We've had about all the help we can stand.*

Experts. 

The word itself makes my skin crawl. In my twenty-five years in the classroom, I must have sat through a bazillion "professional developments" and trainings conducted by people who didn't understand the classroom and often knew less about the topic of the training than I did. I'm sure many all of you have experienced similar frustration.

It wasn't actually horrific during my first few years. We all met in the auditorium and everyone, including the bosses it seemed, understood the performative nature of these meetings and we got through them together. As quickly and painlessly as possible. While grading papers. Once in a blue moon you might look up and say to yourself or your neighbor, “Wow. That could work.” Then you would take a few minutes figuring out how to use it.

Then, I think it was about 2000 or 2001–that would make sense–the faculty was suddenly offered the opportunity to create a matrix of PDs that would carry through the year, address our concerns, and be conducted by our own expert teachers. It was awesome. 

We dedicated two department meetings to making a schedule and in the third meeting we were told the deal was off. Back to the dictated meetings, only this time the bosses would be taking them seriously.

It was all downhill from there with more and more time dedicated to testing and whatever the latest brainchild of "Downtown" might be. And testing. 

We got more and more consultants and program preachers of one kind and another, and instead of being able to ignore them and do the work we were paid to do, the work that wanted to do--even the grading, sort of--we were now watched, monitored like prisoners in the yard to make sure we were there in the correct spirit. 

Meanwhile, our spirits were low.

Terrible experts who knew nothing about how their concepts would work in the classroom, nothing about the actual thing they were trying to fix, nothing about teachers and nothing about kids. 

I take that back. They all knew that teachers were the problem.

It was around this time that I remember starting to read about the profession and all the things that were wrong with schooling. All these articles by think tanks and foundations, by researchers, by economists and politicians and "thought leaders"--anyone but teachers.

Articles written by people who have never worked in a school. Articles full of interviews with people who have never worked in a school. These people have ideas about everything!

They have ideas about testing and standards and what the curriculum should and should not be. They have ideas about classroom management and teaching reading. They have ideas about class size and educational technology and how expensive school is. They have ideas about our pensions.

They have ideas about unions. They have ideas about school choice. They have ideas about the teacher shortage.

And they have power. They flood the zone with their essays and reports and studies that reflect their specific agendas and those of their funders. Do a Google search on topics like teacher pensions or school choice and the first ten or thirty results will be from one of these experts giving you their slant, and creating impression that theirs is the one true way to think about it. Look up one of their organizations and try and find information about them that doesn't come from them. They are a well-funded, committed bunch.

From the numbskulls that used to come to a room full of English teachers to offer advice on quick writes, to the motivated thinkers suggesting that the problem right now is too many teachers, it's no wonder that teachers continue to feel that their experience, intelligence, and expertise are not valued. And just try and ask a penetrating question or propose an answer that conflicts with the program of the day.

I write all this because I'm feeling it right now. As I've been looking at what Big Thinkers are saying about the teacher "shortage." As I'm now researching what some educonomists are saying about teacher pensions. These people have ideas.

Anybody who is or has been a teacher knows what is true and what is not. We are the ones who have asked the questions and dug deep to find real answers.

I can't help but think that we've had about all the help we can stand.

*h/t John Sayles, Matewan

Teacher Shortage? Don't disbelieve everything you hear. (part two)

Sorry it has taken so long to post part two of my response to cynical media denials of the "teacher shortage." Life intervenes, as they say. 

Anyway, although the actual articles critiqued here might now seem outdated and irrelevant (I hope that's true), the bad reporting that birthed them is certain to resurface, and so this post.

Update: It's already happened. See this from the AP today.  Similar to what I detailed in my last post, again we hear that the problem is only in "certain subjects, certain places, certain kinds of schools." Again we hear that "it's always been hard, and then the pandemic." And again we hear that "it's not a quitting problem" without hearing about the collapse in numbers of new teachers. And AGAIN we hear from the RAND Corporation.

We do get story after story of schools scrambling for staff, but this time we're also treated to a little "bright spot" at the feel-good ending where, in spite of the challenges, a student teacher, newly hired using "federal relief money," is "confident she is meant to be a teacher." I know the feeling, and I hope it's as true for her as it was for me.

There is no mention of the changes her school district intends to make in order to keep her, however. And that brings me to this: I've tried to figure out why all the deniers are so committed to this "no shortage" narrative. I even made a big long list, but maybe it's much simpler than that. Now I'm thinking that the objective is to pretend there's no problem until it's too late to fix it. (h/t Peter Greene here)

Now the post.

Yes, Virginia, there is a teacher shortage. 

The discussion around the shortage is lively among the researchers and writers who cover this beat, and of course among the students and teachers and other educators who are looking around and wondering, "Where'd everybody go?" and trying to survive and thrive in this macerated world.

Lots of this talk and work and even more talk is honest and dedicated to figuring out what's really going on, why it's going on, and what to do about it.

However, there is another side of the shortage "debate" that is definitely not honest, not well-supported by what little data is available, and often relies on the wishful thinking and pre-set agendas of academics and the ideologues who cite them. At best, these are savvy contrarians looking for attention. At worst, they are the enemies of public education working toward its destruction. These are the shortage deniers. 

A prime example of shortage denial is this piece from Jill Barshay and the Hechinger Report. Titled "PROOF POINTS: Researchers say cries of teacher shortages are overblown," it is a medley of selective quotation, deflection, and hyperbole. And I'm saving the subtitle for the punchline. 

Start with the title and the "overblown" "cries" of teacher shortages. That is not neutral language and neither is this article. From there Barshay acknowledges that "the stories are scary" but asserts that "education researchers who study the teaching profession say the threat is exaggerated."

Do they, though? Everyone acknowledges that the data are incomplete and inconclusive. That doesn't prevent some people from cobbling together selected quotes and favored statistics to draw definitive conclusions.

In what will become a recurring theme of hearing from the same Big Brains over and over, we again hear from economist Dan Goldhaber, who observes that “Attrition is definitely up, but it’s not a mass exodus of teachers," a quote Barshay uses to support her "overblown" claim. 

However, Barshay's next two paragraphs are apparently built on this paper, from a study that examined only one out of fifty states: Washington. And in that paper, Goldhaber described the situation in slightly less confident terms: "In sum, our opinion is that many of the recent media stories about rising teacher attrition rates are accurate in direction but, arguably, not in magnitude." I guess arguable doesn't tell the right story. 

We also once again hear from Heather Schwartz, RAND Corporation researcher, who offers no evidence but says, “Among researchers, I think we’ve reached a consensus that there hasn’t been an exodus of teachers during the pandemic.” That's what she thinks anyway, as she speaks for all researchers. 

We talked last time about the redefiners who dismiss the shortage as impacting only certain subject areas for certain kids in certain states. Now cue the pivot to the story Barshay's article is dying to tell: The real problem with the shortage--such as it is--is all that pandemic money rolling in. I kid you not. They want to argue that there's a "hiring spree" that only makes it look like there's a shortage. 

Barshay describes it this way:

Imagine that Google decided to expand its ranks of computer programmers. It might be hard to find so many software engineers and it would feel like a shortage to IT hiring managers everywhere. That’s what’s happening at schools. 

All this certainty--based on a feeling. Barshay reports that    "Schwartz doesn’t yet have data on the exact number of new hires, but she is confident that schools have increased head counts." Is that Schwartz's confidence? Or Barshay's?

Anyway, the problem isn't too few teachers; it's too many. 

So we end up where we were headed all along--The punchline. 

Here's the subtitle of the article: 

Schools are going on pandemic hiring sprees and overstaffing may be the new problem

All that free money juicing up the schools, see? All these "educators" rolling in dough and hiring all these teachers willy-nilly. 

I guess we're supposed to disregard the fact that (apparently based on the RAND study, though Barshay doesn't specify) "[t]he biggest areas of staff expansion were among substitute teachers, paraprofessionals or teachers’ aides, and tutors" which schools "lured" by increasing daily pay from "$115 a day to $122 a day." That's about 15-20 bucks an hour. 

I'm thinking this is not a solution to the teacher crunch.

Barshay gets to the point:

Schwartz says her biggest worry isn’t current teacher shortages, but teacher surpluses when pandemic funds run out after 2024. School budgets will be further squeezed from falling U.S. birth rates because funding is tied to student enrollment. Schools are likely to lay off many educators in the years ahead.  “It’s not easy for schools to shed staff and maintain quality of instruction for students,” said Schwartz.

Barshay finishes with: "That won’t be good for students."

No. No, it would not. You know what else isn't good for students? The chronic underfunding that existed before the pandemic. The constant churn in the schools The Economist called "the usual suspects."

Oh, and if you're waiting for any mention that schools were understaffed before the pandemic, or that the teacher "pipeline" is down to a trickle, don't hold your breath. Doesn't fit the counternarrative.

If the Hechinger article is full of stats and quotes cherry-picked to make the counter-case, Derek Thompson's article in The Atlantic, the one that started me down this road, is mostly just selected "experts" bloviating and Thompson hearing what he wants to hear. 

We get the busy Heather Schwartz again, and school choicer    Chad Aldeman, who "writes about education finance at Edunomics Lab" and is a critic of teacher pensions as well as an experienced skeptic when it comes to teacher attrition. We also get Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat and previous staff writer for The74. 

There is the usual proviso about inadequate data, the real shortage, according to Thompson, as he quotes Brown University associate professor of education Matthew Kraft's acknowledgment that his team couldn't draw conclusions "because of the weakness of the existing data.” However, that doesn't stop Thompson from somehow twisting it into support for Thompson's own claim that the "dreaded teacher shortage that so many educators had warned about" is exaggerated.

Next we get Barnum again and some stats cherry-picked to enhance the picture, and then we hear from Chad Aldeman again, and this time both he and Thompson want us to know that what we're seeing is a drop in enrollment and... wait for it... an increase in hiring. According to Aldeman, who is not sure but "think[s]" this must be true:

“I’m not confident about the education data, but I think we’ll eventually discover that public-school enrollment declined in the 2022–2023 school year even as districts hired more teachers than they had before the pandemic,” Aldeman told me. “If the student ratio goes down, it’ll be very hard to call that situation a ‘teacher shortage.'”

All this is asserted and used by Thompson to bolster his claim, even though Aldeman himself admits he is "not confident" in the data.

There is so much wrong with the article that it's honestly hard to know where to stop. There's some nonsense on teacher mental health and stress and how it's not yet a problem.    There's the requisite "not a shortage everywhere" and the obligatory and insidious "teachers just say they're going to quit." 

And from the use of "might be" and "I think" to suggest a conclusion for which there isn't sufficient evidence, to the selective omission--again--of the supply side of the teacher equation, it's hard to tell how much of this is dishonest, how much is glib savviness for the next cocktail party, and how much is just laziness. 

There are people who will do anything to avoid the obvious: People are not excited to teach anymore. 

So don't make yourself crazy (like I did) by reading their crap. Instead, for an honest look at teacher flight--which is real--and the reasons and solutions for it, read things like:

This, from Peter Greene, who spent almost forty years in the classroom and is now a writer for Forbes and his own blog, Curmudication. He starts with the standard "There Is No Teacher Shortage" as a hook, but immediately and thoughtfully cites both the durability of the shortage and the conditions that cause it (including the strained pipeline). 

He doesn't redefine the shortage but he does rename it, instead preferring to call it "an exodus, a slow-motion strike." His point is that referring to it as a "shortage" implies that "all of the nuggets have been pulled from the mine," and absolves us of the responsibility to find ways to improve conditions and attract teachers to the profession. Greene also gives his thoughts on why the "shortage" narrative persists and whose interests it serves.

Another writer who you should know and probably do is Anne Lutz Fernandez. I first encountered her work when I was working on a previous post about the shortage, in the form of her tweet in response to this article in the Washington Post:

They are leaving because teaching has been made unattractive and unsustainable. The drain won't stop until compensation, micromanagement & management through fear, de-professionalization, overwork & make-work, politicization of curriculum are addressed.

— Anne Lutz Fernandez (@lutzfernandez) August 4, 2022

Of course we are. 

I encourage you to read this piece of hers from the Hechinger Report. It contains an excellent breakdown of the reasons for the present crisis--yes it is--and some solutions that might help. You won't find any gaslighting, no denial or redefinition. Just an honest assessment of where we are and how we might get out of this jam. And she even suggests listening to teachers!

Attrition isn't the only way we lose teachers. We lose people who are trained but no longer want the job. We lose people because they hear and read what it's like and they wouldn't take the job in a million years. And talking to a bunch of Big Brains to "prove" teacher attrition isn't sooooo bad does not mean there's no teacher shortage. 

If you really want to know what's going on in schools, go to a few. Talk to people who work there. Most teachers are not shy about telling you what's happening and, as Greene notes, you're likely to hear, “We’ve been trying to tell you the house was on fire for years, and now you’re finally noticing something’s wrong??!!” 

We lose teachers--and pre-teachers--for the same reasons Greene and Lutz Fernandez and Waid and thousands of others have been talking about for... a while. The deniers can cherry pick all they want, but it won't fix the problem.

I'm retired. Greene and Lutz Fernandez are out of the classroom, but you don't have to take anyone's word for what's happening. If you want to hear from teachers who are quitting today, just go on YouTube or TikTok and search "teachers quit." You'll find hundreds of videos like this one, or this one, from teachers who have just recently been driven out of the classroom. 

And for those of you who say to us that these problems with schools aren't new, and if Waid or Greene or Lutz Fernandez can take it for twenty or thirty years, these other teachers should also be able to do it, just shut up.

The point is they are not taking it. And they shouldn't have to. 

Teacher Shortage? Don't disbelieve everything you hear. (part one)

Apparently there's a debate over whether or not the teacher shortage is real. As someone who retired in 2021 and contributed to the present situation--regardless of what you call it--I must say I'm surprised by that. 

We didn't have enough teachers when I was still in the classroom, and that was only halfway through the pandemic lockdown and before the ginned up don't-say-gay / CRT bs and book banning, and before Uvalde and the predictable "arm the teachers" plan. I've written about this before, here. I don't see things as being any better, and my friends who are still in the game tell me it's worse.

For whatever reason, a bunch of Big Thinkers in and around education have discovered they can get clicks by stringing together the musings of a bunch of "experts" and then putting the title "There Is No Teacher Shortage" above it all. I thought it would be fun to look at the different teams playing in this league and see if anybody knows what the heck they're talking about.

First up, we have the researchers themselves. These are organizations like the RAND Corporation, which launched its American Teacher Panel in 2014 and produces the State of the American Teacher Survey, the 2022 version of which seems to be the catalyst for lots of the discussion. 

RAND has been doing this for a while, and the latest survey has been interpreted to suggest that the "teacher shortage" narrative is an exaggeration.

However, in a classic case of "I don't think this means what you think this means," when I look at the survey results they do not support the sweeping "nothing to see here" conclusions of the deniers. First there are the limitations of the survey itself, beginning with the obvious challenge of using a sample size of 2,360 point-in-time responses to generalize findings to more than three million teachers. Then the researchers acknowledge a critical underrepresentation of novice teachers (first or second year). This is a serious hole in the data considering the propensity of newer teachers to leave the business at a higher rate relative to more experienced teachers.

With respect to indicators of a teacher shortage, the actual data from this survey reveal that "74% of respondents answered yes to the question: Have You Been Asked to Assume More Responsibilities Than Normal This School Year (2021–2022) to Make Up for Teacher or Substitute Staffing Shortages?" with 41% saying they've had to make up for "Shortages of Nonteaching Staff." Furthermore, 52% listed "Taking on extra work because of staff shortages" as a source of stress with 47% listing it in the top three sources. That sounds like a teacher shortage to me.

In addition, there is this report from a bunch of RAND Big Brains including Heather Schwartz, who we'll hear from again. The report, based on the State of the American Teacher Survey and titled "Restoring Teacher and Principal Well-Being Is an Essential Step for Rebuilding Schools," offers a clue to how we get to "no shortage." 

In a section titled "Poor Well-Being and Adverse Working Conditions Were Associated with Intentions to Leave," (resist the "duh"), researchers found that, indeed, stress from long hours, more responsibilities because of staffing issues, crappy pay, "exposure to school violence," racial discrimination, and harassment over Covid "safety policies" and "teaching about race, racism, and bias" were factors in teachers and principals expressing a desire to leave.

How many teachers and principals wanted to leave? According to the report, "In January 2022, about one-third of teachers and principals reported that they were likely to leave their current teaching or principal job by the end of the 2021–2022 school year," a number "up from about one-quarter of teachers and 15 percent of principals in January 2021." 

Nothing to worry about, though. Only about a third of the third actually leave--at least in the first year. From the report:

Although these rates are concerning, we hypothesize that they reflect some teachers’ and principals’ job dissatisfaction rather than a major disruption in the workforce. Although teachers who state an intention to leave are more likely to resign than those who do not state such an intention, intentions to leave are an imperfect predictor of whether educators actually resign. One pre-pandemic estimate found that one-third of teachers who stated an intention to leave resigned within the next year (Nguyen et al., 2022).

It's troubling that shortage deniers don't think that 10-12% of teachers leaving every year would be troubling. But this "sense" that teachers are dissatisfied, that they express that dissatisfaction in their intention to leave the business, and that they may threaten to quit but really won't, is at the heart of much of the "no crisis to see here" reaction. 

Most researchers point to the dearth of clear, comprehensive data. I would note that a lot of the data has been produced by economists and a good deal of it seems cherry-picked and massaged to serve an agenda. Nevertheless, several Big Brains have made noise recently by making categorical pronouncements like "There is no shortage." Let's take a look.

First, there are what I will call shortage redefiners. These commentators seem to be operating in good faith, observing--rightly--that there are thousands of teachers out here who have left the business because of untenable conditions. Some of those conditions are the result of the pandemic, but some have been festering for years. Still others are the result of bullying based on ideology and politics.  

These commentators offer an honest reminder that schools have been difficult to staff for a long time, and with all the present stresses on teachers, lots of us have simply declined to continue. Add that to a depleted pipeline--for the same reasons--and you get places like Arizona and Florida inviting folks to "come on down" and join the team. Lots of teachers have decided not to teach, these folks argue, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.  

Petula Dvorak, columnist for the Washington Post, is a redefiner, and she does it in her article "There’s no shortage of teachers. We’ve just driven them out of schools." The first sentence? "There’s no teacher shortage." 

She goes on to discuss the challenges of working the classroom in 2022 and gives important attention to the role the gender shift from male to female has had in licensing the present public contempt for teachers. She ends with: "The crisis isn’t the lack of teachers. It’s the nationwide disrespect for those in the profession." I don't exactly agree, but at least she did talk to a couple of teachers.

I find this argument curious and wonder if it would be made in any other area. If suddenly all the surgeons in the country decided they couldn't take it and became gardeners, would they simply be surgeons in waiting? Wouldn't we have a surgeon shortage? I think people waiting for operations might think so.

Or if people thought soldiering was too dangerous and stopped believing the patriotic hype and opted to sell shoes instead, we would certainly be hearing about a soldier shortage and worrying about national security.

I'm also fascinated by the claim that there isn't a "national" shortage, but merely an uneven distribution of teachers and teacher candidates across districts and states. In what other area would we say, for example, there may not be any plumbers where you live, but there's lots of them in a big city in the next state over, so you're all set. 

You can't take your pipes to them, so unless you can convince the plumbers to come to you, you've got a plumber shortage. And a problem.

In other words, for people making this argument, there continues to be a theoretical reservoir of teachers out there who are just in the wrong place, or who may be temporarily disenchanted with the profession but would certainly return if we'd just treat them better. As one of those whose disenchantment led to retirement at the first opportunity, I find this argument unpersuasive. 

It is important to examine the conditions that lead teachers to avoid a subject area, or a geographical area, or leave the business altogether, or that discourage people from becoming teachers in the first place. However, to the extent that this line of argument disguises and even minimizes the challenges of staffing today's schools, I find it counterproductive. 

I can tell you from my own experience that people who leave the classroom find other jobs and discover other things to do. We are no longer teachers and to define us as such and thereby lessen the gravity of the situation is naive at best and destructive at worst.

There is also a subset of the redefiners that is not operating in good faith. They maintain that any shortages are "only" in certain specialties, only in certain areas of the country, only in low income schools. It's difficult to ascertain whether they are arguing that these conditions disqualify the shortage from being "national," or that because the conditions only exist in these schools the shortage isn't as important.

The Economist, for example, called the concern over the shortage "hysteria" and suggested we not get too excited because "most pupils will have a teacher" and the schools experiencing shortages are just "the usual suspects." I'm not kidding.

And in a May 2021 article for school choice champion The74, Dan Goldhaber, an economist with the American Institutes for Research (and someone who has been on the too-many-teachers train for a while), writes that "there is not an overall teacher shortage. Nationally, each year, there are tens of thousands more people prepared to teach than there are available teaching positions." 

He does, however, acknowledge that there are "more specific challenges to staffing classrooms in particular schools and subjects." Among the usual suspects? Goldhaber finds that "high-poverty schools in Washington need to replace about 400 more teachers every year than do low-poverty schools."

Even so, his big worry is money.  "If the message is that people en masse are turning away from teaching as a profession, it might push policymakers toward generic solutions to the problem, such as across-the-board pay increases." A terrifying thought, apparently.

Just a side note: In what other pursuit do we question whether paying someone more results in more people wanting to do a thing? 

So we've got researchers and redefiners, and many of them are honest, and some of them are wrongheaded, and some just see what they want to see. 

But there is another side of the shortage debate that is definitely not honest. These Big Brains set out to "prove" what they want to be true. They pick and choose their “experts” and massage what little data is available to support their claims. Their team includes academics and the ideologues who cite them. They are the shortage deniers. 

We’ll get to them. Next.

Don't make yourself crazy.

This goes out to all of you starting up your school years, whether it's for the first or thirtieth time. In addition to having to learn names and do your actual jobs, you are going to be inundated with tons of crap that seems meaningless, counterproductive, and irrelevant to your present needs. 

If you are a rookie, you're going to be tempted to take it seriously. If you're a vet, you may forget how unserious it all is. This post is to remind you.

Rule 1: First, second, and third, pay attention to your kids. 

Get to know them well enough to enjoy them. Listen to them and they will tell you how you can help.

Do what you have to to hold on to your job, but all the rest of the nonsense foisted upon you by not-teachers doesn't even make the top ten.

Rule 4: Do not sweat your test scores. 

They are not your test scores. They are your students' scores. They reflect the SES of your students and their families, not your value (added or otherwise) as a teacher. The bosses know this. 

As long as you look like you care about the tests, you'll be fine. But for the love of John Dewey, don't let yourself be fooled into believing that they mean anything beyond the fact that this country continues to fail to address child poverty.

Rule 5: Don't sweat your job (too much). 

They need you much more than you need them. When they go on about "student performance" or "proficiency," they really only mean test scores, and that's something you have very little control over. Scores on the big standardized tests are not reliable and not valid, and they have nothing to do with what you are trying to teach. Pretend to care, but don't.

Rule 6: Other things you can't control.

Attendance. My administration used to try and chastise me for students missing class. By all means, cover your ass and make sure phone calls are going home and you reach out to the PSA counselor, but you have a job. Whether getting students into your room is a job for administration or the parents, it's definitely not yours. Again, pretend you are committed to whatever they think will work.

It might be somebody's job to check hallway passes and track down the wanderers and police the restrooms, but you have 20-40 human beings in a box and that's your job.

You can't stop every bad idea that trickles down from superintendent to local district to principal to you, but you can limit the damage. You can ignore some, and what you can't ignore you can sometimes modify. 

Rule 4: You have a job.

It is not your responsibility to make sure there's a teacher in every classroom. Cover a class if you want the money or can't get out of it, but either way make sure you get paid. When you cover, your job is not to teach geometry if you're an art teacher. It's to take attendance, get to know the students, and make sure nobody gets hurt. If they want a geometry teacher, let them find one.

Finally, join your union. My first union was the United Auto Workers in 1975. I'm a member of SAG-AFTRA and a life member of UTLA. UTLA is not perfect, no union is, and I've had my fights with them, but if you think things are tough now, imagine how much worse they could be. Then imagine worse than that, and that's where you end up without a union. 

The only thing between you and fifty kids in a class and unpaid training days and zero say in what you teach, is your union. The only thing between a satisfying if challenging career and being ground into dust ten years too soon, is your union. 

And if you are somebody who just takes the collectively bargained money and the delineation of duties and doesn't pay union dues, then fuck you.

Here's to a good start and smooth sailing. If you have tips of your own or any questions, don't hesitate to comment here or reach out to me at nowwaid@gmail.com.  In the meantime, good luck. Try to enjoy the ride.

Back to School: It's the tests.

It's August, and for millions of U.S. students that means the first day of a new school year. Here in Los Angeles, LAUSD classes started on Monday, and so the last week or so there have been loads of stories in the paper and on local news about Covid precautions, the new superintendent, and of course why in the world we start school in August.

Didn't it used to be different? Didn't those idyllic endless summer vacation days used to dissolve to the sound of that first bell just after Labor Day? Turns out the answer is yes and no, and yes.

As we were sipping our coffee the other morning and watching one of those stories on local morning news, the smartest person I know turned to me and said something to the effect of "Why does school start so early?" To which I replied, "Testing." "What?" "Yeah. It's so kids have more time to prepare for the big tests in the spring."

She couldn't believe it. "I had no idea." Then I couldn't believe it. I had no idea everyone didn't already know that. But it's true. And I'll bet there are lots of people who don't know.

For anyone who's spent a significant amount of time working in schools, the addiction to testing and the "data" it generates is common knowledge. In fact, it's hard to explain to outsiders how thoroughly the testing imperative dominates all other dimensions of schooling. It often feels as if the testing schedule determines and controls every hour of the school year, and in important ways that's true. 

In this wag-the-dog world, your pacing, the standards you are directed to teach, the way you structure your lessons and craft your assessments, even the language you are instructed to use with your students, are all dominated by the impending big test in the spring. Even Advisory activities and school assemblies seem to exist in service to the testing. The start of the school year, too.

I've included here once again the testing schedule for LAUSD: 

And here's the current table:

I've highlighted the exams with what I would call the highest stakes for administrators and their schools and their districts, and you can see that even though the second semester of school is particularly impacted by this madness, the most intense window of high stakes testing begins in February.

It starts with the ELPAC for English language proficiency reclassification, on which the district and state base their estimation of how well you are serving your English Learners. Then, in March, you begin the big math and ELA Smarter Balanced Assessments on which the bosses base everything else. And don't be fooled by the long window or the June completion date. Schools are forced to begin as early as possible in order to ensure as many students as possible complete the assessments. So the principal doesn't get yelled at.

Throw in the AP exams in May and you've got a busy spring spent under a lot of pressure.

It wasn't always this way. I don't think. In an effort to avoid being the "when I was a kid" guy, I did some digging around but the data is... elusive. In fact, when trying to answer the simple question "Are students going back to school earlier than they used to?" even Pew Research Center, in an article titled "‘Back to school’ means anytime from late July to after Labor Day, depending on where in the U.S. you live," admitted that   "[f]inding school calendars from years and decades past for our sample districts proved to be beyond the reach of this analysis." This one, too.

Reporting from CNN is a little more helpful, relating that while districts around the country vary depending on who's running the show in which state, generally up until the mid 1980's Labor Day was still a common boundary between summer freedom and back to school. By the mid 90's things were changing and the change continues today.

Los Angeles and LAUSD is an interesting case, as we were evolving our present calendar while also emerging from the mayhem of year-round schooling, the workaround initiated in 1981 for overcrowded schools. By the 2000s, as enrollment eased and schools moved from multiple tracks back to a "traditional" calendar, the trajectory was clear. However, the question remained as to when that calendar would start. 

In 2008-2009, the first day for schools on the "traditional" track was September 3. But by 2012 LAUSD had moved its single-track start date to August 14, and in 2017, when Bell Senior High School became the last year-round LAUSD school to return to a single-track schedule, that schedule started in August.

Of course, the world is full of Big Test promoters who are happy to tell you that the first day of school is different from district to district decade to decade, and that's true-ish. But anybody with a brain and a calendar can see it's different. 

The same bunch will also offer that it makes it easier on teachers and students to finish the first semester before winter break, or that shorter summer vacations produce less summer learning loss, or even that more breaks during the year make the early start necessary (instead of, perhaps more plausibly, the early start requiring more in-semester breaks in order to avoid finishing the 180 day year in April).

But here's the truth: All of those things would have been true for about a hundred years. What's different today, is testing. Beginning with Bush's "No Child Left Behind" (more about Bush 1 and Clinton some other time) and continuing through Obama's "Race to the Top," free market education became the neoliberal wet dream. And the market means competition, and competition requires metrics, and our present testing derangement was born. 

But we aren't encouraged to talk about that. Even in this CNN piece, although we are given lots of reasons for the change, number one is more instructional time before the testing begins, and yet nobody goes on the record. Only "several experts" who "agreed" that this was the big one. Reminds me of when I was still teaching and we brought in a bunch of consultants to help us with text prep, only we had to call it formative practice or some bullshit. Testing is the Voldemort of the education biz.

I guess maybe they're worried that if parents actually understood how much of their kids' school lives are devoured by test prepping and test taking and test talking, they might not think that the numbers which don't mean a thing to their kids -- You mean they don't need it to graduate? It's not for a grade? Will it at least help them get into college? -- are a good tradeoff for drama class or driver's ed.

Parents also might wonder why the family trip to Yellowstone or Las Vegas that they used to take with their parents every year as the end of summer/beginning of school is now unavailable to them and their children. Every year I taught, I had students miss the first week of school or the last week of school for family vacations. 

Sadly, come to think of it, I spent a significant portion of those years being mad at kids, which was stupid, because one of the most important lessons I learned later than I should have was how little control students have over their own lives. Lots of parents have very little flexibility with respect to trips and time off. Their kids have none.

In any event, the news stories ran back to back  one morning this week, and one was on starting school in 90 degree weather--117 in Palm Springs! (there's no air conditioning on the basketball courts or in the cafeteria) and one was on so many absent kids. I wonder if there's a chance the early start and the absent kids are connected. I don't wonder, really.

With the August 15 return to school, students have approximately three more weeks to prepare before the SBA and AP exams roll around, and three fewer weeks to just fool around learning afterward. What a waste.

Summer is not over. Testing is not that important. Or it shouldn't be. If you don't know, now you know.

 

How Shitty Is It? Updated.

There are numerous reasons people leave teaching careers prematurely or avoid them altogether, but as I wrote here and here, shitty pay is surely at the top of the list.

An outstanding new report by Sylvia Allegretto @Sly21 at the Economic Policy Institute uses data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to comprehensively illustrate what I previously described from my own experience at LAUSD.

I've included a couple of pertinent graphs here:

And here:

The pictures tell part of the story, but the report has a wealth of important information and connects the teacher pay issue to the teacher shortage and school funding overall. 

To the teachers out there: 

• No, you are not imagining things. I was getting screwed when I was in the game, and you are getting screwed now.

To the teachers in LAUSD and UTLA members in particular: 

• You have a right to the raise you're asking for.

To all the education reporters out there: 

• You need to include this information on pay every single time you report on the teacher and school staffing shortage. 
• You need to stop pretending that the staffing shortage is a mystery or a force of nature. Its causes are known. Enumerate them.
• You need to report the staffing shortage for what it is: a policy choice.

listen to "In Local News..."

In Local News...

The carnival comes to town. 

Can it live up to the advance publicity?

Students return to classrooms tomorrow and in lots of ways it will be like every other first day of school: seeing friends, sizing up new teachers, having the rules read to you over and over again. 

But for the first time the Los Angeles Unified School District will be back-to-schooling with its new boss, and he promises things are going to be different.

Alberto Carvalho took the reins at LAUSD in February after 13+ years running Miami-Dade County Public Schools. By all accounts, he is a good talker who enjoys the limelight. His pet patter includes "Skill set will set," "Academic temperature," and talk of "lost children" for students the district has lost track of.  

In addition, Alberto Carvalho loves him some tech. "Digital Empowerment." During a Discovery Education confab "Transition to Digital Classrooms" speech he gave in 2013, he pumped technology as "the most noble and dignifying of investments in our country at this time." In 2011, eSchool News selected him as "one of 10 winners of the 11th Annual Tech-Savvy Superintendent Awards" for, among other things, "increasing virtual school enrollment by 800 percent." That aged well. 

Carvalho is a slick salesman, but does what he says always add up? This morning he was on Face the Nation ostensibly to talk about the school staffing shortage, and when asked why teachers are leaving the classroom, his answer was a medley of insufficient pay, the pandemic with its "virtual learning," and somehow those dumb teachers who take early retirement before they even qualify for full benefits. Unsurprisingly, there was no mention of the other 150 reasons the job has become unsustainable. (see Edxit or: Where'd Everybody go?)

When asked about using alternative certifications and permits to fill vacancies and whether that lowered standards, Carvalho replied that "these are fully credentialed individuals" who have college degrees but "may not have the state certification." Um, what? 

He then defaulted to his talking point that the district is "for the very first time in over a decade fully staffed going into August 15th, the very first day of school." Which is, to say the least, unlikely.

The teachers union (@UTLAnow) finds it 'improbable' that @LASchools was able to fill about 700 vacancies in the last week. #LAUSD #caedu #edchat #LosAngeles https://t.co/C3qY8fA4Bm

— EdSource (@EdSource) August 12, 2022

He carried on with somethingsomething wide net and with what was apparently his safe word: micro-credentialing.

The way I read the district website, these look to me like specialized credentials available to already credentialed staff. If you're out there and you know more, please comment here or email me at nowwaid@gmail.com and educate me. Also, if the Super is hiding behind micro-credentialed newbies to say "these are fully credentialed individuals," I'd love to know about that, too.

He countered a predictable "is it really about money, though?" question with a nod to cost of living and working conditions (fleetingly) before landing squarely on "recruitment," almost as if they weren't connected. As with the "pay, pandemic, and early retirement" above, Carvalho again conflates teachers' problems (cost of living, working conditions) with his own (recruitment). It made me wonder if he is even capable putting himself in the shoes of LAUSD staff, of seeing students, families, and schools through their eyes. 

He took one more bite at the "fully staffed" apple and talked about the "lost children" who have left school, and that was it.

Nothing I've seen gives me confidence that Supt. Carvalho understands the inside of a classroom, or ways to support and recruit staff, or the limits of his own power and where to look for help. I know it's difficult right now to get young people to commit to a life in teaching, but it's not that complicated. The reasons teachers retire early are the same reasons people decline to become teachers in the first place: 

... teaching has been made unattractive and unsustainable. The drain won't stop until compensation, micromanagement & management through fear, de-professionalization, overwork & make-work, politicization of curriculum are addressed.

— Anne Lutz Fernandez (@lutzfernandez) August 4, 2022 (h/t @nancyflanagan)

You can't fix it if you won't admit what's broken. And unless Carvalho expects some nonprofit or public-private partnership send an army of teachers, he doesn't seem to have an answer.   (I discussed his Miami-Dade dependence on Teach for America here.)

Staffing is a big and chronic problem, but it's not the only thing the Super wants to tackle. Carvalho sees himself as a  transformational figure and he has plans. As I wrote here back in February, Carvalho is a big believer in school choice, which translates to competition among schools, which inevitably leads to test scores, which are bullshit. 

In fact, while boss at MDCPS, Carvalho facilitated the mass exodus of students from their neighborhood schools. This is from Answer Key back in December:

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)

As I wrote here back in February, another of Carvalho's favorite aphorisms is "One size fits none." It will be interesting to see if he applies that same principle to the district's standardized testing obsession. I'm thinking probably not. 

And finally, as you prepare to greet your students at the door and hand out those schedules and discuss your class rules and expectations, as you try and remember last year's names and start memorizing new ones, you apparently will be doing it without a contract. 

Of all the troubling aspects of the new boss, from his self-promotion to his faith in tech to his devotion to school choice, to a sense he just might be in over his head, nothing beats Carvalho's autocratic approach to leadership for "number one thing to be most worried about."

The UTLA contract expired at the end of June and Carvalho has refused to negotiate a new contract in good faith, instead counter-proposing language that would turn the union itself into a strikebreaker. 

Carvalho also scheduled four additional (optional) days of instruction without negotiation or discussion, further evidence of the "my way or the highway" style of leadership that has been tried--unsuccessfully--before. Nevertheless, both examples are alarming signs of what might lie ahead. 

In that Discover Education talk Carvalho declared, "Reform needs to be swift. Reform needs to be pervasive." 

He also detailed how he used the catastrophe of the financial crisis of 2008 and the recession to advance his policies in Miami-Dade. Carvalho described it this way:

We decided that the crisis was our friend. We're not going to complain. We're going to embrace the crisis and do every crazy great thing we always wanted to do today and blame it on the economy. And that's what we did.

And what were some of those crazy great things Carvalho did?

In four and a half years I have replaced, terminated, demoted, promoted sixty-four percent of all principals in [the] fourth largest school system in America. I did not renew 6,000 teacher contracts in four and a half years.

Carvalho goes on to say that they avoided national scrutiny by intentionally keeping a lid on what they were doing, thereby preventing blowback from "national forces."  

Behind the patter and the pageantry, Superintendent Carvalho is a dedicated "transformer," and intends to disrupt and break the district in order to remake it in his image. We should not allow ourselves to be fooled by the high-gloss exterior and we must not be taken by surprise. 

If any of you out there have additional information, I would be glad to receive it. If there is any way I can be helpful, please reach out.