In the ongoing search for a Common Core PR bump, Education Post with the use of VIVA Idea Exchange has issued a report, trotted out for the convention of the Education Writers Association (a group that has steadfastly expunged bloggers and other ne'er-do-wells from its consideration, but I'm not bitter).
The report "Common Core State Standards: the Key To Student Success" has a weird retro vibe, like someone stashed it in a drawer in early 2013 and only just now dug it out. But Education Post is a group that has been bankrolled to promote and push the Core (which, among other things, creates the spectacle of a raft of Democratic operatives working hard to smooth Jeb Bush's path to the White House). Peter Cunningham, former mouthpiece for Arne Duncan's USED, reportedly got a cool $12 million to launch the rapid response PR machine, but I am going to go ahead and take a look at their nifty everything-old-is-new-again report for free.
Note: Education Post's name has been carefully omitted from the report itself, but still proudly sits atop the press release for it.
The use of VIVA represents an attempt to involve authentic teacher voices in this report. There are ten authentic teachers listed on the Writing Collective for this, plus one moderator. If you want a picture of how well that flies, scoot on over to Living in Dialogue and Anthony Cody's recent series about how that very thing turned out (spoiler alert: not all that great for authentic teacher voices). The report features four recommendations, all of which will strike you as vaguely familiar.
Recommendation 1: Clearly Acknowledge that the Common Core and Curricula are Two Different Things.
Yes, it's that golden oldie, "The standards aren't curriculum at all." Like many writers in the field, I've addressed this question many times. But the report wants teachers to get out there and convince people that the standards aren't curricula, while sharing all of their CCSS-aligned curricula. But in the meantime, the phrase "common core curriculum" turns up in marketing materials all over the place. Core supporters lost this one over a year ago.
The report shoots itself in the foot by offering an analogy-- all lasagna has the same basic ingredients, but no two chefs make it exactly the same. So.... what? The Core is not restrictive and one size fits all? In Core land, you can eat anything you like and select anything from the vast and exciting array of foods known to humans-- as long as it's lasagna. You can make lasagna with a little more ricotta cheese, or a bit more basil, and you can make it in a rectangular pan or square pan, so you totally have all sorts of freedom. If I had looked for an analogy to show that, when it comes to Common Core, standards vs. curriculum is a distinction without a difference, I could not have done any better myself.
What exactly do they recommend? Get out there and sell the Core, because according to that bogus Edutopia poll, folks love it. Also, make a culture in which teachers are involved "in every part of educational policy-making implementation," which will be hard since the very existence of CCSS means that ship has sailed (and no teachers were allowed). Basically, we really need to get teachers on the team here.
Recommendation 2: Restructure the Way Schools Engage Parents, Families, and Community Members with the Common Core in the Academic, Emotional, and Social Education of Their Children.
In other words, do some community outreach PR for the core. Proposed solutions include "Share Evidence that the Common Core State Standards Provide Opportunities for All Students Regardless of Background or Economic Privilege." Which is tricky since no such evidence exists. And in fact the breakdown for specific actions under this item includes-- well, sharing the PARCC timeline and keeping a blog.
Or how about some five-minute videos of happy children talking about their Common Core success stories. We could show them at "family universities" designed to alleviate frustration. There's a lot of recognition of the need to work with diverse cultural backgrounds and to help overcome the issues of poverty. At times you can almost see where the authentic teacher voices have been grafted right onto the authentic client message that VIVA was hired to articulate.
Recommendation 3: Change the Concept of “School” from Just a Building Where Our Children Sit All Day, to a Place of Community Identity and Opportunity.
"The Core is starting to make children and their families hate school. Try to fix that." They don't get into many concrete recommendations here, but off the top of my head I'm thinking that putting back all the things schools had before CCSS and testing drained resources and forced schools to focus on test prep-- that might be a good start.
But basically we're looking for ways to help parents with their kids' homework, because the Common Core is making parents feel frustrated and dumb. So let's pass on some of the CCSS training that we haven't finished giving to teachers yet. That should do it.
By gifting families with new tools for success, teachers increase school-home communication. In return, teachers get partners who can monitor homework and ensure that students are physically, emotionally, and mentally prepared for active learning throughout the day.
Oh, Core-o-philes! You just never tire of re-inventing the wheel. Communicating with parents! What an idea! But I'm taking a point deduction for the use of "gift" as a verb,
Recommendation 4: Create Opportunities for Sustained CCSS-Based Professional Development that Allows Teachers to Collaborate Regularly and Provide the Resources Necessary to Achieve Success.
Ah, another old fave-- the Core rollout was rocky because we didn't train teachers enough. That was barely credible two years ago. Now that teachers have had a chance to really get to know the Core, pretending that we're victims of our ignorance just doesn't fly. The results are in, and they are that the better teachers know the Core, the less they like it. More PD from Core cheerleaders isn't going to fix that. Also, when you hand a surgeon a rusty can opener, his problems with operating is not because you didn't give the accessories necessary for success-- it's because the main tool you handed him is a lousy tool.
But hey-- let's identify master teachers and have them teach the rest. Let's have PD sessions to surf the resource sites on line. Let's work with the union! Let's do lots of PD so the teachers can teach each other and get on the same page. If we pass the rusty can opener around many times, maybe we'll figure how to better use it!
Recommendation 5: Ensure CCSS-Based Assessments are as Useful as Possible to Students, Educators, the Community, and Policy Leaders.
You will perhaps be surprised to learn the two purposes of assessment: Instructional change, and accountability. Also, here's the goal of Common Core:
The goal of the Common Core is to make children think critically while teaching them how to absorb, process, and use those skills on an everyday basis. The assessments we develop and administer to students should align with that goal.
So add that to your list of explanations for what this is all supposed to be accomplishing.
The report recommends fewer and fairer assessments, so less time spent taking, less test prep, and less pressure and emphasis on them. The detail portion also says we should be clear about the test purpose, but hey-- that's simplified above, so no sweat. Also, only one CCSS test per year, and let's use portfolio assessment too.
Then some editor just let the authentic teacher voices run wild-- let teachers have input on what's on the test, and let us know what texts will be on the test ahead of time, and deliver the results within thirty days, plus creating rubrics. Also, let's scrap grades and move toward competency based education. Also, every child should ride to school on a unicorn. Okay, I made that one up, but what a crazy page. Were the ATV's just carried away with irrational exuberance, or did the VIVA folks miss a page in the edit. Anyway, fun list of things that are never going to happen.
Recommendation 6: Reconsider the CCSS-Based Assessment Schedule
States that haven't rolled out CCSS tests yet should do it in stages, and all I'm thinking is who hasn't rolled out their CCSS tests yet? Anyway, if you've already done it, we've got nothing for you.
So what have we here?
We appear to have a blunt PR object that took some ATV input, wrapped it up in a nice sauce of the client's making, with the hopes that some enterprising education writers (real writers, not those damn bloggers) will write it up and creatively disrupt the already fully-congealed narrative that Common Core is just Dead Program Walking. Cunningham is being paid good money to make sure that people hear that Common Core builds strong bodies twelve ways and is totally grrrrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeaaattt and will cure your bad breath and hair, and since most politicians will no longer even say the Core's name out loud, it needs all the press it an get. In which case I guess they can thank me later-- and I did it for free.
Monday, April 20, 2015
Managing Across the Moat
Several of my friends in the business world have told me that modern management is taught to keep its distance. "You are supposed to live at least fifty miles away from the facility," one told me. The idea is to not be influenced in decision making by any personal attachments to the people who work for you.
That gulf, that moat between management and the people and facilities which they manage is a common feature of corporate life, and it explains a lot about how large companies work (or don't). Managers never have to face the people whose lives they disrupt, and they are fine with that because human beings are a distraction-- it's profits and gains and stock prices that are the true measure of good management choices. They can make the Right Choices unhampered by empathy.
The management technique reminds me of Louis C K's Conan appearance in which he explains the dynamics of bullying. Kids will try out being mean, but if they have to do it to someone's face, they see the hurt, their empathy kicks in, and they decide that being mean to someone doesn't feel good. But bullying-by-text has no such feedback loop.
When you can't see the hurt, you don't feel the hurt.
When the Let's Run Schools Like a Business crowd (like Reed Hastings) complains about school boards, that is the essence of their complaint-- these elected board members live in the community and must face the people who are affected by their decisions, leading board members to make decisions for all sorts of terrible reasons when their eyes should stay focused on Return on Investment and Bottom Line and all the markers of success that too many business types value.
And so one way of understanding the modern wave of reformsterism is a slow steady process of trying dig a moat between the people who make the decisions about schools and the people who must are there in the schools.
Let's make sure that tests are devised by people who never meet the students and administered by teachers who must, by edict, behave as if the students are strangers to them, as if they aren't even in the same room.
Let's dismantle school boards and replace them with appointed managers who can operate by spreadsheets and "data" and never have to actually face the teachers, students, parents and community members who have to live with the decisions.
Let's put school districts under the control of people who have never been in a classroom-- that way they will make the Right Choices without being swayed by too much empathy for teachers of students.
The application of this management technique in places like Newark, where "Superintendent" Cami Anderson's concerted effort to never mix with the stakeholders of the school district would be comical, were the costs not so high to the people the district is supposed to serve. Other super-managers like John King and John White and Merryl Tisch do their best to avoid ever looking school stakeholders in the eyes.
The modern charter has a similar management approach in which the people who run the school never have to actually deal with the people whose lives are wrapped up in the school. Someone like Eva Moskowitz, who appears to spend plenty of time in the Success Academy charters that she runs, is no exception to this technique. But where someone like Cami Anderson simply hides from the public, the Moskowitz approach is to send away everyone who doesn't see things her way. If SA fits you and your child, she's happy to see you-- if not, then you are the one who needs to get out and move on and join the rest of the invisible multitudes outside the school's walls.
This management by moat is also evident on the national level. Secretary of Education rarely mixes with ordinary parents or teachers, and any teachers that do come into his orbit are carefully vetted and screened so that they will be The Right Type. Finding Duncan in an ordinary public school without advance screening and a carefully prepared program would be more exceptional than finding a family of yetis on the beach at a Disney Caribbean resort.
Distance and separation builds callousness and short-circuits empathy.
Leaders and policymakers see lobbyists every day. They regularly hang out with thinky tank experts and corporate bigwigs. I have to wonder what it would be like if Duncan or some of the other policy bigwigs spent one or two days a week in an actual school-- an ordinary school, not hand picked or carefully chosen, but just a random ordinary school.
They don't know what it's like out here in the trenches, and some of them work very hard to make sure they don't learn. That disconnect, that difficult reach across the moat, hampers much of our policy choices and is one of the worst principles that we've tried to carry over from the world of business. But it's faulty. It's dysfunctional. It's wrong.
Imagine if I tried to teach my classes without ever appearing in the room-- just check some spreadsheets from my office in another city, sent instructions to an aide via text, never met my students or their parents face to face. I would be a terrible teacher (though uncomfortably close to vision of Master Teacher touted by some reformsters).
Education is a human service, and the means its foundation is relationships, and the first rule of relationships is that you have to show up (take it from a guy on his second marriage). To try to conjure up a management system that not only doesn't require you to show up, but actually requires that you don't-- that is a recipe for failure and toxicity. It's bad management and terrible education.
Fill in the moat and show up. Anything else is a waste.
That gulf, that moat between management and the people and facilities which they manage is a common feature of corporate life, and it explains a lot about how large companies work (or don't). Managers never have to face the people whose lives they disrupt, and they are fine with that because human beings are a distraction-- it's profits and gains and stock prices that are the true measure of good management choices. They can make the Right Choices unhampered by empathy.
The management technique reminds me of Louis C K's Conan appearance in which he explains the dynamics of bullying. Kids will try out being mean, but if they have to do it to someone's face, they see the hurt, their empathy kicks in, and they decide that being mean to someone doesn't feel good. But bullying-by-text has no such feedback loop.
When you can't see the hurt, you don't feel the hurt.
When the Let's Run Schools Like a Business crowd (like Reed Hastings) complains about school boards, that is the essence of their complaint-- these elected board members live in the community and must face the people who are affected by their decisions, leading board members to make decisions for all sorts of terrible reasons when their eyes should stay focused on Return on Investment and Bottom Line and all the markers of success that too many business types value.
And so one way of understanding the modern wave of reformsterism is a slow steady process of trying dig a moat between the people who make the decisions about schools and the people who must are there in the schools.
Let's make sure that tests are devised by people who never meet the students and administered by teachers who must, by edict, behave as if the students are strangers to them, as if they aren't even in the same room.
Let's dismantle school boards and replace them with appointed managers who can operate by spreadsheets and "data" and never have to actually face the teachers, students, parents and community members who have to live with the decisions.
Let's put school districts under the control of people who have never been in a classroom-- that way they will make the Right Choices without being swayed by too much empathy for teachers of students.
The application of this management technique in places like Newark, where "Superintendent" Cami Anderson's concerted effort to never mix with the stakeholders of the school district would be comical, were the costs not so high to the people the district is supposed to serve. Other super-managers like John King and John White and Merryl Tisch do their best to avoid ever looking school stakeholders in the eyes.
The modern charter has a similar management approach in which the people who run the school never have to actually deal with the people whose lives are wrapped up in the school. Someone like Eva Moskowitz, who appears to spend plenty of time in the Success Academy charters that she runs, is no exception to this technique. But where someone like Cami Anderson simply hides from the public, the Moskowitz approach is to send away everyone who doesn't see things her way. If SA fits you and your child, she's happy to see you-- if not, then you are the one who needs to get out and move on and join the rest of the invisible multitudes outside the school's walls.
This management by moat is also evident on the national level. Secretary of Education rarely mixes with ordinary parents or teachers, and any teachers that do come into his orbit are carefully vetted and screened so that they will be The Right Type. Finding Duncan in an ordinary public school without advance screening and a carefully prepared program would be more exceptional than finding a family of yetis on the beach at a Disney Caribbean resort.
Distance and separation builds callousness and short-circuits empathy.
Leaders and policymakers see lobbyists every day. They regularly hang out with thinky tank experts and corporate bigwigs. I have to wonder what it would be like if Duncan or some of the other policy bigwigs spent one or two days a week in an actual school-- an ordinary school, not hand picked or carefully chosen, but just a random ordinary school.
They don't know what it's like out here in the trenches, and some of them work very hard to make sure they don't learn. That disconnect, that difficult reach across the moat, hampers much of our policy choices and is one of the worst principles that we've tried to carry over from the world of business. But it's faulty. It's dysfunctional. It's wrong.
Imagine if I tried to teach my classes without ever appearing in the room-- just check some spreadsheets from my office in another city, sent instructions to an aide via text, never met my students or their parents face to face. I would be a terrible teacher (though uncomfortably close to vision of Master Teacher touted by some reformsters).
Education is a human service, and the means its foundation is relationships, and the first rule of relationships is that you have to show up (take it from a guy on his second marriage). To try to conjure up a management system that not only doesn't require you to show up, but actually requires that you don't-- that is a recipe for failure and toxicity. It's bad management and terrible education.
Fill in the moat and show up. Anything else is a waste.
Sunday, April 19, 2015
Dear Burbank School Board
Dear Burbank School Board:
I have no dog in your particular superintendent hunt, but as a blogger, unsolicited advice is my (non-paying) bread and butter. You've taken a lot of heat for your hiring choice. I just watched the video short form of your very contentious meeting for the approval of Matt Hill as your new superintendent. Clearly many people on all sides of the table were extremely agitated and emotional. (If you haven't seen the edit yet, I've included it below so you can see what I saw.)
What I saw was brutal. And frankly, though I am a teacher and former union president, some of the attacks on Mr. Hill were unnecessary and not helpful. I keep trying to imagine his wife going home later to try to explain to their children why all the angry people hate Daddy so much. Add to that the emotional, angry resignation of a board member, and the apparent twenty minutes of angry interlude, and there's no question that many people came together to create an ugly mess.
However, at the risk of being one more person who seems to be piling on you, I have to tell you-- that ugly mess was entirely your fault.
I'm in Pennsylvania. I have no idea what the historic relationship between board and teachers in Burbank has been, but I presume, given Burbank's reported excellence, that it has been pretty good. That makes it all the sadder that you messed it up.
I have no idea if Matt Hill was the best man for the job (I rather doubt it, but I wasn't the one looking at those eighteen candidates, so there's no way I can know). But if he was, you did him a huge disservice by botching the hiring process.
There's a basic principle involved in running any organization-- people want to be heard. If they don't think they're being heard when they speak, they will keep raising their voices until they believe they are being heard. If I'm in a leadership role and someone is screaming at me, I first check the possibility that they don't believe I've heard them. And really, you already know this-- why were you so angry with the teachers at the meeting? Because you felt they were not hearing what you had to say.
You had to know that the selection of Hill as superintendent would be contentious, that many people would have legitimate and heartfelt concerns about the choice. As Mr. Hill's future employers, you owed it to him to make sure those concerns were heard so that he could enter the office without having to face employees who were pre-disposed not to want him there.
That means that your obligation as his future bosses and the leaders of Burbank schools was to make sure those concerns were heard and addressed, even if it lengthened your timeline. But when you you announced a meeting to allow teacher discussion and questioning of the candidate with barely twenty-four hours notice, you sent a clear signal that you were interested in looking as if you'd listened to people, not in actually listening. Of course that meeting was contentious-- by your actions, you told them before they even showed up that you weren't really going to listen. And so they showed up ready to scream. Your ranty ex-member complained that everybody was just assuming how he'd vote, but of course the actual vote showed that what everybody assumed was correct-- the hiring was a done deal on a fast tracked railroad. This type of behavior does not build trust.
I could see the hurt and disappointment in board members, and I recognize it because I've seen it in leadership amateurs before-- we went through so much, thought so hard, went through so many steps to make this decision, and it hurts that people are reacting as if we pulled it all casually out of our butt, as if we don't really care.
So you went through a long, hard process. Ask yourself one question-- how much of that process occurred out in plain sight for any and all to see? So many school boards seem to have trouble grasping a simple idea-- what you do in secret and private is effectively invisible. If you want people to see what you've been through, you have to show them every step of the way.
Matt Hill comes with huge, huge issues attached. You say that you were satisfied that he had addressed those properly. How many of those answers did you share? How many did he provide to your teachers?
Matt Hill comes with no classroom background at all. That is not a hopeless obstacle, but it is an obstacle. How will he evaluate the performance of a job that he knows nothing about? How will he decide what resources teachers do or do not need if he does not understand what they need the resources for? These are not un-answerable questions, but if you are the only people who have heard the answers, do not be surprised that other folks are doubtful.
Matt Hill comes attached to John Deasy, whose tenure at LAUSD was a disaster, rife with massive screw-ups that were in turn connected to what could at best be called shady behavior. And Hill was attached directly to two of the largest disasters. It's fine to say, "Well, he assured us that he learned some important lessons," but that's not really an answer.
Matt Hill comes attached to the Broad empire, which is a giant red flag for anybody working in education. It's like handing management of your steak house over to a life long vegetarian. It's like putting a Democrat in charge of the Republican primary. It's like hiring a fox to watch your henhouse. It might very well work out, but not if there's no real plan, and you certainly can't expect people to just shrug and say, "Sounds legit."
Matt Hill comes believing that schools can be run by a business guy (which is expected from a good Broadie), but not only has he not ever run a classroom, but he has also never successfully run a business. The biggest business decisions he has ever been associated with would be the oft-mentioned disasters at LAUSD.
Hill has never run a classroom, a school district, or a business. His most recent relevant experience was a highly public failure. His whole adult life has been spent working for and with people who are devoted to shutting down public schools and replacing them with charters.
There may very well be reasons to believe that none of this matters going forward and that he will be a great superintendent-- but if you guys didn't know there would be enormous pushback then you must be partially brain dead. As a business guy, he should have been able to tell you-- if his installation in the job was going to run smoothly at all, the massive baggage that comes with him would have to be addressed, publicly, openly, honestly, and with an understanding that people's first reaction was going to be negative.
I don't know how you imagined it would work. People would just take your words for it? You would just run this through quickly before any kind of bad stink could be raised? The other seventeen were so bad and you had lived with this for so long that you just couldn't see anything else to do?
Like I said. I'm in Pennsylvania and for all I know you didn't botch the selection process at all. All the evidence I can see says, frankly, you did-- but all the evidence I can see isn't very much. But whether or not you botched the selection process, you completely botched the hiring process.
Is there a way forward? Sure. If I were your school board management consultant, here's what I would advise you to do.
Have the meetings now that you should have had in the runup to this decision. Put on your big boy and girl pants, because the first hours of meetings will consist of people yelling at you. Suck it up and take it, because you earned every bit of it. Listen honestly and reflectively. Show that you hear what they're saying. Show that you understand their concerns. Earn back some trust.
Be honest. Don't be defensive, don't try to save face, and don't try to make up reasons for anything. Don't try to manage the situation. Be honest. Be open.
Assume good intent. Teachers and public folks are not being a pain your ass because they're big meanies-- they're doing because they think a terrible scary thing has happened that they have had absolutely no say in. If they did not give a rat's rear about Burbank schools, they would laugh, shrug, call you names in the faculty lounge and get a comfy seat for the expected disaster. They are upset because they care what happens to your schools. Remember that.
Do not say things like "We'll talk to you when you grow up." Say things like "We know this decision looks like a terrible mistake, but we really do want the best for these schools, and we will tell you everything we know that helped us feel good about this choice." They will yell some more, because right now they don't trust you, and that's not going to fix itself overnight. Some of them will keep yelling forever and will never be okay with this; if your choice was good and your motives pure, then slowly but surely the angry voices will become a minority.
Finally, and perhaps most painfully, consider the possibility that you have screwed the pooch on this one. The absolute worst next chapter for Burbank would be if Hill does turn out to be awful but the board backs him because you'll be damned if you admit that you were wrong.
As much as I think you've made a bad choice, one bad choice doesn't have to turn into the kind of management dysfunction fiasco portrayed by the video. Your mishandling of the hiring has multiplied your problems a thousand-fold. You need to get your act together. If you want people to act like grownups, start by modeling the behavior yourselves.
I have no dog in your particular superintendent hunt, but as a blogger, unsolicited advice is my (non-paying) bread and butter. You've taken a lot of heat for your hiring choice. I just watched the video short form of your very contentious meeting for the approval of Matt Hill as your new superintendent. Clearly many people on all sides of the table were extremely agitated and emotional. (If you haven't seen the edit yet, I've included it below so you can see what I saw.)
What I saw was brutal. And frankly, though I am a teacher and former union president, some of the attacks on Mr. Hill were unnecessary and not helpful. I keep trying to imagine his wife going home later to try to explain to their children why all the angry people hate Daddy so much. Add to that the emotional, angry resignation of a board member, and the apparent twenty minutes of angry interlude, and there's no question that many people came together to create an ugly mess.
However, at the risk of being one more person who seems to be piling on you, I have to tell you-- that ugly mess was entirely your fault.
I'm in Pennsylvania. I have no idea what the historic relationship between board and teachers in Burbank has been, but I presume, given Burbank's reported excellence, that it has been pretty good. That makes it all the sadder that you messed it up.
I have no idea if Matt Hill was the best man for the job (I rather doubt it, but I wasn't the one looking at those eighteen candidates, so there's no way I can know). But if he was, you did him a huge disservice by botching the hiring process.
There's a basic principle involved in running any organization-- people want to be heard. If they don't think they're being heard when they speak, they will keep raising their voices until they believe they are being heard. If I'm in a leadership role and someone is screaming at me, I first check the possibility that they don't believe I've heard them. And really, you already know this-- why were you so angry with the teachers at the meeting? Because you felt they were not hearing what you had to say.
You had to know that the selection of Hill as superintendent would be contentious, that many people would have legitimate and heartfelt concerns about the choice. As Mr. Hill's future employers, you owed it to him to make sure those concerns were heard so that he could enter the office without having to face employees who were pre-disposed not to want him there.
That means that your obligation as his future bosses and the leaders of Burbank schools was to make sure those concerns were heard and addressed, even if it lengthened your timeline. But when you you announced a meeting to allow teacher discussion and questioning of the candidate with barely twenty-four hours notice, you sent a clear signal that you were interested in looking as if you'd listened to people, not in actually listening. Of course that meeting was contentious-- by your actions, you told them before they even showed up that you weren't really going to listen. And so they showed up ready to scream. Your ranty ex-member complained that everybody was just assuming how he'd vote, but of course the actual vote showed that what everybody assumed was correct-- the hiring was a done deal on a fast tracked railroad. This type of behavior does not build trust.
I could see the hurt and disappointment in board members, and I recognize it because I've seen it in leadership amateurs before-- we went through so much, thought so hard, went through so many steps to make this decision, and it hurts that people are reacting as if we pulled it all casually out of our butt, as if we don't really care.
So you went through a long, hard process. Ask yourself one question-- how much of that process occurred out in plain sight for any and all to see? So many school boards seem to have trouble grasping a simple idea-- what you do in secret and private is effectively invisible. If you want people to see what you've been through, you have to show them every step of the way.
Matt Hill comes with huge, huge issues attached. You say that you were satisfied that he had addressed those properly. How many of those answers did you share? How many did he provide to your teachers?
Matt Hill comes with no classroom background at all. That is not a hopeless obstacle, but it is an obstacle. How will he evaluate the performance of a job that he knows nothing about? How will he decide what resources teachers do or do not need if he does not understand what they need the resources for? These are not un-answerable questions, but if you are the only people who have heard the answers, do not be surprised that other folks are doubtful.
Matt Hill comes attached to John Deasy, whose tenure at LAUSD was a disaster, rife with massive screw-ups that were in turn connected to what could at best be called shady behavior. And Hill was attached directly to two of the largest disasters. It's fine to say, "Well, he assured us that he learned some important lessons," but that's not really an answer.
Matt Hill comes attached to the Broad empire, which is a giant red flag for anybody working in education. It's like handing management of your steak house over to a life long vegetarian. It's like putting a Democrat in charge of the Republican primary. It's like hiring a fox to watch your henhouse. It might very well work out, but not if there's no real plan, and you certainly can't expect people to just shrug and say, "Sounds legit."
Matt Hill comes believing that schools can be run by a business guy (which is expected from a good Broadie), but not only has he not ever run a classroom, but he has also never successfully run a business. The biggest business decisions he has ever been associated with would be the oft-mentioned disasters at LAUSD.
Hill has never run a classroom, a school district, or a business. His most recent relevant experience was a highly public failure. His whole adult life has been spent working for and with people who are devoted to shutting down public schools and replacing them with charters.
There may very well be reasons to believe that none of this matters going forward and that he will be a great superintendent-- but if you guys didn't know there would be enormous pushback then you must be partially brain dead. As a business guy, he should have been able to tell you-- if his installation in the job was going to run smoothly at all, the massive baggage that comes with him would have to be addressed, publicly, openly, honestly, and with an understanding that people's first reaction was going to be negative.
I don't know how you imagined it would work. People would just take your words for it? You would just run this through quickly before any kind of bad stink could be raised? The other seventeen were so bad and you had lived with this for so long that you just couldn't see anything else to do?
Like I said. I'm in Pennsylvania and for all I know you didn't botch the selection process at all. All the evidence I can see says, frankly, you did-- but all the evidence I can see isn't very much. But whether or not you botched the selection process, you completely botched the hiring process.
Is there a way forward? Sure. If I were your school board management consultant, here's what I would advise you to do.
Have the meetings now that you should have had in the runup to this decision. Put on your big boy and girl pants, because the first hours of meetings will consist of people yelling at you. Suck it up and take it, because you earned every bit of it. Listen honestly and reflectively. Show that you hear what they're saying. Show that you understand their concerns. Earn back some trust.
Be honest. Don't be defensive, don't try to save face, and don't try to make up reasons for anything. Don't try to manage the situation. Be honest. Be open.
Assume good intent. Teachers and public folks are not being a pain your ass because they're big meanies-- they're doing because they think a terrible scary thing has happened that they have had absolutely no say in. If they did not give a rat's rear about Burbank schools, they would laugh, shrug, call you names in the faculty lounge and get a comfy seat for the expected disaster. They are upset because they care what happens to your schools. Remember that.
Do not say things like "We'll talk to you when you grow up." Say things like "We know this decision looks like a terrible mistake, but we really do want the best for these schools, and we will tell you everything we know that helped us feel good about this choice." They will yell some more, because right now they don't trust you, and that's not going to fix itself overnight. Some of them will keep yelling forever and will never be okay with this; if your choice was good and your motives pure, then slowly but surely the angry voices will become a minority.
Finally, and perhaps most painfully, consider the possibility that you have screwed the pooch on this one. The absolute worst next chapter for Burbank would be if Hill does turn out to be awful but the board backs him because you'll be damned if you admit that you were wrong.
As much as I think you've made a bad choice, one bad choice doesn't have to turn into the kind of management dysfunction fiasco portrayed by the video. Your mishandling of the hiring has multiplied your problems a thousand-fold. You need to get your act together. If you want people to act like grownups, start by modeling the behavior yourselves.
Arne Bumbles Dyslexia Grilling
Oh, it just hurts.
Here's a link to a clip from 2016 Budget grilling of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. In it, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) asks a simple question: What specific programs do we have in place for helping students with dyslexia?
And it just goes south from there.
The answer, pretty clearly, is "none." But Duncan is bound determined not to go there, so he tries, "Well, students with dyslexia have special needs, and we have a special needs fund, so they fall under that--"
Cassidy bores in, citing studies and facts and figures to elaborate on his point which is that students with dyslexia make up 80% of the students with special needs and as much as 20% of the general student population, so wouldn't it make sense to have programs directed at that particular issue?
Let the flailing begin. I would put together my usual summary-deconstruction of a Duncan word salad, but this is the mouth noise equivalent of a large-mouthed bass thrown up on the creek bank and trying to flop his way back to some water.
Cassidy tries again. Does Duncan have any sense of the quality of dyslexia programs out there? The answer, again, is "no," but Arne can't form that word, so instead he starts making up some sentences that boil down to, "I suppose there are some good ones and some bad ones and some in between ones" which is not exactly an insight that required the United States Secretary of Education to deliver it.
Here's Arne's problem-- he absolutely has an idea about what the approach to dyslexia should be. He's been very clear about it in the past. Let's go back to his conference call about new USED special needs policies
We know that when students with disabilities are held to high expectations and have access to a robust curriculum, they excel.
Or the explanation from Kevin Huffman in that same call. These words didn't come out of Duncan's mouth, but he didn't say, "Well, that's not quite what we mean" either.
Huffman challenged the prevailing view that most special education students lag behind because of their disabilities. He said most lag behind because they're not expected to succeed if they're given more demanding schoolwork and because they're seldom tested.
So, Senator Cassidy, that's the USED plan-- we will expect those students with dyslexia to do better, and then if they don't we'll get rid of their teachers and replace them with teachers who are better at expecting things. That's it. That's the plan.
But Duncan was smart enough not to say that out loud to a man who 1) has clearly done his homework about dyslexia 2) cares about dyslexia and 3) is a US senator.
Cassiday found a few more ways to make his point, comparing the USED stance on for-profit colleges (we're going to be all over that) to their stance on dyslexia (someone will either do something about it or not). He even offered some concrete solutions, noting that research indicated you need the entire teaching staff to have some understanding of dyslexia to address it, and maybe we could direct some money toward programs that would provide that broad level of training.
Cassidy starts a great question--In your dream of dreams, what would be done for the screening and intervention of students with dyslexia?-- but then it turns into a bit of a rant-- we're worried about the 1% of gifted students who will probably succeed no matter what, but what about the 20% that won't succeed unless we do something-- and he loses the thread, so that by the time Arne gets to talk, he can dodge the real question.
Well, I think our office that looks at this is doing really good work there [which office would that be, exactly?] Again, it's a fair critique. Do we have enough resources put behind children whether they have special needs or whether they're extraordinarily gifted that we're not investing enough in either population, and for us to invest more we clearly need your help and support.
I skipped all the "ums" and grimaces. Arne is just trying so hard to find his way back to his standard talking points and you can just hear all the tension go out of his voice when he finally makes it back to "we clearly need your help and support."
It's a pretty excruciating six minutes-- Sen. Cassidy is closing his eyes and massaging his own forehead by the time it's done-- and just one more example of where Duncan is in way over his head. Show it to all your friends who care about dyslexia.
Here's a link to a clip from 2016 Budget grilling of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. In it, Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) asks a simple question: What specific programs do we have in place for helping students with dyslexia?
And it just goes south from there.
The answer, pretty clearly, is "none." But Duncan is bound determined not to go there, so he tries, "Well, students with dyslexia have special needs, and we have a special needs fund, so they fall under that--"
Cassidy bores in, citing studies and facts and figures to elaborate on his point which is that students with dyslexia make up 80% of the students with special needs and as much as 20% of the general student population, so wouldn't it make sense to have programs directed at that particular issue?
Let the flailing begin. I would put together my usual summary-deconstruction of a Duncan word salad, but this is the mouth noise equivalent of a large-mouthed bass thrown up on the creek bank and trying to flop his way back to some water.
Cassidy tries again. Does Duncan have any sense of the quality of dyslexia programs out there? The answer, again, is "no," but Arne can't form that word, so instead he starts making up some sentences that boil down to, "I suppose there are some good ones and some bad ones and some in between ones" which is not exactly an insight that required the United States Secretary of Education to deliver it.
Here's Arne's problem-- he absolutely has an idea about what the approach to dyslexia should be. He's been very clear about it in the past. Let's go back to his conference call about new USED special needs policies
We know that when students with disabilities are held to high expectations and have access to a robust curriculum, they excel.
Or the explanation from Kevin Huffman in that same call. These words didn't come out of Duncan's mouth, but he didn't say, "Well, that's not quite what we mean" either.
Huffman challenged the prevailing view that most special education students lag behind because of their disabilities. He said most lag behind because they're not expected to succeed if they're given more demanding schoolwork and because they're seldom tested.
So, Senator Cassidy, that's the USED plan-- we will expect those students with dyslexia to do better, and then if they don't we'll get rid of their teachers and replace them with teachers who are better at expecting things. That's it. That's the plan.
But Duncan was smart enough not to say that out loud to a man who 1) has clearly done his homework about dyslexia 2) cares about dyslexia and 3) is a US senator.
Cassiday found a few more ways to make his point, comparing the USED stance on for-profit colleges (we're going to be all over that) to their stance on dyslexia (someone will either do something about it or not). He even offered some concrete solutions, noting that research indicated you need the entire teaching staff to have some understanding of dyslexia to address it, and maybe we could direct some money toward programs that would provide that broad level of training.
Cassidy starts a great question--In your dream of dreams, what would be done for the screening and intervention of students with dyslexia?-- but then it turns into a bit of a rant-- we're worried about the 1% of gifted students who will probably succeed no matter what, but what about the 20% that won't succeed unless we do something-- and he loses the thread, so that by the time Arne gets to talk, he can dodge the real question.
Well, I think our office that looks at this is doing really good work there [which office would that be, exactly?] Again, it's a fair critique. Do we have enough resources put behind children whether they have special needs or whether they're extraordinarily gifted that we're not investing enough in either population, and for us to invest more we clearly need your help and support.
I skipped all the "ums" and grimaces. Arne is just trying so hard to find his way back to his standard talking points and you can just hear all the tension go out of his voice when he finally makes it back to "we clearly need your help and support."
It's a pretty excruciating six minutes-- Sen. Cassidy is closing his eyes and massaging his own forehead by the time it's done-- and just one more example of where Duncan is in way over his head. Show it to all your friends who care about dyslexia.
Driving Ed Reform
I don't know as much about Michael Fullan as I'd like to. Fullan is an educational expert-professor-consultant from Canada who has been brought to California multiple times to share his ideas about how to revitalize the education system, and is often credited/blamed for what has happened in Ontario. It's a thorny mess, and clearly many folks have wildly different impressions of what has happened and who's to blame or credit-- you can get a feel for the issues by reading this article, including the entire comment section.
All of which is a way of allowing that Fullan's ideas, while intriguing and thought-provoking, have not necessarily been field-tested, and there is some question about whether or not they can survive the transition from theory to reality. And he occasionally makes troubling friends (most notably, the McKinsey Group).
But Fullan does a good "What's wrong with NCLB and RttT" from a non-US perspective. This morning I want to take a look at a paper of his from 2011 that returns to one of his favorite ideas-- choosing the right drivers for system change.
The basic concept makes sense-- if you want to redirect a system, you have to do it by installing the right drivers. The wrong drivers get you the wrong results, like pushing a bulldozer up against the side of your car in an attempt to help drive forward out of the mud. And in "Choosing the wrong drivers for whole system reform," Fullan lays out the wrong drivers that US reformsters have bet the house on, and tells which ones should be used instead.
Accountability (not capacity building)
You manage a widget factory. You want to ramp up widget production to 1000 widgets a week. Which of the following is your first step?
1) Make sure that you have sufficient workers with sufficient training and sufficient materials and sufficient tools to meet that production goal.
2) Gather your workers together and tell them they'd better try harder and meet that production goal, or they were going to be fired.
That's the difference between driving by capacity building and driving by accountability. And since we're in a sector that provides a human service and not a widget factory, the difference between the two becomes even more complicated and troublesome.
Fullan does not call to throw out standards and assessment. The problem, he says is the attitude toward them and their dominance in the system. If that dominance is based "on the assumption that massive external pressure will generate intrinsic motivation it is patently false."
Higher, clearer standards, combined with correlated assessments are essential along the way, but they are not going to drive the system forward. Whole system success requires the commitment that comes from intrinsic motivation and improved technical competencies of groups of educators working together purposefully and relentlessly.
His stance raises a question for me-- is it possible to have those standards and correlated assessments without having them take over the system? I'm not sure I think it is, and in general Fullan still likes accountability as a tool more than I do-- but I do agree that trying to redirect the system by simply demanding that teachers Do It Or Else pushes us into the weeds. The assumption that teachers and schools have the capacity to make all students awesome but are, for some mysterious reason, just refusing to use it is both insulting and destructive. Its ultimate expression is Arne Duncan's repeated assertion that all low-achieving students and students with learning disabilities need is just expectations.
Why do we choose accountability over capacity building? Imagine if the feds and states had said, "We will spend whatever it takes to make sure that every child in this country is sitting in a classroom with no more than fourteen other students" or "We will spend whatever it takes to get every teacher three solid years of higher-level teacher training." It would be expensive.
But accountability feels cheap. It doesn't cost anything to tell teachers they'll be fired if they don't shape up. It doesn't cost anything to tell teachers, "You don't need any more resources. Just use some grit and make it happen." Spending billions on testing doesn't feel or look like a big expense, and accountability hawks keep telling themselves that testing will pay huge dividends.
Fullan says that testing should be done less, with an eye toward figuring out how to improve, not punish. He's also a big fan of transparency of results as well. But he asserts that "no system in the world has ever achieved whole system reform by leading with accountability."
Individual Quality (not group quality)
Fullan says that the land of rugged individuals is particularly susceptible to the idea of individual hero teachers striving away in their individual classrooms, but he says that's not where the magic happens.
He refers to a study by Carrie Leana at the University of Pittsburg which looked at the different effects of human capital (the awesome powers of the hero teacher) and social capital (the interactions between staff and administration). Both are necessary, Fullan says, but it's the social capital that really "is the more powerful."
Fullan suggests that this particularly powerful in combination with an emphasis on capacity-- that social capital creates its own intrinsic motivation, while accountability-style drivers actually break down the social capital. Think of how a ranking system where your pay or even your job rest on "beating" other members of the staff-- this is an approach that actively destroys the social capital in a school.
Fullan acknowledges several large challenges in pushing group quality. In particular, he notes that you have to involve all the teachers. Getting buy-in from a few hand-picked staff members doesn't cut it. And I get a bit nervous myself when he starts talking about how "teacher quality" is just another proxy for student learning-- that the metric is how well students are learning. But in no point in this paper (or in the admittedly small amount of Fullan I've read) does he address the question of how we decide whether a student has learned anything or not.
Fullan often emphasizes the importance of teacher morale and intrinsic motivation to a school system, and he is equally clear here-- school leaders who don't get this part right will not get anything right. Top down, carrot and stick attempts to punish and fire individual teachers to excellence will fail every time.
Technology (not instruction)
I hate to sound like a broken twitter but no other successful country became good through using technology at the front end. Without pedagogy in the driver’s seat there is growing evidence that technology is better at driving us to distraction, and that the digital world of the child is detached from the world of the school.
Fullan is short but sweet on this point. "There is no evidence," he writes, "that technology is a particularly good entry point for whole system reform." In other words, the fact that you're making students take their Big Standardized Test on a computer does not revolutionize anything.
Fragmented (not systemic)
Fullan is a systems guy, and I think they are prone to their own set of blind spots. But he believes that countries who have mastered this start from the idea that teachers are crucial and must be supported. They look to improve the quality of the profession, but they do it through methods of support rather than through threats and punishment-- recruit the best, improve working conditions, differentiated roles, support particularly through the early years of work.
In the absence of a system mindset individual pieces, each of which contains half-truths, are pitted against each other as vested interests bash each other with proverbial baseball bats. No one wins; the system loses every time.
He puts particular emphasis on how the system must come to trust teachers, and that this is a particular issue in the US (and Australia). His advice-- to create a cycle of trust, you have to respect people before you think they've earned it, and then "do the things that build competencies and trust over time." This is not bad advice-- as soon as I read it, I recognized it as what I do in my classroom-- but perhaps because he is primarily addressing policymakers and leaders, he fails to take into account the power differential. I can extend respect to education leaders and policymakers in this country (I really can-- I swear) but I can't "build competencies" because I'm just the help, and I have no real contact with them. In fact, now that I think about it, that may be one of the problems in education, just as it's a major problem in the private sector-- the actual physical gulf between management and the work. If policymakers started respecting me, I would see it indirectly in the policies they created-- but they have no idea whether I respect them or not because they've never met me, seen me, seen my work, talked to me. Absent any sort of communication loop between policymakers and people who actually work in schools, I'm not sure Fullan's trust-building model can take root.I'm going to have to think about this some more.
So what have we learned
I don't think Fullan's told us anything we don't know. Bits and pieces of his ideas have clearly taken hold-- the social capital construct of teacher communities is pretty much the entire guiding idea behind PLCs, and reformsters have cherry-picked tiny pieces here and there.
But Fullan's writing gives us other language to use when discussing what's wrong with US ed policy, and that may be helpful, just as it's always useful to have another model by which we can understand what's happening. I'm going to mull some of his ideas over some more. Meanwhile, readers can use the comments section to debate whether or not Fullan sent Canadian education straight to hell in a handbasket or not.
All of which is a way of allowing that Fullan's ideas, while intriguing and thought-provoking, have not necessarily been field-tested, and there is some question about whether or not they can survive the transition from theory to reality. And he occasionally makes troubling friends (most notably, the McKinsey Group).
But Fullan does a good "What's wrong with NCLB and RttT" from a non-US perspective. This morning I want to take a look at a paper of his from 2011 that returns to one of his favorite ideas-- choosing the right drivers for system change.
The basic concept makes sense-- if you want to redirect a system, you have to do it by installing the right drivers. The wrong drivers get you the wrong results, like pushing a bulldozer up against the side of your car in an attempt to help drive forward out of the mud. And in "Choosing the wrong drivers for whole system reform," Fullan lays out the wrong drivers that US reformsters have bet the house on, and tells which ones should be used instead.
Accountability (not capacity building)
You manage a widget factory. You want to ramp up widget production to 1000 widgets a week. Which of the following is your first step?
1) Make sure that you have sufficient workers with sufficient training and sufficient materials and sufficient tools to meet that production goal.
2) Gather your workers together and tell them they'd better try harder and meet that production goal, or they were going to be fired.
That's the difference between driving by capacity building and driving by accountability. And since we're in a sector that provides a human service and not a widget factory, the difference between the two becomes even more complicated and troublesome.
Fullan does not call to throw out standards and assessment. The problem, he says is the attitude toward them and their dominance in the system. If that dominance is based "on the assumption that massive external pressure will generate intrinsic motivation it is patently false."
Higher, clearer standards, combined with correlated assessments are essential along the way, but they are not going to drive the system forward. Whole system success requires the commitment that comes from intrinsic motivation and improved technical competencies of groups of educators working together purposefully and relentlessly.
His stance raises a question for me-- is it possible to have those standards and correlated assessments without having them take over the system? I'm not sure I think it is, and in general Fullan still likes accountability as a tool more than I do-- but I do agree that trying to redirect the system by simply demanding that teachers Do It Or Else pushes us into the weeds. The assumption that teachers and schools have the capacity to make all students awesome but are, for some mysterious reason, just refusing to use it is both insulting and destructive. Its ultimate expression is Arne Duncan's repeated assertion that all low-achieving students and students with learning disabilities need is just expectations.
Why do we choose accountability over capacity building? Imagine if the feds and states had said, "We will spend whatever it takes to make sure that every child in this country is sitting in a classroom with no more than fourteen other students" or "We will spend whatever it takes to get every teacher three solid years of higher-level teacher training." It would be expensive.
But accountability feels cheap. It doesn't cost anything to tell teachers they'll be fired if they don't shape up. It doesn't cost anything to tell teachers, "You don't need any more resources. Just use some grit and make it happen." Spending billions on testing doesn't feel or look like a big expense, and accountability hawks keep telling themselves that testing will pay huge dividends.
Fullan says that testing should be done less, with an eye toward figuring out how to improve, not punish. He's also a big fan of transparency of results as well. But he asserts that "no system in the world has ever achieved whole system reform by leading with accountability."
Individual Quality (not group quality)
Fullan says that the land of rugged individuals is particularly susceptible to the idea of individual hero teachers striving away in their individual classrooms, but he says that's not where the magic happens.
He refers to a study by Carrie Leana at the University of Pittsburg which looked at the different effects of human capital (the awesome powers of the hero teacher) and social capital (the interactions between staff and administration). Both are necessary, Fullan says, but it's the social capital that really "is the more powerful."
Fullan suggests that this particularly powerful in combination with an emphasis on capacity-- that social capital creates its own intrinsic motivation, while accountability-style drivers actually break down the social capital. Think of how a ranking system where your pay or even your job rest on "beating" other members of the staff-- this is an approach that actively destroys the social capital in a school.
Fullan acknowledges several large challenges in pushing group quality. In particular, he notes that you have to involve all the teachers. Getting buy-in from a few hand-picked staff members doesn't cut it. And I get a bit nervous myself when he starts talking about how "teacher quality" is just another proxy for student learning-- that the metric is how well students are learning. But in no point in this paper (or in the admittedly small amount of Fullan I've read) does he address the question of how we decide whether a student has learned anything or not.
Fullan often emphasizes the importance of teacher morale and intrinsic motivation to a school system, and he is equally clear here-- school leaders who don't get this part right will not get anything right. Top down, carrot and stick attempts to punish and fire individual teachers to excellence will fail every time.
Technology (not instruction)
I hate to sound like a broken twitter but no other successful country became good through using technology at the front end. Without pedagogy in the driver’s seat there is growing evidence that technology is better at driving us to distraction, and that the digital world of the child is detached from the world of the school.
Fullan is short but sweet on this point. "There is no evidence," he writes, "that technology is a particularly good entry point for whole system reform." In other words, the fact that you're making students take their Big Standardized Test on a computer does not revolutionize anything.
Fragmented (not systemic)
Fullan is a systems guy, and I think they are prone to their own set of blind spots. But he believes that countries who have mastered this start from the idea that teachers are crucial and must be supported. They look to improve the quality of the profession, but they do it through methods of support rather than through threats and punishment-- recruit the best, improve working conditions, differentiated roles, support particularly through the early years of work.
In the absence of a system mindset individual pieces, each of which contains half-truths, are pitted against each other as vested interests bash each other with proverbial baseball bats. No one wins; the system loses every time.
He puts particular emphasis on how the system must come to trust teachers, and that this is a particular issue in the US (and Australia). His advice-- to create a cycle of trust, you have to respect people before you think they've earned it, and then "do the things that build competencies and trust over time." This is not bad advice-- as soon as I read it, I recognized it as what I do in my classroom-- but perhaps because he is primarily addressing policymakers and leaders, he fails to take into account the power differential. I can extend respect to education leaders and policymakers in this country (I really can-- I swear) but I can't "build competencies" because I'm just the help, and I have no real contact with them. In fact, now that I think about it, that may be one of the problems in education, just as it's a major problem in the private sector-- the actual physical gulf between management and the work. If policymakers started respecting me, I would see it indirectly in the policies they created-- but they have no idea whether I respect them or not because they've never met me, seen me, seen my work, talked to me. Absent any sort of communication loop between policymakers and people who actually work in schools, I'm not sure Fullan's trust-building model can take root.I'm going to have to think about this some more.
So what have we learned
I don't think Fullan's told us anything we don't know. Bits and pieces of his ideas have clearly taken hold-- the social capital construct of teacher communities is pretty much the entire guiding idea behind PLCs, and reformsters have cherry-picked tiny pieces here and there.
But Fullan's writing gives us other language to use when discussing what's wrong with US ed policy, and that may be helpful, just as it's always useful to have another model by which we can understand what's happening. I'm going to mull some of his ideas over some more. Meanwhile, readers can use the comments section to debate whether or not Fullan sent Canadian education straight to hell in a handbasket or not.
Saturday, April 18, 2015
NPE: My Session
For those of you who are going to Chicago (cause your baby can take you), we'll have two opportunities to meet. One will be at the luncheon, where I have been promised a Watch What Happens style grilling by Jennifer "Edushyster" Berkshire.
On Sunday, in the last choose-your-own-session spot (known to seasoned conference attenders as the Skip It While You Finish Packing To Leave session) I'll be doing a presentation loosely entitled "Teach Writing Like a Writer and Not Like a Test Prep Content Delivery Specialist." I'll share just a bit of what we've learned about how to test prep for writing at my school, to set up what I've learned about teaching writing from a perspective of real actual writing and not just filling in the paper for a school assignment writing.
If people attend, I'm hoping we can do a little discussing and sharing, and in that spirit you're invited to send me questions of issues that are concerns of yours. I don't know All The Answers, but I know several of the questions. I'll talk both about some technical, mechanical tricks I know as well as some of the bigger thinky issues involved in making some brain adjustments in how students approach writing. The idea is not to turn every student into a professional paid author, but to get them to approach writing like an important part of human expression, and not a painful torture used only in a classroom. I am sure I don't know great secrets that nobody else knows, but my dream is that a bunch of us who are excited about writing can share and support and confirm each other.
I'm both excited and terrified about going to Chicago-- I feel like I'm taking my ukelele to go hang out with rock stars, but I'm on the other hand, I'll get to actually see some faces and hear some voices and meet the rock stars. If you're going, I'll warn you right up front that I am absolutely terrible with names and probably not as clever or snappy as I appear to be on the screen. But I am really looking forward to connecting with everyone from all over (and some of my oldest friends in the world live in Chicago, too). I will be the one with the slightly dazed expression right next to the woman who's way too good for him. If you are also dazed and feel out of your depth, find me and we'll start our own table in a corner.
(And if you're still thinking about going, here's some info...)
On Sunday, in the last choose-your-own-session spot (known to seasoned conference attenders as the Skip It While You Finish Packing To Leave session) I'll be doing a presentation loosely entitled "Teach Writing Like a Writer and Not Like a Test Prep Content Delivery Specialist." I'll share just a bit of what we've learned about how to test prep for writing at my school, to set up what I've learned about teaching writing from a perspective of real actual writing and not just filling in the paper for a school assignment writing.
If people attend, I'm hoping we can do a little discussing and sharing, and in that spirit you're invited to send me questions of issues that are concerns of yours. I don't know All The Answers, but I know several of the questions. I'll talk both about some technical, mechanical tricks I know as well as some of the bigger thinky issues involved in making some brain adjustments in how students approach writing. The idea is not to turn every student into a professional paid author, but to get them to approach writing like an important part of human expression, and not a painful torture used only in a classroom. I am sure I don't know great secrets that nobody else knows, but my dream is that a bunch of us who are excited about writing can share and support and confirm each other.
I'm both excited and terrified about going to Chicago-- I feel like I'm taking my ukelele to go hang out with rock stars, but I'm on the other hand, I'll get to actually see some faces and hear some voices and meet the rock stars. If you're going, I'll warn you right up front that I am absolutely terrible with names and probably not as clever or snappy as I appear to be on the screen. But I am really looking forward to connecting with everyone from all over (and some of my oldest friends in the world live in Chicago, too). I will be the one with the slightly dazed expression right next to the woman who's way too good for him. If you are also dazed and feel out of your depth, find me and we'll start our own table in a corner.
(And if you're still thinking about going, here's some info...)
Am I Counting Down?
One of the things that absolutely burns my toast, grinds my gears, and irritates my irritatable places at this time of year is The Question.
It comes in a variety of forms. Are you counting down the days? Are you ready for summer? Are you excited to get out of there?
I know people are generally trying to be chatty, pleasant, or conversational. I know that they're just latching onto a conceit that has floated around the culture for decades, just like complaining about the old ball and chain or assuming strife with you mother in law. But what I hear is the assumption underneath, which bugs the shit out of me:
Don't you just hate your job? Don't you wish you didn't have to do it any longer than is absolutely necessary?
Well, no. No, I don't. I don't hate my job. I don't find my students annoying and unpleasant. I don't find teaching a dreadful chore.
There are things that go along with the job that are a royal pain, not the least of which is that every year gives me less time to get the job done, squeezed out by testing and test prep and shorter periods and more required extras.
So I try not to be rude (because life is too short to be an ass any more than necessary, even if you have a natural aptitude for it), but I refuse to acknowledge the attempt to engage me in some nudge, nudge, wink, wink bonding over how much I'd like to not be doing my job. I will respond as if it's a real question, answer, "God, no. I am stressing over getting everything in before I run out of time with these guys. There's so much to do and so little time, and then I'll have to send them on their way, and I try not to think about that because I'll miss them."
I'm not an idiot. I look forward to the chance to travel to see family, to enjoy some lazy days with my wife, to work on some of my own projects. And I am grateful for the summer time to recharge and prepare for next year; it is a considerable luxury that regular working folks do not have, and I try never to forget that.
But it pains me to see my fellow professionals play this game. To hang up countdown numbers, or cross off the calendar squares like an advent calendar. I cringe. How can we expect students to take school seriously when we stand in front of them and say, "Yeah, you're right. This place is an awful waste of all our time, and won't we be so much happier when we can get out of here."
If we don't think, or act as if, school is an important, valuable, interesting, exciting place to be, how can we ever, ever hope that students will see any value in being there?
So, no, I'm not counting down. And no, my wife, who loves her work and may well be a victim of staff cuts come next fall, is certainly not looking counting down. And no, I am not counting down to retirement, either. As long as I can get important, exciting, invigorating, rewarding, fulfilling work done, why would I pass up the chance to keep doing it?
Look, I know times are rough for teachers. I know that people teach in places far rougher than my district. I know some people are hanging on by fingernails. And I don't fault those people for a second. You can only do what you can do. You can only take what you can take. When you get to the end, then you have to move on. That day hasn't come for me yet, but I fully get that for some folks, in some places, it has, and I don't think any less of them for it.
But when we, as teaching professionals, buy into, reinforce and amplify the cultural assumption that teaching is awful work and putting up with kids is dreadful and teachers all dream of vacation so they can get away from their terrible situation-- well, hell. We don't talk like that about pro sports or being a rock star or being a lawyer. We don't look into our spouse's beautiful eyes and say, "Man, I'm glad you finally stopped kissing me. I thought that was never going to end."
We don't tell our kids at the end of a Little League game, "Boy, you must be glad you get to go home now." We don't routinely tell the band and choir kids, "Boy, I bet you can't wait to be done with that concert." I don't pep up the cast of the school musical by standing back stage hollering, "Hang in there-- only fifteen minutes till intermission."
If we want people to stop treating public education like a painful unpleasant terrible torture, we can start by knocking it off ourselves. Sometimes standing up for schools means writing letters and making phone calls and carrying signs and walking the picket line. But it's also as easy as looking someone in the eyes and saying, "Counting down till I'm down? Why would I do that? I love this work and I always miss the students when summer comes. But I'm grateful to have the chance to get prepped and ready to go back in the fall, because that is going to be awesome."
It comes in a variety of forms. Are you counting down the days? Are you ready for summer? Are you excited to get out of there?
I know people are generally trying to be chatty, pleasant, or conversational. I know that they're just latching onto a conceit that has floated around the culture for decades, just like complaining about the old ball and chain or assuming strife with you mother in law. But what I hear is the assumption underneath, which bugs the shit out of me:
Don't you just hate your job? Don't you wish you didn't have to do it any longer than is absolutely necessary?
Well, no. No, I don't. I don't hate my job. I don't find my students annoying and unpleasant. I don't find teaching a dreadful chore.
There are things that go along with the job that are a royal pain, not the least of which is that every year gives me less time to get the job done, squeezed out by testing and test prep and shorter periods and more required extras.
So I try not to be rude (because life is too short to be an ass any more than necessary, even if you have a natural aptitude for it), but I refuse to acknowledge the attempt to engage me in some nudge, nudge, wink, wink bonding over how much I'd like to not be doing my job. I will respond as if it's a real question, answer, "God, no. I am stressing over getting everything in before I run out of time with these guys. There's so much to do and so little time, and then I'll have to send them on their way, and I try not to think about that because I'll miss them."
I'm not an idiot. I look forward to the chance to travel to see family, to enjoy some lazy days with my wife, to work on some of my own projects. And I am grateful for the summer time to recharge and prepare for next year; it is a considerable luxury that regular working folks do not have, and I try never to forget that.
But it pains me to see my fellow professionals play this game. To hang up countdown numbers, or cross off the calendar squares like an advent calendar. I cringe. How can we expect students to take school seriously when we stand in front of them and say, "Yeah, you're right. This place is an awful waste of all our time, and won't we be so much happier when we can get out of here."
If we don't think, or act as if, school is an important, valuable, interesting, exciting place to be, how can we ever, ever hope that students will see any value in being there?
So, no, I'm not counting down. And no, my wife, who loves her work and may well be a victim of staff cuts come next fall, is certainly not looking counting down. And no, I am not counting down to retirement, either. As long as I can get important, exciting, invigorating, rewarding, fulfilling work done, why would I pass up the chance to keep doing it?
Look, I know times are rough for teachers. I know that people teach in places far rougher than my district. I know some people are hanging on by fingernails. And I don't fault those people for a second. You can only do what you can do. You can only take what you can take. When you get to the end, then you have to move on. That day hasn't come for me yet, but I fully get that for some folks, in some places, it has, and I don't think any less of them for it.
But when we, as teaching professionals, buy into, reinforce and amplify the cultural assumption that teaching is awful work and putting up with kids is dreadful and teachers all dream of vacation so they can get away from their terrible situation-- well, hell. We don't talk like that about pro sports or being a rock star or being a lawyer. We don't look into our spouse's beautiful eyes and say, "Man, I'm glad you finally stopped kissing me. I thought that was never going to end."
We don't tell our kids at the end of a Little League game, "Boy, you must be glad you get to go home now." We don't routinely tell the band and choir kids, "Boy, I bet you can't wait to be done with that concert." I don't pep up the cast of the school musical by standing back stage hollering, "Hang in there-- only fifteen minutes till intermission."
If we want people to stop treating public education like a painful unpleasant terrible torture, we can start by knocking it off ourselves. Sometimes standing up for schools means writing letters and making phone calls and carrying signs and walking the picket line. But it's also as easy as looking someone in the eyes and saying, "Counting down till I'm down? Why would I do that? I love this work and I always miss the students when summer comes. But I'm grateful to have the chance to get prepped and ready to go back in the fall, because that is going to be awesome."
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