PDs: Tactical Weapons in the War on Teachers

Why do they do it? Why do administrators high and low insist on putting teachers through these instruments of torture aka “professional developments”? This is how it looked to me:

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. 

"Learning? What Learning? We're in the middle of testing." "I was misinformed."

Testing + PD =

Nuclear Powered Bullshit

Of all the PDs in all the towns in all the world, the ones purporting to be about “data” are easily the most absurd. More from Answer Key:

So if meetings are mostly bullshit, and PDs are bullshit, and as I've written before here, and here, and here, and here (among other places), data–specifically data from "Big Standardized Tests" (h/t Peter Greene Curmudgucation)-- is bullshit, then…

forty-four

PDs about data are nuclear powered bullshit.

These are the toughest to take without going completely insane. Besides all the philosophical reasons for opposing the toxic testing-industrial complex, and all the moral reasons for fighting against the reduction of human beings to data points, the numbers are phony. It’s all a fraud. The data do not mean what they say the data mean.

Now if you are tasked with administering these tests and you happen to be arithmophobic (an arithmophobiac?), you may not notice or want to, but the tests do not measure what they purport to. They are not reliable. They are not valid. First of all, if you’ve ever given a ten question multiple choice quiz to your students, you will know that even if you test exactly the same material again a week later, sometimes the same student will score higher and sometimes their scores will go down.

Performance on a task including an examination depends on any number of factors including blood sugar level and the quantity and intensity of available distractions. That is why no teacher worth the name would ever rely on a single assessment given a single time to evaluate a student in any significant way. 

We give tests, but we also give projects and writing assignments short and long, formal and informal. We assign debates, we listen to conversations and questions and we try to get a comprehensive, meaningful picture of what each student knows and can do along with some idea of what they need--particularly from us--in order to be able to know and do more. In other words, it's the opposite of the testing-industrial imperative. And it's not likely to be featured in a PD.

But it’s even worse than that. In addition to not measuring what a student has learned, the tests don’t deliver even within their own narrow objectives. They do not measure what they say they do.

I’ll give you an example: My school hired a group of education consultants to boost our test scores. (Hilariously, we were not allowed to acknowledge that’s what we were doing.) We had days and days and days of meetings with these “experts”--only the math and English departments of course, because (sotto voce) That’s what we test. Meanwhile, everyone else could work on what they needed to do to prepare for actual teaching.

And when we were through with these literal weeks of PDs, we had created five exams to give in each class, one every five weeks and each test would assess five distinct standards representing five discrete skills. That’s five, then five weeks later a different five, then a different five, until we get to twenty-five. Why twenty-five? They’re most frequently on the test.

And after each test we would look at how dismal our scores were and compare them to the previous test to see if they went up or down. In a PD about data* we would assemble in the elementary cafeteria and show each other our dismal scores (our scores? our students’ scores?) and make up a story about why our scores might have gone down or up, and we’d make posters and cut out student names and put up the posters around the cafeteria and go one-by-one around the room and tell our stories and stand for our sins. That is, those of us in the math and English departments. All others adjourn to your rooms to work on teaching stuff.

The tests were all different and "tested" different standards and skills. We were told we could not test the same things twice even if just to see if we had made progress. We compared scores from different kinds of tests and had to pretend that the improvement or decline from one test to the next meant something. “Wow, those kids really got it this time.” “Oh, (downward inflection) that’s disappointing. What did you do differently?” “I taught different stuff!” And we did this for years.

I tried several times during the early days of the catastrophe to point out that we were not actually measuring progress or the lack of it. “It’s apples to orangutans!” “Five answers to five questions is not a valid measure of proficiency!” “Who chose four correct answers as the benchmark for proficient? And why?” “Skills? Standards? I looked at the data and my student scores tracked their reading levels. Aren’t we really just assessing their reading?” I was... unheard.

And there’s more. We were required to give the exam--in English--to every single student. Boost scores? Shhh! Yet we were required to prep for and administer the exams to seniors who would never be taking another test in high school. Our ELD teacher was forced to give the exam--in English--to newcomers to the U.S. who had been in country for a week and spoke zero English. For these students and others, and for the teachers in their classrooms, the tests were a deliberate insult.

So why doesn’t someone put a stop to it? The testing for ratings for rewards and punishments is big business, that’s why. Hundreds of thousands--maybe bazillions of people are deeply invested in its preservation.

But doesn’t your administration understand how destructive it is? Why spend so much time prepping and administering and "analyzing" data that is so meaningless?

“It is difficult to get a man [sic] to understand something, when his [sic]* salary depends upon his [sic]* not understanding it.” Words by which to solve the puzzle and unriddle the world.*

So what do teachers do? Do what you always do: use your experience, expertise and best judgment to assess and support your kids. Be honest: Why does this matter to us? It doesn’t, but do your best anyway. 

Students, not skills. Students, not curriculum. Students, never ever Big Standardized Test scores. Start with the kids and what you want for them. Work backward from there to the curriculum. Figure out the standards afterward, and leave the "data" for the bosses to figure out.

Whatever you do, do not take them seriously--not the scores, not the administrators, and certainly not the PDs about data. Give the tests. Look busy at the bullshit PDs. Keep your job. Do not internalize their madness. 

*I prefer accurately quoting a source even if they are trapped in the sexist language of their day, but I didn’t want you to think I hadn’t noticed. Feel free to translate to the 21st century: It’s hard to get someone to understand something if their stock options depend on their not understanding it.

The Bull Sessions also known as Professional Developments

In reading about the experiences teachers are having this PD season, I see a lot of frustration and even disgust at being trapped in a grueling, insulting dog-and-pony show. Of course, I have a lot of sympathy for those of you still out there grinding, and I write to offer some context and encouragement. 

Like many of you, I can count on one hand the number of PDs I attended  that were actually helpful and that were conducted by people who knew what they were doing. Mostly these sessions were just exercises in patience, in how to hold your tongue and keep your head from exploding while thinking about the gazillion really important things you could be doing with that time.

Writing as a guy who went through PDs summers, weekends, and Mondays-then-Tuesdays for twenty-five years, I want to reassure you that your anger is righteous, you are not alone, and you can get through it if you keep in mind what’s really happening. Second in a series.

 Bullshit

This is from something I wrote called Answer Key: A Teacher’s Completely Unofficial, Fiercely Unauthorized Handbook and Survival Guide.

forty-one

Meetings are mostly bullshit.

Most of the people who call meetings do so because it’s their job. You can begin by remembering that, if your job is to go to meetings, you think having meetings is a job. It is not. As a teacher, going to meetings is most often a thing that keeps you from doing your job, keeps you from your work, makes it harder and makes it take longer.

People who have meetings are mostly out-of-classroom personnel looking for a way to justify their paychecks. They need access to you in order to check an “I did this” box, and they need a mechanism for pushing their work onto you. I think you’ll find that you can ignore most of what happens in meetings because, and this is true, I probably had the same exact meeting about differentiated instruction twenty times. Every time they were going to follow up and we were going to create a plan and report back and blah blah blah, but nobody ever follows up. That’s why you have to start from the same place and say the same shit twenty times. Check box.

Meetings with colleagues where you work together to set your own agenda and are free from bosses “checking on you to see if you need anything” are not bullshit, but they are still a pain in the ass. Everybody is busy and you always have something else to do. But even though they may include a preliminary bout between anger and exasperation, and often a detour into bellyaching and recrimination, they are still the most productive meetings I ever had. We actually did stuff that was actually relevant to our actual jobs. At least it felt like we were on the same side, mostly.

forty-two

Professional Development(s) are Bullshit.

Meetings called “professional development” are almost always bullshit. They are often delivered by people who don’t know your school or your students, and sometimes the messengers may not even know their own material. They may be there to show a video or read a presentation to you. On occasion, the meeting you were asked to prepare for may not even be the meeting you get. 

On this one I couldn’t even blame my bosses–not entirely anyway. I’ve had decent administrators turn entire PD weeks over to a teacher or team of teachers and suddenly the district sends a directive at 2:45 and it has to be done that day yadda yadda compliance. Check box. However, that doesn’t make it any easier to take.

Administrators are not teachers for a reason. Everything you know about constructing a lesson, sharing important information, following up in a timely manner, all that stuff is missing from the administrative brain. That’s how for twenty-five years, instead of what ought to be a five hour deep dive into parent outreach or child abuse recognition and response or support for special needs students, you get the exact same first hour of that PD over and over and over again.

These things will always be true:

• It’s frustrating to sit through the same PD for twenty-five years.

• It’s not always their fault, but that doesn’t make it any easier to take.

• It’s exasperating that there is never any follow up or follow-through.

• It’s maddening to have to sit through canned presentations from consultants who know a lot less than you do and get paid a lot more.

• It’s demeaning to be forced to do busy work in a workspace shared with a hundred other busy workers just so the marshals can monitor your pace of play and your attitude, you know, in order to make sure you're smiling through the bullshit.

And finally,

• It is degrading to be asked by administrators, “How can we make PDs better?”   It’s degrading and infuriating. And fucking ridiculous. They know. Of course they know. 

And if, in a moment of weakness or amnesia you actually give them an answer, they just pretend they haven’t heard you.

And that I do not forgive.

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

It's PD season in schoolworld and I've written a fair bit about my professional development experiences through the years, so I thought I'd review my thoughts and see how they match up with what many of you are going through (based on the descriptions some of you have shared on EX). Unsurprisingly, I see things haven't changed much. First in a series.

Wednesday, September 14, 2022

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

requiem for the sports pages

I want to take just a moment to mourn the passing of The Sports Pages.

I've been reading the sports pages since I began reading for myself. Dick and Jane and Spot were okay for school. Dr. Seuss was great. Tom Swift was good if you had the time. 

But the sports pages were a refuge. In the world I was growing up in, filled with war and protest and assassinations and riots, the sports pages made perfect sense. Everyone played on the same field and I had no idea that it hadn’t always been that way.

One of the beautiful things about sport is that there's a clear winner, a clear loser, and practically nobody dies. The stakes are momentous and pretend. Tomorrow is another day. We'll get'em next year. 

The sports pages I read just for me. 

You could picture any batter and any pitch. You could track the triumphs and struggles of your favorite players and your favorite teams. Like magic, you could have a seat at any game in any city. 

I read the articles if they were good and I had the time. But the real bedrock of sports pages were the standings, and the box scores that told their story. These precious little rectangles of tiny text were safe places to go and live inside a world of numbers and names that generated images at once familiar and exotic. They could take you to the game--any game--in an instant.

The sports pages make perfect sense because of their unequivocal clarity. A baseball box score is a wonder, containing the story of a particular game and the narrative of a season up to that moment. I’d pick through walks, hits, and look for how batting averages moved up or down. Then I'd shift to the standings to see how this single event had helped or hurt my favorite team as they tried to beat out rivals to the playoffs and--hopefully--the World Series. 

Later on I would discover football box scores! and hockey! But my first love, and my first experience of reading for myself, was with the sports pages spread out on the living room floor while my dad sat in his chair reading about the war and the riots. It felt important. Like something grown-ups do.

Sadly, for readers of the New York and Los Angeles Times, that option no longer exists.

Those newspapers (can we still call them papers?) have abandoned the field to digital media and discontinued carrying standings and box scores. They still have sports sections of a sort, but they resemble the human interest stories usually reserved for Sunday magazine features. Gone are the guts of the sports pages. 

What is a sports section without box scores? What is a sports section if you can't even find the standings? 

Without that essential element of sport, there are no more sports pages. And that means some little kid learning to read will be clutching a device, scrolling for scores, maybe messaging friends. Turning those pages on the living room floor at my dad’s feet was a rite of passage into adulthood. Now it's gone, like so much else.

What does that mean?

I wrote in the last post that the best teaching guidance I ever got came from a colleague who advised, with regard to students, "Your only job is to love them." It’s a true story, but I wanted to expand and clarify. Even as I was writing it I was thinking, “What the heck does that mean?” What did it mean to me?

In my career this advice formed a perfect framework for my practice, a perfect center from which to operate, but what did it look like? And since each of us has to do the work of understanding what it means to us and to our students and to each student, what can it look like? And how do you measure it?”

For me, loving my students meant that every decision I made was based on what I judged to be in the best interests of one or all of them. It’s easy to say “Of course! That’s obvious!” And it may be obvious in the abstract, but in the real world it’s not so simple. There are choices that are risky, choices that are difficult or burdensome or just damned inconvenient. 

From what book to teach (or, as test-prep pressure has ramped up, even to teach books at all) to seating arrangements to the amount of homework to give to whether to go out on strike, I tried to make all my decisions entirely from the perspective of what’s in it for them. That way I was able to figure out what to do, and able to rest easy in my decisions and defend them to those who criticized my choices. 

Just remember that you are the expert in the classroom. You know better than any administrator and almost every coach or consultant you will ever meet. Be confident in your choices. Treat the kids like the humans they are.

Your choices will surely be different from mine, of course, but just keep in mind that our students are fully incorporated human beings, developing and incomplete (who isn’t?), with needs and dreams and anger and sadness and humor and insight and everything else. They are not “problems” but puzzles. They are not numbers on a spreadsheet or avatars of your brilliance. They are not the enemy unless you make them the enemy.

What they need to know is what’s in it for them. And they need to know that we are asking and answering that question on their behalf every day. That’s what we’re there for.

It doesn’t mean you have to be a pushover in the classroom. Or even particularly nice. Every student I ever met–including the ones who didn’t like me very much–knew one thing: I was there for them. I cared about them. I cared for them. I asked a lot of them because I believed in them a lot. They know when you’re on their side and when you’re not.

Now, nobody who ever took any of my courses would say it was a sappy feel-good place to be. Or easy. We worked really hard. That’s how we proved we cared–about the work and about each other. They knew I believed in them because I asked them to know and do things they hadn’t before. They got bigger, and so did I by knowing them.

But knowing students is not what modern school big-brain thinkers think is important. If it can’t be quantified and by that I mean reduced to its least important, least relevant, least informative number, then it’s not important. We value what we can measure. Easily. At least the bosses do.

I’ve written before that the concerns of school bosses–principals, directors, superintendents, school board members, as well as state and federal officials–are not congruent with those of teachers or even students. In many cases, those sets of concerns are not even compatible. Instead of individual human beings, bosses tend to think of students as aggregations of data points which, when properly assembled, lead to a promotion and a better job in the district.

Take testing, for example. Test scores, at least those on the Big Standardized Tests (h/t Peter Greene), are bureaucratic, sometimes political concerns, and the bosses dedicate a lot of resources to the administration of those tests. Administrators also try to convince teachers–often through fakery and intimidation–that they should spend a ton of classroom time and other resources on the attempt to raise scores.

As others have written here and here, and as I’ve written here, and here, and most recently here, these tests are not useful. The data are invalid and unreliable and, at best, the tests measure the degree to which a student reproduces a set of favored knowledge within prescribed terms of expression, in a single-session time period. Fundamentally, Big Standardized Tests are a sorting mechanism that tracks poverty and propels a "failing schools" narrative.

In fact, they are destructive with negative impacts on students as the curriculum is narrowed to service the testing and time is diverted in an effort to pump up scores.

So when you are faced with giving a Big Standardized Test that is effectively meaningless and even detrimental to your students but high-stakes for your school, your job, and for the way your boss is likely to treat you, what do you do? How do you reconcile a vicious testing regime with the prime directive of loving your students? Here’s how I did it: I gave the test.

I gave the test because I wanted to keep my job. You probably have to give the test in order to keep your job. Ask yourself if your students are better off without you. If the answer is “no,” and it had better be, then there are things you have to do in order to be there for them.

However, you don’t have to spend two weeks of instructional time trying to pump scores so your life will be easier. You don’t have to pretend to your students that the test is the most important week of the school year. And you don’t have to “touch the poster” of standards three times a class in the hope that magically scores will go up. They say “Don’t forget to touch the poster”; I say my students expect more than performative childishness. I won’t talk down to them (the way some bosses talk down to teachers).

There are other ways to push back, to love the kids more than you love smooth sailing, a slightly easier day at the office. 

Is your boss trying to enforce some PD consultant’s brainchild of stopping what everybody is doing every fifteen minutes and pushing them around the room in a mingle? Research-based! Ignore the boss the moment your students look up and say “Aww, it was just getting good!” You might get a mean face from your supervisor or called into a meeting, but you will have done the right thing for the right reason and you can feel good about defending your decision.

Do you have a tree on campus fit to read poetry under? Take them there one afternoon. Disregard questions about “rigor” or standards. Answer if your bosses ask, but don’t take them seriously.

You want to take the class on a walking tour of campus to help out new students? I did that and got berated by an assistant principal. I “won” my grievance and got an apology (of sorts). Honest! And I kept doing the tours.

We had a problem with tardies first period, so I started asking every tardy student to come to the front and sing with me. ABCs or Wheels on the Bus–you know, school-related. We went from twelve or so students coming anywhere from two to thirty minutes late to one or two students coming five minutes late. One of them complained to my principal and I got written up for that one and had to stop and tardies went up again. Sometimes you lose.

In the end, what does it really mean to “love your students”? For me, it was to keep trying to get better. Keep trying to learn more about your content. Keep trying to learn more about each student because the truth, for me at least, was that the answer to what it means is different with every student, for every teacher, and it can change every day, every year.

Keep trying to generate better lesson plans. Keep looking for better materials. Observe other classrooms. Talk to colleagues about what works for them. Come to school every day unless you just can’t take it, then take a day off. That’s for the kids, too. 

Simply put: Listen. Show up. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Say you’re sorry. Prepare. See the big picture. Give second chances. Give them the time they need. Give them your time.

This all sounds peachy, but how do you measure it?

First of all, not everything great and almost nothing sublime can be measured at all. Keep that in your heart.

Second, you sure as hell don’t measure your expertise, your effectiveness as a teacher, or your commitment to your students by adding up scores on a generic Big Standardized Test. If you want to know how you’re doing, get to know your students. 

I used to start every year by getting to know the kids, at least a little. We spent a couple of weeks just talking and writing and playing a few games. I got my share of side eye from colleagues (“Aren’t you getting behind?”) and bosses (“When are you planning on starting?”) but it was worth it to watch the kids re-connecting with friends they hadn’t seen, give them space to ask me questions and get to know me, and to start to figure out who these people were. 

I started from the position that I couldn’t know if my students were getting something if I didn’t know what it looked like when they did and when they didn’t. That was me. But of course that’s not the work my bosses wanted me to do. They paid lip service to the importance of a “safe, respectful, responsible” environment that valued each student, but their focus was always on test scores and how everything I was doing–we were doing–impacted those scores. My friend Nick used to remind me that you tell an organization's priorities by the way it allocates resources. Actions, not words. Follow the money.

That’s why you get programs–treatments, not treats. In his Curmudgucation post "A Treat, not a Treatment," Peter Greene writes:

Harold Pixley, one of my high school band directors, used to have a saying that summed up his programming philosophy; 

Give the audience a treat, not a treatment.

His thinking was that the music should not be some kind of unpleasant medicine--good for you, but unenjoyable, a painful cure for what ails you.

Some education discussions remind me of Pix's words. There's this continuing thread, this notion that the Youngs all suffer from a variety of maladies, all distinguished by what the children lack--knowledge, understanding, skills, etc--and it is the job of schools to give children a treatment to fix them.

I saw this over and over while I was in the classroom. Sometimes it was the students they were trying to fix. A lot of times it was the teachers. Regardless, the “treatment” usually came in the form of a new technique or program, usually with a new acronym, and it invariably involved ridiculous PDs and served as a make-work project for school-based coaches and imported consultants. 

Not that we ever had the chance to implement them before the next new new thing came along, but what would have indicated success? That students were “fixed”? What do you think? They didn’t spend billions of dollars creating billions of tests for nothing.

The problem? As Greene observes:

Education treatment fans dismiss the premise that a teacher needs to know or know about the students. The right treatment will always work. And because they focus on the deficiency, education treatment fans often display an absurd lack of understanding about human children or the education thereof.

<snip>

The related premise of the treatment school of education is that children are pre-humans, being prepper for their Real Life, which hasn't actually started yet. Therefore, the daily concerns of things like joy and accomplishment and building relationships and figuring out how to be your best human self in the world--none of those things should matter. 

But they do matter. They matter or nothing you do makes any difference anyway. Not to them, and not to you. 

So how do you withstand the deluge of bad ideas and weather the storm of pressure to act in the interests of the district, or the school, your department, or your self? The answer to that question is the best teaching guidance I ever got.

When you’re not sure how to proceed, or you are getting criticism or pressure from your bosses, resist all the bad ideas you can, trust your instincts, and use your own best professional judgment to act in the best interests of your students. 

Your only job is to love them.