What is it really like?

Please tell us.

Charles Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) retweeted an interesting article from Esquire. It's written by Jack Holmes and contains interviews with selected teachers around the country talking about what's really going on in their schools. (Note: Journalists should really talk to high school teachers once in a while. Here we at least get one middle school teacher, but the form is dominated by interviews with "specialists" and elementary school teachers. I don't get it. Never have.) Anyway, it's a good read and accurately represents my own experience and that of my colleagues who are still in the business. 

The thing is, why is this a thing? If there is anybody out there who isn't aware of what it's like teaching and learning in schools right now, they are either not interested or posturing and they should just shut up. 

But of course they won't. That's why Holmes describes a "great American schools debate," which is an interesting way to frame what we're going through. I used to teach debate, and to have one you need some sort of resolution. What would that be? What is the actual proposition being debated? What is one side "for" and the other "against"?

"Schools should be open" comes to mind, but that is what we like to call a shitty proposition. Who would argue otherwise? Maybe one of my ninth graders during the before times, fantasizing about endless summer and no homework. Not today. 

"Schools should be open under all circumstances" is obviously preposterous, as most people can imagine a case where closing schools would make sense. All they have to do is look up.

"Schools should be open under these circumstances." Now we're getting somewhere. Except this is where awareness of the circumstances comes in. Honest awareness. After two years? C'mon Man.

As I say, in Holmes's article teachers accurately describe conditions inside schools. But you shouldn't take my or anyone's word for it. If you are not familiar with the actual circumstances in an actual school, if you have not talked with students (including some kids who are not your own), and a variety of teachers, you have not done your homework. In spite of what you heard on Fox or found on Facebook, or read about in the New York Times for that matter (looking at you Michelle Goldberg, and your pal Randi Weingarten), if you have not talked with counselors and administrators, if you have not made time some morning or afternoon to mask up and visit your kids' classrooms, you really don't know anything. And honestly, that is some bullshit parenting.

Now, maybe you don't give a crap about schools. It may be that you don't have kids in school and you really don't see how any of this concerns you and you have nothing to say about it. Carry on. 

However, if you have kids in school but haven't done your homework, and you still insist on demonstrating and shaking your fists and terrorizing teachers and school boards declaring "schools must be open!" and "no mask for my kid or I'll bring every single gun," then you are just political dupes serving your ideological masters, and you are using your kids to demonstrate your fealty. You dream that your performative outrage will earn you a place at the adults' table but you will settle for scraps dropped on the floor as long as you get a pat on the head once in a while. You are dangerous. And fuck you.

And if you don't have kids in school and haven't done any homework. but you make a lot of "kids need to be in school-no masks-no vaccines!" noise with all your threats and your shouting, then you're even bigger assholes and fuck you twice. 

None of you, not the quiet-no-kids, nor the kids-no-homework, nor the no-kids-no-homework people has any legitimate place on the debate stage. If you are going to contend that "Schools should be open under these circumstances," you need to understand the circumstances, not based on social media claims or commentary by those intent on ginning up outrage for their own purposes, but from your own observations. If you want to determine what should go on inside schools going forward, you must at least know what's going on now. Do some real research. Or just shut the fuck up.

Teachers would be the LAST to suggest that there are simple answers to our present "debate." Teachers keenly understand the complexity of the unique challenges presented by COVID, as well as the numerous problems which are magnified by the pandemic but that many of us have spent careers trying to solve. 

Teachers don't have all the answers, but we know the questions. We understand the "debate" at a level more profound than any of the other stakeholders except students because school is where we spend our lives. In the "great American schools debate," someone really should start listening to teachers. At least we're qualified to argue the proposition. 

It is odd to be reading this article in January, 2022. I'm not complaining, exactly. It's just that this information has been readily available for a long time. Whether it's life in schools during the pandemic or any other time, teachers and their students have been talking and writing about it for years. It just feels like, if anyone was interested in knowing what we think, they would have listened by now.

Data is bullshit. Part Two

What's the plan? Testing is easy; fixing things is hard.

It's testing season in California, as this graph shows:

It's going to be a busy spring! And you can get a picture of the next three years here:

The list at the bottom tells you what these kids, their teachers, and their schools have to go through every year. Shit, the testing window for four of them never closes. And in my school our administration hired test prep consultants to make us develop five extra tests to get kids ready for, you know, the other tests. 

So, once again, in a pandemic (please do whatever it takes to keep yourselves and your families safe) with schools closing and students walking out, the testing abides. Someday we'll find ourselves in whatever comes after a pandemic and we can get back to fighting the Originals for the soul of public education. A preview: Data is bullshit. 

Data is bullshit for several reasons. These tests produce useless snapshots of a student's state of mind on a particular day. They are developed by people who don't know students and certainly have never met yours. The "data" they generate is neither reliable nor valid and arrives too late for immediate action even if they were. Finally, we begin today with how data is used. 

If there is no plan for meaningful analysis of what "data" is produced, and no plan for action based on that analysis even if it took place, which it doesn't, then data is bullshit. 

I've got a lot more to say on why you should not take these tests seriously--and why you should never use them to evaluate your students or your teaching (that job will eagerly be done by the testing fanatics), but I'll just close this installment with the following short excerpt from my book, Answer Key: A Teacher’s Completely Unofficial, Fiercely Unauthorized Handbook and Survival Guide. 

Data is Bullshit.

My friend Rebecca reminded me recently that data doesn’t have to be bullshit. It’s really about how we use it. And I’ll even admit that not all data is bullshit. For example, as I’m writing this, the Chicago Cubs have averaged four hits and two runs per game over the last seven games, of which they have lost six. That is significant and actionable. I’ve stopped watching them for a while and I feel a lot better.

Data can be useful in schools, too, but it depends on what kind we’re talking about. If we’re talking attendance, we can and do make calls home to find out where a student has been when they have not been on Zoom or in school. Schools are pretty serious about that because their paychecks depend on it. Another example is reading level data which can be useful for teachers as they work to assemble appropriate materials and devise plans to address each student’s specific needs.

On the other hand, if the data comes from a standardized test you are required to give and you don’t get the scores back until after your students have left your class or the class has left that area of study, or if the tests don’t measure what they say they measure, or if they measure something of no value to your students--often because the something is unrelated to your instruction because you know your students and they tragically do not, then data is bullshit. 

 <snip>

As my friend Nick would often say, “Right now, there is a third grader who can’t read.” That’s the data part, if we’re keeping score. “What’s our plan for that student?” Of course there wasn’t one. There isn’t one. Bullshit. Testing is easy. Fixing things is hard.  

If there’s no schoolwide plan to address issues revealed in the data and no time carved out to analyze the data and formulate a set of strategies (maybe during one of the thousand “not this again” PDs), then the school is profoundly unserious about data and is not advancing the interests of students but simply using the testing for some other purpose.

The true purposes of data collection might include “accountability” (rewards and punishments) or advertising (competition for students) or political advancement (see how they turned that district around!) or the support of the testing-industrial complex and its bazillion jobs inside and outside actual schools and school districts.

But in the end, the answer to all the questions is money.

Now those profiteers and hucksters and fanatical true-believers will never stop pretending that theirs is "important work." They will offer to help with analysis and remediation and "standards based instruction," and all it will cost is bags of cash, tons of time, and everything you know about teaching kids.

They will never stop bullying. They will never stop lying because their career advancement, their political futures, their paychecks depend on it. 

That does not mean you have to believe them. 

Next time we'll get into some of the details regarding the tests themselves and share ideas for resistance. I'm sure many of you have developed strategies for minimizing the damage. If you have any good ones, please share. 

Great post from Diane Ravitch's blog on standardized testing. 

impedimenta vocationis, or...

 "Why So Sad?"

It's back to school as Los Angeles Unified joins districts around the country in the post-holiday, in-person student and staff scavenger hunt, aka "Where is Everybody?" Oh Boy. 

As you know, across the country teachers and staff are sick and sick of the madness, and intelligent parents are reluctant to send their kids into the maw of the beast while equally intelligent students are refusing to offer themselves up as sacrifices to the ideological and economic deities reigning over The Greatest Country In The World. (Caution Nitwit Crossing: I am not referring to the deranged California anti-vaxxers pulling their kids out of school so they can march with them holding up dopey signs while they hack up talking points --"show me the science!" and "my child's body something something"--about shit they are too stupid to even want to understand).

Chicago Teachers are fighting the Good Fight. At some schools, thirty percent of the staff is out sick. Kids are walking out in New York. But across The GCITW, bazillions of people who spend a lot of time yakking about public schools without bothering to spend any time in them have thoughts. "Children need to be in school!" they declare, not knowing what that will look like but at least it'll be quiet around the house. And don't get me started on childcare! The howling intensifies--"schools must be open! in person! for the children!"--in spite of...well...anything. 

Chin Up, teachers! This is actually good news! Oh yeah. It's what we call a teachable moment. Here's a nugget, fresh from the "Every challenge is an opportunity" cliché dispenser.

Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.

Translated from the original Nietzsche and hammered into a paraphrase celebrating toughness and resilience, it goes something like "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." 

Only it's not true. Not true at all.

What doesn't kill you can leave you smashed and broken, exhausted, discouraged and depressed. If you are a teacher these days (or any other kind of human), you are running hard on a treadmill going faster than you are and you're ready to break. You might be thinking, "I'm working as hard as I know how to work and all I hear is how terrible teachers are. Maybe I'm not cut out for this. Maybe I just can't take it."

Maybe you can't. There are a million reasons someone might want to leave the profession, but people saying mean things about you isn't a very good one. Nor is the fact that you don't get everything you want. Nor the fact that your bosses are idiots and make you do stuff you don't want to do while taking away every good thing. If a middle schooler can survive that nonsense, you can too. You did. You can survive this, too. 

But it is hard. I did it for twenty-five years and I understand. I certainly get that it was a lot easier "back then." Even though I retired barely a year ago, in that one year teachers have been dropped physically into the middle of a virus superstorm armed only with sham promises of new "safety protocols" and masks and hand sanitizer they bought themselves. You've had to endure the anti-vax, anti-mask maniacs and dodge the mountains of CRT bullshit. You've had to withstand the hostility of the ignorant and the ignoble who blame you for wanting to save the lives of your school families and your own.

And you've had to do all that while the usual suspects--venal climbers in the Principal's Suite, brain-dead district lackeys, the anti-public school crusaders in the Privatizer Brigade--have continued to damage students, undermine your work, and destroy the institution you have dedicated some or a lot of your life to sustaining. Well, at least that hasn't changed. 

We will eventually find a way to manage COVID and stay reasonably safe. The maniacs will find something else to rant about, and maybe it won't be schools. And the CRT thing? What CRT thing? It served its immediate purpose in Virginia and went on break. Even when they inevitably resurrect it for political ammunition, teaching the truth about racism will always be something worth fighting for.

COVID sucks in the extreme and there's nothing you or anybody can do except everything they tell us to do to keep ourselves and our friends and families safe. But the people who are making your life miserable are knowable and beatable. Some are just bad bosses in the way that bosses all over the known universe are bad, and you will find a way to impede them, ignore them or fool them in order to do what you know is right. 

However, the Big Project to Destroy Public Schooling that has been grinding forward for decades is kicking into high gear, and these enemies are not going to give up or forget about the multi-billion dollar reservoir of public funds they are itching to get their hands on. In fact, the pandemic offers the perfect opportunity to further ravage a system under stress and slice off another chunk.

Some of these weasels are plutocrats looking to cash in. Some hate public schools for providing opportunity across class lines. Some of the haters are still seething over the elimination of state-sponsored prayer in schools. And some are permanently appalled by integrated classrooms. All of them, though, are salivating over the big juicy pie of public money they've dedicated their entire so-called lives to getting a piece of.  

These demolition and excavation experts have already had considerable success. The Supreme Court will soon decide how much more. That part is familiar to anybody in the education biz anytime in the last two decades. It's also infuriating and exhausting. And heartbreaking. 

But here is the important part: Your heart is much stronger than you realize. That's how you ended up a teacher. You're smart and tough and you absolutely can survive this. Don't give up, is what I'm saying.

Of course I'm saying it from retirement. I don't carry a roster anymore, and I'm here writing about it, not there going through it. That's a fair criticism and I acknowledge it. But teachers have been dropped in the shit up to the eyeballs for as long as there have been clueless dilettantes and rapacious grifters cashing in, and I swam through it for twenty-five years. When I left, I left in my time, on my terms, when I had done what I set out to do. Don't let them force you out before your time. Don't let the bastards grind you down.

How? How do you not just say screw it and hit the snooze button? Get up tomorrow and find an easier job that pays more and where nobody hates you for being good at it. How do you carry on? 

I don't know for sure how you can, but I know that it can be done. I know that stubbornness helps. A bit of flexibility when necessary. I know you should never underestimate the value of outrage and pure, unalloyed anger. I  always felt I got strength and the energy to sustain my career from looking directly into the faces of those who are rooting for us to fail and making it harder for us to succeed. And saying--at least to myself and my friends--Fuck Those Bastards. 

In that spirit, I think Diane Ravitch has it about right when she asks:

Who is responsible for the widespread teaching exodus? Who demoralized America’s teachers, the professionals who work tirelessly for low wages in oftentimes poor working conditions? Who smeared and discouraged an entire profession, one of the noblest of professions? 

and goes on to assemble a rogues' gallery of culprits. She continues and puts a lot more meat on the bone in a follow-up post:

Last week, I posted my thoughts on “Who Demoralized the Nation’s Teachers?” I sought to identify the people and organizations that spread the lie that America’s public schools were “broken” and that public school teachers were the cause. The critics slandered teachers repeatedly, claiming that teachers were dragging down student test scores. They said that today’s teachers were not bright enough; they said teachers had low SAT scores; and they were no longer “the best and the brightest.”

The “corporate reform” movement (the disruption movement) was driven in large part by the “reformers'” belief that public schools were obsolete and their teachers were the bottom of the barrel. So the “reformers” promoted school choice, especially charter schools, and Teach for America, to provide the labor supply for charter schools. TFA promised to bring smart college graduates for at least two years to staff public schools and charter schools, replacing the public school teachers whom TFA believed had low expectations. TFA would have high expectations, and these newcomers with their high SAT scores would turn around the nation’s schools. The “reformers” also promoted the spurious, ineffective and harmful idea that teachers could be evaluated by the test scores of their students, although this method repeatedly, consistently showed that those who taught affluent children were excellent, while those who taught children with special needs or limited-English proficiency or high poverty were unsatisfactory. “Value-added” methodology ranked teachers by the income and background of their students’ families, not by the teachers’ effectiveness.

All of these claims were propaganda that was skillfully utilized by people who wanted to privatize the funding of public education, eliminate unions, and crush the teaching profession.

More villains follow, largely taken from suggestions made by readers of her excellent blog. In additional posts, Ravitch discusses the new private bounty hunters and the old "voucher vultures." And please do read through the comments, made by not-robots, many of whom are or were actual teachers instead of politically motivated bloviators looking for a consulting job. 

If you're wondering why teaching--even in a pandemic--is so much more difficult than it has to be, which is to say, more difficult than the practically impossible job it already is even under the best circumstances, you can start with these lists. Look your enemies in the face and learn their names. You may find that some you've known forever, but some you may have thought were your allies. They are not. Our enemies are mere mortals engaged in an immoral project. Identifying our enemies and calling them by their names gave me strength. And giant reservoirs of anger. Which kept me going for decades. It may help you.

It's hard, but in Chicago and New York and New Haven and Philadelphia and Fort Worth and Des Moines and Los Angeles and Oakland and a million other places around the country--in every other place around the country--students and parents and teachers and staff are fighting for their schools and figuring it out in real time. You are not alone.

No one is alone.

Fuck the New York Times. Double Fuck the Wall Street Journal.

I read the news today, and Oh Boy.

Schools are opening again at the end of Winter Break and Omicron is kicking ass with nine hundred thousand new COVID cases a day, and kids and teachers and staff are sick and scared, but according to The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, the problem is...?

If you said god damn teachers and their god damn unions, YOU WIN!

I tweeted out a response calling out the union-busting privatizers and profiteers along with their media boosters, and I thought I'd share that tweet here. Solidarity, Chicago Teachers Union! Stay safe. Stay strong.

 

Here's Josh Marshall on what's happening in New York schools. There are similar stories from around the country. It's not simply a question of open or closed. Does open mean safe? Meaningful? Are promised safety protocols real or CYA lip service?

Politicians and ideologues insist "Schools must be open!" and "Think of the children!" Parents, frustrated and exhausted from these last two years, shout their assent or just nod along, not really knowing what they are signing their kids up for. Many parents whose students are privileged to attend well-funded schools can be confident that their kids will be taken care of. Other parents face the impossible but inescapable decision to gamble the safety of their children against their ability to provide for them.

What a perfect opportunity for the privatizers and profiteers to bash teachers and their unions and impugn the entire notion of public schooling!

These vultures conveniently ignore the fact that their decades-long project of degrading, starving, and slicing up public schools has led directly to the crowded classrooms, staff shortages, and inadequate resourcing we are grappling with in this moment.

Oh, and you know who else ignores it? The New York Times with its faux concern for students obscuring the sideways wink to its anti-union corporate masters and privileged readership. Well, fuck the New York Times.

And while we're at it, double fuck the Wall Street Journal with its hysterical "political scandal of the year" bullshit and its call to use Chicago teachers' concerns over safe school openings as an excuse to institute a voucher program. Yes, double fuck them.

Links deliberately omitted because, of course, fuck them.

The pandemic has magnified a lot of problems with public schooling: insufficient resources (particularly technology), hapless administrations, low staff morale, flagging public confidence and the lack of enlightened political leadership and support. For teachers, these are familiar challenges in an extraordinary time.

But one of the greatest threats schools face, apart from COVID itself, is the investor class with its media allies that are using this emergency as an opportunity to advance their financial interests in the privatization project.

We know this stuff already. I plan to keep going until everyone does. Stay safe. Stay strong.

And by the way, UTLA? Are you there?

Data is bullshit. Part One

Yes. Yes it is. 

Of course, it doesn't have to be. There is lots of useful data in the universe. The Covid infection rate and the number of available hospital beds in your town are important pieces of information. Cholesterol level. Blood pressure. Miles to the gallon. Yards per carry. Odds of getting a heart on the river. Each of these data points has an outcome associated with it that is meaningful and actionable. 

There are data that are related to schooling that are also meaningful. Graduation rates. Attendance. Student-teacher ratio. Number of students qualifying for subsidized lunches. The trouble is that when school reformers talk about data, they are talking about test scores. 

So, as I wrote last time, all of these terrible ideas that incoming superintendent Alberto Carvalho is likely to bring to LAUSD--school choice, performance pay for teachers, the firings--all of them depend entirely on "data," by which he means "testing," by which he means state-sponsored, corporate-controlled assessments. If you are wondering what the hell I'm talking about: 1) You need to pay closer attention, and 2) You obviously don't teach math or English, or now science, or... 

In any case, this approach is unsound because the data are unsound. 

I threw that "are" in there for those of you who insist that data must be plural. However, I'll be using the word as a singular mass noun to represent the scores on these tests, and using it specifically to attack the notion that these scores--this "data"-- is the supreme (or any) expression of what students know, how effective their teachers are, or whether their schools have "failed." This data is a political tool and not meaningful in any educational sense. Teachers should resist the entire enterprise. Some ideas on how to do that later. 

For those of you thinking "Oh my test scores! I could lose my job!" I'm sorry, but you are right to be concerned. For any of you thinking, "My scores! I must be a shitty teacher!" You might be a shitty teacher, but it has nothing to do with your test scores, which are not your test scores. They are your students' scores. 

If you've been thinking that the testing is crazy and pointless and you've been thinking the same thing since No Child Left Behind, take comfort in the fact that you have been right for twenty years. Read on for corroboration and please comment and add your own thoughts. For those of you newer to the madness and thinking "Am I crazy? Or is this insane?" Take comfort in the fact that you are not crazy. It is insane, and you need to give yourself permission to acknowledge that. It's not you, it's the testing. You want proof?

Let's begin with the emphasis on testing and the elevation of test data generation over other elements of schooling. In case you haven't heard, we're in the middle (if we're lucky) of a fucking pandemic. Schools are under assault while struggling to keep students and staff safe, and people increasingly don't want to work there or go there. Teachers are desperate to reconnect with their students, to support their mental health while helping them engage and focus on their studies. So what do you think would be the most important concern for educators high enough on the food chain to actually decide things? 

If you guessed standardized testing, you win! Libraries are battlefields and there's no staff and schools can't even follow their own safety rules, but the testing abides. The testing obsession among educators who aren't teachers is as stifling as the gun obsession among 2nd Amendment fetishists. The destruction just happens more slowly.

In her excellent The Answer Sheet blog (no relation) at the The Washington Post, education writer Valerie Strauss posted on the subject and includes some very good questions from Bob Schaeffer from Fairtest. It's a good read.

Right now you should be on break, but in a week the lunacy will resume and many of you out there will be trying to open a testing session, trying to get students to finish a session, or wondering why there are sessions at all while we're still in a fucking pandemic. You are asking the right question and very probably using the right words--at least with your friends--to describe the ridiculousness. 

Some of you, however, might actually be listening to the testing fanatics who are leading your so-called Professional Developments (really just test training and ass covering) or pushing you to be sure you catch the "make-up" testers, and you might actually be thinking, "Well, at least it's for a good cause." 

Well just forget it. You (may) have to give the tests in order to keep your job, but unless your idea of a good cause is enriching the testing-industrial complex and their shareholders while destroying the public in public education, there is no reason for any teacher to feel good about giving these tests. Period. 

If you have any doubt about this, consider the following (if you haven't already--like a bazillion times): First, teachers are prevented from seeing the questions from the tests--including the ones their students got right and wrong--and are prevented from seeing the scores in time to shape instruction. And, get this, teachers are definitely prohibited from discussing the assessments with even their own colleagues (sign the affidavit!). So ask yourself: Why would such a discussion--one that might actually do some good if by good you mean helping students and, incidentally, raising test scores--be outlawed? 

Second, imagine a world so gripped by a pandemic that whole school systems had to close down for months. Then they open again and improvise their way through a year of masks/no masks, vax/no vax, and "What happened to all the Covid tests?" Under these circumstances, what could the value of administering these assessments possibly be? Except, of course, to support the narrative of failing schools. In that case, what better time to test? 

(By the way, check the "Nation's Report Card"  if you're up for a little mind tease. It takes some doing, but if I'm reading the long-term trends correctly--and I like to think that I am--it turns out the actual scores on perhaps the least egregious of the Big Tests, the NAEP, have been pretty stable recently and have gone up significantly over time. Hardly a picture of crisis. There is a genuine and serious issue regarding score gaps and equity, but even those gaps have diminished. However, you probably haven't heard how great a job we're doing in schools. That's not the carefully constructed and immensely profitable narrative.)

The truth is the testing exists to enrich the industry and generate data that will elevate certain schools and punish others along with their teachers (aka "hold them accountable"). Which might make some kind of sense if you believe or pretend to believe that teachers are slackers who can and should be shamed and hectored into magically levitating scores, which are in fact controlled by a million variables only one of which is a teacher--or six or seven teachers if you're in high school. And it might make very good sense to you if you're the type of person who cocks their head and looks up at the stars and muses: If only we could get rid of all the bad ones... And oh yes, fuck the teacher unions! 

Or maybe you really believe, or pretend to believe, that scores on a glitchy exam given once a year tell us what we need to know about students and their learning. And if that doesn't work, then we have lots more exams for all the other times of the year! Yes, you might be thinking, "That's totally worth it! Beating up teachers and hijacking instruction is a small price to pay for the higher test scores that will then prove that beating up teachers and hijacking instruction really works! To produce higher test scores!

Except for one thing: Data is bullshit. 

Next up: What's the plan? Testing is easy; fixing things is hard.