some sort of pedagogical police state. "Break this child's will and bend it to my own," is not a viable strategy, not just because it's morally and ethically wrong, but also because a too-large part of the time, it simply won't work. 

People want to be heard. If they don't think you're hearing them, they will keep raising their voice till you hear them. When someone is yelling at you, that's a message for you. Every piece of student misbehavior is information about that student. 

However, it's also true that many schools have botched the rollout of programs like restorative justice. In the wrong hands, these are programs that reinforce an old bad lesson for students--just say the words the adults want you to say and you can go on about your business unhampered. 

And really, if there are SEL lessons to be learned at school, one of them has to be that struggling with your own load is not a free license to piss all over everyone else, and being in the classroom of someone who is not doing a great job is not a good reason to physically attack them. 

The issue is difficult because so many things can be true at once. A child can be a trauma victim who needs appropriate services. A teacher can be lousy at managing a classroom. A student can cause problems because he knows there will be no consequences for his bad behavior. A school can have a bad learning environment because students run roughshod over teachers, and a school can have a bad learning environment because the adults impose a tyrannical culture of compliance. 

And all of this happens against the background of a culture in which it's okay to denigrate and disrespect teachers, to accuse them of being groomers, teaching "filth," hating children and their country. And that is happening in a country in which it's increasingly acceptable to deal with people you disagree with by trying to obliterate them, either figuratively or literally, violently. Schools exist downhill from society and the culture at large; everything happening in society eventually ends up in schools. 

What can help? The biggest line of defense preventing violence against teachers is administration. Take teacher concerns seriously (and if you have a teacher who is demanding your happen too often, take that seriously). Be clear, proportionate, and consistent with student consequences, and keep those separate from labeling and pigeonholing children as "bad." Watch your teachers' backs. Prioritize making your school a safe space for everyone. Embrace solutions that work, not just those that feel good (throwing the book and just having a talk can both feel good). If you are over thirty, recognize these are not the times you grew up in. 

Parents can help, and some do, and some won't. Teachers can help, often, but not always. 

And policy makers can help mostly by not reducing the issue to simple solutions, which starts by admitting that the issue exists and that it needs to be worked on and not simply exploited as another way to kick the public education football around. 

Another Data Mining Cautionary Tale

 Over at The Verge, a story copublished with The Markup reveals that Facebook was looking over millions of our shoulders as we prepared our taxes.

Major tax filing services such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have been quietly transmitting sensitive financial information to Facebook when Americans file their taxes online, The Markup has learned.

The data, sent through widely used code called the Meta Pixel, includes not only information like names and email addresses but often even more detailed information, including data on users’ income, filing status, refund amounts, and dependents’ college scholarship amounts.

So, yikes.

Even when some of the information was obscured, there was enough included that Facebook could match up the tax info to the Facebook profile, giving Meta a collection of particular sensitive and personal data.

Remember this story the next time your school district is talking about whatever cool new computer program they are plugging all of the students into, and what sort of data is being collected. Not even the various parties involved seem to have fully grasped what information was being passed around by the pixel that is largely about collecting a record of where you've been and what you've done and passing it on.

This stuff gets complicated. Read Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin's Chokepoint Capitalism to get just a taste of how intertwined ad software has become. One new one on me-- an online advertiser can contract to advertise to widget.com customers by setting ads to target "people who regularly visit widget.com" and thereby avoid paying widget.com's advertising prices. 

Schools are data goldmines, and every piece of software that gets inside the schoolhouse door is looking for nuggets, and sometimes nobody really knows how much is being mined and where it will end up. If your district is not prioritizing data security, you have a problem.

Boston Globe Offers More Testocrat Cries of Anguish

Lost months of learning! Lost future income!! 

What the heck does that even mean.

The NAEP numbers have been used to manufacture all sorts of panic, and the privatization-loving Boston Globe has piled on, using a few of the more dubious arguments, starting right in by chicken littling the headline:

Pandemic learning losses could cost Massachusetts students $21 billion in future earnings

Don't click on it. You'll only hit a paywall, anyway. The research referenced is the work of Tom Kane, economics professor in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who is interviewed for the piece and takes the opportunity to ring the urgency bell about "helping students catch up."

But let's review two of the most misleading pieces of "research" cited by the 3D crowd (disrupt, defund, dismantle).

Measuring learning in months/days/years is bunk

The analyses show that on average, Massachusetts students lost 75 percent of a school year's worth of math learning and 41 percent of a year of reading.

Any time someone measures learning in days, months, years, seconds, eyeblinks, etc, your bullshit detector should go off like smoke alarm at a forest fire. Let's think about this for a minute.

73 percent of a school year is roughly 131 days. Which 131 days are we talking about? Because days in September are not quite as learning-filled as days in, say, February. The days coming up between Thanksgiving and Christmas are not exactly well-known in education circles for being learning rich. Likewise, Fridays and Mondays probably aren't as learningful as a Wednesday. So which 131 days of learning are students short?

Of course, the answer is that days of learning (and months, and years) aren't really a thing. They're a made up way of talking about test scores. Turns out we're back to the gang at CREDO.

The Learning Policy Institute offers an explanation for days of learning. The short form is that a typical growth on a standardized test score, divided by 180, equals one day of learning. If you want a fancier explanation, LPI looks via CREDO to a 2012 paper by Erik Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann:

To create this benchmark, CREDO adopted the assumption put forth by Hanushek, Peterson, and Woessman (2012) that “[o]n most measures of student performance, student growth is typically about 1 full standard deviation on standardized tests between 4th and 8th grade, or about 25 percent of a standard deviation from one grade to the next.” Therefore, assuming an average school year includes 180 days of schooling, each day of schooling represents approximately 0.0013 standard deviations of student growth.

So in the ends, we're really talking about test scores. Saying that students "lost" thirty days of learning is another, more compelling, way to say, "Test scores are down this many standard deviations from what we expected them to be." 

It's smoke, mirrors and misdirection, because "Your child's bucket of learning is empty" is scarier than "Your kid's score on this one reading and math test went down, boogah boogah." Lost instruction time is a thing. Lost days of learning is not. It's just a drop in test scores.

Of course, if your reaction to dropping test scores is "So what," there's another piece of questionable research to answer that.

Test Scores and Future Earnings

Economist Raj Chetty (it's always an economist) made a big splash with research that tried really, really hard to link test scores to future earnings. The sexy headline version you may recall was that a child who has a great kindergarten teacher will make more money as an adult. There's a full explainer of Chetty here, but whenever you see someone trying to link test scores to future earnings, you're usually looking at the work of with Chetty or Erik Hanushek or Tom Kane.

And that's what the Globe used for the "state level analysis performed by the Globe"--a paper by Tom Kane. The paper is not long, but it's thick with layers of nearly impenetrable economist argle bargle. But here, to the best of my ability to slog through the language, is how Kane et al figure that a drop in test score means less money as an adult.

They used "the mean [NAEP] score of 8th graders in a state as an estimate of the mean achievement of those born in the state 13 years before," then added scores for missing years by "estimating" then did some mathy things to adjust for race/ethnicity and parental education. Then they used census data by state to compute life outcomes (income, teen birth, arrest for violent crimes). Then they looked at changes in each. Then they pretended that there was some sort of connection between them. 

In other words, they said that from 1996 to 2019, Pennsylvania's math NAEP score went up 16 points. From 2001 to 2019, Pennsylvanian's mean income rose $1,600. Therefor, point on the math part of the NAEP equals $100 in future income.

That's an over-simplification, but not by much, and I'm not sure what you could do to that approach that would make it a non-ridiculous mess of assuming correlation equals causation. Kane and his co-authors add a bunch of math stuff that's supposed to correct for various factors, but it still looks like fried baloney to me. 

“We use these state-level differences in achievement gains on the NAEP along with outcomes by year and state of birth in the American Community Survey to estimate the association between past achievement increases and later-life outcomes.” Rather than NAEP scores, one could just as easily look at average height, or common hair colors, or shoe size. This seems like a good time to link to one of my favorite sites, Spurious Correlations.

Other highlights

Other research is cited, including a finding that spending more time in remote learning meant less math learning (aka test score) except when it didn't. Thanks. Very helpful.

Kane tries to make a case for saying that "underlying these tests scores are concrete skills" which matters because "you just can't skip calculus if you want to be an engineer" and "you just can't skip writing if you want to have almost any professional job" and good lord. The connection between test scores and concrete skills is a leap. The assumption that everyone should be tested as if they want to be an engineer is odd. The assumption that the NAEP (or any other standardized test) is a legitimate measure of writing skill is counter-reality.

There's a quote from Stephen Zrike, a school turnaround "expert" and current superintendent who may have the least silly comment in the whole piece:

We have a moral imperative and responsibility to support young people, not just in their academics. That's critical, but [so is] their ability to engage and enjoy their childhoods.

Which actually gets at the central problem with this kind of fear-mongering. It all boils down to an argument that, out of all the things that children experienced (and experience) during the pandemic, nothing is more important than the drop in standardized test scores, and the bulk of our meager resources must be focused on raising those test scores. 

All of this panic-button hammering is just the anguished screams of testocrats who, for a variety of reasons, would like us all to join them in thinking that nothing schools do is more important than getting students to score higher and higher on the Big Standardized Test (and its corollary-- believing that schools are failing because the score are low).

Late in the piece, the Globe returns to this theme

The analysis sheds light on the progress Massachusetts students had made on the NAEP over the 27 years prior to the pandemic--around two grade levels' worth of gains in math, or $65 billion in future earnings.

This is utter, fabricated nonsense. It's an attempt to stampede the crowd toward the exit marked "Testing" by hollering "Fire." It's not to be taken seriously. 

Pompeo: Randi and Teachers Public Enemy Number 1

Oh, look! We're already starting the new election cycle by further vilifying teachers.

This frickin' guy

David Weigel (former Washington Post) and Shelby Talcott (former Daily Caller) are new hires as political reporters at Semafor, and they stirred up the clickbait today by getting Mike Pompeo, in his role of coy candidate, to slam U.S. teachers. You're going to see this quote lots of places, but let's commemorate it here as well.

I tell the story often — I get asked “Who’s the most dangerous person in the world? Is it Chairman Kim, is it Xi Jinping?” The most dangerous person in the world is Randi Weingarten. It’s not a close call. If you ask, “Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?” It would be the teacher’s unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids, and the fact that they don’t know math and reading or writing.

There it is, fully distilled. Teachers teach filth (the anti-CRT+ movement) and they don't know math or reading or writing (science of reading, high stakes test scores). When you think about it, it's quite an accomplishment-- teachers don't know enough about reading, math, or writing to actually teach it, but they can indoctrinate students with all this commie filth. That's America's teachers--supremely incompetent, and yet the greatest brainwashing conspiracy in the world. Can't teach students to read; can teach students to hate the United States of America. What a pile of baloney. 

There's a follow-up, in which Weigel, not unreasonably, asks that, given Pompeo's dismissal of silly conservatives trying to own the libs:

Criticizing Randi Weingarten, pointing to something crazy in a textbook or classroom — if I’m talking to a Democrat they’d say “that’s just owning the libs.”

I'd disagree. It's not so much owning libs as it is slandering several million hard working Americans who have spent far more of their adult lives working to educate young people than Mike Pompeo ever dreamed about. But he has an answer:

If there’s something in the textbook that shouldn’t be there, it’s okay to identify that and call it out. But that’s just openers. That’s identification of a risk. Then the question is, so tell me how it is the case that you’re gonna go convince the people of Cedric County, Kansas, that they need to identify school board members who are going to push through a curriculum that actually returns to the ideas that made America unique and special.

If our kids don’t grow up understanding America is an exceptional nation, we’re done. If they think it’s an oppressor class and an oppressed class, if they think the 1619 Project, and we were founded on a racist idea — if those are the things people entered the seventh grade deeply embedded in their understanding of America, it’s difficult to understand how Xi Jinping’s claim that America is in decline won’t prove true.

Well, "something in a textbook that shouldn't be there" is doing a lot of work here--who exactly makes that call--but he's crystal clear on his belief in American exceptionalism and the idea that every child should be indoctrinated in that belief. I'm not going to relitigate the entire CRT/1619 Project debate here. Just going to note that American exceptionalism is a scary bad idea, and ahistorical to boot. The "American exceptionalism" crowd often reminds me of an angry fifteen year old snarling "If you say anything at all bad about my girlfriend, I will cut you." Mature love--love of a person, love of a country--sees and understands the flaws and problems. Insisting that they don't exist and we must never ever talk about them is not healthy. Likewise, serious grownups recognize that history is a conversation, not a declaration. 

There's one other moment to catch. Pushed to admit maybe he's sort of critical and breaking with Trump, Pompeo offers this:

Well, when you work for the president of the United States, you work for the president of the United States. There’s no, “coming out against the president.” It would be deeply anti-constitutional. It’s immoral, it’s not right. And I never did it, and would never.

Anti-constitutional to criticize the President?! Immoral??!! But then, I thought that the folks in the administration were supposed to be working for the country, not the President.

There's more. He talks about the Deep State without using those words, and he cheers for traditional conservatism, which is apparently another term he doesn't understand.

I'll link to the piece here, because I think it's important to cite your sources so people can check your work, but for the love of God, don't click on it because then they'll just do more of this baloney.

In the meantime, congrats to Randi and America's hardworking teachers on being a football yet again for an aspiring rightwing hater who wants to claim to be conservative while simultaneously vilifying the backbone of one of America's oldest and most important institutions, even as the numbers suggest that beating up teachers has not been a successful strategy. May he disappear into the dustbin of history exceptionally soon.

ICYMI: Finally Winter Edition (11/20)

I still remember the year my family was driving back from New Hampshire via the New York Turnpike and after driving down one land snow canyons, we were finally forced off the road at Syracuse, where the turnpike had been closed. As a kid, I found it a great adventure. As an adult, I'm suspecting my parents did not. God bless everyone in the downwind-of-the-lake portion of New York. 

Meanwhile, here are some readings from the week. 

Police Officer Accidentally Shoots Child While Teaching High School Students How To Be Good Police Officers

Whoopsies! Everyone's okay in this Indiana high school, and they've certainly learned about the importance of gun safety and why it's a super-good idea to bring guns into schools.

Not just ‘Maus’: A Missouri school district removed several Holocaust history books, too

That Holocaust is such a bummer, so in Missouri, some folks think maybe we should just disappear it so nobody gets uncomfortable. From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

What you don’t know about the UW System’s new charter schools should worry you

In Wisconsin, a sudden explosion in charter schools, and there are many reasons to be concerned. By Ruth Coniff for the Wisconsin Examiner.

‘Too hyperbolic’? School board parental rights push falters

Collin Brinkley for the AP. Another election post-mortem looking at the ways in which the parental rights moral panic didn't quite score as well as hoped.

Democrats poised to increase their majority on state board of education

Some good things happened in the last election in Michigan, including the election of Mitchell Robinson, friend of the Institute, to the Starte Board of Education.

One Educator’s Grateful Remembrance: A Teacher

Paul Bonner guest blogs at Nancy Bailey's blog, talking about a teacher who made a difference in his life. Spoiler alert: he doesn't remember her for her excellent test prep.

Messy

At Blue Cereal Education, Dallas Koehn offers a personal reflection on the place of mess in his life and teaching.

A call for rejecting the newest reading wars

At Hechinger, fifty-eight educators sign a letter in reaction to Emily Hanford's latest podcast/hit piece for the reading wars (my wife, a certified reading specialist and second grade teacher is listening and is not impressed). 

Success Academy Parents Speak Out. Part 2 “I was told my seventh grade daughter had to repeat entire grade because she failed one course by one point”

Gary Rubinstein has been hearing from parents who have dealt with Success Academy, New York's bit time charter business. Here's another rough story.

The Promise, Power, and Practice of Student Agency

At ASCD, Tanji Reed Marshall has a paper looking at the whys and hows of building student agency. You may not agree with all of this, but it's still thought-provoking.

Play is crucial for middle schoolers, too

Christina Samuels at Hechinger with something that's not exactly news to anyone who spends time with middle schoolers, but it's still nice to see it in print.

This week at Forbes, I looked at research about Arizona's new massive voucher system that serves wealthy students who were never in public school in the first place, and some of the stories coming out of places where right-wingers took over the school board.

And, of course, you can sign up for the substack version of this blog. Same stuff, right in your inbox.

A Moonshot For The Big Standardized Test

In the Washington Post, a new call for an education moon shot as a way to recover from the after-effects of the pandemic learning interruption.

The authors list gives us a hint at where this headed, and it's not the moon. There's Dan Goldhaber, vice-president of AIR (a test manufacturing outfit) and director of the National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), from which vantage he has pitched research supporting the idea that it would be great to jam a bunch of students in a room with one teacher (and back in the day, he used to argue for VAM, too). There's Thomas Kane, the economist who is somehow a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who has carried water for Bill Gates, pushed high stakes testing, and helped Eric Hanushek promote the idea that your Kindergarten experience at age 5 determines your wealth at age 55. Round this out with Andrew McEachin and Emily Morton of NWEA, the test manufacturing company that has been pushing Learning Loss and themselves as the antidote to same. 

Just for the record, this is not the first call for a moonshot. The Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress previously announced a "Moonshot for Kids," an "open competition meant to elicit and highlight breakthrough ideas that could best leverage a major public or private research and development investment of $1 billion or more to improve outcomes for school-age kids" (albeit with an image of a launching spoace shuttle, a vehicle that does not go to the moon). However, that announcement came on March 17, 2019, just days before the coronavirus upended everything. Nevertheless, I fell that the four writers of the WaPo piece at the very least owe Mike Petrelli some sort of royalty payment for the whole "moonshot" thing.

Goldhaber et al open with the Big Pitch:

American students have experienced a historic decline in academic achievement. The only possible response — the only rational response — is a historic collective investment in children and young adults.

Yeah, the reason that sort of investment would be historic is the same reason that unicorns pooping rainbows in the middle of Wall Street would be historic. And then there's this:

The results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveal plummeting test scores nationwide, setting students back to where they were two decades ago.

This is a classic in a genre that likes to reduce students to an amorphous blob of data-generating abstractions, because here's the thing--if we set the actual live human students who took these tests back "to where they were two decades ago," they would all be unformed, unborn, not yet even twinkles in their parents' eyes. 

Goldhaber et al correctly note that the pandemic exacerbated the gap in test scores between haves and have-nots, and that ought to be a call to action except that, of course, the basic inequity should have been a call to action in the first place, but we've been taking the Big Standardized Tests for a couple of decades thereby attaching a numbered score to the inequity that people already knew was there, and somehow it has never led to states giving those schools more resources or support. "There's a big bear in the neighbors' house," has never prompted the authorities to send help (other than offers like "Well, we could arrange for one member of the family to move to a nice charter house across the street" or "Okay, let's demolish the house with the bear and the people in it"). So I'm not sure why "Okay, there's a bear in the neighbors' house and it's even bigger than we thought" would change anything.

These losses won’t be fixed by few hours of tutoring or a helpful computer program.

Well, they got that right, anyway. And they also score with the observation that the first step is "to more clearly define the task in front of educators and families." And then it goes south.

States need to help everyone see the loss in terms of what it’s going to take to get students back on track. Telling educators that proficiency rates have declined isn’t enough. Explaining that students lost several months or a year of math instruction provides a more solid basis for planning an ambitious recovery agenda.

This is the opposite of clearly defining the task. Because "proficiency rates" is just a snappy term for "test scores." And if your takeaway from all this disruption of school is that our most pressing need is to get test scores back up, then you have lost the plot (or spent too much time in the testing industrial complex). And the reference to months or a year of lost instruction is just to set up the use, again, of one of the more egregious falsehoods pushed by testocrats.

Research suggests that districts might be able to get a year’s worth of additional growth by providing students with three hours of tutoring, with three or fewer students per teacher — each week.

There is no such thing as learning measured in years, months, days or minutes. The time units of learning is a made-up sexy way to talk about--again--drops in test scores. It's a conversion made up to turn slices of standard deviation into units of time. It's a way to distract from the suggestion that of all the things you could worry about when it comes to the education, the thing you should worry most about is their score on the Big Standardized Test. Any time someone starts talking about days, weeks, months of learning, your bullshit detector should start clanging like a Don't Fear The Reaper cowbell.

But Goldhaber et al are going to suggest that a summer school session might yield an academic quarters worth of learning. Or maybe give students an extra period of algebra. Which are exactly the kind of solutions you come up with if you start with the premise that nothing is more important than raising those test scores. And not, say, deciding that your band and chorus need extra periods to help build the ensemble skills that have suffered from the long break. 

The writers also discuss the issues of staffing; in short, the school is probably going to have to staff all this stuff by mobilizing "local undergraduate students, parents, and other community members to provide tutoring." And be up front about the sacrifices necessary

Schools and education leaders should also be frank about what this effort requires from families. Expanding learning opportunities, such as after-school programs or Saturday academies, will require students and families to sacrifice time they might ordinarily spend on extracurriculars, family responsibilities, or even vacations. Year-round school will require broader adjustments to family routines — though it might be a benefit for parents scrambling for summer child care.

To get consensus (aka buy in) from parents, the school will have to be "crystal clear about where individual children stand." And I would love to sit in on the meeting in which Principal McData explains to Mr. and Mrs. Parentsalot that little Sam and Pat should have summer vacation taken away from them until they get that score on the annual test back up, because policy leaders are unhappy with the data. 

The writers also try to sell the idea that parents are largely deluded in thinking that their children are up to speed, which does not "line up with what we know about where students are academically today." But that's just another cover for "test score." (Reformsters really need to decide whether parents are the ones who know their children best or parents don't have a damn clue.) 

Look. This piece touts the value of transparency, but it also uses a trick known as the used car lot world as "assume the sale." That's when the salesman starts talking as if your decision to buy the car is already a done deal, and you're just haggling over details.

In this case, testocrats start the conversation on the premise that, hey, we all agree that nothing is more important than getting those annual test scores on a single badly-designed math and reading test. We skip right over the long long list of educational items that suffered during the pandemic and just quietly move test scores to the top of the list without any discussion about what priorities should be. For that matter, we also skip over the discussion that had already been raging for a few decades before COVID, the discussion about whether tests tests are valid, whether they're a good proxy for educational achievement at all, whther test scores tell teachers anything they don't already know, whether they are serving as a massive example of Campbell's Law as they warp education all out of shape, whether education would not be better off if we scrapped the whole BS Test business.

Testocrats are nervous. During the pandemic, testing was suspended, and parents and teachers did not collapse, wailing, "How shall I ever know how these children are doing??" Not a teacher in the country said, "Man, I wish test prep and administration was sucking up more of my time." 

I won't pretend to know how many testocrats have been swimming too long in their own koolaid and how many are just cynically opportunistic. Either way, they need a moonshot not to rescue children, but to rescue their own industry. In the meantime, schools and parents should be having a conversation about what students need without jumping to the assumption that nothing could be more important than getting those test scores back up.

CT: Darien Gets It

 It's a small local story, but I want to highlight it because it shows that some school districts can figure it out.

Darien Public Schools are located in Darien, Connecticut. According to Niche, they're a top-rated district with A and A+ rating for everything except diversity (C-). The district serves a little under 5,000 students, and was singled out by the state for excellence in managing its way through the pandemic. Darien is a costal town on Long Island Sound with a median household income of $232,523, a preponderance of Republicans, and low taxes. Median home price is $2.2 million. Both film versions of the Stepford Wives filmed in Darien.

But in 2021, more than 70 teachers left the district (double their pre-pandemic rate). Only five of those were retirees. The board and the teachers union agreed--some sort of action had to be taken. What to do?

Darien didn't lower the bar by deciding to hire any warm body that could stand up in a classroom. They didn't shrug and say, "Well, just jam more kids into the classrooms we still have teachers for." No, they did something radical:

This week, the school board approved a three-year contract with Darien educators that will cost the district a total of $6 million but gives teachers the biggest increase in salaries in more than a decade and the highest starting salary among districts of comparable size and affluence.

That's right. They got competitive. They recognized that the high cost of housing in the district means it's an expensive place to teach, even if the expense is measured in many hours of commuting. They extended maternity leave, to twelve weeks plus five days.  

Not every district has the kinds of resources that Darien has, but every district has the ability to compete with comparable districts. Every district has the ability to look at the down side of teaching in their schools and ask themselves, "What would make our district more attractive." Every district can work to use its strengths to offset its drawbacks.

Or they could just shrug and say, "Well, there's a teacher shortage. Nothing we can do about it." Darien's approach seems more useful.