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Holiday Wishes

May your classroom be full, but not too full, of eager students.

May your students not be jaded.

May they have turned off their gadgets before they went to bed.

May they greet you when they encounter you.

May they look you in the eye but not get in your face.

May they bless, not curse you.

May they never say “whatever.”

May they get their work done—by themselves.

May the sparks that light up their studies be sparks of interest, not Spark Notes.

May their parents appreciate what you do for them and see you as an ally.

May your classroom be live and virtuous, not virtual.

May you be the master, not the slave, of your classroom’s gadgets.

May your school’s and classroom’s routines serve not thwart your needs and your students’.

May your classroom’s main source of light be sunshine.

May its main source of sound be live voices.

May your bag of tricks be bottomless.

May the only value-added in your life be the value added to your abundantly deserved retirement accounts.

May your administrators be educators not businessmen.

May they keep education from becoming preparation for standardized tests.

May they never think that education is a product.

May they share your horror of baloney and pink slime, whether in the cafeteria, the classroom, or the office.

May they back you up not cut you down.

May your school’s mission be expressible in under ten words, none of them a superlative.

May nothing in your building leak.

May your school’s IT network work.

May value-added metrics be subtracted from your life.

May Arne Duncan enjoy a contented and very long retirement from his job as Secretary of Education.

May he spend it studying the work of Professor Harry Frankfurt.

May the Race to the Top bottom out.

May No Child Left Behind be left behind.

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No Artificial Teachers!

For the last four years I have been a critic of the advance of on-line “learning” and “virtual” “schools,” starting with  a discussion of a 2012 study showing that on-line ‘schools’ did worse at improving their students than did genuine schools. I welcome such studies but have claimed that even without them good sense could explain why they would fail and why they can’t get at the heart of good teaching. I argued that education is a humane profession not a set of processes, and that it is important for students to have real people at the core of their learning, not machines or dire transformationists.

This stance is reinforced (again) by research conducted at Stanford on the difference between on-line ‘learning’ and more traditional forms of learning. The recently released findings show that

“While findings vary for each student, the results in CREDO’s report show that the majority of online charter students had far weaker academic growth in both math and reading compared to their traditional public school peers…. This pattern of weaker growth remained consistent across racial-ethnic subpopulations and students in poverty.”  [emphasis added]

This news comes on top of the failure of California State University San Jose to implement an on-line learning program that came in with great fanfare but slunk away in ‘underwhelming’ results.

In my high-school debating team I learned to recognize ad hominem arguments—the kind that attack the person rather than the idea. Proponents of on-line ‘learning’ often say the reason teachers oppose it is that they are afraid of losing their jobs or are afraid of the unknown. Well, of course we would rather not lose our jobs, but most teachers I know offer educational arguments because they believe in them. As for the unknown: teachers don’t fear it, they face it every year on the first day of school. Skeptical readers who are not teachers are invited to manage a roomful of seventeen-year-olds and see what I mean.

I have written about undead educationist “thinking”; the stuff being talked about online “learning” qualifies as undead. It can’t be reasoned with and can’t be destroyed by research. Does anyone have a stake, a mallet, and a ton of garlic?

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Carnival of Errors

Shortly after the hasty departure of Professor Snape from Harry Potter’s school, a student asks what has happened to him. Professor McGonagall, the acting headmistress, replies, ‘He has, to use the common phrase, done a bunk.’ [Cheers] Like Snape, Bunkin’ Duncan has suddenly left the Department of Education. Unlike Snape, who was on a secret mission for the good, Duncan and his promoters seem to have done nothing but harm either in secret or in public.

A lurid but not extraordinary example exists in the unfortunate state of Tennessee. In their haste to be first in RAT[1], Tennesseans have built themselves a sinking ship of testing and teacher evaluation whose details have to be read to be believed. (Read them here.) I will choose only two to relate in this posting. (1) Teachers of ‘untested’ subjects like P.E. or music are to be evaluated by students’ math and English test scores, including students they don’t even have for P.E. or music. (2) Tenure is granted after five years only following excellent ratings for the prior two years.

The first item is so manifestly absurd and contemptible that nothing needs to be said except ‘Read your Mencken’ and ‘Where are the tar and feathers?’ but the second sounds at first like a reasonable proposal. Look more closely, though, and you will see it is just as bad, and perhaps more sinister. A Stanford professor has done research[2] determining that the measuring system is so volatile that teachers have only a 20% chance of getting excellent ratings two years in a row. That is roughly the odds of throwing a 7 in craps. Care to bet your career on a throw of the dice? Step right up! But thank Arne and DoE before you throw.



[1] RAce to the Top, the ironically named program of the Department of Education to replace one set of bad guidelines (NCLB) with another

[2] You have to pay $5 to read it, but I have saved you the time and expense by paying to read it and reporting it in this posting.

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The Arts of Give and Take

Education is not escaping the imperative to mechanize, as David Bromwich[1] details in his article “Trapped in the Virtual Classroom.” Though Bromwich’s article is also worth reading for its reflections on our intellectual wrong turns, I welcome it for its concern with the “arts of give and take,” which include conversation and Socratic discussion.

These arts are vital, and they are under threat. One of the chief threats comes from a perverse determination by educators and their commercial epigones to ignore elements of knowledge that do not lend themselves to mechanized treatment, and indeed to ignore elements of the mind that cannot be reduced to machine-likeness. How else could we have reached the point where knowledge of a subject is equated with the ability to take multiple-choice tests?

Take a classroom—mine—in which Theory of Knowledge students are examining how ethical knowledge is constituted and justified. The treatment is bound to be introductory and perhaps unavoidably cursory, but this course is not itself meant to be an ethics course. This week’s topic was corruption. I asked small groups to consider the Texarkana test preparation case[2] and the Atlanta cheating scandal and to come up with a definition of corruption that would cast a net around the bad fish but let the good fish escape. Their definitions went on the board, and I wrote a quasi-Socratic question by each one. We then have a conversation in which they reconsider their definitions in light of my definition-specific questions and these further questions:

1.     Are teachers who erase their students’ wrong test answers and fill in right answers corrupt?

2.     Are teachers who give their students right answers to tests corrupt, and are the students who receive them corrupt?

3.     Are teachers who offer courses of test preparation corrupt and are students who take them corrupt?

All of this is done using the “arts of give and take.” Nothing like the considered treatment and discussion would be possible in a mechanized transmission of information followed by multiple-choice testing. A good classroom seeks and sometimes achieves this educational virtue, and it is important to remember that such virtuous classrooms are not virtual.



[1] The Sterling Professor of Literature at Yale

[2] Used by Donald Campbell in his formulation of Campbell’s Law

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Roll Up Your Sleeves

Yesterday our school had its ‘Inter-house Swimming Gala,’ a day-long contest in which the school’s houses swam for victory, or waited to swim for victory. Hong Kong is studded with municipal swimming pools or, more accurately, complexes comprising many pools and ‘lakes’ with geographic features and, in the case of ‘our’ pool, bleachers; for we had the gala at one of the municipal pools.

I took not one but two seats in the Sargent House bleachers: one for myself and one for the steady stream of students who came by to talk during the gaps between cheers about their IB English submissions and their college admission essays. Finally, a bit after my last student conference and a bit before the end of the gala, I left with a colleague to attend a citywide meeting of teachers of the IB’s Theory of Knowledge course. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss the recently released ‘Prescribed Titles’ for ToK essays, due in March. The talks were productive and helpful.

This morning I had a letter from a former colleague, also of mature years if not as mature as mine, who with his wife took a job at another school in east Asia. Now, this former colleague established and ran one of the world’s pre-eminent Model United Nations conferences and took his students to two other conferences in addition to his work as a successful IB history teacher. He wrote to say that he was overwhelmed with work, though I guess he will find a way, as he always used to do, to stay on top of it. (When I had to go in to the school on weekends, as often as not he was there planning the week or the conference ahead. He is the teacher who taught me to use classroom furniture flexibly depending on the kind of lesson to be taught.)

Also this morning I read a wonderful article in The New York Times about Xavier University, a Catholic historically black college founded in New Orleans by St. Katharine Drexel, which has the most successful rate of placing African-American graduates in medical schools of any undergraduate program in the country, including the Ivies. I was highly impressed by the determined dedication to teaching and learning displayed by its faculty, and by the same kind of dedication displayed by its students, many of whom were from disadvantaged backgrounds and the first in their families to attend college.

The title of today’s posting is the Text: “Roll Up Your Sleeves.” Though care must be taken to avoid burnout in students or teachers, the late Jaime Escalante, a high-school teacher of renown, put succinctly what he thought the “secret” of success in teaching and learning was: “a very simple and time-honored tradition: hard work for teacher and student alike.”

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“Are Our Kids Tough Enough?”

The three-hour BBC documentary “Are Our Kids Tough Enough?” is about a group of Chinese teachers who travel to England in an experiment to teach 9th grade using Chinese methods for a month. It portrays the ways of teaching typically employed at excellent Chinese schools and in our laboratory school, which is rated Outstanding by Ofsted, the British office that inspects and regulates state schools. Watch it, but watch it with caution.

I think it is important to spoil the suspense at the outset: the Chinese teachers produce significantly better results with English pupils than do the teachers of an outstanding English state school. The reason you need to know this at the outset is that there is not very much evidence presented in the documentary of how these results are attained. Scene after scene shows boys & girls charmingly rebelling against the harsh and demanding teaching regime, sleeping during lectures, making mischief, and dissolving in tears; the classrooms are appalling nightmares of mismanagement and ineptitude. If the classes were really so constantly awful, how did the teachers succeed? The documentary will not tell us.

The makers of the documentary do a bit of playing to the British gallery. The soundtrack includes music from old prison-camp movies, the Chinese teachers are usually (but by no means always) shown as severe by contrast with the gentle British teachers, and the troublemakers are articulate and sympathetic, not feckless louts. The whole experiment is treated as a competition till near the end.

Again and again the charge is made during the documentary that Chinese teaching does nothing but tell students to take notes and memorize. This in spite of (brief) footage shown during the last hour of Chinese teachers giving help and encouragement, and of students working out an understanding. It also ignores the PISA results on solving problems with which students are not familiar, in which Chinese students outdo British and American.

In short, the documentary does an incomplete job. We are left with some big unanswered questions. They have to do with “Chinese methods,” but they also and more importantly have to do with the culture of learning. It may be that the larger questions are not questions of pedagogy but questions about what a culture values in its young.

We are not answering those questions in a culture where expectation and blame fall on teachers but not on students, parents and society.

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O horrible, o horrible, most horrible!

The school where I began my teaching career required all 9th-graders to be able to write a five-paragraph essay and all 11th-graders to write a successful research paper under the dual guidance of their English teachers and one other-subject teacher. I am not a great fan of the five-paragraph essay because I hold with Barzun that ‘all systematic devices for generating good writing are a mistake.’ Even so, I see the need for some students to start with training-wheels, as it were, before the unaided bike ride actually begins.

I was therefore deeply shocked to hear about a new-teacher orientation at a state university in which the following exchange took place. One new teacher asked the Director of Academic Technology what to do with students who ‘struggle with the five-paragraph essay’ and do not like writing at all. The director replied that the teacher might make an alternative assignment ‘like a poster’. (No advice on buying crayons and scissors was given.)

The principal of my first high school would have had a better answer to that question. It would have been to advise the teacher to help the students learn the five-paragraph essay. If a student had been foolish enough to assert to that principal that he did not like writing at all, the answer would have been very clear: If you want to be a sophomore, you will learn how to write a five-paragraph essay whether you like it or not.

If students at this university can avoid learning to write because they ‘don’t like it at all,’ what do they have to look forward to? The university’s president said at the same convocation that he wants students to ‘own their own minds.’ What a statement! Fan away the misty cliché about ownership and it becomes perfectly meaningless and unintelligible. If a student doesn’t like writing and therefore doesn’t have to do it, if he doesn’t like reading more than a few pages a day, if he doesn’t like demanding teachers and savages them in the course evaluation, if he likes computing but not counting, and if he can’t hold up for thirty seconds in a Socratic discussion, what kind of mind will he ‘own’?

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Strategic Planning for Goodness

Regardless of what verdict may be returned in the case brought against a former upperclassman of St Paul’s School for raping a freshman, the rector’s public reaction to the case is unsettling. On the one hand, he assures parents and students that the school remains ‘committed, as always, to ensuring our students’ safety and wellbeing [emphasis added].’ On the other, in the face of allegations that the school appears to turn a blind eye to sexual predation in certain circumstances, he says that ‘we could be doing better’ to plan and structure preventives to such things as ‘relational violence’.

‘Relational violence prevention’ is one of the eeriest euphemisms I have heard anyone use in connection with secondary education. It is possible that the rector is merely walking on eggshells, but yet another statement of his suggests a deeper problem. The New York Times reports that he said, ‘[the alleged rape] provides us with an important opportunity to reconsider elements of our shared life that do not appear in our strategic plan.’

Strategic plan? St. Paul’s School is an Episcopalian/Anglican school, or professes to be. The times being what they are, everyone professes need for a ‘strategic plan’, though organically constituted communities can manage without them, as did another Anglican institution, the University of Oxford, in its 19th-Century reform movement. More to the point is the implicit admission that strategic planning is not a be-all and end-all. How anyone could have thought otherwise?

Part of strategic planning is to identify opportunities and threats and to consider what might be done to take advantage of the former and keep the latter at bay. Anyone who has participated in this part of the plan knows how much fantasy and wishful thinking matter in the final lists and plan. Suppose you are in a planning group and you say, on the basis of evidence available to you, that one threat to a school is destructive and violent behavior by students countenanced or tolerated within the school culture. The chances are that within an insecure or disingenuous corporate culture your warning will be dealt with ineffectively or, worse, will be dismissed or derided.

But all this discussion should be beside the point. Schools should have moral compasses, which are one of the things that happily distinguish them, or should distinguish them, from educational software. By moral compass I do not mean the one that identifies bad conduct as ‘inappropriate behavior’. That sorry category makes date rape sound like a faux pas.

If the allegations now on trial should be proved true, and if as claimed the school’s culture is shown to have led to the behavior alleged, it will suggest strongly that St. Paul’s moral compass is faulty. That is a pity, for an effective traditional guide to conduct is available to St. Paul’s. It is called the Spiritual Works of Mercy. If that seems too sectarian, there is yet another guide available. It is called the law.

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In the Meantime…

Now that the unfortunate Motoko Rich has reported in The New York Times that there’s a teacher shortage, and Frank Bruni has editorialized about making teaching jobs more attractive, we can repose in the stability of inertia, one of two normal responses to trouble in the ed biz.

(The other response is to launch a futile and abortive revolution such as NCLB or RAT. The Didact’s Dictionary proposes a definition of inertia (n.): The normal state of education. The revolutions usually said to punctuate inertia are in fact extensions of it because nothing continues to change.)

Nonetheless, I have a few suggestions for dealing with the teacher shortage.

1.    Determine that public schools are a public good and that their teachers, like soldiers and police, should be shielded from the worst effects of the business cycle.

2.    Do something about the fact that teachers are dead last among jobholders for their relationship with their supervisors.

3.    Get rid of the demonstrably worthless ‘metrics’ used to impose false accountability on them.

4.    Train them truly and then trust them truly, as the Finns do. No fake teacher education, and no top-down management.

5.    End wasteful and unsustainable personnel management (e.g., lower 24% annual turnover rates to acceptable levels).

6.    Take school administration out of the hands of incompetent monsters of the deep.

7.    Bring up children like Jane Eyre’s Adèle, to be obedient and teachable.

8.    Do not impose unreasonable teaching burdens. Instead, like the Finns & Japanese, allow teachers time to do their work at school.

9.    Do not entertain false notions about the ease and simplicity of teaching, or think by reductive fallacies that it can be reduced to a series of steps that can be captured by software.

10.    If you insist on leaving teaching a miserable job, at least provide good pay and job security until that time in the unimaginable future when the world beats a path to education’s door.

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Touts at the Schoolhouse Door

 

At one end of San Francisco’s Broadway in a quiet neighborhood stands the Sacred Heart Convent School for girls, the soul of discretion. Its Wikipedia entry is only a few lines. It knows what it wants to do, as do its students and their parents.

At the other or neon end are (or used to be) the city’s topless and strip clubs. True, you could get gnocchi al pesto at Enrico’s or hear Tom Lehrer or Lenny Bruce at the Hungry i, and you can still buy ‘Howl’ at City Lights Books, where it was notoriously published sixty years ago. But for many people from the 1970s to the 1990s it was the topless joints that made the street famous. People would stroll by the topless clubs, each with its ‘barker’ outside touting the delights to be found within, such as ‘live girls’. (Gary Larson in The Far Side imagined an insect topless joint featuring ‘live females’, but that joke is less understandable today, when people often refer to men and women as males and females, than it was when Larson published it.)

The polarity of Broadway has its analogous polarity in education. At one pole are the schools that simply get along in their completeness, giving information to those who inquire and simply attending to their missions. Those missions are themselves simple and free of gongs and sirens. One school I know of has the mission ‘to provide a liberal education based on Christian principles’. One can hope that such a mission is free of baloney and that people are attracted to the school for all the right reasons.

At the other pole are the schools that ‘market’ themselves like barkers, inviting the young to sample the delights within, delights that usually fall far short of the barkers’ hyperbolic promises.  One such school, absurdly named Quest to Learn, even managed to get The New York Times to do its barking. I was not very hopeful that the children gulled into attending would come out with much to show for their efforts, assuming efforts were required. (This is not a sure thing, especially where ‘failure is not an option’.)

As my summer holiday continues I visited a former colleague who found a teaching job at one of the more ‘prestigious’ (what a word!) schools in the city where she lives. She has just quit, telling me that she is tired of an administration that seems more intent on barking than teaching. Part of the school’s ‘problem’ is that it and other schools ‘compete’ for the same students and try to catch them by pitching ‘the delights within’. It sounds less like admissions than like hunting season. I think the last straw was being commanded to make students take notes on computers only, not by hand, so the school would be 100% computerized. Since there can’t be any reason for 100% computerization that forbids handwriting, it must be to accommodate their pitchmen.

One mark of a potentially good school (there are others) is that it can be found at the right end of Broadway, so to speak, far from the barking crowd.