Why we can't have nice things.

Leaders Must Address Teacher Well-Being With Action, Not Just Self-Care Talk

By listening to educators and building supports that reflect their genuine needs and concerns, these leaders are shifting school cultures in ways that go beyond lip service.

By Paige Tutt

August 16, 2024

(published in Edutopia, online magazine from the George Lucas Educational Foundation)

A little tardy, but I saw this article posted on Bluesky (July 8, without comment) by Peter Greene @palan57.bsky.social and, having received numerous attendance medals and leadership coffee gift cards at dozens of doughnut parties throughout my career, I thought I'd read it, you know, for laughs. 

Instead, I teared up a little, just like at the end of It's a Wonderful Life when everything works out just like it's supposed to--even brother Harry flying safely through a blizzard and right down to the little bell ringing at the perfect moment. There are some things that just seem right. Maybe I cry because of that. Maybe because it's never like that.

For the article, author Paige Tutt developed her thesis by talking with school administrators, instructional coaches, professors, consultants, and motivational speakers, several of whom were identified as former teachers. I know I know, and don't even get me started on the elementary-centric focus, but wait, there's good news! 

At least these educators and education leaders appear to have actually talked and listened to actual teachers, and getting the truth from teachers second-hand is better than nothing, which is what we usually get. 

And through the process of being (former) teachers and listening to existing teachers, these education professionals have come up with, and Tutt has distilled, the following to-do list of ideas for saving teachers' careers and sometimes their lives in schools:

START WITH TEACHERS.

TREAT TEACHERS LIKE PROFESSIONALS.

That's it. That's the list. Within these rather mushy principles, Tutt does detail some concrete-ish recommendations that the "education professionals" shared, and I'll write about them next time, but I want to encourage you to read the article. This is how it's supposed to be. 

This article is good and I'm all for going beyond "lip service." And the ideas, such as they are, are fine. And in my 25 years in a classroom, it was never like that. Why?

There is absolutely no doubt that implementing these ideas would make the job more sustainable and teachers healthier and more effective. These are, in fact, the same things that teachers themselves ask for every single day but never seem to get. Instead, it's doughnuts and gift cards. "That doesn't make sense!" some might say. "Why don't we do the good things and skip the goofy stuff?" What's the deal, right?

Once again, the answer to all your questions is money.  

 ***

I've written a fair about about "teacher morale" and burnout and how to keep smart, young teachers in the profession. After retiring I even wrote a book trying to help teachers old and especially new sort and survive the bullshit. In it, I wrote down why I think these commonsense, humane answers to "teacher well-being" never happen. 

We think that the bosses who make the rules want what we teachers want: healthy, happy students who leave smarter than they came and have a fighting chance to find and make the life they want to live. It's not true.  

The concerns of Administrators are not the same concerns that teachers have when they plan a lesson, create an assessment, read an essay, or wonder why a student has been losing weight or has become surprisingly quiet. 

Administrators care about keeping their jobs, first and foremost. They care about their mortgages and their promotions so they can have bigger mortgages. To be fair, they also care about sending their kids to school, often to "better" schools than the one the Admin works in. Their work in schools is a means to an end, and the end is centered on themselves and their families. They could just as well be working as a store manager at Walmart.

"But teachers have mortgages and car payments, too!" Yes, but any teacher worth their credential centers their work on their students, with the people they work with every day. They, too, want to keep their job of course, but it's so they can do their job. It's not a means to an end; it is the end. The two are not the same. 

So when an Administrator challenges you on a "sick day" or questions your test scores or gives you coverage or packs your room with 40 students, they are just following orders. They are trying to solve a numbers game in a way they can explain to their bosses without getting into trouble. 

Things like how many hours in a work day, how many sick days in the contract, how many students show up for English 9, how many instructional minutes in a year, how many rooms in the school, how many schools on the same campus, how much you get paid, are mostly out of their control. Attendance medals are what they have, just a pathetic plea from a boss who has no good subs to take your place when you're sick.

This is not to say it was always as horrific as it is now. It used to be better when the incentives were different and the pressure was graduation rates and dropout rates instead of numbers on mysterious Big Standardized Tests (h/t Peter Greene @palan57.bsky.social ), numbers that mean nothing except you and your students are fuckups. (Astonishingly, missing from Tutt's list is any mention of perhaps the most debilitating debilitator of all: testing.)

So this handful of educators and leaders in the article is all for the good ideas teachers have been advocating for, sometimes begging for, for decades. That's good, right? And I'm happy the one or two actual active principals interviewed appear to be on board with these "innovations" and I'm happy they are in the unusual position to be able to be. Happy for them. Ecstatic for their staffs.

You know who's not on board? The thousands of Administrators just paying their bills, following orders, and handing out doughnuts.

"Leaders Must Address Teacher Well-Being With Action, Not Just Self-Care Talk"

Must they, though? Really? Do a quick search on teacher morale and you'll find similar conversations going back decades. This NATIONAL CENTER FOR EDUCATION STATISTICS report, from 1997, specifies "Administrative support and leadership, student behavior and school atmosphere, and teacher autonomy" as  critical.  

And this one, by Francis S. Chase in the Phi Delta Kappan from 1951 (!), identified working conditions (including work load), autonomy, teacher voice in policy, and professional status, as significant drivers of teacher morale and job satisfaction. Also on the list: money. 

These elements all sound achingly familiar, and the fact that they haven't changed over time is evidence of a broken, disconnected incentive structure where the concerns of teachers are increasingly dismissed and the concerns of Administrators are narrowed to two numbers: attendance, and a mysterious set of numbers generated by a tech-infected testing regime. Suspensions used to be a thing, but those have mostly disappeared. Instructional minutes! 

A few principals in a few elementary schools is nice, but the system is broken. It has been broken by the testing-industrial complex, the politicians who use it for a punching bag, privateers hunting for new sources of revenue, and reformsters pretending they are acting in the interests of "the children."

What makes me sad is it doesn't have to be this way. The way things are is a choice we've made. This article describes the way it should be. Maybe I cry because of that. Maybe I cry because it's never like that.

Bye Bye Berto!

It took me a while to get to this, but then again it's hard to say goodbye. 

So Los Angeles Unified School District now-former Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has resigned. The little man with a big plan apparently got caught up in a fraudulent contract brouhaha and had his home and offices raided by the FBI. After a few months on the couch under suspension, he finally called it quits, which makes one wonder what's next. 

Now, LAUSD is no stranger to corrupt and incompetent leadership. We did have a John Deasy on our letterhead for a bit. We had David L. Brewer. The Super's office changed hands ten times while I worked there, and twice since. LAUSD. hired the same guy, Ramón C. Cortines, three different times, mainly because he could actually talk to people and get things done without stepping on his own dick every other week. 

And now Alberto Carvalho has hit the proverbial road and been replaced by someone named Andrés Chait, who was once an actual teacher. So we got that going for us. Which is nice. He was chosen unanimously as Carvalho's replacement by the LAUSD school board, but I wouldn't read too much into that. So were Deasy, and Brewer, and Carvalho for that matter. Makes you wonder about the seriousness of the Board. As for Chait, time will tell.

But a few parting words for Alberto M. Carvalho. When I saw he had been given the job, I had a few choice observations about Mr. Carvalho (see below), and he has proven to be all that I expected and more. But I'm going to start with one good thing, from April of 2025:

Who will stop them? LAUSD says "Hold my beer."

CBS News Los Angeles (KCAL) is reporting today that "Department of Homeland Security agents were denied entry into two South Los Angeles elementary schools earlier this week, according to a district spokesperson."

Going to the mattresses to protect students and their parents from marauding ICE goons was a good thing, and as I wrote then:

I have written a lot of things about Alberto Carvalho and said a lot more and none of them have been good. This is a good thing he's doing. It goes beyond simply putting up a "We Are One" resource page on the website. It's the natural next step in a broad campaign to protect students and their families from the kind of immigration terrorism favored by the Trump administration. 

Unfortunately, my suspicion that Carvalho was in other ways a slick, self-serving huckster pitching all manner of shiny objects to credulous politicians, parents and boards of education turned out to be only too true. Carvalho was and is what he's always been: a fast-talking, overconfident "reformer" offering magic technology or some novel "system" in place of sound pedagogy and curriculum.

There's lots to criticize about this choice for Superintendent and about the way the Board of Education unanimously votes for problematic candidates. And I'm particularly exasperated by UTLA who, it seems to me, avoids even taking a position on potential candidates. If you can't identify and support the best person for your students and families and members, you're just lazy and timid. 

If the problem is an opaque process that shields contenders from public scrutiny, then that practice should be challenged in contract talks and in the community. I'm sure parents would appreciate an ally in the fight for transparency.  

Anyway, Carvalho is gone. I guess we'll find out if the New Boss is same as the Old Boss.

If you are interested, following are links to some of my Carvalho stuff. Old news, now. 

I wrote this in November 2021 as LAUSD started looking for a new superintendent: No experience necessary, and this on December 14, when Carvalho was tapped.

Tuesday, December 14, 2021

LAUSD shits the bed?

 

Monday, December 27, 2021

Meet the New Boss

 

Monday, February 14, 2022

Testing is Politics and Profiteering, not Pedagogy.

 

Saturday, August 13, 2022

In Local News...

The carnival comes to town. 

Can it live up to the advance publicity?

 

Sunday, February 26, 2023

LAUSD Up -- Periodic Reporting on the Los Angeles Unified School District - Episode Five

Progress Report

Carvalho Edition

 

 

 

Throwing Money

 

What to say when Know Nothings and villains start talking about "throwing money at schools."

Reposting until it stops!!!! schoolfinance101.com/2026/06/16/m...

[image or embed]

— Bruce D. Baker (@schoolfinance101.bsky.social) June 17, 2026 at 9:51 AM

 

 

For further analysis, see Bruce D. Baker's Education’s Merchant of Doubt: One man’s deceitful mission to undermine fair and adequate school funding, his schoolfinance101.com, and his Educational Inequality and School Finance.

 

Like I said, Testing is Bullshit

I don't know where to start. I've written a lot about testing, and by testing I mean the Big Standardized tests (BS tests, h/t Peter Greene @palan57.bsky.social) that are required by school bosses local, state, and federal. I started teaching high school in 1994, and within the first few years I had gotten a master's degree and achieved National Board Certification. 

Then, in 2001, the world began to change. No Child Left Behind, they called it, and in the beginning it involved simply making your standards and objectives concrete and observable by writing them on the board or posting them in the room, a practice that helped teachers, students, and administrators figure out what should be going on in the classroom. 

If I remember, we started with about two or three BS tests a year: a high school exit exam and I guess the (P)SATs plus AP tests. In 1997 we started with the STAR tests in reading, writing, math, history, and science. That was a big step, but I think it took about a week and then we could get back to class. There was also something called a Stanford 9, but I don't remember why.

In 1999, test scores began to be used to calculate something called an "Academic Performance Index" used to rate and rank schools for "extra assistance" but mostly punishment. In other words, "ACCOUNTABILITY."

After that, it felt like testing, along with its evil offspring testing prep, testing PD, testing visits to the principal's office, seemed to explode like a fast-growing cancer, consuming all the healthy cells around it and squeezing every other purpose of schooling out of the school day. In my opinion, in my experience, it ruined school. 

So, in other words, I hated testing, and I hated what testing did to students, to parents, to teachers, to administrators, to schools, and to schooling. 

I've spent a lot of time hating testing, and for thirty years I have been itching to take all the Aspen Institutionalized, Foundationified, think-tankie, corporate shilling consultant-bots that ever walked in without a week's experience in the classroom, and I wanted to put them in a big bag and beat them with a baseball bat. 

Which makes this next part hard. Here's a guy who claims to have seen the light. Writing in an opinion piece for the New York Fucking Times, a former? education reform evangelist named Ross Wiener claims to have come to the realization that testing may not only not be the answer, it may even be a little bit--gasp!--bad for kids. Not to mention everyone else. 

Much like Never-Trumpers who ignored all the warnings from people who were right about the right all along (h/t Driftglass  @driftglass.bsky.social), and now offer their critiques as if they are original analysis, Mr. Ross Wiener funnels the criticism, objections, and complaints from over twenty years of teachers trying to resist the testing madness into his very own road to Damascus moment. 

Mr. Ross Wiener now understands, like all those classroom professionals have always always known, that he was wrong. However, the article quickly becomes more mea than culpa as he insists his heart was in the right place all along.

I say that's cold comfort to the thousands and thousands of kids denied a full, humane, robust, sometimes fun education because their educational captors were busy puking test score bullshit all over each other at the retreat. I'm bitter because my colleagues and I and teachers across the country were forced to implement a program WE KNEW WAS BAD FOR STUDENTS, and when we objected we were threatened and mocked and challenged over our commitment to our students. My friends still in the game are still facing that crap right now, today. And yeah, I'm still pissed.

But I search deep in my own heart and I find just a spark of forgiveness. Maybe we accept this reversal like it's a good faith repentance. Maybe we just take the win. BUT...

I would like to see some proof. I would like to see this former Aspen Institutionalized, Foundationified, think-tankie, corporate shilling consultant-bot do just one thing: 

WORK AS HARD FOR AS MANY YEARS ON KILLING THE TESTING CANCER AS YOU WORKED ON SPREADING IT. 

Then, maybe, redemption.

You can read it here for yourself. If it all sounds so familiar you want to beat somebody with a ball bat, I get it. 

 Testing! Testing! Testing! 

"It was a mistake in the past to treat test scores as the purpose of public schools rather than as partial proxies for what a good education actually delivers."

Yes. Yes it was. Mr. Wiener goes on: 

But there was a question I couldn’t shake: Were the outcomes we were holding schools accountable for the ones that actually determined whether a young person flourished? I still remember when I first encountered research showing that high school G.P.A. predicted college graduation better than standardized test scores. I went to my boss’s office to discuss it, expecting her to help me push back, but she confirmed it was true, and always had been. If so, I recall thinking, why are we fighting so hard for test scores to be the arbiter of quality education?

Years later, research from the University of Chicago Consortium would show that schools’ effect on students’ social well-being and work habits predicted academic gains about as well as test performance did, and was more predictive than test scores for students’ graduating from high school, enrolling in college, and staying out of the criminal justice system.

Accountability policy gave unprecedented authority to the idea that standardized test performance is the most important outcome schools produce and made it the organizing principle of American schooling. What could be easily tested gained importance. What could not — the practical, civic, relational and developmental — was pushed to the margins. 

 

 

 

 

Above I said I'd written a lot about testing. Here's some of it:

In "The War On Teachers Part Two: Working Conditions - Testing. Obviously"  about the effects of testing on working conditions and the teacher shortage.

In "Back to School: It's the tests" I wrote about the impact of pervasive testing on the school calendar.

In Data is bullshit. Part One I wrote about how the tests do not generate "data," they generate test scores from assessments given over several days under different conditions. Schools generate tons of data; test scores are among the least valuable.

In "Data is bullshit. Part Two: What's the plan? Testing is easy; fixing things is hard," I wrote:

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."

 In "Data (scores from state-sponsored standardized tests) is bullshit. Part Three, part one" I wrote about how the tests don't measure what they say they measure.

In  "Data (scores from state-sponsored standardized tests) is bullshit. Part Three, part two" I wrote about the testing PDs and how destructive they are.

And finally, and absolutely worst of all, I wrote about the pernicious and abusive practice of collecting data on our students through all these testing and testing preparation programs in "Test Scores are bullshit. Secret data is evil bullshit." 

 

Too Many Goddamn TRILLIONAIRES

Whether thrilling to the awesomeness of large numbers, or tsk-tsking their way through a "How did this happen?" segment, talkers talking about Elon Musk and his Glorious Trillion predictably invited other people to talk along with them. Many of the invitees have been at least ambivalent about individual humans owning their own countries (haven't we already done this?), and many are adamant that no, individual humans should not, in fact, have the money (or fiction of money) to control the fates of tens and hundreds of millions of folks. 

But whatever the particular bent of the particular talker, one question that gets asked as if it's a moment of holy reflection is:  "Is it wrong for someone to have a trillion dollars?" (Used to be a billion. Good old days.) 

It's a trick question, of course, straight from the bot-scripted newsy show handbook. If the well-meaning guest says "No, but..." the questioner is all "Then what's the problem?" implicitly endorsing the widespread delusion that owning billions and billions of dollars proves you are god. 

If, however, the guest comes up with, "Yes, of course it is wrong," then they are bombarded with two dozen versions of "Why?" and ten "stifle innovation" hypotheticals dipped in contempt and fired directly into the "communist!" guest's face until they retreat, harrumphing their way to commercial.

But it doesn't have to be that way. There is an easy, elegant, best of all straightforward answer to the question, whether one is a cheerleader for the wealth class or thinks obscene amounts of dollars is wrong or immoral or bad or destructive to democracy (which it certainly is).

Nope, don't need none of that. The simple answer is: "No, billionaires, even trillionaires are  not inherently evil or immoral. The problem is the system that creates them. This system, a system that creates billionaires and created Trillionaire #1, is not fair. 

Taxes are not fair (see carried interest, unrealized capital gains leveraged for loans (buy, borrow, die), even the preferential rates on capital gains). Special V.I.P. access to information and investments is not fair. Inheriting all the money and pretending you earned it--not fair.

Individual billionaires--and even Trillionaire #1, 2, 3 etc.--may or may not be evil, may or may not be immoral, but the system that created them and which they strive every day to recast to their advantage, that system is rigged against everyone else. It's corrupt, and it's unjust, and the wealthy strive every day to further corrupt it and make it even more unjust. The system is evil and immoral.

The wealthy work tirelessly to reshape the system to their advantage by buying more and more influence. It is wrong, but it is not eternal. Where it is legal, laws can be changed. Where it's illegal, criminals can be prosecuted. This brand of capitalism, with its front-of-the-line treatment for chosen insiders and slamming doors for the rest of us, is not an immutable law of nature. It was designed and developed by human beings, some more powerful than others, to serve the interests of the most powerful. It doesn't have to be this way.

The system is the problem and it needs to be changed. It was made by human beings and it can be destroyed and remade by human beings. The sooner the better.

Then we won't have to worry so much about the rich.

Too many goddamn billionaires

   There it is.

All I remember seeing is rockets crashing and exploding, but whatever. 

My point is that this is immoral and poisonous, and it ought to be against the law. 

In other words: Why is everything so fucked up? Too many goddamn billionaires. 

And now there's fucking trillionaires.

 

more to come

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InDAklMpVao

 

One Trillion Dollars

Evil Jeff Bezos is in the news planning to do some more evil shit so I thought I'd republish this from late last year. Like many of us, I'm just yelling the same things over and over because they are always true and it always makes me furious.

Once again, the answer to all our questions is: Money (and once again, h/t Tony Kornheiser)

 

Just a quick word about Elon Musk and the tussle over whether to pay him a trillion dollars as Tesla's CEO. In the November 6 issue, the New York Times asks the important question: "Would Elon Musk Work Harder for $1 Trillion Than $1 Billion?" (no link, because fuck the New York Times) I didn't read it because I don't give a shit what their answer is because, again, fuck the New York Times.

The question reminded me of something I've thought about for ever. Why do we think that billionaires making less money makes billionaires want less money? Do we do that with poor people? Working people? Do we believe that paying people less per hour makes them want and need more hours or fewer hours? Do we believe that taxing the money above a billion makes billionaires quit at a billion? Or go find a different job?

I'm convinced that the biggest lie in capitalism--among thousands--is that if Big Brain Masters of the Universe don't get their money (including their tax breaks and their public investments and etc.), they'll close up shop and tell everyone else to suck it. 

I think that's extortion, and I don't think it's true.

When it comes to how we think about money, I think there are two kinds of people. One kind of person thinks about the life they want to have and thinks of money as the way to get that kind of life.

The other kind of person thinks of money as a way to keep score in the big game of World's Greatest Human (aka Biggest Asshole).

For the first kind of person, money as a means to a material end might mean feeding your family, a decent car, a home of your own. For lots of people it's being able to pay your medical bills. Send your kids to college. Travel once in a while. You know, normal shit. For this kind of person, if you have enough money you can get the life of your dreams, so you work and save to have that life.

For the other kind of person, there's no such thing as enough money. It's not a means to an end, it's a competition. That means if you make a million and someone else makes two, you're losing. If you make a billion or ten, that doesn't put you ahead in the race against eight billion other people; it puts you behind a couple thousand other assholes. 

In other words, this kind of person can never get enough money because somebody's always got more or they're trying to get more. They're not working for enough; They're working for more, more than anybody else. 

Which is why, if Elon Musk lost 459 of the 460 billion dollars he now owns, he would never ever not in one billion years stop trying to make that 459 billion dollars back again -- and then a trillion more. That goes for the rest of the goddamn billionaires, too.

In the 1980s, people said, "Whoever dies with the most toys wins." That was greedy and selfish, but at least it was tangible. Toys could be played with. Today's billionaires have an empty hole right through the middle of them, and they can never earn enough or steal enough or inherit enough to ever fill it. (h/t Kevin Jarre, 
Tombstone)

We have too many goddamn billionaires, and billionaires ought to be illegal. 

It's hilarious to hear a bunch of middle-aged, middle class folks cry for the billionaires and vote to protect them from the communist socialist leftist antifas. 

I imagine it's especially hilarious to billionaires who shout "look over there!" as they scoop all the money into numbered bank accounts or crypto accounts or whatever else I wouldn't know about because I'm not a goddamn billionaire. 

I don't know a single billionaire, nor do 99.99% of the people screaming to keep our commie hands off the money owned by billionaires. "Be nice! Don't make them mad! They'll quit and take all the jobs with them! They'll stop making new iPhones and bad newspapers and weird trucks and delivering our toothpaste in three hours!" 

What is it we're really afraid of? What would we lose if we lost all the billionaires? 

What would we lose if one morning they all became just millionaires? 

It's stupid that the rest of us do all that screaming for them.

Now there's goddamn trillionaires.

If you want to know why things have gotten so fucked up, follow the money.

Further reading: Why is everything so fucked up?