The Ambler

There was an Irish journalist living in the US who used to assert that the way American media deal with contentious issues is to oversimplify and to omit important elements of the issue from their ‘discussion’. His hypothetical example, given tongue in cheek, was a media ‘debate’ on cannibalism, in which ‘one side’ contended that it should be permitted while ‘the other side’ contended that it should be regulated. I was reminded of the ‘debate’ on cannibalism when I glanced at a New York Times ‘debate’ on how to raise students’ test scores by producing better teachers.

The resemblance of this ‘debate’ to the mythical regulation of cannibalism lies in what is left out of the discussion: producing better evaluations of teaching and learning, producing better administrators, producing better funding, producing better working conditions, producing better models of school operation, producing better attitudes towards quick fixes, particularly e-fixes, producing better schools of education, producing better parents, and producing better students. Any ‘debate’ or program that addresses only one or two of these desiderata will be inconclusive or come to grief. Any program that punishes ‘bad’ teachers without producing the other necessary conditions of teaching and learning will be bound to fail.

An illustration of what I am talking about occurs in a blog posted in The New York Times this morning. The headline promises a story about a New Electronic Product that makes math teaching more effective. However, the blog tells a different story to someone who opens out the focus. It seems that in the course of making the e-stuff work, the school featured in the blog has found out some of the methods used in Finnish schools.  Online learning is one of the edbiz’s and the Times’s debating points, and so the interesting Finnish-style classroom arrangement (though with four teachers for 120 students instead of the twelve that that number would have in Finland) receives notice but not focus. Since Finnish schools cost the government a fraction of the typical US school, and since the proprietary software is very expensive, we should expect a discussion of this innovation to investigate these other possibilities too. Without a proper investigation, the software may turn out to be like one of those breakfast cereals of empty calories that provide nutrition when eaten with milk, fruit, wheat toast and no sugar. Instead, the blogger focuses on ‘proving’ the software.

It would be interesting to know whether the teachers could be given the prep time that Finnish and Japanese teachers get. These teachers are in the classroom about 55% of the time that American teachers are, and use that time to prepare good lessons, not needing to rely on expensive proprietary software to get them through their bloated workload. But giving teachers less classroom time is not a part of the ‘debate’ either.

Far from it: the ‘debate’ focuses on the charter schools, but not on their unsustainable depredations on the ranks of teachers-to-be (24% annual turnover on the average). This style of crap-through-the-goose personnel administration needs more examination than it is getting, as do the working conditions that lead so many young persons to flee the field of education. But the problem affects not-so-young teachers even more: teachers with family responsibilities who don’t want to spend eleven hours a day at the school and then two or three hours at home doing ‘homework’. Today’s Guardian has an anonymous story by a teacher who with her husband committed career suicide in order to have family time with their daughter. The biggest reason was the unreasonable working conditions, but can you imagine an article in an American paper featuring a teacher subjected to similar or worse conditions? It’s not part of the ‘debate’. Indeed, so far from the ‘debate’ are teachers’ working conditions that reporters can misreport research showing how high the stress levels of teachers really are.

Far from the stressful crowds of teachers lie salvific foundations like the Gates Foundation, which spent $45,000,000 to promote a radically defective system of ‘value’-‘added’ ‘metrics’ that is bound to fail when it is used in the RAce to the Top and the foundation’s findings are used to support huge payments to education companies for defective systems of testing. None of this defectiveness has received attention in the mainstream media. The shortcomings of foundations were analyzed keenly by Barzun in his book The House of Intellect (1958), and those of standardized tests by Banesh Hoffmann in his Tyranny of Testing (1962); but these findings have also been largely ignored.

And few people are discussing, or want to discuss, the role of bad child-rearing and administrative practice in producing defectively educated children. Parents who hire lawyers when Junior fails his assignments and administrators who tell their teachers that ‘failure is not an option’ are depriving young people of the kind of learning ‘opportunity’ that they will face on the job if they have not learned how to think and do a job of work—and face in less supportive conditions than those at school.

What all this narrow focus and glossing-over ensures is that the narrow solutions thrown up by ‘the debate’ will be inadequate to the task.

A friend sadly reports that an old mentor of hers has died.  Under Sister Mary Richard’s guidance she “studied Carlyle, Ruskin, Thackeray, Wordsworth, Emerson, Thoreau, and a host of others. The fact that I still remember some of the lessons and how they made me feel speaks volumes to things that cannot be measured on a test.” And Sister was as exigent as she was memorable: she “required not only frequent composition, but also what seemed like endless re-writing of poor work.”

It speaks volumes for the ethos of schooling where Sister taught that if she required rewriting, her students would do it. Contrast this with the ethos reported by Garret Keizer, in which students simply ignore his demands and reprint unchanged the compositions he marked up. It also speaks volumes against value-added metrics that they might select Sister as a good teacher and Keizer as a poor one, regardless of the ethos that informs their students’ work.

My friend was bound to tell what she knows in Sister’s class because of those frequent compositions and the meetings where she discussed them. This is by contrast to students who memorize little gobbets of learning and fill in blanks or point to letters of the alphabet on their assessments. Emerson said, “I hate quotations. Tell me what you know,” but multiple-choice (or multiple-guess) testing is rendering Emerson sadly obsolete.

It is also, equally sadly, rendering teachers like Sister Mary Richard obsolete, and teachers like Garret Keizer: teachers who insist that students revisit their work in order to make their thinking and writing on it the best it can be.  Such abdication may explain why the freshmen at many ‘colleges’ read at the 7^th-grade level. Professor Barzun reports that a graduate student of his came to him in tears after her third failing grade. Conversation revealed that her other teachers had made the same comments he made, but “the comments didn’t matter.” Barzun forced his student to be responsible till she learned what she had to do. To those who object that schooling should be a tepid bath, the answer of our three teachers is that education, like ambition, should at least at times be made of sterner stuff.

What kind of teacher is favored under the VAM[1] regime? I had a clue offered recently when visiting a school I used to be familiar with, but that has become nearly unrecognizable. Its teachers are disaffected, which they did not use to be; and its current Chief Executive talks a line that includes the importance of VAMs. The way success is judged is by standardized test results. The Chief Executive says[2] that the kind of teacher he wants is someone who has taught little or not at all and can be “molded”—and, presumably after a few years of teaching to tests, discarded and replaced (the annual turnover rate of teachers in charter schools is 24%). An experienced teacher’s skill and discretion at teasing out the best thinking, speaking and writing are not needed because these powers are not demanded of students who bubble in their learning on Scantron sheets.

What is more, he intones that “failure is not an option.” He does not say this to the students to exhort them to do their best. He says it to the teachers so they will not act like Sister Mary Richard or Professor Barzun when students need reproof or a severe judgment. Barzun notes that reproof must be accompanied by encouragement, not that encouragement may not include reproof.

There is an eerie parallel between the formless failure-free processing the CE wants in lieu of education and the school’s campus as it has changed under his direction. The old school, as it might be called, had a low-profile look, which suited its situation; for the classrooms were more evident as such, and the upper buildings allowed the people there to take in lawns, fields, hillsides and a splendid big picture that was especially fine in the afternoon. I remember sighting a comet from the corner of one classroom and a tropical sunset from another. The new construction has made that comet- and sunset-viewing obsolete. Near the center of the campus is a purpose-built “focal point”, a weird erection in canvas scraps and bars that looks like a wrecked catamaran if it looks like anything. As such it is the precise physical equivalent of an educationist Big Plan signifying nothing. I am not interested: I prefer the big picture, and I think I’d rather have focused on what Sister Mary Richard and people like her were able to teach.

The botanical phenomenon known as tropism shows how even vegetal life sometimes changes itself in response to primitive stimuli such as light. The classic example is a field of sunflowers that face east in the morning but look westward in the afternoon. I sometimes think that the ‘discourse’ over the ‘reform’ of education is a kind of tropism. I mean not just vegetal action but the –ism of tropes, that is, bromides and caked wisdom, as Barzun calls it.

Typical of the tropism I’m talking about is an article appearing in the most recent issue of The New York Review. Its subject is Joel Klein (“Mr. Klein talks lots of bunk and / More bunk comes from Mr. Duncan”). Now, Mr. Klein’s bunk has been debunked often and at length in these postings and elsewhere[1], but for the writer of the article, it is as if that part of the ‘debate’ never took place. He opens breathlessly with a comment supposedly made to Klein by the late Bruno Bettelheim shortly before the tragic end of his life. That rather ambivalent comment includes the statement that Klein ‘ignores yesterday in order to keep his eye on tomorrow.’

Like George Santayana, I take a dim view of people who ignore yesterday in order to do anything, and have shown in these postings how misguided education ‘transformationists’ have caused more trouble than they’ve cured. But our reviewer actually subsumes tomorrow into the present, asserting against much of the evidence that Klein has already transformed New York’s schools.

One of the properties of tropism is that it functions below the level of consciousness and intelligence, and that seems to be what is happening in this review. Like the Orwellian animals that call out “Four legs good, two legs bad,” our reviewer uncritically presents again all the debunked evidence, though not entirely without a new approach. The novelty is a kind of ad hominem attack on Diane Ravitch, related more in sorrow than in anger.

Joseph de Maistre said that a country gets the government it deserves. After reading something like this review, he might be tempted to assert the corollary that it gets the schools it deserves too. I hope he was wrong.

The grade 12 students in my school’s IB program have just finished their 4,000-word Extended Essays, and their supervisors, including me, have held the viva voce sessions with our individual essayists that the program mandates. While a part of the contemporary purpose of the viva voce[1] should be congratulatory, the traditional purpose of this exercise, going back to the Middle Ages, is mainly to establish that a student really understands what he has learned[2]. The EE supervisor, in the course of a student’s work on the EE, can often size this up with partial effectiveness by discussions during the production of the essay; but there is nothing that is so good at testing the student’s power of synthesis and grip on the material synthesized as a spontaneous probing discussion at the end.

The viva voce is therefore a special case of spoken discourse in its educative aspect. By contrast, as I have argued in these postings, simple knowledge-as-recognition, without understanding, is thin stuff. A good example is Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoon showing a man pointing at a dog and talking. The dog is named Ginger, for the dialogue balloon says, “Blah blah GINGER blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah GINGER blah blah blah blah blah…” Our aim as teachers should be to help students cut back the blahs and fill in the blanks, and we are not doing that if we don’t check for understanding by questioning our students in our live voices.

E-voices won’t do because they cannot pick up the strands of a student’s thinking and handle them in real time. There is also something more compelling in a live human being than in a screen or a squawk box (or there should be: consider Ferris Bueller’s history teacher as a counter-example). But such considerations won’t stop “education” companies from trying to insinuate their gadgets and labor-saving devices in places that should be occupied only by living beings. The key question of such companies is not “How can we give students an education?” but “How are you going to monetize those users?” There will be pressure to recognize machine-gradable or algorithmically gradable learning as the chief kind, but it must be resisted. The key counter-question to be asked by believers in education as a philanthropic enterprise is “Why don’t you get out and stay out?”

But there is another problem that big assignments pose: how to manage something requiring large-scale synthesis. Ideally the EE supervisor and the student meet a number of times to consider how to make disparate material hang together, how to draw an idea out of a collection, how to test the idea by submitting it to the control of facts and questions, and how to produce coherent results. I have heard that some people handle their EE’s using “scaffolding” whose product is from a template and not just the student’s mind. While that is unfortunate, it at least takes the student through some steps leading to a large-scale production.

There should ideally have been some preceding exposure to work that is similar in kind if not necessarily in extent and depth. Our own school sets something in Grade 10 that we call a “Mini-EE”, which is due in Mr. Z’s box at about the same time that the actual EE’s are due to be turned in to the supervisor. My own experience confirms the value of a double pass-through. I used to set research papers for my students in two successive years at one school where I had my students for all four years. The first time through was a “learning experience,” as we say: it was only on the second try that most students produced creditable work.

They certainly won’t learn to manage something big if their only experience of being examined is the scourge of Scantron or the miasma of multiple choice. Such “tools” ensure that learning is pelletized, and they work against learning with continuity or context. Garret Keizer’s experience is instructive. In his book Getting Schooled, he reports his effort to get students to write a research paper. The exigencies of his teaching ordained that it must be taught in an inadequate time, though he and the tutors did their best to communicate what was needed and to shepherd their students along.

To his chagrin, he discovered that some of his students did not use his required checklist of things to do, or they checked items as done that they had not in fact done at all. Others handed in papers late or not at all. But he was most deeply troubled by the number of students who simply ignored everything he told them in his editing comments and conferences. They seemed not to understand the difference between a second draft and a reprint.

They took their interaction with the teacher to be of no account, and they took their first production as final, not tentative. Of course, that is the way it is with pelletized learning leading to pelletized productions. For students who have spent ten years in discourse like C B D C A B, or who hear the teacher’s words as blah blah blah, what else can one expect?

I recently interviewed an applicant for admission to my alma mater. As always when the candidate is highly intelligent and engaged, this was a fascinating exercise. My applicant hopes to study astrophysics and notes that the student/faculty ratio in that department is about 3/2. One of the attractions she sees in such a favorable ratio is the opportunity she will have to work closely with her teachers and mentors. With that ratio, she certainly won’t be able to dodge them!—not even on days when she is sleepy.

Her comment reminded me of what I had heard about the physicist I. I. Rabi, who often taught by having chalk talks and coffee with colleagues and students in Pupin Hall. These talks were said to be formative by those who attended. Interestingly, my applicant went further along this line of thinking when I asked her what is most likely to lead to a successful course.

She said, ‘a teacher who is interesting and makes the subject interesting.’ She added that it helps when students have a generally positive attitude towards the teacher. I guess that if she is successfully studying AP physics and math, this same teacher must lay down and uphold a high standard of work. As a teacher I would add to the mix a readiness to meet a halfway interesting teacher halfway. It would also help that the interactions between such students and teachers took place at schools that support genuine teaching and learning.

That is not what is happening in schools that have to assume the position of recipients of money from programs like RAce to the Top, or other mandates for mastery or university readiness. My applicant is going to be ready for university and scientific work with leaders in her field because she has been made ready through her efforts to work with engaging teachers on material that lays the groundwork in knowledge, skill and understanding that she will need in university. She will not be made ready by being turned into an exam weenie who sacrifices the Big Three for ‘test-taking skills’.

For that is what happens when schools are sized up using the wrong kinds of test. Studies have been done showing what the right kinds are, and they have shown why the wrong kinds are wrong. (There is also the educational experience of the human race, in case something were wanted to supplement quantitative methods.) You won’t need three guesses to tell which category the RAT and Common Core tests fall under.

But there is another problem—one discussed by Garret Keizer in his book Getting Schooled. This is the tendency of large mandatory programs and systems to suffocate the teaching they ostensibly ‘measure’, and its effects extend beyond just high-power programs.  Keizer’s wife and daughter are special-education teachers who labor under crushing bureaucratic burdens that almost guarantee their students will not have their special needs met.[1] These include shape-shifting  ‘programs’ and ‘software’ that ‘monitor’ teachers, provoking Keizer to assert that the two top trends in public education are

‘the rate at which pedagogical conundrums are being replaced by technological ones,’ and

‘the alarming rate at which educators are losing their ability to tell the two apart.’

What educationists should be doing is seeking to provide the training and working conditions in which good-quality teachers are supported in their efforts to help students like my applicant become really ready for university—that is, really ready to think, write and act, not just to bubble.

Reading Flannery O’Connor aloud is wonderful because her stories almost read themselves—almost, but not quite, for the reader has his job of understanding to manage, and getting the timing and cadences right. It is sometimes easy to miss the point of her writing. She knew it and admitted it, sometimes sardonically and sometimes slyly, as when she said her story “Good Country People” is about a “lady Ph. D. who has her wooden leg stolen by a Bible salesman she is trying to seduce.” I created a stir at a reading group one time by reading aloud her story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” in which a family and their cat Pitti Sing take a drive trip in which they end up being methodically shot one by one by a killer called the Misfit. After I finished the room lit up with discussion.

That can happen with students, too. One time I was conducting a discussion of her story “Revelation” and asked whether it was right for the Ugly Girl to throw her book at Mrs. Turpin and try to strangle her in the doctor’s waiting room. I was surprised, though I shouldn’t have been, by how many of them said yes. An excellent discussion ensued. Another time I read aloud the ending of “The Enduring Chill” with its hero lying weakened to motionlessness by disease and terrified as he is pursued by his implacable adversary—the Holy Ghost. Reading the last paragraph aloud took some care, but the result was entirely satisfactory: I could hear breaths exhaled after I finished the last sentence.

Yeats is also good to read aloud. I have had excellent results with “Lapis Lazuli” and “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”—one of them upbeat, the other gloomy. His emblematic poem “The Second Coming” is a tougher go, but I was assisted by Mother Nature one time while reading it in South Africa. That part of the country has the most lightning strikes of anyplace in the world, or so I have been told. One afternoon the clouds were building as I started to read. I got to “Surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” As I finished that couplet a tremendous thunderclap broke over the school, and for the only time ever, the rough beast’s slouching towards Bethlehem was an anticlimax.

All this reading illustrates the truth that our live voices, which are our live presences in their communicatory aspect, bring something essential to the upbringing of children, including big ones. A recent study shows that reading aloud to young people even up to the age of eleven was associated with their decision to read more on their own. No benefit was shown for reading to teen-agers, but I guess that if they are more receptive to the printed word they will be more receptive to the spoken word too. And the receptivity of both ages is more strongly anchored in shared humanity, which children value; for the study shows that they regarded as “special” the time they shared with a grownup who read to them.  It doesn’t seem farfetched to suppose that the experience of such comforting time is cast forward at least to some extent into subsequent reading time.

It should then be obvious why the same results will not obtain when children are read to by screens and machines, whether set up by zealous mechanist parents or by profiteering “education” companies. Both are in the grip of the false doctrine that education is a process performed on children as feeding is performed on a henhouse of battery chickens.

Yeats said,  “fine women eat / Crazy salad with their meat / Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.” He was mistaken: “In the field of education / Crazy salad is the ration.” Teachers, their handlers, and their reporters can’t get enough of it, and they manage a creditable job of undoing the Horn of Plenty too, if it ever worked in education.

It doesn’t seem to be working now, to judge by a New York Times headline that “Middle-Class Pay Elusive for Teachers, Report Says.” I like that “elusive.” What the headline means is that many American teachers spend years near poverty, particularly in expensive cities, waiting for the salary scale to move them slowly into the lower reaches of the middle class. In return for this reward they hold a job so difficult to manage well that they can only smile knowingly when they read that Garret Keizer, an excellent teacher who returned to the profession after a fourteen-year hiatus[1], started having nightmares as Day One approached.

In response, some people, fresh from a crazy salad binge, are proposing that as an alternative, teachers be allowed to reach the top of the pay scale after six or nine years of being rated “highly effective”.  Teachers who want to sup at this mess  had better get out their long spoons. Professor Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford reports that of teachers whose “Value”-“Added” ratings placed them at the top, only 20% maintained those ratings the following year. That kind of volatility makes an excellent rating nothing but a craps shoot. The odds of making the shot nine years in a row are not much better than the odds of rolling nine sevens in a row at the craps table.

Darling-Hammond notes VAMs are volatile enough that 40 – 55% of teachers rated at one level one year were rated at a “significantly different” level the following year. If VAMs actually measured anything, which they don’t, it would mean that teachers suffered from an intellectual-professional bipolar disorder: excellent one year and mediocre the next, which they aren’t. (Maybe VAM should stand for “Volatile Arbitrary ‘Measurement.'”)

Something doesn’t add up, and not just the salary. Why are people advocating compressed salary scales attached to volatile rating systems? I think something sly may be going on—like the tout at the carnival midway trying to get people to pitch balls at bottles that are impossible to knock down. All the teachers have to do is accept this new way of determining pay. Go ahead: try your luck!

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 a live one.

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, and may you find no water balloons there.

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 and all officials keep education from becoming preparation for standardized tests.

May they never think of education as a product.

May they share your dislike 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, all of them simple and direct.

May nothing in your building leak except hot air from pompous persons.

May all your school’s networks work.

May you possess or achieve the serenity to accept the human condition and the keenness to relish the good things you have; and may your administrators share this goal.

Teachers have their defining moments too, and one such came to me this week—a week unusually rich in professional development opportunities (i.e., I had to go to two workshops). During the week I had been reflecting on the lessons presented in Monday’s workshop on how to teach in order to build students’ ‘skills’. The presenter’s argument, which echoes a view that underpins the Paideia Proposal of forty years ago, is that an over-emphasis on teaching knowledge is wasteful and fruitless. The timeless insights are the timeliest of all, and I found myself wishing that the presenter had recognized a couple of other Paideia insights too.

Of course it is important for a good teacher to encourage the self-regulated learning that our presenter advocated—or it should be. Of course all good teachers should encourage the development of skills that are universal, essential, persistent, and unchanging in nature: time management, listening, note taking, concentration, and group work or team work. But it is also important for the teacher to act directly as a mentor or coach, adapting instruction to the needs of particular students in particular subjects. There is no universal, essential, persistent and unchanging way to tell Student X productively that his essay is a bit heavy on its feet, or Student Y that hers is too flippant. Nor can this advice be imparted by software, or the faults it remedies be detected by software. It is a matter of what Professor Barzun called “perpetual discretion,” a virtue with no proxy value.

And it is vitally important to do something else that our presenter almost entirely overlooked. At one point in his presentation he said that students must “use reflection to find out … the gaps in their understanding,” like telling them to lift themselves up on a teeter-totter. Another way to put it would be, echoing a former Cabinet secretary, to encourage them to learn the things they don’t know they don’t know.

For both these deficiencies only one agent can supply what is needed, and that is a real live teacher. The reason is that only a real live teacher can provide what Amherst College calls “close colloquy” and what Scott Newstok calls “close learning”. Many people, including our presenter, are convinced that cognitive and affective “skills” belong to two “domains,” when cognition and affect are actually—to use this word in an old-fashioned sense—a condominium of intellect in which the things we know must be “proved upon our pulses.” Real live teachers are at home in this condominium.

Leading students to fill in the gaps in their understanding by subjecting them to Socratic questioning; setting up live possibilities for feelings to engage intellect; giving skilled advice—all these powers are available to the real live teacher, and are not generally available to machines or electronic networks.

During the week’s second professional development opportunity I got to see three real live teachers discuss (with video clips) how they do these things in “flipped classrooms”. Their thesis was that, handled right, “flipping” allows teachers to cut away from live delivery of didactic instruction in order to make more room for coaching (skill) and questioning (understanding). Two of them showed how they handle this job at a school on Hong Kong Island that is famous for the quality of the education its students receive. The third showed her (and her assistants’) work in a very large class at a primary school on the Chinese mainland. The audience was deeply impressed.

We were not nearly so impressed by the speech of a locally well-known professor of education. I became suspicious before he even started when I saw the first slide in his PowerPoint show: one of those “evolution drawings” showing an evolutionary parade of an amphibian, a knuckle-dragging ape, a cave man, and a modern man. This one continued the parade with a man reading a book, a man using a computer, and five or six red dots in a network on a stylized map superimposed on a jet plane.

The speech delivered on the weak promise of the “evolution drawing”. His mission was to show that flipping was nothing but a stalking horse for online education, and proprietary online education at that. His model was an actual profit-making online “university” that he said would deliver an education as good as the best in the US for a sixth of the price—a kind of Amherst On Line, if you will. I will not hold my breath waiting for Amherst to be left high and dry.

For the problem, as readers of these postings will know, is that that “vision” is rubbish. And, hallelujah, one of the other presenters said so. During her remarks on flipping she politely but directly and firmly rebuked the professor and explained why real live teachers are needed and electronics for profit will not work. The defining moment I spoke of earlier was this one: when I saw on stage the clash of two opposing visions of where education may go—one of them powerful and effective, and the other corrupt and ineffective.

More teachers must do as our colleague did, and identify bad teaching and bad educational leadership for the threats they are. Who knows that the larger public and reporters on education won’t start listening? The alternative will be an electronic landscape of miserable Mudvilles where education has struck out.

Entries from the Didact’s Dictionary, compiled from past postings:

branding irony: a description or name chosen for its public relations value; the opposite of what is actually the case with the thing named, as No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Value Added Learning

Baby Einstein^®: The name of a series of MOOCs for babies by the Walt Disney Company, a corporation with a profitable line of products that simulate education. Disney is in the vanguard of such companies, having admitted that its product does not work as advertised.

balonist (bə-lōn΄-ist) n.: one who offers or requires baloney. Not to be confused with a balloonist, whose hot air is confined to his balloon. Cf. “Baloney Bingo”. Richard van de Lagemaat offers a workshop in “Baloney Detection across the Curriculum,” but not at schools of education or departments of education (qq. v.).

brand n.: 1. a proprietary mark burned into the hides of animals to identify their herds and to distinguish them from members of other herds. 2. a proprietary name given to a product to distinguish it artificially from other products. v.  (non-standard): to use the services of a balonist, often called a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), to promote falsehood. Sometimes applied to schools’ efforts to position (q.v.) themselves.

bumfalo, n. [from British bumf, short for bum-fodder: useless administrative paperwork]: a factual monster endemic to educationist ecologies. Its usual habitat is administrative offices and five-star hotels, but never classrooms. Its chief prey is teachers, whom it attacks by force-feeding them data and paperwork until they perish from explosion or inanition (e.g., sightings are attested of bumfalos requiring teachers to spend twelve hours on a single lesson plan and then rejecting it). It sometimes paralyzes its prey before killing it by displaying PowerPoint presentations and pie charts^[1]. Like the parrot and mockingbird it has a variety of calls: “robust”, “alignment”, and “hard data” among others are attested. The US government is in the process of granting it ‘protected species’ status even though the government has not yet declared the teacher an ‘endangered species’.

cutting edge n. [used with “on the”] or adj. [with hyphen] Applied to an educational movement, technology or technique whose uselessness, waste, or harm has not yet been proven by experience in classrooms. Examples from the past: open classrooms, new math, whole language, and mobile computer labs. Example from the present: value-added metrics.

Edspeak n. The skein of bad language tangled around the field of education, sometimes praised by its users as “professional.” Its characteristic vices are vagueness, feigned objectivity, love of cliché, baloney, regressive sentimentality, euphemism, faddism, and scientism—sometimes all in one sentence.

education for the 22^nd Century: Baloney of the future.

Education, Department of n. The name of a fiction.

education, school of n. 1. any of a number of imaginary institutions that impart sound principles and practices of teaching to their students with a minimum of baloney. 2. any of a number of real institutions that do not.

era (n): 1. a brief period of time. a. in education, the time between the introduction of a great new reform like value-added learning and the point when it is cast off as unworkable. 2. (obsolete) any long period of time seen in light of a unifying factor

essay [Fr. essai, try] n. [archaic] A composition in which the author tries to present or discuss a point with economy, skill, intelligence, rhetorical art, and respect for the reader.  Some schools have replaced it with the I-search paper and FAQs (qq.v.).

eternity (n.): in a school’s faculty room, the period before everything works as well and looks as nice as it does in the administrative offices.

failure (n): [obsolete in education] a key to success. ‘The idea of building grit and building self-control … you get … through failure, and in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.’—Dominic Randolph, Headmaster, Riverdale Country School, New York. ‘Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential’—J. K. Rowling in her commencement address at Harvard.

FAQs n. A composition in which all the reader’s needs are anticipated except those that are ignored.

Gloucester, Duke of n. A British aristocrat who described The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to its author as “another damned, thick, square book.” His type was to have been made obsolete by the ideals of his contemporary Thomas Jefferson and by public institutions of learning like the University of Virginia, which he (Jefferson, not Gloucester) founded.

I-search paper n. [a nonce word that has outlasted the nonce] A kind of non-fictional composition that makes a virtue of absorption in one’s own world, just what high-school students need.

index n. [archaic] The search engine of a book.

mission n.: a statement, not necessarily accurate or intelligible, by a school of its reason for existing, usually to impart vaguely described super powers to its graduates. Example: “Our graduates will demonstrate appropriate critical thinking behaviors in a global context for a variety of self-actualizing purposes in keeping with the aims of personal fulfillment and good world citizenship.” Often considered important in branding and positioning (qq.v.).

multitasking n. [non-standard] claiming to divide the attention into an undiminished quotient, as 3 ÷ 3 = 3.

peer editing n. a kind of editorial homeopathy.

position: n. (used with “assume the”): a stance often adopted by a teacher in the ordinary course of work. v. (non-standard) to practice verbal shape-shifting in order to make one’s product more attractive in a market.

profit (n): a tangible or intangible gain. non-profit education: teaching for the benefit of students. for-profit education: the simulation of teaching for the benefit of investors.

standard (stănd΄-ərd) n.: 1. something set up and established by authority as a rule for the measure of quantity, weight, extent, value, or quality. 2. (Edspeak) a claim made by a balonist of what the graduate of a school or university will be able to do, but what the graduate will not actually be able to do.

[1] “The only thing worse than a pie chart is more than one pie chart.”—Edward R. Tufte, author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.