Mostly, school site leaders (i.e. principals, assistant principals, coaches tasked with doing the dirty work) were just checking boxes handed down to them by other administrators who were checking boxes handed down to them by yet more administrators. The needs of students and the needs of teachers serving those students were not central to their thinking.
At the top of this power pyramid scheme were politicians cosplaying as educators. The rest of the players were trapped in an ambition loop that went around and around until it ground them into gristle or spit them out and up for a job higher in the food chain.
Principals are the most immediate tormentors. They are the ones calling you to the same PD over and over again. They are the ones “moving on,” instead of following up or following through. Principals are the ones delivering or introducing canned presentations or canned consultants who know a lot less than you do and get paid a lot more.
It’s principals who force teachers to gather together to do a bunch of busy work in the gym or the cafeteria just so they can surveil them while they do it, you know, to make sure no teachers escape to do any actual work. And at the end of it all, it’s principals who send out surveys asking “How can we make PD better?” while never intending to make PDs better. And that I do not forgive.
Principals are bad. They are much worse than they have to be. But they are pawns in a mediocracy that rewards them for never saying no, even to the worst ideas. I’ve often compared principals to amoebas: they simply move toward the food source and away from any negative stimuli. There is no intellectual or moral component. They’re just following orders.
The real villains are the frauds running the show, the Big Bosses who give the orders. The Super and their various lieutenants hold the keys to advancement and that’s what principals really care about. If principals give a specific pointless slide presentation, or host a particular consulting firm, or introduce a certain approach to grading or formula for creating collaborative groups, it’s either been delivered from above or improvised by some lackey who just found out it was their job and can be blamed if it doesn’t come off. The Big Bosses are sure to be watching, and a promotion is always on the line.
In other words, the PDs are bad because the principals are bad, and their bosses are much, much worse.
Fundamentally, the Big Bosses at the top of this misery machine are politicians. They are unscrupulous climbers in endless pursuit of greater influence and the next, even more lucrative job. As with all politicians–especially those faking their way upward–these walking vessels of ambition are forever afraid of being found out.
That’s why this bunch likes to act tough. It’s also why they respond and overreact to pressure. Some of that pressure is self-inflicted as they stress about being outed before they can bamboozle their way to their next big job.
A lot of pressure, however, comes via the “failing schools” narrative promoted by the Enemies of Public Schooling and amplified by school privatizers and charter cheerleaders with an assist from credulous “news” outlets. The narrative creates pressure for “solutions” for the “failure” coming both from bad-faith school privatizers and good-faith concerned citizens (including but not exclusively parents) who are simply mis- or under-informed.
Either way, for a politician the pressure is real and must be responded to. The terrible PDs and senseless directives, all the bullying and the ridiculous orders are proof of performance and they need to be delivered to and enforced on thousands of school sites in the face of tens of thousands of accomplished professionals. That’s what principals are for. Hence, additional “training” for teachers in the form of “See? We’re really doing something!” PDs. And the “solution” for the “failure” is pointed directly at the easiest of targets, the teachers.
It’s not an accident. It’s a war. A war on public schools and schooling. A War on Teachers.
Administrators are not teachers for a reason. Whether at your school site or in the privileged seclusion of district headquarters, administrators’ concerns are not teachers' concerns. That’s why, in what they call “professional developments,” they can conduct in schools and school districts all over the country these time-wasting black holes that they cynically and dishonestly claim to be helpful while actually acting as a powerful weapon in the War on Teachers. This is from January of this year.
Professional Development
PDs are Tactical Weapons in the War on Teachers
Wednesday, January 11, 2023
The War On Teachers Part Two: Working Conditions - Instruments of Torture
(excerpted and revised)
To review: The project to destroy authentic public schooling is a war fought on many battlefronts. Essential to the project is the war on teachers.
The Enemies of Public Schooling have lots of strategies for making the teaching work space unworkable: suppressing teacher pay and attacking pensions, pretending class size doesn't matter (or pretending you've already addressed it), endless testing.
The aim is to degrade teachers' work environment--and students' learning environment--in a multi-dimensional campaign to grind teachers up and run them out of the classroom. No public school teachers, no public schools, and Vouchers for Everybody!
I wish I could say that attacks on teacher pay and pensions were the only issues driving teachers out or discouraging aspirants from becoming teachers in the first place. Or that huge classes and ceaseless testing were the only working conditions weaponized in the war on teachers. I wish that these were the only features in our work environment grinding teachers down and driving them out of the business. In fact there are many, many days when other features are even more destructive.
Some of this stuff doesn't fit perfectly into the category of deliberate attack. Much of it is the result of neglect and lack of imagination combined with an administrative structure obsessed with authoritarian hierarchies. Whether a result of action or inaction, direct attack or neglect, the war on teachers is waged through the de-professionalization, even infantilization of teaching.
From scripted lessons to stupid rules, teachers who are experts in their fields are demeaned and ignored, setting them on a course toward burnout and early departure. Again, destroy the teachers, destroy the schools.
Stragety.
I'm sure every teacher has their own list of things that drive them crazy about their job (feel free to add your own in the comments!).
However, it's the awareness that "things don't have to be this way" that makes these headaches a particularly corrosive weapon in the war on teachers. Every teacher knows that their working conditions are their students’ learning conditions, and that a degraded environment is bad for their students. Teachers live with that knowledge day in and day out.
Teachers also live with the knowledge that these working conditions are not acts of nature nor are they inevitable. These acts of sabotage are choices made by bosses implementing the choices of bigger bosses. Nevertheless, the results--degraded working conditions and a shortage of teachers qualified and willing to endure them--are the same.
It's the deliberate, aggressive disregard for teachers' experience and expertise and judgment and commitment to students that makes these instruments of torture so effective. So it is with “Professional Development.”
Let's take a ride on the reform-a-go-round, that carousel of "Hey! I've got an idea!" snake oil that consultants sell ceaselessly and education bureaucrats buy, swallow, and then throw up all over teachers in some dumbass new PD that interrupts the string of old PD reruns.
The only thing worse than sitting through the same stupid blood-borne pathogen PD you've sat through every September since 1998 is sitting through a brand new stupid PD where "experts" who don't know a roll book from a jelly roll hand out all the answers--brand new! answers to replace last year's answers--often recited from scripts memorized during retreats and delivered with a sickening excess of zippiness.
The whole exercise saps the strength of even the bubbliest newbies and eventually coats everyone in cynicism. You're sitting there thinking about the thousand problems with which you could really use some help, and you can only experience the same cycle of ill-conceived ideas presented as solutions so many times before ceasing to take the whole charade seriously. Especially as, year after year, you watch the initial administrative enthusiasm disappear as the latest miracle cure is poorly implemented, terminated prematurely, and fades into oblivion. Pretty soon it becomes clear: that's the game plan.
I've been through whole language, phonics, and reciprocal teaching PDs. I've been through Open Court, READ 180, sustained silent reading, reading circles, independent book study, context clues, journaling, and I'm sure lots of approaches I can't even remember. Every one of them was delivered as if the "method" was a brand new discovery, and as though each one wasn't connected to all the others and all the others not named. It was ridiculous and everybody knew it and everyone had to pretend it wasn't.
And I've left out Lucy Calkins because I just watched that battle from afar. I've also left off "science of reading" because I don't know what it is and I don't understand how it's different or why it has to replace anything. Such is the nature of the reading wars.
Note: Just for kicks, I googled "methods of teaching reading" and was introduced to "the" 4, "the" 6, "the" 7, 8, 10, 11 and 12 methods of teaching reading. That's enough for a whole semester of PDs!
So that's just the bouncing ball of teaching reading. Maybe some of you have had PDs on Carol Dweck and growth mindset. Maybe you've been subjected to Kagan cooperative learning structures.
Maybe you've sat through (probably one isolated) training on restorative justice. Maybe it was trauma-informed teaching, special needs students, differentiation of instruction (theoretical only–don’t ask us to model examples!), classroom management, student engagement, culturally responsive teaching.
Every teacher I've ever known could benefit from an in-depth training in any one of these areas--I know I would have--but do we get that? I sure didn't. It was invariably a one-off check-the-box presentation by a district consultant or an out-of-classroom coach who may have found out that morning that they were conducting the professional development. And virtually every one of the presentations ended with the question of what to do next and a promise to follow up. Needless to say, there wasn't any.
The reform-a-go-round is a circle, built of one miracle cure replacing another until you get right back to where you started. There is never any follow-up, no consummation, no progress. It is debilitating, and it is a powerful weapon in the war on teachers.
Wow, that was a lot. Must be twenty-five years of wasted Mondays and Tuesdays and weeks and weeks of summers all coming out at once. Restraint, beginning... NOW.
To all of you suffering through this nonsense these past several weeks, I repeat: Your anger is righteous, you are not alone, and you can get through it if you keep in mind what’s really happening--and what’s really important.
Just for fun, next post is a short one about the best PD I ever had.
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