Teacher Morale: Is Everything Fine?

If you aren't a regular Education Week reader, you may have missed the debut earlier this month of their Teacher Morale Index, and it's actually, well, pretty good. 

The beauty of this index is its elegant simplicity. It's based on three questions from their State Of Teaching survey, each with three simple choices.

1) Compared to one year ago, my morale at work right now is worse, the same, or better.

2) Right now, my morale at work is mostly bad, equally good and bad, or mostly good.

3) One year from now, I expect my morale at work will be worse, the same, or better.

Each answer has a value (-100, 0, or +100). Answers collected, and the crunching begins. Some takeaways from the morale index.

Overall teacher morale is low. (-13).

But that total hides some vast differences depending on subject area. Foreign language and CTE teachers are actually on the positive side. Meanwhile, the very lowest morale score is reported for social studies/history, science, and elementary teachers. Fine arts are not much better.

Morale also varies by where you teach. Urban teachers report the lowest morale, rural teachers the highest (though still negative).

Black teachers actually report positive morale; every other group is negative. Hispanic and multi-race are next, with White teachers reporting lowest morale.

Finally, years of service also factor in the findings. Teachers with fewer than three years report positive morale--but it's not a steady slide. Teachers with 3 to 9 years of experience show much lower morale than their more seasoned brethren. You know--the teachers who have never known anything except the doubled-down high stakes standardized test accountability of ESSA, and who came of career maturity under the Trump/DeVos administration. 

Other fun data points from the report--

Administrators believe that the morale situation is far better than it actually is. The survey also shows that administrators favor structured consistency over teacher autonomy-- and value teacher autonomy far less than teachers do. 

And in other unsurprising findings, way more administrators (84%) think professional development is relevant than teachers do. Not only do over half of all teachers find PD irrelevant, but about half also think there's too much of it (only 15% of admins agree). 

Black and Hispanic teachers report more hours of work (65 and 64) than White teachers. And teachers mostly don't want their own children to become teachers. 

There's more detail to dig through, so if you tend to save your free peeks at EdWeek carefully, this is one worth considering. 

These aren't big surprises. Morale is down, and an awful lot of administrators are out of touch with their own staffs. That's bad news-- an administrators Number One Job is to create the conditions that help classroom teachers do the best work they can. If administrators are disconnected, that's a problem for everyone in the system (and given the state of morale, the problems reported with safety and management in buildings, and the pandemic destabilization issues, it's evident that many administrators are, in fact, on some different planet from their staff). Note to principals everywhere: everything is not fine.

BS Test Blows A Billion

It's hard to track each and every sad side effect of the unexamined, unsupported assumption that the Big Standardized Test, our annual adventure of administering a mediocre math and reading test and then pretending that we have somehow measured how well the whole Education Thing is going. But here's one more bad example.

The feds had a whole grant program called Investing In Innovation (i3). It ran from 2010 to 2016 and doled out $1.4 billion to universities, school districts, and private outfits in a total of 172 grants to either develop, validate or scale up shiny reformy ideas. That innovation is "important to help improve student learning and close equity gaps nationwide" and the goal of this program (courtesy of the US Department of Education) was "to build high-quality evidence about effective educational strategies and to expand implementation of these strategies." 

And all of that pretty language about "improve student learning" and better "effective educational strategies" just means "raise scores on the BS Test." 

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is the arm of the feds that is like a test lab for education stuff, and they've done a study of just how well i3 grantees worked out by sifting through the research done about those various programs. So how did well did the programs work?

The short answer is, "Not great." 

The long answer is, "Nobody is even asking the right questions."

Of the 172 grants, only 148 had completed research that could be viewed. Of those, only 26% showed a program that actually had a positive effect. A small number had a negative effect, and about 76% showed no affect at all. 

Grants are grouped by different sort of effects. One small group of grants was aimed at student attendance and completion, an effect that can actually be measured in a reasonably accurate manner. 

The rest were aimed at "student performance" in academic areas, plus a small group aimed at social emotional learning; the biggest number of programs wanted to improve classroom instruction, which in the largest number of cases meant either more teacher PD or developing and instituting curriculum and materials. For all of these student performance areas, the most important question to ask is "How do you think you measured that?"

Improving teaching and materials in the classroom is a worthy goal. But this review is a reminder that using the BS Test to see how we're doing is a self-defeating. It's looking for your lost car keys under a streetlamp 100 yards from where you dropped them because the light is better there. 

It is amazing to me that after all these years, so many folks are still talking about BS Test scores as if they are not just a true and accurate measure of educational effectiveness, but THE true and accurate measure. 

They aren't. They never have been. They remain an effort to gauge height, weight and health of an elephant by examining its toenail clippings. Their effect on education is the most prolonged, debilitating example of Campbell's and Goodhart's Laws in action, a situation in which some have so mistaken the measure for the Thing Itself that they are wasting time and so very much money. 

What the IES report tells us is that in a billion-dollar game of darts, a whole lot of people missed the wrong target. I don't know what that information is worth, but it sure isn't worth $1.4 billion. 

OK: Walters Wants To Take Local Mess National

Oklahoma's Education Dudebro In Chief Ryan Walters has produced a steady stream of ugliness. That hasn't stopped; in fact, it's apparently seeking a national audience.

Walters drew headlines for moves like explaining that Tulsa Race Massacre was not about race. He called the teachers union a "terrorist organization." He also proposed a host of rules for restricting reading, mandatory outing of students, searching out the dread CRT, and backing it all up with threats to take away a district's accreditation if they dared to defy him. And he followed the Chris Rufo playbook and announced his intent to ban DEI from all schools. Walters wants to see the state "champion religious freedom," like the Catholic "public" charter school that the state is trying to launch (and their Republican attorney general is trying to stop). Somehow, "religious freedom" means to Walters that the Ten Commandments should be posted in every single classroom in the state.

 

In keeping with the screw-ups he orchestrated before taking office, Walters managed to fumble away a bunch of grant money and piss off staff--staff who were sympathetic to his agenda--to the point that they walked out.  And he's still cleaning up after fines from his campaign for office. 

He went out of his way to stop a sixteen year old trans student from changing some paperwork. His reaction to the death of Nex Benedict was such a mean-spirited reactionary mess (one part "we want students to feel supported" and two parts "LGBTQ students must be hold the hard truth that their existence is an ugly terrible lie") that 350 groups signed a letter demanding he get the hell out of office, as he has fostered "a culture of violence and hate." Walters is a prime example of the kind of faux christianist MAGA strain running through too much of our country these days, drawing targets on marginalized people, calling them all manner of ugly names, signaling that the power of the state will be used to silence and erase those people, and then denying that any of this creates a culture of hate and violence. It's spectacularly unChristian behavior offered in the name of Christ. 

And yet, Walters apparently senses that he's destined for bigger things on a broader stage. 

Jennifer Palmer of Oklahoma Watch reports that Oklahoma taxpayers have helped Walters hire a PR firm that, among other things, is sending out pitches like this:

An open letter called for Ryan’ (sic) immediate removal from office for, the letter claims, “fostering a culture of violence and hate against the 2SLGBTQI+ community in Oklahoma schools.

Ryan responded to the letter saying: ‘[this is a] standard tactic of the radical left, and they will stop at nothing to destroy the country and our state.’

Want Ryan on to discuss?

Palmer was ahead of this story, reporting back in November that the Oklahoma Education Department was looking to hire a PR firm to provide print and digital op-eds to national outlets, provide national bookings, coordinate national events and appearances for executive staff, write speeches and handle some communications. That included a minimum of three op-eds, two speeches and 10 media bookings per month. This in addition to the in-house comms department. It sure looked like Walters wanted to be bigger.

So Oklahoma has hired a PR firm from Virginia to craft pitches like the one above and presumably to deliver all that national exposure Walters is looking for. 

The firm is Vought Strategies, They seem like a great fit. Their website includes a testimonial from Jim DeMint calling the firm's founder, Mary Vought, "one of the best conservative communicators and public relations specialists in the nation." Mary Vought has been at it for a decade; previously she did coms work in the US Senate and House of Representatives, working for folks like Ron Johnson and Mike Pence; she's also a senior fellow for the far right Independent Women's Forum, and  the executive director of the Senate Conservatives Fund, an outfit that endorses the likes of Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Rick Scott. And she cranks out pieces like this one for the Daily Caller in which she writes "as a parent" (not a conservative PR operative) that she doesn't want her daughter reading naughty books. Or slamming NIH for Fox News. Or noting a Wall Street Journal profile of Walters, saying "we proudly stand beside our clients as they fight to protect our children and parental rights."

In short, she seems like just the person to be running PR for whatever it is that Walters is trying to do with his profile.

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, where he was elected to serve an actual function, Walters draws cranky comments from legislators about his lack of transparency, and reports that he's mostly out of the office. Asked about the expense of $30,000 of taxpayer money to hire Walters some PR services, his regular patron, Governor Kevin Stitt said a whole lot of nothing. 

It continues to look as if the taxpayers of Oklahoma are not getting anything like their money's worth out of Walters. Hard to say what job he is auditioning for at this point, but it seems easier to say how much Oklahoma taxpayers should have to pay to fund his clip reel-- $0.00. 

ICYMI: My Least Favorite Holiday Edition (3/17)

I have nothing against the Irish, who arguably helped save western civilization as we know it, and who suffered a lot abuse and mistreatment. But this holiday? I will spare you the rant.

Oh, and this nonsense about a leprechaun sneaking into the house and making a mess? Whoever came up with this idea is getting their own special corner of hell, and while I love elementary teachers a lot, I am pleading with them to please stop spreading this big fat PITA faux tradition to their students. 

Plenty to read, though, so let's start into the list. I put this list together kind of on the fly every week, and if I have missed something worthwhile, that's on me. There is so much to read and so many writers who deserve attention, and if I missed something or someone this week, that's a measure of my inefficiency, not their worthiness. 

I Told You So

Audrey Watters comes back to the world of ed tech for a quick recap of why she was just proven right when she dismissed Udacity as junk.

Americans Have Yet to Accept COVID’s Tragedy — And Are Taking It Out On Schools

Conor P. Williams and The 74 have been on the wrong side of plenty of education issues, but this piece about how schools have taken endless blame for a nation's flubbed pandemic response is absolutely worth the read.

Yet here on the other side of that disaster, we’re determined to assign blame for dips in U.S. students’ academic achievement, as if learning loss could have — should have — been avoided in a moment of widespread viral transmission and mass death. Say it plain: There was no educational and public health playbook that could have wholly averted the pandemic’s impacts on kids.

Kentucky Governor Ready to Campaign Against School Choice Measure if It Reaches Fall Ballot

Kentucky continues to stand up for public education. Report from the AP.

Idaho House committee kills private school tax credit

From Boise State Public Radio, some good news from Idaho, of all places.

Dissecting Republican Messaging, 101

Nancy Flanagan looks into some of the GOP machinery driving some messaging in Michigan (where Betsy DeVos still lives and does her thing).

"Science of" Movement Repeating Mistakes of Education Reform Cycles

Paul Thomas explains who we need to be doubtful when someone starts waving around the science banner in education.

Central Bucks to pay suspended teacher, attorneys $425k, remove references to report

In Central Bucks, PA, the new school board continues to deal with the messes made by the former MAGA majority, including finally getting some justice for a teacher who was punished for standing up for an LGBTQ student. Jo Ciavaglia reports.

Misleading “No Kid Hungry” Ad: School Meals Already Free

Seem those "No Kid Hungry" ads? The indispensable Mercedes Schneider has, and she did some digging. Why are they soliciting by talking about schools that already have free and reduced lunch programs? Who is behind this organization, and where does your contribution actually go? The answers are far less heartwarming than the commercials.

Culture Warriors—on Both Sides—Are Wrong About America’s History Classrooms

At Time, some researchers from the American Historical Association offer a new perspective on what's actually happening in history classrooms.

Library organizations react to Prattville library firings: ‘A travesty’

A library board in Alabama decided to hide a bunch of naughty books, and when the librarian filled a legitimate journalist open records request about the matter, they fired the librarian. 

Professional Development Done With Us, Not To Us

Jose Luis Vilson has looked at many many hours of teacher PD, and he has some ideas about how to make the whole operation a little more useful.

Hackers are targeting a surprising group of people: young public school students

Reporting from Kavitha Cardoza at NPR about the hot new frontier in data hack-and-grab. How good is the cybersecurity at your school?

When Classical Learning Meets Public Education, the Dialogue Isn't Always Socratic

A bit over-sympathetic, but still an interesting look into the various threads in the Classical Learning world, courtesy of Vince Bielski at RealClear.

Rep. April Cromer and her allies dox librarians

And that's not all. Steve Nuzum reports from South Carolina on this Moms for Liberty MAGA menace.

President Biden Proposes Urgently Needed Federal Education Budget Increases for FY 2025

There's some good news for public education in the newly proposed budget. Jan Resseger has some details.

Can Early Academic Pressure Cause Learning Disabilities?

Nancy Bailey looks at what the experts have to say about the effects of making kindergarten the new first grade.

It Could Have Been Worse: An Update On Florida’s 2024 Session

Sue Kingery Woltanski sums up the latest legislative session in DeSantisland. 

Florida teachers can discuss LGBTQ topics under 'Don't Say Gay' law, settlement says

But of course the big news in Florida is the settlement around one of the state's attacks on the First Amendment. NPR has a fine summary, but you might also like the one from Judd Legum. 

A Wisconsin ruling on Catholic Charities raises the bar for religious tax exemptions

AP reports on a decision that makes it harder for Catholic Charities to claim exemptions. Basically, if they're doing secular stuff, they can't claim religious exemption. Does this have anything to do with education? I'm wondering, so I'm putting a pin in it here.

How Viktor Orbán Conquered the Heritage Foundation

These are the same folks who are pushing so hard to dismantle public education and establish voucherfied privatized education in its place. This piece by Casey Michel in The New Republic will not sooth your heart.

How Evangelicals Use Digital Surveillance to Target the Unconverted

Also from the New Republic, and not related to education, but holy cow! Several layers of creepy scary going on here.

Join me on substack. The more subscribers I have, the more this stuff gets pushed out into the world. It's easy, and it's free.

Conflict, Silos, and Choice

One of the less common arguments in favor of school choice is that public schools are just a mess of conflict because people of different beliefs are forced to educate side by side. Wouldn't it be better if everyone could just go off into their own little silo and educate just with like-minded people?

Well, no. It wouldn't.

A couple of decades back, I went to Divorce School. The tuition is very high, and other people have to help pay the cost of your education, so I don't recommend it. But you can learn a lot there.

One thing I learned is that if conflict exists, you cannot disappear it somehow. What may feel like putting it off or tamping it down is really just putting it into an escrow account where it compounds interest and eventually emerges even huger than when you stuffed it in there. If the conflict exists, you are going to deal with it, one way or another, sooner or later. 

A common method for trying to disappear conflict is to try to make the people on the other side of the conflict just go away. Sometimes that takes the form of trying obliterate them in some sort of total victory, sometimes just erasing them somehow, and sometimes simply making them go away. 

The thing is, none of these work. All have been attempted on various scales, and none of them work.

A history of modern warfare, the first time in human history when leaders imagined that the technology existed to truly erase the enemy, shows that from the Third Reich to the middle east, policy based on the notion that the other side can be completely obliterated is failed policy that simply increases suffering and waste of human lives.

In the world of culture panic, we are seeing an attempt to erase certain folks. "Maybe," the theory goes, "if we just made everyone pretend that LGBTQ persons don't exist, we could end all the noise and conflict over that stuff." It's not working. It isn't going to work. 

The current rising love of authoritarianism is cut from the same cloth. If we just had a Really Strong Leader (like Viktor Orban or Putin) he would just make all those dissenting voices shut up forever. This comes with an attempt to Other the opposition, casting them as stupid and/or evil instead of other actual human beings that we need to talk to.

As Americans, we ought to know better. "Wouldn't everyone just be happier in their own place," is the language of segregationists. Segregated silos are bad news, particularly in a diverse pluralistic society.

The more obvious bad part of segregation is not just that diverse people are kept apart. Segregation of people facilitates segregation of resources. If your position is that you don't really want to pay to educate Black kids, then putting all the Black kids, and only Black kids, in the same schools makes it much easier to create policy that directs fewer resources to Black kids. Segregation also works for resource hoarding-- if we put all the rich kids in the same schools, then we can insure that only they benefit from certain privileges. 

But there are other problems with choicing our way to segregated silos. 

One is that every silo is a bubble, and within that bubble, stupid prejudices are free to grow. They're reinforced; say "All mugwumps like pineapple on their pizza" and a hundred heads will nod in agreement, and you'll be that more certain that those pineapple-eating mugwumps really are awful. 

Well, the argument goes, mugwumps will have a school of their own to eat all the pineapple pizza they like, so it's fair. I understand the reasoning. It just doesn't reflect what actually happens. What actually happens is that when marginalized students and families create a siloed option of their own, they turn themselves into easily-identified targets. Anti-LGBTQ folks don't have to say, "Well, those awful people are out there somewhere" and wave their hands vaguely about. They can--and repeatedly do--point at an LGBTQ-friendly charter or private school and declare "How can we allow that!!" Those echo chamber bubbles allow the worst ideas to fester and grow and, ultimately, explode.

Certain conflicts exist in our country right now. LGBTQ persons exist, and some folks wish they would not. Some folks want to keep working on our issues surrounding race and other folks would like to be done with all that. How do we manage religion? Where do we go with democratic norms in a pluralistic society? And why do some people put pineapple on their damn pizza?

The conflicts exist. Nobody wants them. Nobody likes them (though some folks find them useful). But they are here, and one way or another we will be forced to deal with them.

To pretend that we can create samethink silos for schools--or any other part of society--and thereby make our country a better place is a silly idea. We are a diverse, pluralistic country. If you just wish we weren't, well, I wish all my hair grew back, but we can't live the lives we wish we had, only the ones we actually have. 

A diverse pluralistic society based on democratic norms is going to have conflict, and we can either deal with it or let it curdle and mess with us. We're currently operating at a disadvantage, with a shortage of leaders willing to engage in difficult conversations, and we are certainly not going to create such leaders by raising generations in samethink silos. Yes, conflict is hard. Sometimes it's unavoidable. Suck it up and do the work, because there is no way out but through.

Practicing On Cyber Students (Sort Of)

The Relay Graduate School of Education, a pretend graduate school started by pretend teachers, has come up with a great new training idea--practice with pretend students. But not just any pretend students-- AI pretend students. Because if it has AI in it, it must be extra cool and shiny. Except that once again, the actual product promises so much more than it actually delivers.

It appears that Madeline Will, a reporter for Education Week, caught the RGSE pitch at SWSX, and grabbed this unironic quote:

“In order for a teacher to become great, they need high-quality practice,” said Lequite Manning, the department chair of clinical practice and residency for Relay

The high-quality practice is to involve skills teachers need such as "getting to know their students." This happens through some text-based interactions. The teacher candidate plugs in some personal info, then watches a video of a talk between the head of Relay, Mayme Hostetter, and Layce Robinson, CEO of UnboundEducation, a teacher PD outfit. 

Then the AI finally shows up in the form of a letter from a "teacher mentor" who gives the candidate student demographic info. The candidate can ask the AI for advice on dealing with students. Let me say that again--the human prospective teacher can ask the computer for advice about how to deal with the imaginary human children.

Then the teacher begins "interacting" with the imaginary students. Note--the students are NOT AI, but are personas based on "real kids" that Hostetter and Robinson taught. Robinson have had some actual classroom experience (though only a couple of years are listed in her LinkedIn profile); Hostertter spent two years in a private boarding school, and three years in a KIPP charter. The candidate imagines sitting down at the student lunch table (an interesting choice, that) and "strikes up a conversation." Will says that the candidate has several choices about how to start the conversation, suggesting maybe that what we're actually talking about is a multiple choice Talking To Students quiz. Then the candidate shares with the AI mentor, and then is finally rewarded with one of two videos by Hostetter and Robinson--either an attaboy or a try-it-again video.

So, not very impressive, but one more entry in the drive for classroom simulators for teacher prep. I get the appeal-- an actual classroom is often unforgiving, and when you screw up, you may have to live with the fallout of your bad choice for weeks. But the dream of a classroom simulator that's like a, a Hostetter suggests, a flight simulator, is a silly dream. Simulating a physical object interacting with the laws of physics is a hell of a lot easier than simulating human interactions.

Not that folks don't keep trying. Back in 2016 there was a bunch of noise about TeachLivE, a classroom simulation with CGI students direct from Uncanny Valley School District. This looked creepy, but like this newest wrinkle, it turned out to be far less than it pretended. The teacher trainee is interacting with a CGI rendering of students, but those students were actually animated by "an interactor" who "controls the student avatars in the classroom, speaking through a microphone and using head-mounted and handheld controllers programmed to respond to certain movements." It's a blend of "program control and puppetry." 

What classroom simulators seem to have in common is the attempt to look as if they are harnessing cool new technology, when they really aren't.

In the late seventies, I had an education course taught by Robert Schall, who had years and years of actual public school teaching experience. We would develop and teach practice lessons, with our classmates as students. Also in the classroom was "Bobby," a compendium of every annoying student behavior ever. Dr. Schall didn't filter himself through a special algorithm or computer program or even put on some kind of costume. He just sat in the back of the room and gave us the experience of dealing with challenging students. After years in real classrooms, I can confirm that Bobby was an excellent simulation of the real thing. 

The best way for new teachers to learn about the classroom is direct experience, and the second best way is from experiences teachers who have spent years in the classroom. Trying to interpose shiny tech is both hugely difficult and also never likely to yield the quality of results from the first two sources. 

PA: Vouchers Feed Discrimination

In Pennsylvania, where we ought to be focused on responding to a court finding that our whole method of funding public education is both inequitable and inadequate, our Democratic governor Josh Shapiro and the GOP legislators just cannot get over their desire for more school vouchers.

This despite the fact that our current voucher system is both hugely unaccountable and also used to fund some jaw-dropping religious discrimination. 

So there are hearings going on (and have been for some time). Recently one of the people offering testimony was Susan Spicka, of Education Voters of Pennsylvania. Spicka is a rock star in the world of supporting public education. At a hearing of the House Democratic Policy Committee, Spicka opened her testimony with these lines:

In his budget address, Governor Shapiro said, “It’s ridiculous that here in Pennsylvania two women can get married on a Sunday and fired from their job on a Monday, just because they’re in love.”

What Governor Shapiro left out is that the children of this couple could get kicked out of their private school on Tuesday. And that tax dollars are used to support this discrimination.

Discrimination is a feature, not a bug, of school voucher programs. Pennsylvania’s Educational Improvement Tax Credit (EITC) and Opportunity Scholarship Tax Credit (OSTC) school voucher programs direct $470 million tax dollars into private and religious schools that can, and do, explicitly discriminate against students for just about any reason they choose.

During this particular hearing, Representative Ismael Smith-Wade-El asked the question that has been on lots of minds since the death of Nex Benedict (video below):

Do you feel that the outcomes of these sort of funding pass through and voucher programs pose a risk to the lives of transgender young people?

Spicka's answer was to the point. Yes.  

If you're not living in an area like this I don't think that you can understand the impact that this hate that is coming out of these churches has on communities and on children, and without the tens of millions of dollars in voucher funding that has been poured into Lancaster County since eitc ostc was founded, these churches would not have the revenue that they have they would not have the expanse that they have. These churches are being funded by voucher dollars and they are spreading the hate.

Spicka's full testimony is worth reading, but I want to underline this point because it is often overlooked. It's not just that these discriminatory schools reject and expel students who don't align with their particular values. It's not just that they take taxpayer dollars and then decide which students they consider worthy of receiving an education, once again demonstrating that the promise of school choice is empty--it's school's choice instead.

It's also that by strengthening and funding these schools, taxpayers are energizing a source of toxic attitudes in the community. People who want to treat LGBTQ persons as Other, treat them as (as NC gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson puts it) "that filth," get to gather together in a bubble, convince each other that their way is the only right way, and then go out into the community and act on that belief. 

We continue to see signs that increased anti-LGBTQ rhetoric fuels more abuse and mistreatment of LGBTQ persons, and funding these christianist organizations makes it easier for them to amplify their anti-LGBTQ voices. 

I use the term "christianist" because none of this discriminatory nonsense looks like the Christianity that I know. Look, if you feel you can't fully and freely exercise your religion without being able to marginalize, attack, and discriminate against certain classes of people, I'm pretty sure you're doing your religion wrong. You are making your community worse, and why taxpayers should finance your bad behavior is beyond me.