Meet the New Boss

So now, on to "data," which really means test scores, 

which is bullshit.

Update Update: I should explain that I'm still writing about new LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho because when he was in Miami-Dade he made a ton of decisions ostensibly based on "data" and he's likely to carry on the same way in Los Angeles. The problem is, data is bullshit, but education bosses are not clever enough to understand that or principled enough to do anything about it. It's a failure of imagination and a lack of courage. I wish I was wrong.

Update: When I first started this post about five ten days ago, I had a hard time finding anything on this guy. I mean I was looking through old videos of his speeches. Algorithms! Now there's stuff everywhere and you can look it up for yourself if you want. I recommend the speeches rather than the canned talking points that seem to dominate the more recent reporting.

For me, it has been an education and it has left me with a queasy feeling. Does this guy intend to do it all by himself? Is collaboration part of his skill set? Is he capable of compromise? Does he process new information and revise his position?  Is he ever just wrong?

The first word I think of when I hear him speak is ego. The second two words are enormous and gigantic. Then it comes to me: I remember the last time I watched a guy stand on a stage in front of an adoring crowd and declare, "Only I can fix it."  It did not end well.

Now, the post...

In the Los Angeles Unified School District we have selected a new superintendent who, according to reports, is just crazy about "transformation." Alberto Carvalho, late of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, talks a good and passionate game. But when he talks and says things like "invested in choice and innovation (41:35-42:10)," I see the life of public schools flash before my eyes. Is he serious when he equates district transformation with "the breaking down" and "deconstruction of the school system"? 

I will admit that when I worked in LAUSD, I frequently fantasized about "deconstructing" the system. Frustrated with the bureaucratic bumbling, angry at the arbitrary nature of policies and edicts, some of my most frequent dreams were of asteroids landing directly on district headquarters. But I don't think that's what Carvalho is talking about. 

When he talks about transformation, an outcome his cheerleaders on the school board and at the L.A. Times are eager to support, Carvalho is talking about firing people, pay-for-performance, and school choice, three terrible ideas that rely almost exclusively on what the big brains artfully call "data," by which they invariably mean test scores. (He's also talking about technology and the drive to "merge and migrate toward a digital environment." More on that in another post, but for now suffice to say that anybody who has gone through the last two years and still believes that tech is magic has no place in education.)

As a critical early step in his "transformation" of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Carvalho launched a campaign (33:50) of transfers, non-renewals and firings(18:00) based on "achievement data." What does that look like? Maybe you haul a few people downtown, you know, to make examples of them. You could put their test scores up on a big screen--or better yet, on television during a school board meeting--and demand explanations before publicly firing them. That might give the rest that warm, tingly feeling that goes with wondering if you'll have a job on Monday. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Proud of this purge, Carvalho boasts that he brought in Teach for America replacements to fill the vacancies and City Year for intervention. As if that were a viable solution.  Putting aside the mountains of evidence that experience is a crucial ingredient for effective teaching, in 2019 there were 700 TFA teachers in all of California. There are over 25,000 teachers in LAUSD. It wouldn't even make a dent.

So maybe you squeeze a bunch of district bureaucrats until they go running back to the classroom. News flash: There is a reason these people are not in the classroom. 

In our present environment, this approach doesn't pass the smell test.

It can't work. Not today and not in LAUSD. Just like other districts all across the country, LAUSD is fresh out of teachers. You can't just "bring in" a bunch of newbies to replace the "bad" teachers because nobody's out there. No one is scrambling to get in, battling to be first in line for a job that people hate you for doing and that pays barely enough to pay L.A. rent much less buy an L.A. house. It seems unlikely in the extreme that Carvalho will be able to fire his way to the top. Still, that doesn't mean he won't try. 

I'm not going to waste much time on performance pay. First, it's based on "data," which means test scores, which are bullshit. Second, the whole idea rests on the assumption that teachers are not presently doing the best job they know how to do. It imagines that if we can just sweeten the pot a little, that extra cash will get teachers off their lazy asses. Not only is this trope untrue--most of the teachers I ever worked with were ruining themselves working so hard (often trying to figure out how to teach to the test)--it's completely disingenuous. The hatcheteers don't give a shit about the top 20% of TestScoreProducers. They want to identify and eliminate the bottom 20% (for which there are no replacements). And third, if UTLA is worth its dues, it's never going to happen.*

Where Carvalho is really invested, the transformation theology for which he proselytizes relentlessly, is school choice. Time will tell, but what I've learned so far is alarming. Carvalho, from a news report back in 2012: 

"We are now working in an educational environment that is driven by choice. I believe that is a good thing. We need to actually be engaged in that choice movement. So if you do not ride that wave, you will succumb to it. I choose not to."

Aside from the fact that "there's nothing we can do about it so we might as well get on board" is a shitty ethos for a leader, it's clearly not an accurate representation of his position. He likes "school choice." He comes across as a true believer, and when he was still in Miami, Carvalho described his kind of school choice as transformational, recreating the district as "a hotbed of ideas and innovation." 

(I have to wonder what innovation even means if you and/or your principal can be fired based on data scores and the judgment of one person?) 

In a 2018 article, the corporate school-reform website The74 reported that then-Miami schools chief had a "sweeping vision for dramatically expanding educational choice," and went on to say this about Carvalho:

"Understand this fact: In Carvalho’s district, the fourth-largest in the country, more than 70 percent of the roughly 400,000 students do not attend their zoned public school. That’s not a typo. These students attend charter schools, take classes over the internet and at local colleges, and even attend private, faith-based schools — all with taxpayer funds or under tax credit scholarship programs." (emphasis mine)

The thing is, school choice is just one more reform in the never-ending search for a magic remedy for the crisis we're constantly told exists in public education. It can "theoretically"  produce some positive outcomes for some students, but creates many of the very inequities and disruptions it purports to address. Oh, and one other thing: The "choice" that parents and students make depends almost exclusively on data derived from scores on state-sponsored standardized tests. And that data is bullshit.

Of course, in this devotion to choice orthodoxy Carvalho has lots of company. Right this minute, the federal government's website continues to pimp "school choice." Powered by the radioactive decay of No Child Left Behind, their guide "Choosing A School For Your Child" urges parents to consider charter, private and religious schools, and it even recommends websites to compare them. First on the list:  www.greatschools.net (which is really .org and may have changed or been a typo in the pub) and which I will not link to because fuck them. 

GreatSchools, which got its seed money from a venture capital fund and has received substantial funding from the Gates and Walton Family Foundations (and free advertising from the Department of Education!), is one of several school ratings websites and one of the most well-known. They claim that their big, overarching "Summary Rating" is "based on four ratings, each of which is designed to show different facets of school success: the Student Progress Rating or Academic Progress Rating, College Readiness Rating, Equity Rating, and Test Score Rating." Sounds solid, right? Probably does to most parents, too. The thing is, every one of those measures is based on the same test scores. In fact, each "rating" is just another way of saying test scores.

More perniciously, even websites like Niche.com that claim to factor in reviews and information from "dozens of public data sources" are running a rigged game. Academics (test scores) count for 60% of the school's overall score, while teachers (teacher quality?) comprise 10%. And I bet you can't guess one of the ways their super duper algorithm determines teacher quality. If you said test scores, give yourself a round of applause. 

And here's a fun thought experiment: Those reviews? All that feedback from students and parents? Imagine the review for a teacher who is forced at the point of a termination letter to spend fifty percent of their time test-prepping, testing, test-analyzing and testing again.

Finally, when parents are surveyed, they list "Quality of teachers, principals, or other school staff" as their highest priority in choosing a school. Remember, these are schools they don't know and their kids haven't been to yet. What are the criteria for evaluating the "quality of teachers, principals, or other school staff"? Well if they're using GreatSchools or any of a number of other ratings sites, it's likely to be--wait for it--test scores. 

The bottom line is that all of these terrible ideas that Carvalho is bringing to LAUSD--school choice, performance pay for teachers, the firings--all of them depend entirely on "data," by which they mean "testing" by which they mean state-sponsored, corporate-controlled assessments.** 

It always comes down to test scores. This is the measurement to end all measurements. That teachers are forced to administer these assessments is akin to digging our own graves.

And The Funniest Joke in the World? The data is bullshit. Next time, some of the why.

*I'm not saying they aren't, but I still haven't heard the union's position on the choice of superintendent. 

**They might also refer to graduation rates. These, it turns out, are much more easily massaged. Stay tuned for a future post on "Mastery Grading."

 

LAUSD shits the bed?

We interrupt our regularly scheduled post for some breaking news!

LAUSD Taps Long-time Teacher, Charter School Skeptic as 
New Superintendent!

"I think there's a tendency to reduce human beings to data points, and I'm absolutely convinced there's entirely too much standardized testing in our schools," said the new LAUSD schools chief...

...in the middle of a ridiculous dream I had two nights ago. 

Now I'm not saying Alberto Carvalho is a bad guy. I'm not saying he's a good guy, but that's because I don't know the guy. What I do know is that he's a "reformer" who is very popular with people who want to destroy public education or simply define it out of existence. If public education to you means any building or digital platform that can be accessed by human beings and that awards certificates of completion, then you hate public education, assuming you know enough about it to hate it.

I worry for my former district. Then again, I've been worried for a while. But if the enemy of my enemy is my friend, then the friend of my enemy is my enemy. When I saw Nick "a charter for you! and a charter for you!" Melvoin pumping this guy on the local morning news shows, I knew there was trouble in purgatory. 

Like the Republicans who run for office on a platform of hating government, Carvalho could turn out to be a guy who hates the "public" part of public school but wants to be the boss of it anyway. Because? The guy is 57 years old. In three years he will be a billion dollar asset for the privatization zealots and that's a nice retirement.

(I wonder why he didn't take that New York job? Maybe our school board is more philosophically compatible? More aligned with his priorities?)

Again, I don't know the guy and if I hadn't worked in LAUSD for twenty-five years, I might be persuaded to hope for the best. 

The L.A. School Report had this to say about Carvalho:

"An advocate of school choice, nontraditional schools and known champion of undocumented student rights, Carvalho, 57, has run Miami’s schools for more than a decade."

and

"In his 13 year tenure as superintendent, he’s pushed for the expansion of charter and magnet schools throughout Miami and encouraged families to use publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools."

and

"The 'privatization' of the district, and its hefty payouts to expand school security, have garnered national scrutiny for years over concerns that they’ve siphoned funds from existing, traditional schools."

Of course, "school choice" has routinely been code for racism, white flight and resegregation. It has crippled the public system in L.A., and I can't see how supporting the use of "publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools" solves a single one of the myriad problems the district is facing.

But maybe Mr. Carvalho has a different idea. Maybe he doesn't really intend to divert public money to private companies. Maybe he hates segregation and loves students--all of them. And maybe he even likes and respects teachers. 

On the other hand, he is quite popular with the bunch over at Education Next, and that is alarming. According to the progressive nonprofit watchdog Center for Media and Democracy, Education Next is "a propaganda outlet for corporate education reform  policies such as charter schools, school vouchers, and merit pay." It opposes teacher unions and "attempts to increase or equalize funding for schools." Think of it as the love-child of the Hoover Institution and Harvard University's School of Drunken Government.

The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education has made its choice and it's a done deal. As I suggested in a previous post, I wish the union--come on UTLA, get your shit together!--had weighed in forcefully and publicly regarding the sort of superintendent we supported and had chosen a candidate to advocate for. I mean, it's not like we didn't know what a shitty superintendent can do to the district. 

What the hell did we strike for if not a seat at the table? The membership deserves to know where we stand. If no one listens and we lose, at least we'll all know that we fought for something. It's important. There will be another strike one day. 

As for the new guy, I guess time will tell. I hope he's great; I have a lot of friends and former students still out there, in the arena every day. I'm worried and I want to be wrong. But still, the friend of my enemy...

Always hopeful. Seldom optimistic. Maybe this time we'll win. 

 

Life During Wartime

Life During Wartime

As we fight against the forces of evil, one of our allies presumably ought to be the press who are ostensibly dedicated to reporting the truth. Unfortunately the Murrow Myth is just that, and all too often the scribes are simply transcribers more interested in keeping their heads down than their eyes open. And this goes centuple for their corporate bosses and the organs they command.

Eric Boehlert posts some of the best work on this issue in his Press Run newsletter, where he is routinely writing about the failure of the media to report honestly and courageously on the madness afflicting our nation. If you haven't seen it, please stop over there and take a look.

As for me, I was particularly appalled with a story in Thursday's (Nov.2) New York Times titled "Schools in Bind As Bitter Feuds Cripple Board," (Now "While Politics Consume School Board Meetings, a Very Different Crisis Festers" online - subscription required) and written by Times national correspondent Campbell Robertson. I don't know Robertson but I know the Times as a fearful, hedging, have-it-both-ways publication that offers just enough honesty on the op-ed page to satisfy the progressives who stop by mainly for the Arts Section, while covering up the truth with disingenuous "Both Sides" reporting. That's what I expect from the Times, and it never disappoints.  Every once in a while I get mad enough to write them a letter which, unsurprisingly, is not published. It's been a week, so I offer it here.

Re: Schools in Bind as Bitter Feuds Cripple Board

To the Editor,

For god’s sake, please call it what it is.

The New York Times continues to politely look the other way to avoid describing our present circumstances. When parents and agents of chaos attack schools and the people who work in them, when they confront school boards with, according to the Times' reporting, cries of "supposed Jewish ties to organized crime," this is not a disagreement among good-faith actors over policy. This is crazy. 

We are being swallowed up in a mass delusion, and for the Times to report the story but pretend this is a “feud” or these are “debates about schools” is an attempt to say you’ve done your job without actually doing the job. The "disconnect" you describe isn't between competing priorities, it's between the sane and the insane. Your timidity and your reluctance to call it by its name puts the entire nation at risk.

On behalf of those of us receiving death threats and being harassed, I beg you to do better. The cancer is here, and it is all around us. Not talking about it will not make it go away.

That's it. 

The refusal of the press to honestly report on the the hot war against schools and the people who work in them may be safe for reporters, but it is dangerous for educators. 

Kyle at Kenosha, with fists closed

Note: This post was basically finished before the tragedy in Oxford. One of the difficulties in completing it has been that something new happens every day. I haven't dealt with that incident here as this piece is concerned with adult violence. I'll address student violence in a future post.

I've really been struggling with this post--feeling like I need to say something but not knowing exactly what to say. I'd love to get down to writing about how to run a classroom or handle a shitty colleague or bad principal, or how to make the most of retirement (hint: this isn't it). But there's just too much going on right now that seems so much bigger. I'm sure that's not the way it feels for lots of you still out there slugging it out day after day and I get that. I guess I'll do this one and call it the third installment in my Teachers Under Attack trilogy. Then on to something new.

As I may have mentioned, teachers, along with other education professionals and school board members have become targets of aggression in an attempt to intimidate us with respect to how we do our jobs. "Moms for Liberty" offered a reward to vigilantes for catching us teaching the truth about race and racism in this country. 

Unfortunately, in today's political climate this experience is not unique to educators. Election volunteers are being accosted in their homes. Any number of service workers have been ridiculed and even assaulted for doing a good job. We've got members of Congress killing their political opponents in cartoons and referring to them as terrorists. You know, just in case somebody wants to do something about it.

For teachers this is not unfamiliar ground. We were purged at the beginning of the Cold War when the country was running Red Scared. Sputnik shocked Americans and focused their attention on purported shortcomings in American education as non-educators fashioned comparisons between Russian and U.S. schooling. And of course, Ronald Reagan took the time to pimp the idea that our entire Nation was At Risk (a report built on fear and preconceptions), which was then followed by No Child Left Behind (who could argue with that?) and Race to the Top. Embedded in all this bashing is a devotion to tests and scores (in an upcoming episode of Answer Key: "Data is bullshit." Stay tuned.) and, of course, a hostility toward Teachers! Teachers! Teachers! Because, again, that train is never late.

So educators are regularly vilified and scapegoated. What's new? I've been thinking about that and it seems to me that the convergence of some specific elements makes today's world different, harder, and much more dangerous.

First, there is a reflexive othering and demonization of those who disagree with us (fueled by cynically manipulated disinformation). And no, this insanity is not equally distributed, so before your head explodes: BOTH SIDES DON'T. 

Other ingredients in this current toxic brew include the devaluation of expertise (Fuck the elites!), Covid anger, and Second Amendment fanaticism (fetishism?). These elements combine to create a combustible grievance stew that poses a novel threat for all of us. 

So you take a bunch of thugs who are desperate to hold on to the privilege to which they have become so accustomed they don't even see it and you radicalize those desperate thugs by hooking them up to a never-ending shitstream of fearmongering, enemies lists, and victim stroking, all pumped directly into their hardwired Matrix pod brains, and now they are pissed. And they have guns. Use 'em or lose 'em, kids. 

It's the plan. As the great Adam Serwer writes in The Atlantic: 

"Right-wing gun culture is not unlike the wellness industry, in that it requires the cultivation of a sustained insecurity in its audience in order to facilitate the endless purchase of its products." 

And the planners know what they are doing. In a magic mixture of cynicism and True Belief, the Right signals its endorsement of violence as a political strategy as it glorifies the Jan.6 insurrectionists and invites killer Kyle Rittenhouse to make the conservative media rounds, even offering him the official endorsement of Republican lawmakers. 

As Serwer puts it:

"The principle that canonizes Rittenhouse as a saint for defending his city from rioters, and the mob that stormed the Capitol as martyrs, is the principle that the slaughter of the right’s enemies is no crime." 

So what does happen next? 

It feels like only a matter of time before a teacher in a classroom enforcing mask regulations or teaching about Jim Crow or redlining, or a school board member speaking in favor of a vaccination mandate gets Rittenhoused. I'm sure that feeling is a factor in schools across the country finding it impossible to hire staff, and not just teachers. This is bigger than you and me, your school, my district. 

May sound a bit gloomy, but I figure we can't win if we don't understand the game. 

In the meantime, of course, things are still happening in classrooms. I talk to my friends who are still battling every day and the challenges they describe are (all too) familiar and still need to be acknowledged and addressed, notwithstanding the elephant in the room. Next time--after one short rant at the New York Times--an excerpt from my book Answer Key: A Teacher’s Completely Unofficial, Fiercely Unauthorized Handbook and Survival Guide. It's called "Data is bullshit" and I think you'll get a kick out of it.

Until then...

No experience necessary.

No matter where you work, your school district probably has a Big Boss who sets the tone and helps establish priorities. In theory, they should know something about education besides what they learned at the Aspen Institute, business school, or in their work for "a foundation dedicated to school reform." If you're lucky, you have a good superintendent. If you work in a big district and have a good superintendent, it's Thanksgiving time. You know what to do.

Here in L.A. we're sort of between bosses, and once again the Los Angeles Unified School District has an opportunity to nominate a genuine educator with genuine teaching experience to lead the district forward. How do you think they'll do?

Well, according to this from the L.A. Times, it's coming down to the wire as candidates are considered.

What qualities are most important in the person tapped to lead sprawling LAUSD, the country's second largest district? I'm glad you asked, because the district surveyed thousands of stakeholders to give the appearance of finding out. Parents, students, and district employees were asked to prioritize various characteristics for the prospective boss. And here's where we pick up the trail.

In their results, published on the LAUSD website and downloadable here, we discover that the number one choice among stakeholders who responded was: "it is either very important or critical the next superintendent has experience working in public schools as a teacher and/or administrator," which came in at a cool 90 percent. Sounds logical, right? Except...

There in the midst of this apparently logical prerequisite is some pretty crafty language. "Wiggle words," or Doublespeak--descended from the marriage of Orwellians Newspeak and doublethink--is deliberately ambiguous language and allows a reader to think words mean one thing while the writer can claim they meant something different. 

Hence, you can think the next superintendent should have actual teaching experience, but the survey offers only one way to express that preference: check the box that also includes chief financial officers, regional administrators, and big shots at "public school transformation organizations." 

You have no other choice, no way to distinguish teachers and former teachers who have worked with students from the myriad functionaries and climbers who have spent practically their entire careers boxed in an office browbeating teachers about a job the "and/or administrators" themselves have never learned to do.

See? Presto! Input! Feedback! Stamp of approval! Once again the board gets to select a bureaucrat with "education experience" without regard for teaching experience, and do it all under the cover of community support and endorsement.

This comes as no surprise to anyone who has served time in LAUSD and paid attention. Although nearly 50 percent of parents, guardians, and caregivers took the time to submit their preferences, less than 20 percent of "Teachers/Educators" did so, and that figure is likely inflated through the use of wiggle word "Educators," which allows the district to include all kinds of "and/or" out-of-classroom personnel in the tally. 

Why was the level of response so low? Because if you are teacher you are freakin' busy, and filling out a survey designed to be ignored is not the best use of your time. Parents get wise pretty quickly, too, but I'm guessing they probably fill it out anyway--you know, because they love their children. 

So based on the results of the survey (or not), the school board has put together a list of potential next superintendents. But let's imagine that we all had a say in who is actually chosen for Big Boss, and let's suppose that we wanted to advocate for one particular candidate. (This is weird. I'm a big supporter of the union, but I can't find UTLA's position on the issue.) Anyway, just try and find out how many years any of these candidates has spent in an actual classroom carrying a roster of actual students. 

404 Page Not Found. I didn't spend hours on it, but I did try to find out how much time some of the leading candidates (according to The Times) had spent teaching as opposed to deaning or counseling or principaling or coaching or consulting. I could not. I did find "business officer" and "CEO" and politicians and lots of "superintendent--or former superintendent of--fill in the blank." The closest I got to actual work in the classroom was a few vague references to "worked in K-12 education," "been an educator for 25 years," and "____ years of experience as a teacher/principal" (what is a teacher/principal, anyway?). 

Wiggle words. It's almost as if they think school happens in an office building at Beaudry, not in classrooms. 

    Just a side note: As a teacher, it took me three years to start to figure things out in the classroom, five years to get pretty good, and I'm still learning now--almost a year after I retired.

In my years in LAUSD, we had superintendents who were actual former teachers, pretend former teachers, professional administrators who moved from district to district like they were being chased (which may be true), a governor, an admiral, a serial resigner who started as a hitman for the foundation class and resides under a cloud of perpetual investigation, and an investment banker and dabbler who thought the job was one thing but found out it was something else. To be fair, and maybe it was partly the strike and certainly the pandemic, this last winner of the Big Boss sweepstakes grew into a fairly humane, adaptable leader. I hope I don't lose my union card for saying it.

Like I said, the Los Angeles Unified School District is again searching for a superintendent to run the joint. The person they choose will depend on what they think schools are and what they want them to be. It will also depend on what they think a student's life and a teacher's job look like. It would be nice if they chose someone who knows because they've been there.

Time will tell.

 Link offered without comment:

The Rude Pundit

Screw that. 

Lee Papa aka the Rude Pundit is one of my favorite cultural and political observers writing today and easily among the most honest (waaay better than those sanctimonious blatherers mincing words in your favorite daily news rag or ocean-themed glossy).  

I do want to warn you, though: The language is salty.

And now in New Hampshire there's a bounty on teachers. Because of course there is.

Just in case you haven't heard, the hilariously named "Moms for Liberty" (apparent motto: "Liberty for me, but not for thee") is offering cash for complaints filed through the shiny new NH Ed Dept website. It's a reeeeward of five hundred bucks for vigilante snitches who think they've caught a teacher telling the truth about race and racism in the Granite State. 

In a typical perversion of language, the whole thing revolves around New Hampshire House Bill 2, sections 297 and 298, passed in June and referred to as  "Right to Freedom from Discrimination in Public Workplaces and Education" , which sounds pretty good, actually, and kind of like it should have been the law already. Apparently, though, the legislation needed a booster shot, so here we are.

This freedom from discrimination law prohibits schools from "teaching and/or advocating that one identified group is:

        [*]Inherently superior or inferior to people of another identified group 

        [*]Inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously 

        [*]Should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment 

        [*]Should not treat members of other identified groups equally"  

I may be missing something, but other than I'm pretty sure "inherently" doesn't mean what they think it means I don't see a whole lot to argue with there. The last two are decidedly "not racist" rather than "antiracist," but if you turn your head to the side and squint a bit, you can see that antiracist discrimination is actually anti-discrimination and not adverse at all if justice is what you're after. And "equally" really just depends on where you start the clock; start it in 1619 and "equal" does not mean impartial. In fact, it requires a hell of a lot of partial to get to equal. But of course, that's naive. People who think that way are not the ones in charge.

Anyway, the law is not the real issue and that is by design. It's the enforcers who matter, and the official ones reveal their intentions immediately. The law comes with its own questionnaire (!) focused exclusively on schools. Just fill it out and anybody can turn anybody in to the "Investigator."  

The fillable form contains multiple disclaimers such as the vehement "THIS IS NOT A CHARGE OF DISCRIMINATION" in the heading followed by "This is a questionnaire, not a charge of discrimination" which in addition to being like, "Hey, we're only asking questions here," is also like, The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Not to worry, though. They use the prime real estate at the end of the form to launch the missile you knew was coming as they encourage these guardians of the realm to "[p]rovide details such as names and dates, etc." You know, just in case. 

In that spirit of plausible deniability, opinions about the new law vary, as you might expect.  "Republicans cast the law as an effort to strengthen anti-discrimination laws" which only goes to show, once again, that casting is everything. On the other hand, "Democrats argue it will prevent teaching about implicit bias and structural racism and sexism." To "Democrats" I would also add anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex and any remaining honest Republicans, all of whom know that this is the purpose of the statute. 

If there were any doubt--and there isn't--what finally gives the game away and blows up the con for good is the suggestion from those "Moms" that in order to build the honey pot of reeeeward money, all true believer donations should include "CRT bounty's [sic]" in the PayPal notes. Cue the unofficial enforcers.

So the law in Texas New Hampshire deputizes the whole state (at least) and sends the posse out to impose their values and version of history on heretics and waverers. The law gives out badges and guns, and the "moms" put up the reeeeward money. To review: "New Hampshire House Bill 2, sections 297 and 298 Right to Freedom etc." points the mob at teachers and schools and says "Go get 'em!" 

What happens next is what always happens. 

Teachers! 

Education Support Professionals! Superintendents, Directors, Principals, Counselors, Assorted Officers (I'm sure I'm leaving somebody out)! School Board Members! 

(and other interested parties)

Abuse and intimidation at school board meetings. Harassment from parents. Book banning and burning. Newspeak and rhetorical legerdemain deployed by the enemies of public education. Makes your head explode, doesn't it? Does mine, and I'm retired. If you are still out there grinding and facing the debasement first-hand and head-on, let's talk about you are going through and what in the name of John Dewey we can do about it.

Of course, the truth is it's never been that great for us. Except in some chimerical past or Another Country where teachers are revered, I tell you! it has been the plight of teachers to face constant disparagement from critics **who know nothing of our work** but who are eager to stand back and throw stones big and small. Lately the stones feel more real than figurative.

And I'm not even talking--yet--about the student-teacher violence spawned by witless TikTok challenges or abetted by the failure of weak administrations to respond to threats, harassment, and genuine assault. That will be the subject of a (near-) future post.

And frankly, the regular attacks from consultants, district commissars, and administrators who may have spent just enough time carrying a roster to learn how to make a seating chart are now routine. Even the actions of legislators in Florida and elsewhere feel like an unsurprising extension of the ongoing assault. Sadly, we've come to expect it and, speaking for myself, I almost missed it when it didn't come. If I wasn't the target of some establishment flunky or another, it made me uncomfortable. It meant I was doing something wrong.

These days the assault is ubiquitous. Beyond the usual suspects, the condemnation seems to come from anyone who has ever stepped foot inside a classroom, and from many who seem to have wasted their time there. More than that, from COVID-19 protections to critical race theory, ideology trumps reason and the outrage is palpable and dangerous. Media coverage is hapless or worse as "news" outlets love their villains and fit teachers for the part. Again. Teachers are under attack, schools are battlegrounds, and the whole notion of public education as a shared enterprise and public good is in jeopardy. 

The "parents" I see on the teevee--grievance performance art forever stuck in the "outrage" default setting--look nothing like the parents I met when I was on the job. All that shouting, all those threats. Maybe I was just lucky. Maybe there was a shift as schools began to open, parents were exhausted from supervising remote schooling, and teachers--gasp!--were cautious about going back to in-person schooling under guidelines that would be predictably incomplete and inevitably disregarded. 

Thus the fifteen seconds during which teachers got credit for recreating an entire system in a weekend was just a blip, and we have returned to our regularly scheduled programming. 

Well, not exactly. It's actually worse. From Texas and Texas to California with Arizona in between, and let's just say many, many, other places around the country, educators are the focus of ideological aggression. 

Political is the operative word. For as long as I can remember--and I started school in the wake of school prayer and spent high school surrounded and confounded by the fight over busing--schools and schooling have been conscripted for ideological service. In more recent years, the pattern generally has looked like this: 

Incumbent: "Look what we've done for your kids! And no new taxes!"
Challenger: "The schools suck! And they're way too expensive!"
Election
Constituents: "You said the schools suck and are too expensive. Now fix the schools! And cheap!" 
New Incumbent: "Uhhhh..." (sound of deck chairs being rearranged) "Look what we've done for your kids!"
Challenger: "The schools suck!"

The punchline is that the ship has not collided with an iceberg. Nevertheless, candidates pretend it has so they can blast their opponents while offering themselves as the only ones who "can fix this." Sounds familiar, yeah?

The punchline to the punchline is that the media are dedicated accomplices because the fight is where the money is. Double-dipping is the rule of this road to hell as reporters pump the fight before the election and don their **somber voices** to tsk tsk the failure afterward. For an excellent breakdown of press complicity manufacturing a preferred (who's your education party, now?) narrative in the context of the Virginia Governor's race, Eric Boehlert has this.

And since comedy works in threes, the final punchline to the other punchline to the other other punchline is this: Almost everything politicians propose to "fix" the "problems" in schools and schooling--school choice, vouchers, incessant testing, the crusade against unionization--every silver bullet cure is pointed right at the head of the patient, who just gets sicker and sicker because the quick-fix medicine is actually poison.

I don't imagine any of this is news to you. But what you gonna do?

We have been the victims of bullying and intimidation and we see the result. There are crippling shortages of teachers and support personnel all over the country. This is the way this world ends.

If it is to end any other way, it's time to stand up, push back, 

and stir shit up. 

1. See the enemy and the enemy's game clearly.

    We want to believe that we're all in this together. We want to understand and serve our students, and we want to believe that everybody wants that. It's not true. 

    For the enemies of public schooling, there are a million masters to serve and promises to keep. For frightened or venal administrators, there are district overlords that open doors to promotion or pull the kill-switch on a career. There are private equity firms with shareholders and bogus non-profits with their donors. There are officials whose constituents expect them to fix the schools for free and get rid of the damn teachers. There are the constituents themselves, privileged in full flight whose kids will always be alright, or scared of a changed and changing world and duped by the disinformationists. And there is the media/press with its corporate mindset and horror of tax money spent on someone else's kids.

    These are some of the enemies we face. They are playing a long and brutal game and, make no mistake, they will settle for nothing less than complete victory. The sooner we recognize them for who they are, the better chance we'll have.

2. Find ways to serve students while resisting the worst of it.

    This is a tough one. When I was in the classroom I did my best to confront and subvert consultant culture, and I tried to throw sand in the gears of the runaway testing locomotive. 

Hey, sometimes you don't have to send kids out of your class for make-up exams. You might forget. And you might raise such a ruckus at a Professional Development that make-ups are given by out-of-classroom personnel during Advisory instead of during math class. I was a tenured teacher with a strong union and got away with it. Conditions may vary. Do you have any thoughts?

3. Find a way to shift the balance, retake the high ground, and beat the bastards. 

    Yeah, this is the big one. I'd say something like join the governing board, run for school board, become a principal (Caution! Body snatcher alert!), or a superintendent or a mayor or a governor, but who has the time? Certainly not you with your 150 students and grades coming up. Maybe old geezers like me... Now there's a thought.

    Also, there's this: Parents. Yeah, yeah, we see the evening news, but like I said, I don't know those people. The parents I knew were my allies and entirely dedicated to the success of their kids. They were thoughtful and engaged, and the only thing preventing them from being more active in advocating for important changes at the school site and at the district level was time (and I thought I was busy) and the built-in barriers to participation such as language and institutional mistrust. If teachers could only step forward as safe conduits for parent concerns and advocates for parent aspirations, this could be our most powerful alliance. I know this is happening at schools in L.A. Is it happening where you are?

    Anyway, this is where we really need the best and brightest to chime in. Answer Key is entertaining all offers.

NOTE: Writing this blog is so far similar to teaching remotely--nobody is turning on their screens. Please, if you are here, make a comment. If you are struggling with hostile bosses, parents and lawmakers, please let us hear your story. 

And please, if you have successful strategies for resisting, pushing back, or just surviving the onslaught, share them here.

Grades! Oh My God, GRADES!!

I'm going to be careful, especially since I'm trying this for the first time. 

So I'm reading the L.A. Times, and there on the front page is an article on districts moving toward  "mastery" grading. The title is "Schools embrace new ways of grading" and the subhead is "Teachers say pandemic showed flaws of point system." I don't know where to start.

The article maintains that the pandemic revealed to teachers the true nature of our students' lives--as if we had been oblivious--and presto! we realized that the points system discriminates against poor kids, and most especially kids of color. To which I and any teacher worth a damn should respond: no freakin' shit. We are not oblivious. This is not an unknown unknown.

Even though the equity lens for re-examining grading practices is relatively new (thank you, Joe Feldman), the limits of a points system and the value of mastery grading (once upon a time--standards-based grading) is not the Revealed Truth brought to you by our friends at SARS-CoV-2. It's old news. Hell, I did a quick Google search and found an article in the New York Times from 1971. 

The article is by By Paul L. Montgomery (March 30, 1971) and is titled, "At John Dewey H.S., a Student Can Go at His Own Pace." In addition to students being able to go at their "own pace," students were given schedule flexibility and multiple chances to complete their work--all in a Brooklyn public school with a "side arrangement" negotiated with the union. And get this: "The grades given at John Dewey are M for mastery, MC for mastery with, condition, MI for mastery in an Independent study course and R for rete[n]tion. Those who get an MC, or who get an R ... must repeat the course, are given detailed analyses of their performance as a guide to future study by their teachers." Sound familiar?

There is a ton of other writing on this issue, but everybody I knew in the business was already familiar with it and we didn't need the pandemic to bring us to our senses. For years before I retired, I and every one of my immediate colleagues had implemented many of the features of this "new" way of grading. Everyone who carries a roster knows that you grade on the work, not the behavior, or attendance. Hell, we were all ecstatic just to get the work. And any teacher who doesn't permit re-tests or multiple attempts on a project or revisions of essays--well, their grading system isn't the equity problem. They are.

Another word on that. In his 2019 article for Phi Delta Kappan (online),"Beyond standards-based grading: Why equity must be part of grading reform," Feldman claims that "[g]rading for equity... protects grading from implicit individual biases and it counteracts the institutional biases in traditional grading." There is, it seems to me, a clear case for NOT averaging a student's performance over time (a bias some teachers, myself included, have attempted to address through variable weighting) and thus tackling that particular institutional bias. 

However, I am having trouble seeing how mastery Grading for Equity safeguards grading from the implicit biases of the teacher, who is, after all, tasked with assessing mastery. If mastery grading itself pushes teachers to confront their own implicit biases, then that of course is all to the good. However, it seems to me that this claim (found elsewhere, as well) rests primarily on the assumption that behavior is being folded into a points-based grade, an unsound approach I discussed above. The work's the thing.

Another word on that. As I've been reading through the discussion of mastery née standards-based grading, I keep wondering not about how students show mastery, but how they achieve mastery. If a student is unable to participate in the process, or if they decline to complete the intermediate steps, how will they "master the standards"? How will they learn if they don't do? Do they have to already have a command of the material before they enter? Talk about equity. 

That was fun. I know this is long, but now that I got that off my chest, let me just discuss a couple of the things that drive me absolutely batty about edumedia. Writing about teaching and schools and schooling is generally atrocious, as I'm sure you are aware. However, lots of it is atrocious in the same ways. 

The L.A. Times article for example, is subheaded "Teachers say" blah blah pandemic blah blah points system. Well, the ONLY teacher mentioned or quoted is Joshua Moreno, from Alhambra High School. Now, I don't know Mr. Moreno, but he seems to have done what many if not most of us do: He thought about his class and his interactions with his students, and he revised one of his procedures. Good Job. 

Yet, as far as I can tell, he is the only teacher saying anything in the article (except for one education professor who arrives in the twenty-ninth paragraph to offer a tepid caution). The rest of the interviews/quotes are from authors, consultants, and administrative personnel from a principal to district execs. Apparently using Mr. Moreno's conversion as a stalking horse, a celebrity endorser out front to lend credibility to the "growing trend," the article spends the rest of its inches pumping the new miracle cure. Not only is it inadequate journalism, it's misleading. Not surprising for a major media organ with an agenda. I read the L.A. Times a lot, and I follow their education reporting closely, and I must admit I am never not disappointed. I wish they were the exception.

Which brings me to my final point (applause!). Anybody who has ever worked in the Los Angeles Unified School District -- or, I'm quickly finding out and am saddened to report, almost anywhere else -- will recognize the following melody. First, the district recognizes it has a problem (in this case, too many Fs and Ds). Second, using their big brains and vast network of authors, consultants, and district inductees to the Peter principle Hall of Fame, the district concocts a solution. Third, the district dips the solution in a solution of rationalization and recrimination. Et voilà! A new star is born, ready to take its place on the reform-a-go-round. 

I suppose I should emphasize that I love grading for equity. I believed in it before the pandemic. But teaching during the pandemic helped me understand it. That's more than I can say about most of the people talking and writing about it.

 I'm here to learn.

Listen, I'm going to make mistakes. I'm teaching myself how to be a more public person using technological platforms that are new to me. It's not that different from learning the nuances of a new Learning Management System (UGH!) or creating a class website, but it's going to take some time. I want to try some things just for fun. What I'm saying is... I could use a little patience and some help. 

When I screw up by writing something that seems like it could be insensitive, or I write too much or too little, or I use a geezer word to describe something that might not even exist anymore (videoTAPE hello!), please let me know and I'll try to do better. 

Nothing I'll be writing will be intended to hurt anyone--not even crappy teachers I've worked with or loathsome administrators I've known. But it will be true and that means it might sting a bit. It should. If you suck at your job or you are lazy or vindictive, you should know it. And you should know that we know. I don't want you injured, just employed in a different field. Like brain surgeon. That way you can only kill one person at a time.

Next post we'll put some meat on these bones. 

This post is not the one I was going to write. In fact, it's not the one I had already written for today. I was up last night trying to figure out how to characterize what I'm hoping to do here. What am I talking about? I'm talking about what you need to do, what I needed to do, in order to put together a healthy, sustainable career in teaching. 

I think of the challenges as falling into two basic categories. First is the classroom. That's students and curriculum. It includes things from planning to classroom management to how do you grade all those freakin' papers? That's a hard part of the job and it's not getting any easier. However, for me, it was the other stuff that made me check my retirement account every other week.

If you are a teacher (or maybe some other kind of education professional--I'll get to more of that later) and you are feeling overwhelmed and frustrated in your job, it's very likely nothing to do with the kids. Or at least, not only or even primarily the kids. It's more likely to be a deplorable colleague, or out-of-classroom personnel whose job seems to be to give you extra work. Or it might be an incompetent or malicious administrator. Or you might be stymied by the abrupt and absurd demands of district administrators cosplaying as educators. 

During my career, these were the impedimenta vocationis (Google translate) that were the constant fuel for my retirement fantasies. The kids were the least of the problems. The truth is, they are the only reason to be there.

So what I'm talking about is this: For the classroom stuff there are lots of great places to get checklists and advice on how to set up your room and what to do about disruptive students--and we'll talk about some of that stuff here. But my main focus, and the reason I wrote Answer Key: A Teacher’s Completely Unofficial, Fiercely Unauthorized Handbook and Survival Guide, is to discuss and address the stuff that doesn't get talked about as much and for which there aren't checklists or "Ten Things" answers. Maybe it's because these feel like enormous, systemic problems with solutions--if there are any--far beyond the reach of mortal teachers. We have our hands full just getting through each minute of each day. 

Still, these are the things that drive a lot of good and potentially good teachers out of the business. I saw it happen and it nearly happened to me. So what do we do? What can we do? One thing I'm certain of: The impetus for change will not come from those who profit from the status quo. Power concedes nothing without a demand (Frederick Douglass, of course). Who will make the demand? 

It must be teachers. If not us, then who? Sure, let's recruit all the allies we can, but the movement--real movement--will have to start with teachers. And students? Now that's an idea...

That's what I'm talking about in Answer Key. How do we resist the education-industrial complex and its binary "data"-driven business model? How do teachers push back hard enough to reshape the system without making the bosses mad enough to bump us off?  (h/t John Huston The Maltese Falcon) I don't know. I don't know if it's possible to change the world. 

But from my own experience I do know this: It is absolutely possible to do the right thing and push back--a lot--against bad ideas and the people who peddle them. It's possible to do that AND sustain a long, profoundly rewarding career while staying sane and being kind. And it's possible to do all that and still wake up one day smack dab in the middle of a fabulous, glorious, magnificent retirement. Ready to stir shit up.

You can. Do it.

In the beginning I was pretty lost, flailing around day to day. Sometimes minute to minute. As time went on I got better and I became one of the teachers other colleagues could depend on for help. And every once in a while as we talked, one of us would forget to breathe, or begin to cry, or fight to hold it in, or just start shaking with frustration, and then someone would say some version of “How do you do it?"

The first time I was on the receiving end of that question I had only been on the job for a year and a half myself, so instead of listening, I talked. I told the other teacher that I tried to get to bed early and eat well and not drink too much--all good tips, by the way--but they practically rolled their eyes at me. The next day I asked a veteran teacher how they would have answered. “I just tell them, ‘Only you can answer that question.’  That usually works.”

Well, “Only you can answer that question” is a bullshit answer and teachers use it all the time. It almost never helps and in this case it’s not even true. Nobody can answer it. Certainly not the person who just arrived on another planet and doesn’t even know yet what the “it” is. And my own bullshit answer had been meaningless because I hadn’t even really heard the question. They were not asking about me. They wanted to know how they could do it. They wanted to know if they would ever be able to do it. 

If you are one of those teachers, if you are asking Am I the only person seeing this? Thinking this? Going through this? Am I the only one who thinks this is wrong? This is a place for answers. Here they are:

NO. You are NOT the only one. You are not crazy. What you are going through is real and it's bad. However, you can do this. You can survive the game, sustain a long and wondrous career. There are real strategies for navigating this corrosive system while holding on to your health and humanity. You can. Do this.

And who knows? Just maybe we can change things along the way. This blog is one part of an urgent and ongoing conversation about how we save schooling and ourselves.

Maybe you've heard it all before. I get that. So had I. So what makes this book and this blog (and me) any different? I retired this year, in a pandemic, while I was still pretty good. I owe nothing to anyone (except all the people I’ve learned from) and I have no fear. I can tell the truth. If we work together, maybe we all can.

First of all, thank you for joining me. 

For twenty-five years I worked in a system designed to destroy students, teachers, and the institution of public schooling. Alternately I growled or ground my teeth to nubs. I joined with colleagues to complain and resist. We led a strike. Through all of it, we had to moderate our criticism for fear of reprisal and concern for our careers. But truth muted is not truth at all.

Now I'm retired and I can say what I really think. I thought retirement was going to mean golf and day drinking my way through old movies in the afternoons. Instead, as soon as I was out of the classroom I couldn't stop thinking about what I'd been through--what we all go through as classroom teachers and education professionals. And now I had the time, so I started to write about it. 

First was a book. Answer Key: A Teacher’s Completely Unofficial, Fiercely Unauthorized Handbook and Survival Guide is nearly finished, and it has become obvious to me that I'm not yet finished in education. I want to be part of an ongoing conversation about schools and schooling, what's wrong with it and what can be done about it. Hence this blog. The day drinking will have to wait. 

Here on the Answer Key blog, I'll share my own insights and some of the obstacles I faced and solutions that I came up with over the course of my career. More than that, though, I really want to hear from you. Whether you are a brand new teacher looking for answers (for the first time) or a veteran with answers of your own, I want to hear about what you're dealing with and how you are thinking about it. We especially welcome all of you who are working right now to serve your students--in the face of absurd and incessant antagonism--but who feel constrained from telling your truth.

I am committed to making this a place where you can finally be heard and where your experience is valued and validated. It must become a place where you can safely say what we all know to be true, a place where, just maybe, we can devise ways to push back and cultivate strategies for resistance.  Welcome to Answer Key.

My name is Jeff Waid. Before retiring in January, I taught English and drama for over twenty-five years in the Los Angeles Unified School District. I have a Master’s in Education and was a National Board Certified Teacher from 2002-2012. 

I’ve also served as a mentor teacher, a department chair, a union rep, and I’ve taught prospective teachers at California State University at Los Angeles Charter College of Education as a part-time faculty member. 

Before that, I did a series of sub jobs at some pretty posh private schools in L.A. and way before that, I even did a couple of summers at an arts camp back east. Along the way I went through a boatload of “how to teach” classes and books and articles and videos and professional developments. 

What I didn’t find in any of them was the truth about what my colleagues and I were experiencing in our classrooms and in our schools. This blog is about that truth and, I hope, yours.