PA: Board Member "I don't care what the law says."

Penncrest is a small rural district up the road from me, a district that has been mirroring the reading suppression battles of the more famous Central Bucks district (and by mirror, I mean that some folks on the Penncrest board appear to be literally copying some of the Central Bucks work). 

But CB is a big district in the busy part of the state, and Penncrest is a tiny district up in the wilderness, so it's not getting much attention. But it's worth paying attention to, because here in the rural school region, it's not unusual for board members to say the quiet part out loud because they don't realize they shouldn't. That happens a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the rest of the state doesn't pay much attention to what rural districts do. Someday I'll tell you the story of a local district that fired a teacher for being gay, didn't bother to cover that reason with even a tiny fig leaf, and was really surprised when they were dragged into court and lost. 

Penncrest has been trying to wield a tiny tattered fig leaf over its motivations for a new set of rules aimed at getting LGBTQ+ books out of its libraries, even as some board members have been quite clear about what they mean by "sexualized content," and while we're at it, all that racism stuff, too. 

Board member David Valesky on LGBTQ books in the library:

Besides the point of being totally evil, this is not what we need to be teaching kids. They aren't at school to be brainwashed into thinking homosexuality is okay. Its [sic] actually being promoted to the point where it's even 'cool'.

Board member David Valesky on books about race in American history:

"I don't have an issue if we're giving books that's targeting education of the Civil War and slavery and there is racism even today, but this is obviously like shoving it down every corner," he said.

Valesky said there were four books on the list that "openly promote the hate group Black Lives Matter."

"That's a group that is for destroying," he said. "They aren't protecting Black lives."

Board member David Valesky on the possibility of legal challenges to the board's new rules:

If we go to court over it, so be it, because at the end of the day we’re standing up for what’s right and for what God has said is right and true.

Those legal issues may in fact occur soon, but in the meantime, the board is setting up a citizen's committee to review naughty books. And in discussing that, board members ended up talking about what was revealed in some emails unearthed by a Right To Know request. 

I believe the terms in the policy we presented are clear. I honestly don’t care what the law says, as long as what I said is right before God. They can change the word at any time in state and federal laws. I’m just concerned that if this policy is pulled, then we have a minimum of 3 months until we can vote on it again. The remainder of my time on the board is uncertain at this point.

Yes, that's member David Valesky again (emphasis mine). Member Jeff Brooks brought it up with the suggestion that maybe the committee should include people who actually care about the law. Valesky said that it was taken out of context, but it's hard to imagine a context in which "I don't care what the law says" doesn't mean "I don't care what the law says." And given the context of Valesky's previous comments, it's hard not to think that he means that he doesn't care what the law says.

Don't blame Valesky just because he's the one who keeps saying things that end up in the paper; he's part of a board majority that appears to agree with him (and plenty of members of the public, some of who hit my comments sections with posts too rude and slanderous for me to put up). And what this board nakedly displays is the same stuff that's behind curtains and masks and tiny fig leaves in other places where the culture wars are being imposed on districts.

What can we take away?

1) It has nothing whatsoever to do with school choice (not really an option in this rural area) and everything to do with imposing the Correct Values on the school system-including all the other people who use it and pay for it. 

2) "Sexual content" means any dirty heterosexual stuff and any mention of LGBTQ persons at all (and it's all "porn" that is favored by "groomers.")

3) No conversation about race-related issues is possible because the terms and targets will move on a sentence by sentence basis.

4) They answer to nobody but God, as they conceive Him to Be.

Penncrest has a bunch of seats open for election this year, and in this neck of the woods, it's an unpaid position, which means community members sign up to get a load of grief for free, and the ongoing battle over these issues in Penncrest seems unlikely to resolve any time soon. We'll see what happens next, but I can practically guarantee that whatever it is, it won't be pretty. 

Democrats Unveil Their Parents' Rights Thing

Well, I'll give them this much: rather than simply bitch about the House GOP proposed Parental Bill of Rights, the House Dems came up with a thing of their own. Since what the Dems are proposing is actually a "resolution" rather than an actual bill, it will have even less impact on reality than the GOP bill, whose main feature is its full-throated support of rights that parents already have. 

The Democrat's resolution is 8 pages long: the first is the intro, the next six are a bunch of "whereas" clauses, and then we finally arrive at what is resolved. 

The whereas's are a big bunch of the usual: schools are crucial public good, invest sufficient resources, cornerstone of democracy, all students benefit from diverse schools, education includes all [insert list here], skills needed to contribute to multiracial, multiethnic, diverse society, benefit from full history, special needs, students benefit from seeing themselves reflected in books etc, enough psychologists and counselors, broad definition of parents, parents want and deserve safety and dignity, parents eager to partner with educators, partnership, access to information about how students are doing, parent involvement is complementary and essential to, not separate from, the work of educators, schools hostile to LGBTQ students bad, dignity and respect and pronouns and names, discrimination bad, censoring books bad, cultural competency, mental and emotional health support for educators, gag law limitations bad, threats against teachers and schools bad...

And that's mostly it. I highlighted the one because I think maybe that was the one they really wanted to hit. But mostly it's a list so long that it becomes a sort of background hum, an list that reads like an attempt to throw everything and the kitchen sink at us, a display with so many points that it fails to have any real point. 

Anyway, the resolved part has four items. Resolved that the House of Representatives:

1) recognizes that schools are important and should be supported

2) "celebrates and encourages" the engagement of students and parents in the process, and collaboration in support of students is good

3) urges adoption of materials that are historically accurate, reflect diversity, and encourage critical thinking' 

4) "promotes the implementation of practices that reduce disparities, eliminate discrimination, and make elementary and secondary schools safer, more inclusive, and more supportive for all students."

And the point of this is... what? We already know who's going to vote for and against it. We already know how many people are going to be moved by it (spoiler: zero). We already know how much effect it will have on education policy (spoiler: also zero). 

It clarifies what Dems professes that is different from what the GOP professes? It ends the, "Well, then, what's your bright idea" conversation about the GOP bill. It creates the unusual spectacle of the GOP calling for more federal government intrusiveness than the Dems. 

It mostly says the right things. And while I'd rather have politicians saying the right kinds of things rather than other stuff, talk is cheap. Obama knew how to say the right thing about education. Heck, on his good days, so did Arne Duncan. But Democrats are far past the point where lip service for public education means much. Actual concrete actions in support of public education would mean far more. And if you want to talk about parental rights, I'll offer the same addendum I offered for the GOP bill:

The right to paid parental leave for 12 weeks after the child is brought home.

The right to wages sufficient to raise a family.

The right to affordable, quality child care so that parents can earn those wages.

The right to send their child to a fully funded, fully professionally staffed school.

The right to universal health care to guarantee the health and well-being of every child.

More political theater is not what anybody actually needs. I mean, if political theater is your job, then you do you. But both sides are going to need more than this for any kind of standing ovation.

ChatGPT Will Power Personalized Learning

I don't get into the business of predicting the future often, and predicting tech future seems particularly pointless as it's an area dominated by aspirational marketing rather than actual prediction.

But I think I've found a use for ChatGPT and its brethren.

The problem with personalizing learning has always been capacity.

Earlier personalized learning systems (think that SRA reading box from your elementary days) were really personalized pacing systems. Everyone traveled the same path, but at their own personal pace. Subsequent attempts to personalize learning have attempted to create multiple branching paths, but the problem remains capacity and inventory. Do you create a worksheet about subject-verb agreement problems focused on 1920's automobile design on the off chance that some day, you may have the student who needs exactly that? You do not. 

But generative text bots can help fill this gap.

I cannot tell you how many hundreds of worksheets I created in my career, and I don't even want to think about the hours I spent on them. Custom made for classes (this class is having trouble telling adjective and adverb clauses apart, so let me bang out a worksheet focused just on that). A small cast of recurring characters with improbably names (so that I would never be targeting current or future students). The years I started every class with a three-sentence editing exercise. 

I've tried ChatGPT at generating basic grammar and usage worksheets. It does fine (sometimes, for no apparent reason, it even throws in an answer key). Even if I were taking time to edit the sentences to more carefully match what I needed (and fit my particular classroom sensibilities), ChatGPT would still be a time saver.

Likewise, I have no doubt that various purveyors of computerized personalized learning products are at this very moment figuring out how to incorporate the new generation of generative textbots to provide the kind of personalization they always claimed they were already doing. Scan the student response, generate a new exercise. Do I think that having software teach a child this way is ideal? I don't. Do I think we've arrived at the point where it can be done? I do. It's cheap, quick, easy, and solves one of the central problems of computerized personalized learning.

Check back later, when standardized test manufacturers start using chatbots to reduce the costs of coming up with test items. 

Asking Teachers To Do Fewer Things Better

At the Fordham Institute blog, Robert Pondiscio and Jessica Shurtz talk about the idea of improving student outcomes by asking teachers to do fewer things better. While we disagree on some points (I'll get to that in a minute), the basic idea is sound.

Anyone who has taught for more than a couple of years has had the experience-- administration announces that you will need to add one more thing to your plate. It may be a state mandate ("Our young people need help with modern widget issues, so let's require schools to include a widget lesson in their curriculum") or it may be a new program requirement ("We're adding the new Hooray For Sticks literacy program so you'll need to make room for daily lessons") or it may be the admin's newest resume bomb ("In my continuing quest to put 'change agent' on my resume, I have decided to add this cool thing to our curriculum") or it may be the result of some passing whim ("I just read an intriguing article about instructional weasel spit...") but the end result is that classroom teachers are regularly asked to add one more task to the list of tasks they already don't have enough time for.

The piece hits on themes that have been consistent through Pondiscio's work. The education system needs about 4 million teachers, which suggests that most of them are going to be ordinary mortals, and any approach to education premised on a plan to find a bunch of superteachers and put them in classrooms is not a very good plan. On this we agree. It has occasionally been the plan, like the occasional vogue for the Super Sardinemaster model, in which we put an awesome teacher in a classroom of a few hundred students and/or shoot her out to a few hundred students via the interwebs. Race to the Top included the notion that we could identify super teachers and move them around to where they were needed, an idea that ran aground on the question of how--how to identify super teachers, and how to move them around.

We all know that "some teachers are more effective than others," except that when we say that, it's really shorthand for "we all know that some teachers are more effective at some things with some students on some days, depending on who you ask." Which is probably why we haven't made much progress with finding ways to identify great teachers and figure out what makes them great.

Many folks think it's really easy to identify really good and really bad teachers, which may be true, but the vast majority of teachers are neither super-awesome or terribly terrible. Which brings us back to Pondiscio and Schurz's point, which is that the system needs to figure out how to get the best work out of those folks in the regular human middle.

I can think of several suggestions, including a good training system and less reliance on measures that don't actually measure anything useful (lookin' at you, EdTPA and Praxis). Pondiscio and Schurz center on cutting the teacher workload-- 

Let’s not ask what more teachers can do. Ask instead what are the things that only a teacher can do. Everything else should be a job for someone else.

True that. Of course, it would require hiring those people and paying them, which is where many districts start to balk. But it is true that education consistently pays out a lot of money to do grunt jobs. Did I need a Master's Degree to supervise all those study halls, or more to the point, did my district need to hire someone with a Master's Degree and at the top of the pay scale to supervise study halls? But these kinds of "duty periods" give districts the illusion that they are getting "free" labor as well as playing to the all-too-common assumption that if a teacher isn't in a roomful of students, she isn't really working and the district isn't really getting their money's worth. 

Pondiscio has long argued that teachers should be freed up of the need to plan lessons, and when he says. "While many educators argue, often strenuously, that their autonomy is sacrosanct, and for allowing teachers to build a curriculum around their students’ interests or customize their lessons to maximize their engagement..." he could be talking about me. 

As with so many educational issues, I think lesson planning falls on a continuum. On one end of the scale, we find "teacher proof" lessons in a box, scripted for delivery "with fidelity" by people who may have the title of "teacher," but are simply content delivery units. On the other end of the scale, we find teachers who just do whatever the heck they want to on any given day. 

The scripted version probably has more supporters out there, if for no other reason than some folks find the McDonaldization of education appealing. If we've got all the lessons in a box, then we can hire any schlubb (or maybe some AI algorithm) to read the script. Low costs, no unions--for some folks it would be paradise. On the other end of the scale, I'm not sure many people are fans of the Teacher Land Of Do As You Please other than the teacher herself (and I'll bet that her colleagues support that model less than anyone). 

To be clear--both models are bad. A canned lesson created by someone who has never even met the students and is delivered by someone who makes no attempt to meet the students where they are is bad teaching. A teacher who just kind of follows her muse wherever it may lead on the taxpayers' dime is irresponsible. 

The answer lies somewhere in the middle (and probably not exactly in the same place for every school). It is both useful and helpful to provide the teacher with something, some guidance, some pathway, some sort of direction about what is expected of them in planning their lessons and laying out the road ahead. Simply dumping a teacher into a classroom and saying, "There you go-- good luck teaching them whatever" is not how you set people up for success. This is how many districts end up with a textbook-dictated curriculum--teachers resort to just opening the book and start heading through it, page by page.

And Pondiscio and Schurz are correct to hint that more autonomy equals more work on things other than analyzing student work, providing feedback and other important work that may vary by grade level and subject matter (as a high school English teacher, I spent so many hours rereading the novels I taught as well as reading about them; my wife the elementary teacher has no such issue, but the sheer volume of lesson planning she has to do boggles my mind). 

Somewhere in the midst of this continuum is the sweet spot, and I think the sweet spot is this. If you are doing your job, then when you use created materials and pre-developed lesson plans, you still go through the process of fitting that to your particular class, adapting it to student interests and needs. If during the adaptation process you conclude that it would be less work to just design your own damn lesson, then you have sailed past the sweet spot. Good teaching materials make it easier to do your job. 

There's a whole other conversation to be had about lesson planning as a paperwork exercise that exists to "prove" to the office that you're doing your job or to add to some district analysis of which standards the district is covering or to feed some admin's dream that if he has all your lesson plans on file he can replace you easily. Generally, lesson plans that are for the use of someone other than the actual teacher are a waste of teacher time.

And there's also a shift in all of this that occurs over time. Throughout my career, my year to year goal was to add one or two more balls to my juggling act while building a bigger and bigger foundation on which to build everything else. You get better at this stuff, the longer you keep at it, and you have to build less and less from scratch (however, if you just pull out last year's materials and walk through it without question or revision, you're no better than the teacher reading from the canned script). 

You learn how to reduce your own extraneous workload. Still. The last few years of my career, I carried a lot of frustration because administration was adding extra workload faster than I could trim. The pandemic and its various side effects amped that up big time. That amping includes both the additional responsibilities tossed on teachers ("Why don't you go ahead and teach all your classes live and on line?") and in the loss of time to get stuff done. I talked to former colleagues who lost their clerical work period to cover someone else's absences every single day for a year. This year, I have lost track of how many specials (art, music, phys ed) my children have lost because the teacher was pulled to cover an absence. 

If you want to piss off an administrator, in one of those Here's Your New Responsibility meetings, raise your hand and ask, "What would you like me to stop doing so I have time to do this?" The question needs to be answered, but it never is. 

In his 2016 book Leadership for Teacher Learning, Dylan Wiliam observes that when teachers are asked to identify something that they will stop doing or do less of to create time and space for them to explore improvements to their teaching, they fail miserably. “They go through the list of their current tasks and duties and conclude that there is nothing they can stop doing or do less of because everything that they are doing contributes to student learning,” he writes. “In my experience, it is hardly ever the case that teachers are doing things that are unproductive. This is why leadership in education is so challenging. The essence of effective leadership is stopping people from doing good things to give them time to do even better things.”

Yes, that. It's yet another issue where the answers can't be scaled because they are very specific and very local. But every administrator in the country ought to be working on it. 

ICYMI: One Hour Less Edition (3/12)

Thank goodness for all the computerized timekeepers, set so nobody has to remember anything. For the record, we at the Institute are in favor of the time change, because the board of directors believe it's okay to get the rest of us up when the sky lights up, and that's starting to get a little early in the day, thanks.

Slimmer list than usual this week, but still some choice bits from the world of education.

Thinking about Teachers at the Table

Nancy Flanagan takes a look at the issues surrounding the presence of teachers at the policy table, and how Michigan is starting to get things right again.

Why are so few Black men teachers in New York City?

Amaya McDonald asks one of the big questions (and talks to Jose Luis Vilson along the way). 

How Child Labor Violations Have Quadrupled Since 2015

NPR offers a podcast about the rise in child labor violations. Extra interesting right now, since a bunch of red legislatures are suddenly super-interested in weakening child labor laws.

Adults complained about a teen theater production and the show's creators stepped in

There had been speculation that administration in Middlefield, Ohio had shut down a student production of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee because it mention gay persons. Turns out things were worse than that, but a compromise was worked out. 

Who Gets to Decide What Students Read?

Anne Lutz Fernandez points out that critics of public education can't decide whether they just don't know what's going on in school, or they know too much (and hate it). 

When Students Cheat, They Only Hurt Themselves

Stevem Singer with some thoughts about cheating and reminders that students are more inclined to cheat on what they consider to be a waste of their time. 

Will The Senate Ignore the Cost of SB202 on Public Education?

Florida, leading the way for education privatization, looks at spending a huge amount of money on vouchers. Accountabaloney has some of the figures.

Neo-Nazi Homeschoolers Could Be Paid $22,000 to Teach Their Kids About Hitler

Yes, that Ohio backpack bill could absolutely direct a bunch of money to neo-nazi homeschoolers. 

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Alexandra Robbins Gets It Right: Read This Book

Alexandra Robbins is a journalist and the author of five New York Times bestselling books. Next week her newest book, The Teachers, drops. I've read it, and you should, too.  This is a must-read for everyone who wants to understand what a teachers; life looks like from the inside, and for every teacher who wants to feel as someone gets it.

Robbins, who actually works as a substitute teacher in her own local district, gets it. 

I approached my review copy of this book with some trepidation. Would this be one more book about education by some writer who dipped her toes in the waters and came away with Startling New Observations that every teacher already knew or, worse, that every teacher already knew were wrong. It was great to discover that this was not That Book at all.

The book follows three teachers month by month through the school year, but it is also packed with the voices of other teachers.

What a radical notion-- a book about teaching that is filled with the voices of teachers!

Teachers from all across the nation, from every grade level (even friend of the Institute Steven Singer), talking honestly about what the job is like, what it takes, what it takes out of you.

Robbins is unapologetic in her respect for the work:

Teachers are among the most vital, hardest working, passionate, and selfless members of the workforce--yet they are among the most disrespected and undervalued. 

The three "close up" stories capture all the ups and downs of classroom teaching--the supportive and not-so-supportive colleagues, the work of finding ways to get students to progress through the year, the struggle of balancing personal and professional existence, the increased demands on time, the difference between a toxic and healthy school environment. Along with the month by month stories of those three teachers, Robbins provides in depth examinations of the larger issues-- violence, problematic parents, pandemic fallout, anti-teacher activists, the problems of understaffing.

To simply list the topics makes the book seem like a downer, but I found it an encouraging and uplifting read, capturing how teachers find ways to rise and meet the many challenges they face--not like the kind of imaginary super-teachers we see in media, but like human beings with their own strengths and weaknesses and struggles who manage to rise up and do the work. In many ways, Robbins captures not just the human reality of teaching, but the ways in which teaching is a deeply human endeavor, centering on the best of what human beings can be. 

Or to put it another way, in my fifth year of retirement, nothing has made me miss the classroom more than reading this book.

Anyway-- you should read this book. It officially drops on Tuesday, March 14, and you should get a copy (or pre-order now). In her blurb, Diane Ravitch calls this book "a beautiful testimony." I agree. Do not miss this book. 

National Parents Bill of Rights Is Wasting Time

The GOP in DC is making noise about a Parents Bill of Rights, but if some folks think they're talking about the kind of legislative overreach we're seeing in places like Florida and Arkansas, well, think again. There's nothing radical in this bill, nothing revolutionary in this bill, nothing new in this bill, and really, nothing objectionable in this bill. This is a big fat nothingburger, a PR move cosplaying as serious legislation.

The breakdown of the bill is simple (so simple that Kevin McCarthy was able to run it down in less than 45 seconds, including a reality-impaired comment about how parents all over who just want to talk are being labeled terrorists), though we'll look at the more detailed breakdown as well.  Here are the five "pillars" of the bill.

1-Parents have the right to know what their children are being taught.
2-Parents have the right to be heard.
3-Parents have the right to see the school budget and spending.
4-Parents have the right to protect their child’s privacy.
5-Parents have the right to keep their children safe.

1- Are there states that don't require public schools to make their curriculum a matter of public record? They should fix that. Now, if the GOP means that every word the teacher is going to speak and every worksheet they're going to hand out should be a matter of public record before the year starts, well, that's not possible. 

This is also meant to include a list of every book in the library, and a "timely notice" of any plan to eliminate gifted programs. 

2- I'm not aware of any public school in the country where the rule is to never, ever listen to a parent who calls the school. I suspect that some folks have confused the right to be heard with the right to be obeyed, and I have no doubt that there are school boards that have instituted rules in self-defense that will limit public comment to less than a total of twelve hours. I do note, however, that since this right is only being "created" for parents, school boards must get the right to tell people who are neither parents nor residents of the district to STFU. 

The long list includes a suggestion that districts consider community feedback when making decisions, except that the community includes taxpayers who are not parents, so the bill is a bit unclear here on who exactly gets rights. Weirdly, the bill also instructs educators and policymakers to respect the First Amendment rights of parents which I'm pretty sure, regardless of this bill, are covered by the actual First Amendment. 

3- Are there any states that do no require budgets and spending to be a matter of public record?

4- The fourth seems simple enough-- don't sell student data, don't give it to tech companies--though Congress might want to have a chat with Google and the SAT and ACT folks on this one. I suspect we'll hit some bumps whenever a child decides that they want to protect their own privacy by keeping things private from their parents. But otherwise, once again, this right already exists.

5- This seems to boil down to letting parents know about any "violent activity occurring on school grounds or at school-sponsored events while still protecting the privacy of the students involved in the incident." So I guess "some student and some other student had a fight at a school thing" is the template? It certainly doesn't have anything to do with serious attempts to get gun violence under control so that parents don't have to worry about their kids being shot at school.

As I said-- a lot of nothing in this burger. If you really want to lay down some parents' rights, we could try:

The right to paid parental leave for 12 weeks after the child is brought home.

The right to wages sufficient to raise a family.

The right to affordable, quality child care so that parents can earn those wages.

The right to send their child to a fully funded, fully professionally staffed school.

The right to universal health care to guarantee the health and well-being of every child. 

And if you want to get really radical, you could demand that the rights embodied by those five pillars be guaranteed not just for public schools (where they are pretty much already law) but also for charter and private schools, which are more prone to meetings and budgetary plans not accessible to the public, listen to parents when they feel like it, and all too often require students and parents to shed rights as part of the cost of admission.

And I'll stop before getting too far into a bill of rights for the taxpayers who are required to foot the bill but are somehow never brought up when folks are beating the parental rights drum.

"I couldn't imagine someone would oppose a Parents Bill of Rights," McCarthy told ABC News, which I think speaks both to his imagination and his goals--to concoct a base-pleasing dog-whistling bill that can score some sort of political win. 

Becky Pringle, NEA president, offered a sort of response

McCarthy would rather seek to stoke racial and social division and distract us from what will really help our students thrive: an inspiring, inclusive, and age-appropriate curriculum that prepares each and every one of them for their future. Parents and voters agree that elected leaders should be focused on getting students the individualized support they need, keeping guns out of schools, and addressing educator shortages.

What else can you say, I guess. Congress could find far better things to do with its time and far better things to do to help education than this performative time-wasting.