The Jazz of Teaching

I grew up listening to swing and jazz thanks to a father who was slightly out of synch with the music of his own times. When I had the chance in fifth grade to start learning an instrument, I picked trombone, because that was what Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey played. 

When we started learning recognizable tunes in lessons, I started trying to "jazz them up." And I started trying to play tunes that I knew even though I didn't have music for them. I was fortunate to have a teacher encouraged this kind of unrestrained blatting, even told me that there was a name for trying to play a tune by ear-- faking it. 

I've been playing now for about 57 years or so, any kind of playing there was to do (my fifth grade teacher was also my middle school and high school band director and a regular working sax player, and one of the things he taught us was music is music and don't be a snob stuck in a particular rut and playing always leads to more playing) and my playing has always included some form of jazz, Mostly I have stuck to the traditional improvisational style, what folks who don't listen to it much reflexively call dixieland.

So when Larry Cuban ran this piece-- "Playing Jazz, Rebounding Basketball Shots, and Teaching Lessons: Instant Decision-Making"-- it spoke right to me. A month later I'm still thinking about it. Because teaching, on my best days, felt exactly like playing jazz, on my best days.

Improvisation is freedom, and it isn't. You can't just pick up an instrument you've never touched before and just start winging away. Learning to play an instrument is learning not only another language, but another way to speak, so that when you reach for a note, it is there. And what you play rests on an underlying structure of chords and progressions and musical lines (your relationship with that structure is a big part of what characterizes the style of jazz you're playing)-- even if you have control of the horn, you don't just honk randomly. And! On top of that, you're also working things out in relationship with the other people who are playing at the same time. And!! On top of that, even as you are racing forward into the next note, you are also casting back, an ear on what you just milliseconds ago did. All while in a feedback loop with your audience. 

Cuban focuses on the idea of decisions-- thousands of decisions made in an impossibly short period of time. Maybe we shouldn't say "decision" because for folks who aren't in it that conveys a slow consideration, and that's not it, exactly (though it can be), as much as it's just reaching a point of action and acting in one of dozens of available directions. Your brain is just firing--bam! bam! bam! bam!--so quickly and fluidly. Being in the zone often feels as if you've disappeared, you've become Emerson's transparent eyeball, and you are just a conduit and a powerful Something is flowing through you into the world.

As Cuban points out, neuroscientists have done some studying of musicians and the micro-decisions, and he ties it to basketball, though I think many sports fit (sports add an extra dimension with the addition of opponents). 

And teaching. There is certainly an underlying structure and order to what a teacher does in a lesson. But researchers tell us that there's a lot going on. From Cuban's piece:

*Researchers Hilda Borko and Richard Shavelson summarized studies that reported .7 decisions per minute during interactive teaching.

*Researcher Philip Jackson (p. 149) said that elementary teachers have 200 to 300 exchanges with students every hour (between 1200-1500 a day), most of which are unplanned and unpredictable calling for teacher decisions, if not judgments.

In short, teaching because it is a “opportunistic”–neither teacher nor students can say with confidence what exactly will happen next–requires “spontaneity and immediacy” (Jackson, p. 166, 152).

Nancy Flanagan, spinning off Cuban's article and a tweet from Ed Fuller, notes that this offers an explanation for why teaching requires so much mental energy. Those little micro-decision points come at you relentlessly in a way for which your college courses do not prepare you (college education students--play jazz or basketball or racketball). 

There are thousand strands running through that room, and your job is to stand at the intersection of them all, keeping them balanced and connected, and it takes a million little adjustments and movements, like riding a unicycle on a tightrope while juggling monkeys with your hands and balancing a broomstick on your nose. 

Teaching, as Flanagan rightly points out, is not the only profession like this, but it is certainly one of them.

The requirement for immediacy, spontaneity, improvisation, deliberate presence-- all of those are more reason that scripted lessons and demands to implement materials With Fidelity are just obstacles to better teaching. 

But wait, someone is about to say. Don't types of music that aren't jazz require players to just follow the notes as written, just like following a script with fidelity? Don't actors on screen and stage follow a script, with fidelity?

There's two answers here. First, there's way more improvisation involved (those Baroque players, for instance, rambled all over the place, just in a Baroquey way).  And no acting script gives you everything on the page; it is the job of actors and directors to fill in the rest.

But second, of course people don't just follow the marks on the page. If they did, there would be no difference between any two recordings of a particular work, or between recordings and live performances. Not every player is a technical whiz or an improvisational genius. Some are just what a friend of mine calls blue collar musicians--they're capable and they get the job done on a regular basis.

That's one more way the mental load of teaching resembles playing. Working musicians find themselves covering the same territory time and time again, and part of the mental discipline is clearing your head so that you can approach the thousandth time while staying fresh and immediate and deliberate and in the moment, true to the path you know well, but open to the opportunities and options that appear in the new moment. 

You can get tired and coast in your ruts. You can get over-excited and try too much at once and drop a bunch of monkeys. And some days you just can't quite connect with that sweet spot and so you fall back on some tried and true routine, which may not be exciting or surprising, but it can get you from Point A to Point B. As I've argued before, teaching is both art and science. But it definitely can be jazz.

ICYMI: Sleepover Edition (2/11)

One of the VP's from one of the Institute field offices is here for the weekend. The Board of Directors has been beside themselves with delight. Exciting times. Yesterday we went to look at dinosaur stuff. And at night, everyone sleeps, some, sort of. 

But I've still got a reading list for you from the week. Share!

“Apples to outcomes?” Revisiting the achievement v. attainment differences in school voucher studies

Josh Cowen has updated his summary of research about voucher effectiveness for Brookings. Excellent source for just how vouchers fall short of what their supporters promise.

Why John Dewey’s vision for education and democracy still resonates today

Nicholas Tampio at The Conversation with a nice consideration of the value of John Dewey (and what some folks get wrong about him).

Is Eliminating Property Tax the Next Step Toward Defunding Florida’s Public Schools?

God bless Sue Kingery Woltanski, because keeping up with the dopey ideas rolling out of Florida's legislature is a lot like playing Whack-A-Mutant-Mole. Latest genius idea? Eliminate property tax.

In Red States, the Bill for School Voucher Bait-and-Switch Is Coming Due

Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire writing for The Nation look at how voucher programs are racking up big time budget-busting costs. Who was surprised?

State vouchers expand, and one Charlotte school remains elusive

A while back. Kris Nordstrom found that some voucher schools had more vouchers than students. Now one reporter is still trying to find one of those schools, or get answers from people supposedly running it. A mysterious saga, indeed.

TFA CEO Announces Exit As Recruitment Falls Below 2007 Numbers

Things continue to go not-so-great over at Teach for Awhile America. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider breaks down the latest news.

How the Far Right Took Over a Pennsylvania School Board—And How Parents Took It Back

For Vanity Fair, Kathryn Joyce provides quite the full history of how Pennridge Schools in Bucks County, PA, got rolled by a MAGA board, became the first district to hire fly-by-night Vermilion education consultant outfit, and managed to sweep all of that mess out of there. 

High School Students Walk Out Over Cellphone Ban

Cellphone bans are all the rage. In one Texas district that's going about how you'd expect.

On Professional Developmentg and the Places We Don't Have

Jose Luis Vilson has some brief but intriguing thoughts about continuous growth for teachers and pedagogical homes. 

“Back to Basics” Again! What Does it Mean for Students and Teachers?

Nancy Bailey has noticed the return of an old favorite education rant--let's get back to basics! What does that even mean?

Ohio’s Gerrymandered, Supermajority Republican Senate Wields Intimidation to Impose Its Will

Jan Resseger reports from Ohio, where a gerrymandered GOP supermajority intends to rule with an iron fist.

Teaching is Hard

Maybe TC Weber isn't saying anything you don't already know, but that doesn't mean it's not worth saying on a daily basis.

‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything

From Financial Times, the best (so far) explanation by Cory Doctorow of enshittification-- how it happens, what causes it, what stops it, what to do about it.

At Forbes, I wrote about new research from Chris Tienkin showing--once again--that the Big Standardized Test doesn't measure what folks insist it does.

Join me over on Substack. Free and easy!

WSJ Runs Anti-Union Choice Spin

Speaking of saying the quiet part out loud...

Choiceworld, like other reformster movements, has always included a healthy dose of anti-union and anti-teacher sentiment, and there's nothing like a teacher strike to bring that out. Massachusetts is an anti-strike state, so the recent Newton strike referenced in the op-ed was seen as doubly-naughty by folks who want teachers to just behave themselves and take what they're offered. 

Teacher strikes are no fun at all. I went through two in my career, once as the local union president, and I will say this with absolute certainty--teachers do not want to strike. Strikes do not happen because a handful of teachers get cranky. They don’t happen because a union somehow cons teachers into walking out. Most teachers really, really, REALLY don’t want to strike. They are by nature team players, good soldiers, and respecters of authority. They don’t want to break the rules. No strike has ever happened because the teachers, at the first sign of negotiation trouble, got together and said, "Well, let's try striking as a first resort."

As I've written before, it takes just a few elements to precipitate a strike:

* A lack of good faith bargaining

* A long pattern of disrespect

* Teacher concern about the future

* Meaningless local laws

* A situation in which teachers see no other options

Note that the list does not include "not getting exactly what they want." The last item--the no other options one--is critical, because teachers will push their leaders hard to Find Another Way. Strikes are called by members who have been convinced that there is no other way to get the board to work for a settlement that is fair enough

But Corey DeAngelis (noted choicer evangelist) and Dean McGee ("educational freedom attorney") see a different problem:

The teachers get what they want, every time. The result is a vicious circle. Teachers unions periodically hold children’s education hostage in exchange for ransom payments from taxpayers. The unions are never fully held accountable for these disruptions. Nor do they ever allow meaningful change to the system.

One would think that teacher strikes are rampant, or at least should be. After all, if a strike get teachers every thing they want every time, why doesn't every local just strike for every contract negotiation. The answer is A) they don't want to and B) mostly other options, pursued with a good-faith board negotiation, work well enough. 

It's that last sentence--the "and they keep standing in the way of voucher policy" of it--that is the heart of the argument here. If only the parents of Newton had access to "alternative schools or educational paths, "they would have been able to avoid the disruption the strike caused. And the unions would have a weaker incentive to behave disruptively in the first place."

There it is. One quiet promise of school choice has been that it can weaken the unions and give teachers less negotiating leverage, so that they will simply take what we want to offer them and be grateful we gave them even that much. Reformsters have long sought to break unions, strip them of negotiating, power, and find ways to defund them. 

It's a version of what we just saw in Covid America; after hailing teachers as heroes for about the first fifteen minutes of the pandemic, the usual suspects shifted over to blame and op-eds like the piece by Matt Bai declaring that teachers are servants and they should start acting like it. Yeah, he said "public servants," but do you think that really makes it any better. "You guys are servants, but, you know, the noble kind."

An essential feature of Betsy DeVos-style education policy has been classism, a foundational belief that people should be prepared for and accepting of their proper station in life, and that includes teachers. In a world run properly, visionary school leaders would be able to hire and fire teachers at will, as well as setting pay levels as they think are appropriate. Teachers should not try to set school policy, and they should be implementing the teacher-proof materials they were given "with fidelity." And they definitely should have no say in how the school is run. 

And they should never, ever be so impertinent as to strike in an attempt to dictate to their bosses how the school should be operated. And school choice, as envisioned by some leading choicers, would get us closer to that world, creating schools that were run the Right Way, with properly submissive teaching staff, while simultaneously reducing the negotiating power of teachers in the public schools.

Look, I totally get it. Teacher strikes suck. They disrupt the school year, the community, and sometimes relationships within and around the school. They create a cascade of pains-in-the-ass, from disruption of students' year to finding child care coverage. Teachers strike are miserable, unpleasant, sucky things.

That's why teachers are so highly motivated to avoid them. Really. 

DeAngelis and McGee are either naive or silly in their assertion that choice would mean that "every child can go to school without fear of being caught in the crossfire of a labor dispute," as if choice schools are immune to such things as teacher strikes (there's a charter school strike going on in Chicago right now). Children are also "caught in the crossfire" when a school's staff turns over regularly because working conditions and pay are lousy, but there's no way to address the problem except by looking for work elsewhere. The writers might also share some concern for the students who are caught in the crossfire of choice school policies that discriminate against them based on religion or LGBTQ status or whatever. I mean, if the goal is to make, as they say, "children the center of the system," maybe the 
system should work harder to center marginalized children rather than expelling them for being gay or having special needs or not loving God the correct way. But I digress.

The "solution" to teacher strikes is not to find ways to systemically strip them of more and more power so that they'll just knuckle under. The solution is to bargain in good faith and work toward contracts that both sides can live with. As I said roughly sixty gazillion times during our strike, “The contract is not a battle to be won by one side or the other, but a problem to be solved by both sides together.” That can only work if you believe that both sides deserve to have a say. 

MO: Candidate Burns Books

Well, the Missouri Secretary of State race is certainly heating up (ba-dum-bum). There are four GOP candidates hoping to take over the spot vacated by Jay Ashcroft. One is a 24 year old former swimmer, and she made a splash on the dead bird app

When I’m Secretary of State, I will 🔥BURN🔥all books that are grooming, indoctrinating, and sexualizing our children. MAGA. America First🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/m8waKi3yhP

— Valentina Gomez (@ValentinaForSOS) February 6, 2024

Just in case the post I've embedded goes away, the caption shows Valentina Gomez declaring that she will burn "all books that are grooming, indoctrinating, and sexualizing our children. MAGA. America First." And in the video, she takes out her flamethrower and does just that. 

Gomez (whose campaign site appears to have some formatting problems) bills herself as a woman on a mission, aiming to defeat the political machine. Here's her intro to herself:

Valentina is a real estate investor, financier, strategist, former NCAA Division I swimmer, relentless achiever, and a fierce advocate for the principles values we hold dear as Americans battling for a better future.

Valentina’s family immigrated to the United States in search of the promises that resonate in its very foundation: safety, progress, and hope. Valentina’s life is a testament of perseverance. Her success was not inherited, it has and continues to be earned through discipline and determination.

The fallacy that only age equates to wisdom is debunked by Valentina’s results. At just 24, and anchored by a combination of tangible accomplishments and intangible qualities. Valentina is a woman of intellect and agility who possesses the highest educational qualifications amongst all candidates having earned an MBA in Finance and Strategy from Tulane University at 22; is responsible for the investment of millions of dollars for business development, and now battling a corrupt political machine with the mission to awaken and unify the people of Missouri against an emergent future filled with darkness and disparity if change is not enacted.

All that and a flamethrower, too. 

Folks pushing reading restrictions often argue that they are not banning books, and I guess we can all agree that Gomez is not banning books--just promising to burn them. She's going viral and getting the attention she clearly hoped to get; here's hoping that the attention brings her the defeat she so richly deserves. 

Schools As Vocational Training

I am a fan of what we're calling Career and Technical Education (CTE) these days. My old district has been part of a consortium running what we used to call a Vocational Technical School in the county for sixty years, and I am a huge fan. For most of my career, I taught students who split their day between core classes at their "home" school and vocational classes at the Vo-Tech, learning to be welders, heavy equipment operators, beauticians, home health care workers, and a host of other solid blue collar careers. 

The school (called the Tech Center these days) has, over the years, phased programs in and out depending on what the market seemed to be interested in. And that's an appropriate choice; it does students no service to prepare them for jobs that don't exist. 

There is a balance in the program that I always appreciated. My students could work on framing a house in the morning and arguing about MacBeth in the afternoon. They could spend part of their day repairing a mangled fender and part of their day studying the causes of the Civil War. They got elements of both vocational training and a traditional "liberal arts" education.

That strikes me as the right way to go. Education has to prepare a student for life and work. They need to become their best selves and grasp what it means to be fully human in the world, and that includes finding work to do that will allow them to support themselves. 

But when schools become too plugged into the idea of career prep--particularly when they attach themselves to specific jobs for specific employers-- they've lost the plot.

Take for instance the announcement that Mastery Charter Schools are going to "partner" with the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) "to create a specialized healthcare curriculum to help its students land industry jobs upon graduation." 

There are several red flags here. One is that the initiative is sponsored by Bloomberg Philanthropies. But what I find particularly ominous is this line:

Graduates of the program will earn industry credentials and certifications, which can be parlayed into high-demand and well-paid jobs within the partnered health system.

When your school program prepares students for employment with one specific employer, I question whose interests are being served.

If the International Dingnozzle Company needs to fill 10 nozzle-maker jobs, it's in their best interests to have 100 qualified applicants to choose from. But if a school focuses specifically on creating the 100 qualified applicants for the 10 jobs, it is doing a huge disservice to the 90 students who aren't going to get the job. 

There has always been and will always be pressure for schools to put corporate interests over the interests of students. The corporate view of students as future "human capital" or meat widgets; they really say dumb things like "Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools," and they are big fans of the neoliberal Democrat idea that if we just make young humans into Really Useful Engines then poverty will be erased and society will be better. And it doesn't hurt that by offloading training costs onto the taxpayers, corporations can save a buck.

Educators must resist that pressure. Public, private, charter, religious, secular-- whatever kind of school you are, if you're not putting student needs and interests, both short term and long term, first, than you are doing it wrong. Is it in the students' interests to collect a set of skills and knowledge that they will be able to trade for money and resources? Absolutely. Is it in the students' interests to design an education around the idea that they will live to work, and that anything that doesn't maximize their usefulness as meat widgets is a waste of their time, and that other folks will tell them what kind of meat widgets they should aspire to be? Absolutely not. 

OH: Yet Another Voucher Bill

Ohio last year joined the club of states with a universal voucher program that requires taxpayers to subsidize private schools even if the student being used as a courier comes from a wealthy family. But that's not quite enough for one Buckeye legislator.

Gary Click serves as pastor of the Fremont Baptist Temple. In 2020, he won a tightly contested GOP primary and then won the House 88th District seat by shellacking his Democratic opponent. He campaigned on Trumpy MAGAtude. He's on his second term. And he's put his name on a ton of bills this year, including arming firefighters, executing condemned prisoners via nitrogen hypoxia, and a couple of anti-trans bills. 

One other thing to know about Click-- he got his degree (Bachelor of Religious Education) from Midwestern Baptist College, an independent Baptist college in Orion, Michigan. They use the King James Bible exclusively and "will not tolerate any other." Founded in 1953, MBC is not accredited by any recognized accreditation body. As it turns out, that may be relevant.

While Click has his name on plenty of bills, one that he's the primary sponsor for is HB 339, a bill intended to establish the nonchartered savings account program.

Nonchartered schools are nonpublic schools that "because of truly held religious beliefs, choose to not be chartered by the State of Ohio." No word on how the state weeds out schools that don't hold their religious beliefs truly.

The bill has its interesting features, like a requirement that a participating school must "maintain a physical location in the state at which each student has regular and direct contact with teachers." 

But mostly, it is a double-dip into choicer concepts. 

First, it is one more means of requiring taxpayers to subsidize religious schools that choose to exist outside the state's system. As Click himself explains, they aren't chartered because they don't want to comply with any government mandates. But government money? That's not so bad.  

The bill includes the now-standard Hands Off language that explicitly forbids the state from attempting to "regulate the curriculum, instructional methods, or other aspects of the school's educational program." We have seen this movie already in multiple states, where the private school reserves the right to discriminate on the basis of religion, gender orientation, or things they don't even bother to explain. This bill comes with a slightly narrower list of allowable expenses, but as Ohio itself has demonstrated, once you have a law in place, it's easy to expand it.

Second, Click is proposing an educational savings account, the type of neo-voucher that has been implemented in states like Arizona and Florida, that allows families to take taxpayer dollars and spend them on a variety of education and education-adjacent expenses, which can end up being theme park tickets and cosmetics and a host of other iffy things. Click has included a means of following up on reports of abuse, but who is going to report abuse of the voucher money? 

Click argues that parents who choose these nonchartered schools "continue two pay twice for education; once through taxation and a second time through tuition." Choice fans never seem to make the leap from that reasoning to the question of why non-parents should pay taxes at all, but of course that would crash the whole system, vouchers and all. Meanwhile, I'm not satisfied with the coverage I'm getting from my local police department, so I would like to hire private security and bill the taxpayers. Also, the local park isn't quite nice enough, so I'd like to join an exclusive club with beautiful grounds, and I will be billing the taxpayers for that as well, because after all, why should I have to pay for those things twice?

Can Girls Get A Christian Classical Education

Among the ideas that percolate among some of the members of the conservative christianist world are the many concerns about the proper role of the womenfolk. 

It has bubbled up lately in the "trending" topic of tradwives, a sort of online white christianist conservative cosplay of an imaginery version of 1950's submissive stay-at-home child-rearing apron-wearing husband-serving woman (who, it seems, does have a lot of time for running her social media account). 

But tradwives are just a new iteration of a recycled idea, and I don't want to try to plumb the depths in a blog post--just look at one particular implication.

That little corner of the world has a lot of ideas about what women shouldn't be able to do, like, for instance. not get divorced. Or vote. 

You know women, with their big fat emotions and their tiny weak thinky parts. Joel Webbon of Right Response Ministries tweets that "women are more easily deceived than men" and that "the 19th Amendment was a bad idea." Bnonn Tennant, author of It's Good To Be A Man: A Handbook for Godly Masculinity, observed on Facebook that "Voting is an act of rulership" and "Since rulership is not given to women, women should not vote." Jesse Sumptor, another leader in that world, tweeted "Brothers, a friendly reminder for election s: make sure your wife votes exactly as you do." And Stephen Wolfe, author of The Case for Christian Nationalism, when asked if he would "affirm franchise for all adult men and women" replied "no." 

Steve Rabeyu, writing for the Roys Report ("Reporting the Truth, Restoring the Church"), pointed out that all of these men have ties to controversial conservative pastor Doug Wilson, and I really, really don't have time to get into the many many forms of controversy that the Idaho preacher has stirred up over the years, from asserting that American slavery fostered "genuine affection between the races" to his many, many, many explanations of the various ways that women are required to submit to their husbands. Or that time he referred to women who disagreed with him using the C word. As Elizabeth Preza wrote about Wilson:

His most famous aphorism is that God designed the male as the one who "penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” He counsels married couples that sex is "not an egalitarian pleasuring party" so women shouldn't expect to enjoy it as much as men.

Wilson's wife Nancy observed, on the subject of a woman saying "no" that “A husband is never trespassing in his own garden.”

There was a fair amount of stir on the topic of women voting late in 2022 because they just had done so, and in ways that MAGA and Christian Nationalists did not care for. And we could talk about that, too.

But for our purposes right now, I want to point out one particular role that Doug Wilson has.

In 1981, Wilson helped launch the Logos School as founding board member and teacher, a school (later group of schools) "governed primarily by the word of God, as understood and applied by the schools Board of Directors and administration." He also founded a publishing house (Canon Press) which produced much of the homegrown materials that the school needed. A decade later, he wrote a book about Recovering The Lost Tools of Learning, and that in turn led to the formation of the Association of Classical Christian Schools, of which the Logos School is considered a leading example. Wilson was part of the leadership of The ACCS for many years, though he is not listed there now.

Classical Christian Education is a lot like regular classical education, but with more Jesus. Study the old white guy canon, focus on universal truths, emphasis on grammar, logic and rhetoric (the trivium), great books, and an emphasis on what's time tested. Plus a Biblical worldview. I didn't find a lot of explicit discussion about teaching women to know their proper childbearing and submissive place, but how could that not be part of the program? 

Wilson is a controversial figure, even within Christian circles, and the ACCS has at times taken pains to assert that Wilson is not a dominating voice in their association or movement. I have no desire to chase down the Doug Wilson rabbit hole, but the attitudes he espouses about women are clearly not hard to locate in the conservative christianist world.

In fact, this divide is likely to become more discussed if the latest research is accurate in telling us that women and men are diverging ideologically more than ever (and worldwide). 

All of which leads to the question that I do want to focus on-- what sort of Christian Classical Education can young women expect to get from institutions led by people who believe that women should not vote, should stay home and make babies, should live their lives in submission to men? The websites avoid the issue, even show pictures of happy girls learning, but how can the teaching not be influenced by a view that says girls may participate in education, but women should hush and know their place? 

We know the answer (not a great one), but it leads to another question-- should the United States taxpayers foot the bill for schools that teach young women that they are second class citizens, less-than humans who don't need all that fancy learnin' stuff cluttering up their brains and distracting them unnecessarily because, hey, if it's important, their man will tell them what to think and do, anyway. There's plenty of discussion, rightly, about racism and LGBTQ discrimination in the conservative schools movement, but we should also keep an eye on the misogynist elements as well.