How To Get People To Listen To You

In these times of stress and struggle, there's certainly a place for groups that can take a vocal and activist stance for teachers (such as the Badass Teacher Association, your local union, and the AFT -- no, wait, the NEA--  never mind).

But there's also a need to talk to individual human issues surrounding the Corporate Takeover Complex in education, whether those individual humans are fellow teachers or civilians. How we can present the issues, person-to-person, in a way that is persuasive and effective? I believe the following are critical.

1) Dial It Back
It is easy, in the midst of a large, sprawling crisis, to become a bit edgy. If the crisis has come to your home turf in a more immediately threatening way (hey there, Philly, Chicago and LA), it's easy to become very focused and energized. If people have been coming at you with the same questions, the same concerns, the same mistaken objections, the same false myths, the same stupid wrongheaded flippin idiotic baloney that I have explained A BILLION GAZILLION TIMES AL-FRICKIN-READY--.......    Okay, let me catch my breath here. You see what I mean.

I get that level of agitation. I was a union president in a strike year, and I remember well one of the irritating principles of running that kind of group. You could have informational sessions, discuss something at great length with the key people, and still, somewhere later, you'd be repeatedly approached by people who wanted to start the whole discussion from scratch.

Add the presence of actual opponents who really do attack you both straight on and with stealth, and it's easy to get yourself in a high state of alarm.

But you have to remember-- that person whose shoulders you have grabbed and started shaking while screaming into his face-- that person may be having his very first day of confronting the issues. He's taking his first step on a road that you've been traveling down for months, or even years. When you scream and shake him, you ARE convincing him that something is alarming, scary and dangerous. It's just that, at that moment, he thinks the scary thing is you.

So take a breath. Dial it back. You don't convince anybody like this. There are many things to love about the BATS and the BATpage, but say the wrong thing and there will be people jumping down your throat faster than Donald Trump chasing golden hair gel. Talk to them like you would talk to a person.

And dial back the rhetoric as well. I agree that American public education is in the fight of its life. But nobody is coming to take teachers to gas chambers. No teachers are being actually raped in the name of the Common Core. When your rhetoric becomes overheated, you lose credibility.

2) Switch Shoes
Sad but true. The effect that CCSS has on how you use your regular math modules with third graders is of no major concern to the average non-teacher.

And, really, tell the truth. Except for a select few, most of us didn't pay any attention for a year or two, until we started to see how all this mess would affect us. So why would the average citizen be any different.

So do not tell people why the corporate movement makes you sad. Tell them why it's going to make them sad. If they are parents, explain how it will affect their children. If they are taxpayers, explain how it will affect the way their taxes are spent.

Look, I'm with you. I wish the majority of Americans had a deeply philosophical commitment to the principles of public education, but as anybody who has ever negotiated a contract or who can read already knows, most Americans just don't think about it all that much.

You have to meet them where they are. You have to explain the issues in terms of their concerns. And if you aren't sure what those are, well...

3) Listen
The best way to get people to listen to you is to listen to them. This does not mean letting their mouth noises wash over you while you finish composing your next talking point.  And it doesn't meaning hearing them just enough to jump down their throats because that concern they just expressed-- it's all wrong.

People are concerned about what they're concerned about. Those people who vehemently disagree with you politically? That's mostly NOT because they are some combination of stupid and evil. They have real concerns.

They may be misinformed. They may be misinterpreting. They may have made some not-quite-right linkage between their concern and the specific actions you're discussing. But their concerns are real. If you can figure out what they are and address them, you will accomplish awesome things.

Oh, and listening also means admitting when you may not be absolutely correct. It means acknowledging when they're not wrong. To do anything else will make it clear that you are an adversary, not a person trying to help them see something.

4) Go Outside
Walk your dog. Eat a hamburger. Fly a kite. Kiss your spouse. In less gentle terms, get a life.

This is another Thing You Already Know From Your Classroom. You are a better teacher when you are a more rounded person and you can approach your students as a whole human being.

Same thing here. If you're a real live human being, you can relate to other real live human beings better.

Bonus Round:
When you go outside, let it be to do something useful in your community. People who know you and trust you because they've dealt with you outside of a classroom or because they've seen you contributing to your community in other ways will be way more likely to listen to you and trust you when you open your mouth.

I probably have more to add to this, but right now my wife and I are going to play with the town band on a float in the local parade for our local Light Up Night before we watch some fireworks and go to a movie. I will continue to try to get people to understand what kind of fight education is in right now, but first I'm going to play my trombone. You should get a trombone of your own, and then get back to the fight tomorrow.

The New Factory Model

We've talked about the factory model in education forever-- the little worker-bees-in-training lined up in ranks and files, learning how to plug away assembly-line style. Truth be told, it's not exactly one of the most endearing features of American public education, and there have been regular attempts to disrupt the model, from elementary classrooms furnished with beanbag chairs and carpet to the Harkness tables of Philips Exeter (I spent a summer as a student there decades ago-- they really do make a difference).

But the newest tweaking of the model is not a good one. It's one critical part of how NCLB and Son of NCLB have poisoned the atmosphere of schools.

Under the old factory model, students were products. We were the workers, our classrooms were the assembly line, and the students were the toasters we were cranking out.

Under the New Reform Model, students are no longer the product. They are workers, and the product is test scores.

Charter schools are the most obvious demonstration of the implications of this approach. What do you do with a factory worker who won't produce a good product? You fire him. What do charter school operators like Steve "65% Graduation Rate" Perry do with students who won't produce good scores? They fire them.

Son of NCLB now requires teachers and schools to produce certain score levels to survive. And so, we are no longer there to serve the students and provide them with the education they need. Now, students are there to produce the scores, the data, that we need to survive.

When "reformers" tout a student-centered approach, they don't mean we should focus on the needs of the student-- they mean we should focus on getting the student to cough up the scores we need.

This is the new factory model, in which students are not toasters, but assembly line robots. If this model persists, here are the things we can expect to see:

-- Charters and private schools will continue to fire any student-worker-robots that fail to produce.

-- Students who can't produce will be labeled defective. After all, if my program (purchased from Pearson) is good, and my delivery system (that well-trained TFA body) is good, then the only explanation for a low student score is some sort of learning defect. Watch for diagnoses of learning disabilities, adhd, etc to go up.

-- While schools chase the top score producers like a pro basketball team tries to recruit the best point maker, some public schools will be left open specifically to warehouse the poor producers. Profit models will develop to make some money from this (cyber schools have a well-developed model of signing these low performers up with big promises and then ditching them after the check clears and before the scores come in), but those will be unsustainable, so we'll see lots of churn in this sector of the market.

-- Schools and, regrettably but inevitably, some teachers will come more and more to see students not as their purpose and focus, but their enemies. "Those damn kids in this years tenth grade are holding out on us and refusing to produce the scores we need to maintain funding. We've got to beat them somehow before they put us out of business." There is something profoundly damaging to a school dynamic when a grown adult's livelihood depends on forcing a ten-year-old to bubble in the answers that we need.

How do we deal with it? It will depend on the building and the administration to some large extent, but ultimately it's up to us to make the best choices in our classrooms.

I dealt with the old model by ignoring it. In my mind, my students are craftsmen, building the best artisanal versions of themselves that they can. I'm some sort of sherpa guiding them to a peak. I'm some sort of guide helping them read a map to a country only they can live in.

With the new model, I think we may have to reimagine ourselves as warriors. Our students, ourselves, our schools-- we have all been thrust into hostile territory where our survival and their graduation depend on meeting a series of senseless challenges, while at the same time we have to acquire the things we need to survive. In their case, students need to acquire an actual education in something other than Bad Test Taking. In our case, we need to acquire the knowledge that we have actually helped the people we went into this profession to help, and have not simply reduced them to assembly line robots. It is not always an easy fight, but we have to remember that we and our students are fighting on the same side.

The Problem That Has No Name

As I mentioned in the previous posting, I believe that part of the problem for the educational resistance movement is a problem of language.

The folks that brought us No Child Left Behind thought that they had made a great branding decision by bundling all the various aspects of their reform program under one title. NCLB was an octopus with many limbs, from high stakes testing to financial boondogglery for remediation to school district evaluations to whatever else they wanted to graft on. The Powers That Were slapped a big label with the NCLB logo on that monster, but when the whole business turned ugly, that giant logo turned out to be a giant target.

If you hated the testing, you were opposed to NCLB. If you hated the government overreach, you were against NCLB. If you hated the overly-prescriptive curriculum materials, you were against NCLB. If you just knew that something was wrong with the whole direction, even if you couldn't put your finger on it, you were against NCLB.

The new wave of reform has corrected that tactical error. CCSS, federal overrreach, high stakes testing, TFA, charter schools, money and power grabs, destructive evaluations of buildings and teachers-- we know all of these things are part of the same toxic trend, the same drive to dismantle American public education and sell the parts for scrap.

But when we want to explain, clearly and passionately, what we are trying to oppose, we have nothing to call it. So we end up either waving our hands vaguely and throwing around phrases on the order of "you know, all that stuff." Or we rattle off the whole laundry list and end up sounding like scattershot crazy conspiracy theorists.

Worse yet, the fact that the Whole Big Mess doesn't have one single name lulls some folks into thinking that we only need to fight one arm of the octopus. Those other arms are friendly and benign; only this one arm wants to strangle us. And because all the arms have different names, the general public-- those folks who don't spend every day poring over blogs about education but whose support we need-- that general public has no idea that these are all parts of the same hungry animal.

Language matters. Language helps frame the discussion. There's a reason that the two sides of the abortion debate call themselves Pro-Choice and Pro-Life. There's a reason that some people call them Public Schools and other people call them Government Schools (three guesses which group supports them). There's a reason that, historically and in so much folk narrative, being able to name something is the key to power over it.

The Giant Education Reform Complex needs a name. I don't have a proposal, but I think about it a lot. It doesn't have to be pretty-- "military-industrial complex" is not very evocative, but everybody knows what it means. But we need something to call this giant mess of reform, and it probably shouldn't have the word "reform" in it because when you are out there announcing that you're against reform, you're already in trouble. Education Complex Takeover. Giant Edu-grab.

I don't have an answer. But I think the question is huge. We know what the beats is. But it needs a name.

Can the CCSS Be Cleansed?

UPDATE: This column appeared in a slightly altered and improved form on Anthony Cody's blog. As much as I appreciate your attention here, you might want to go read that. And while you're there, read through the rest of his most excellent work.

A recent recurring refrain around and about the comments sections is the notion that the Common Core standards are, in and of themselves, quite fine, and if we could just uncouple them from the testing and implementation regimens, all will be well. We need not throw the baby out with the bathwater, nor stand in the way of fine new standards just because their ugly testing step-cousin is trying to sneak through the door with them.

The CCSS are really pure and decent; we just need to find a good exorcist to cast the testing demon out of them.

I can remember thinking like that. I can remember looking at the standards and thinking, "Many of these are actually fine." (I should note that I teach at the high school level, not elementary.) In fact, one of my earliest complaints about the CCSS was that they were one more example of folks telling us to do things that we already did. And I don't think there's a teacher alive who wouldn't relish the promise of freedom to pursue the standards in any way they deemed best.

"You know," I thought at one point. "If it were possible to just use these standards as a rough guide to follow as a thought best, and we got the government to stop testing, I could live with this."

And that was the moment when I knew that, no, the CCSS were not pure of heart and I would never learn to love them.

Because what would decoupling look like, after all? What incantation would exorcise the testing demons? Would teachers go to government and say, "Thank you for these guidelines. Trust us-- we will use our best professional judgment and produce the best-educated generation of students ever. Just step back and watch us work." No, that would never work, and it would never work because the CCSS are not for us. They never were.

People who like the standards are looking at them as a guide, as that helpful assurance that teachers sometimes like that we are on the right page. We like standards. We like standards like drivers like white lines. And we think of standards as a map, a tool to help us find our way. To us standards say, "Here's a map. We trust you to find your way."

Not the CCSS. The primary purpose of the CCSS is to call teachers out. It says, "Here's what you are supposed to be doing, or else. And we'll be checking up on you every step of the way." It is not a tool to be used by teachers; it's a tool to be used on them.

The CCSS say, "Here's what you must prove you're accomplishing." If you tell your students that you expect them to study and learn the chapter about Torquemada and 15th Century Spain, they know there's a test coming. Everyone expects the Spanish Inquisition. The CCSS are not about helping us teach; they are about holding us accountable, so they are meaningless without testing (and some parts are meaningless with it).

They are also, of course, about making money. NCLB also wanted to bust into the big piggy bank that is public school funding, but NCLB was a big blunt hammer; CCSS is a more sophisticated pry bar.

But the biggest-- the hugest, in my opinion-- reason that CCSS cannot be cleansed is reflected in the difficulty all of us who write about education these days, and it is probably the biggest lesson that the powers that be learned from NCLB.

The biggest mistake in NCLB is that they gave the whole thing a name. The testing, the state standards, the punishing evaluations, the funding pressures-- everything was gathered under the No Child Left Behind banner. Oh, how we loathed it. We called it funny mocking names. But even when we couldn't see the full picture, we knew its name. We knew its name.

This thing that's happening now? The contempt for teachers, the drive to privatize, the evaluation-based punishment, the dismantling of our profession, the destruction of public education, the redirection of billions of tax dollars, the secrecy, the ill-conceived standards-- we can see all its pieces, but it does not have a name.

That's a powerful choice, because it fosters the idea that these are all separate and discrete pieces, not part of a giant machine chewing apart the entire American institution of schooling. And it leads to the belief that some of these separate pieces can be cleansed and saved, that we can accept and somehow leave the rest behind.

People who believe in the cleansing of CCSS are like the characters in the story of the blind men and the elephant, only they are saying, "This tail piece is slim and pleasant; I'm going to take it home with me. But the parts you two are describing sound nasty. leave them here." You can't just take home a piece of the elephant.

The Common Core standards are part of that whole nameless beast, and the creators of that beast will never let you take only a piece of it home. The testing regimen is not its own separate thing that can be just thrown out any more than it was its own thing when it was the spine of NCLB. If you want only one arm of the octopus, you can't exorcise the rest of the animal. You can only have one limb when you have killed the whole beast.

Arne Duncan vs. White Moms

As is spreading rapidly, Arne Duncan put his foot in it again this week with his cogent analysis of why people are not putting on a smile, lying down, and letting the Common Core roll right over them. You can find a full treatment here, but I want to just take a moment to unpack how many kinds of arrogant foolishness are rolled into that one little comment.

“It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary,” 

1) Why are we having this conversation?

Once again, Arne seems to have forgotten one of the central, important fictions of the Common Core-- that they are totally the result of a state initiative, and that they in no way represent a federal attempt to commandeer the state-based control of schools. If this isn't his program, why is he devoting so much time and fervor to defending it? Why aren't a bunch of governors running around defending the program that they developed all on their own that was in no way set up and nursed to life by the feds?

2) Moms? Really??

I thought these days it was supposed to be the GOP that dismissed contrary points of view simply by attaching them to women. "Ha ha. This is the crazy kind of objection you'd expect from one of those women. You know women, with their dumb vaginas and not-very-strong thinky parts. That's who comes up with this kind of stupid objection."


3) Plus "white" and "suburban"?? Did you skip politics 101?

Granted, this is a kind of genius play here. These are people who have it cushy, but they're not truly elite. We're trying to invoke the language of privilege, but not too much because that would land us in Arne's neighborhood. So "white suburban" translates roughly as "privileged but not as great as me." Arne is saying, "People who live on the mean streets-- they get it. People who have risen to the heights of power and wealth on their great merit (like, you know, me) get it. But these out-of-touch suburbanites (did I mention they were women) don't get it."

If you think I'm reading too much into points #2 and #3, imagine how this plays if Arne instead attributes these concerns to "blue collar fathers" or "working class black parents."

4) And then when you think for a second more...

Wait-- so only suburban Moms care about how well their kids are doing at school??

5) It's not me. It's you.

The administration has managed to cave and admit that maybe the ACA rollout didn't come off quite as planned and that maybe-- just maybe-- things weren't quite as originally advertised. (Predicted soon-to-be-meme from the comment section of the WaPo article-- "Obamacore-- you can keep your school and teachers if you like them. Oops!")

But in the world of CCSS, there's still only one explanation for why people are upset about the results. Their perception of their school, the school's teachers, the education that they perceived in THEIR OWN CHILDREN-- all of those were at fault all this time, and now only the magic of the federal  oops-- state standards can finally open their eyes.

Yup-- exposure to their offspring, with whom they presumably live, occasionally share a meal, even exchange the occasional grunts and greetings-- none of that could possibly give a parent an impression of how smart their child is. Only CCSS can reveal-- and surprise them with-- the truth.

In Arne's world, there is no possible way that the bad results are even a teensy bit the result of an untested program poorly rolled out program. And that's why--

6) Randi Weingarten is actually right about something

The WaPo column contains a money quote from the AFT head, saying that the CCSS rollout is even worse than the ACA launch. And she's right. And she's right because the ACA rollout has allowed for course correction, changes based on conditions on the ground, and even an admission that some things need to be tweaked.

But in Arne-world, all problems, all objections, all difficulties with the CCSS have one explanation-- all you dumb civilians who don't know revolutionary genius when you see it. Especially those of you with vaginas.

Where Failed Management Fads Go To Die

When I was working my college summers in private industry, I was introduced to Management By Objectives. It was all the rage-- well, it was all the rage with upper management types who liked to book training sessions for the rest of the company. And it was all the rage with the consultants who made money traveling around the country consulting and seminarring and just generally doing their drive-by rearranging of other peoples' deck chairs.

I don't remember anybody liking MBO very much, and when I played catch-up with my old cronies at the company, I heard that MBO was on its way out. Not only were people tired of it, but it didn't work very well.

Not too long after that, as a college grad with his own teaching certificate, I was introduced to the hot new thing in education-- Teaching By Objectives. I was dumbfounded. It was as if someone had simply taken all the old MBO materials and gone through pasting "teaching" in to cover up every "management."

How could it be? People in industry were already abandoning MBO-- even if you thought schools should or could be run with corporate techniques, why would you pick one that was being dumped as ineffective?

Well, I was young, and new, and just learning one of those Things They Never Tell You in Teacher School.

Public education is the elephant's graveyard of bad management techniques.

Maybe it's that some education leaders have an inferiority complex that leads them to believe that business people know something we don't. Maybe it's just that consultants have to eat, too, and once the private sector won't hire you anymore, where are you going to turn. All I know is that I noticed education was always climbing on the bus just as the private sector was climbing off.

Nothing has changed under the current reform wave. Ten years ago, Jack Welch was all the rage with his bell curve management technique-- rate all your employees and fire the bottom ten percent. But by the end of the two thousand oughts, folks were noticing that besides being hardhearted, arbitrary and just plain mean, the Welch strategy didn't actually work.

And yet in the time since the private sector fell out of love with Jack Welch, the commonwealth of Pennsylvania decided to score schools and label the bottom 15% as "failing" and thereby targeted for various remediation, vouchering, and take-over. Essentially PA decided to Welch its schools.

Now Microsoft has forsaken stack ranking. They've finally noticed that it creates a toxic atmosphere, kills collaboration, and is just generally bad for the company's health.

Meanwhile, in the elephant's graveyard, what is being pushed? The Danielson model for teacher evaluation, in which the implicit assumption is that a teaching staff should plot out on a bell curve. "Nobody," we are told over and over and over in PA, "will live at the top level." Most of us will live in the unexceptional middle. You know. Like a bell curve.

And every merit pay variation to come down the pike is built on stacking-- if you want that bonus (or, under some systems, not to be fired) you are going to have to beat out your colleagues across the hall. Fellow teacher needs a little help? Just remember, they can't do better without taking away from your success. Best to keep those lesson plan ideas and teacher-made materials under lock and key.

Public education is where failed management techniques go to die. Whenever someone wants to tout an idea as super-dee-duper because it's all the rage in the private sector, remember that the question to answer is, "And how is that working for them?" And by "working," we mean "creating a better product" and not "hornswaggling a bunch of investors into boosting the stock prices."

TFA in Pittsburgh: Adding insult to injury

When contemplating the deployment of TFA forces in Pittsburgh, there's one other aspect of the PA education picture to keep in mind.

Pennsylvania's 14 state-owned universities have been experiencing tough times. The economic forces brought bear on them include budget moves by a governor who is not a friend of education, and simple demographics. The college-age population of PA has been shrinking, and most schools are suffering a corresponding decline in enrollment.

That has led to rumors of cuts, proposals for cuts, and actual cuts. For one example of how this has played out, we can look at the state university in my neighborhood, Clarion.

In August of 2013, Clarion sent out emails to incoming freshmen headed for the education department that their department was probably going to be axed. Their completion of the program was assured, but they would be the last. Later in the month, Clarion unveiled its "right-sizing" plan which did indeed include dissolving its education department. Since that time, University management has backed away from the original scope of the plan, but it is still unclear how much of the backing away represents real change and how much it represents trying to reframe with new, less-alarming language.

Clarion is a particularly disturbing case, because they started out as a "Normal" school; their core mission has always been training teachers. Now that mission is in doubt. (You can read some current news coverage here, and you can watch the whole mess unfold in real time here ) Similar dramas are unfolding across the system, each dealing with the financial pressures in their own way (the one common thread-- music programs are dropping like flies).

Let's hold this up against the backdrop of the TFA assault on Pittsburgh schools.

You're 18 years old and you are thinking about becoming a teacher. You look around at your state system, and you see an uncertain future. Maybe the program you want to (or can afford to) enroll in will still be there; maybe it won't. Maybe it will vanish out from under you midway through your college career.

But meanwhile, we are supposed to believe that Pittsburgh schools have a shortage of teachers, and that PA needs a TFA field office to help draw more non-teachers into teaching.

So as a future PA teacher, you have to wonder if you should even go into a teaching program, and if you do, will you need to compete for scarce jobs with well-connected ivy leaguers?

If there really is a teacher shortage in Pennsylvania, would it not make sense to work on the pipeline, to support and strengthen teacher training programs and give them the tools to recruit and thrive? If Pennsylvania needs teachers, why is Pennsylvania not trying to create more?

Where is the STEM initiative for educators? After all, nobody is saying, "Hey, we don't have enough scientists and engineers, so lets give graduates with humanities degrees a five week course and send them out to make sciency stuff." No, what we said was, "We need more people in this field, so lets beef up the support, funding, training, and recruiting."

TFA in Pittsburgh doesn't just hurt in the short run. In the long run, it exacerbates the very "shortage" it pretends to address. Combined with the downsizing of universities in PA, it send s a clear message to young Pennsylvanians-- "If you were thinking about becoming a teacher, you should probably think about something else instead."