The Ambler

When Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers made the original proposal for charter schools, he saw them as potential sources of innovative practice where unionized teachers and co-operative administrators would work together to produce the conditions in which good education could take place. His model was a public school in Germany where “[t]eams of teachers had considerable say in how the school was run. They made critical decisions about what and how to teach and stayed with each class of students for six years.”  It need hardly be added that German teachers are well paid compared to American, and that consideration could not have been far from Shanker’s mind.

Professor Richard M Ingersoll of Penn notes that three main reasons for teacher turnover are insufficient pay, lack of administrative support, and lack of influence in how schools are run. These are the features of schools that Shanker’s vision sought to correct. A fourth is ‘student discipline problems’ in schools that are troll havens. If the conditions Shanker sought had been realized in troll-free schools, the visionary gleam might now be a reality comparable in quality to Finnish schools.

Sadly, this has not happened. Instead, charter schools have, with a very few exceptions[1], turned into little Walmarts of learning, run top-down on the cheap, giving an undistinguished ‘education’ at a fearful price. Even though the charters have reduced the troll problem, the undistinguished education still occurs: by most measures, most charter schools do no better than public schools. The fearful price is twofold: 1) increased economic and racial segregation (something the Catholic schools they are replacing managed to avoid), and 2) an average loss of 24% of their teachers each year, twice the public schools’ rate. Compared to that, a goose would be a model of continence. The pool of people available to teach is not infinite. How many of them are gone through in the ‘human-resource’ wreckage typical of charter ‘education’?

William Blake said that “a man who never alters his opinions is like standing water and breeds reptiles of the mind.” I made a visit one day to a crocodile farm[1] in South Africa. We walked along an elevated boardwalk, beneath which the crocs lay basking motionless in the shade-dappled pools. Our guide told us that the largest crocodile, called Arnie, would sometimes snap out of his stillness long enough to attack, eating just enough of his victim to be satisfied while leaving the remainder alive; and that some crocodilian adults would perk up to eat the young[2]; but most of the time they kept a primitive equilibrium. We were invited to toss the chopped remains of a dead crocodile from the boardwalk to feed the live ones. As each chopped piece fell, the nearby animals would rush forward to snap it up, and then resume their motionlessness.

Reptiles of the mind must therefore be backward, unproductive and predatory habits or systems of thought that play out like primitive life forms and are impervious or hostile to improving influences.  That being so, much of the field[3] of education in the United States has figuratively come to resemble a large crocodile farm where trying to replace destructive practices with good ones is like trying to approach Arnie. An article by Professor Jonathan Zimmerman of NYU traces part of the problem to the unfathomable idea common in the US—but not in Finland—that teachers do not really need to know the subjects they are teaching, and even that any good teacher can teach any subject, or at least facilitate at an on-line “school.” Hence abysmal ‘normal schools’ like Southwest Texas State University, which could produce ‘trained’ teachers who were functionally illiterate. Hence “faculties” whose members did worse on reading & math tests than suburban sixteen-year-olds. It is said that “at least” these places give their student teachers a grounding in “theory”, but even that claim is false; for what they give is a set of slogans to be repeated like “Four legs good, two legs bad.”

The problem will not be solved, says Zimmerman, by closing down lousy teacher education programs and insisting that teachers receive arts-and-science degrees. The reason is that many of those programs are also degraded. A report flagged by my friend at a state university notes that many colleges lack serious professional development programs that would help their professors be better teachers. Instead, the tendency in professional development is to help them build their résumés and achieve tenure. At the same time, continues Zimmerman, their students go through mediocre programs that do not really build solid understanding of any field, while enjoying a kind of firing-power conferred by teacher evaluations that lead to personnel action against teachers with the temerity to make demands of them. It could be argued that such young are eating their elders, but it is the elders who will remain tenured and the young who will be indebted and jobless. Maybe they are eating each other.

Presiding over the feast are state and federal education offices that set dinner fields of their own with programs that arbitrarily close schools and fire teachers, “making our best teachers do their job worse.” Zimmerman closes his article with a discussion of an excellent teacher who returned to education after a fourteen-year hiatus. Under the reptilian RAce to the Top program with its “accountability,” he lasted only a year.

When Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines a creature such as a griffon, a basilisk, or a gorgon, it usually opens by describing it as a ‘fabulous monster,’ that is, a monster found in fables and tales. Fabulous monsters can be scary, but scarier by far are factual monsters. At one point in The Importance of Being Earnest Jack at first describes Lady Bracknell as a gorgon, but then changes his mind: ‘she is a monster without being a myth, which is rather unfair.’

Teachers will identify with Jack in his despondency because they are also plagued by monsters that are not myths. We may be grateful that some, like the Secretary of Education, exist in only one (highly destructive) specimen. Others, I am sorry to note, have multiplied in the field of education till they have encroached on or endangered ‘competing’ species such as teachers.

As I reread details of an Education Department grant application that takes 2735-1/2 hours to complete (I love that extra half-hour!), the name of another factual monster came to the Didact’s Dictionary: the

bumfalo, n. [from British bumf or 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 destroys 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. It has a number of characteristic calls, repeated at random: “articulation”; “robust”; “curriculum alignment”; “hard data,” etc. 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’.

Today (a Saturday) I went to the school office to leave a message with one of the clerks. Seated at another clerical cubicle was one of the deans or assistant headmasters. Because the two clerks were otherwise engaged, he was putting the finishing touches on a handout notifying 7^th-graders of an optional weekend course. The subject is classical Chinese. I asked him whether they might be studying poets like Du Fu and Li Bai (8^th Century), to which he smiled and replied, ‘Much older: it will go back to the origins of the Chinese character.” He went on to tell me why learning Chinese characters is not as hard as ‘some people’ think it is: “Everything depends on how they are taught.”

Outdoors the stalls and pavilions are going up for the “Garden Fête,” a well-attended annual fund-raising event. In the two covered playgrounds, table tennis tables have been pushed aside, and students are busily working at getting signs and other materials ready for their grades’ and clubs’ stalls, which will be set up tomorrow morning.

Outside one of the covered playgrounds the school’s Boy Scout troop was putting itself through the finishing touches of close-order drill, accompanied by snare drum, that they will have needed to master by tomorrow, when they proceed with a poppy wreath from the school’s chapel to a memorial to graduates who died fighting Japan in World War II. (The school housed Japanese soldiers instead of students during the war.) They lay the wreath at the memorial tablet.

As the Scouts paraded, students from the Drama Committee [club] came out of the Drama Store Room to watch. They were working on one of the year’s dramatic productions and getting ready to sell DVDs of last year’s productions at the Fête. The rehearsals of the school’s musical groups, which are usually conducted on weekends as well as school days, are canceled this weekend.

During the week the boys publishing the IB Herald picked up our print run, also to be sold at the Fête, and presented a copy to the IB Coordinator. We finished working up the sales schedule, and among today’s off-campus errands I went to get change in case the vendors need to make it. (Some, but by no means all, of the Fête’s visitors say, ‘Keep the change” when paying for things.

My other group of visitors during the week was IB students beginning the 4,000-word Extended Essay that they will need to turn in at this time next year. Most are in English, but one will be in film.

I mention all these things because earlier this week I read a review of a book condemning China’s education as being obsessed by exams and place-hunting. I wouldn’t deny that Chinese students want to do well on their exams, but I do suggest, and have tried to show, that other kinds of activity characterize Chinese students too. Where I agree with the reviewer is in the dim view we take of the test-mania that is sweeping across the U.S., which will be certain to end up producing the worst of both worlds. President Kennedy is supposed to have said that Washington DC combined Southern efficiency and Northern charm. What would he say of Duncan’s Dream?

In 1994, when I saw a touring one-man Dylan Thomas show by Bob Kingdom, “Fern Hill” burst over me like fireworks. The only possible response was to get it by heart, which I did when I got home and over the next day or two. I recited it to my senior English class once I had learned it.

Monday, twenty years since, was Thomas’s 100^th anniversary; a couple of days later I had an email from a student in that class recalling the recitation. “It [the poem] was wonderful then,” he said, “and it still is now,” as he knew from having gone back to take another look.

This correspondence put me in mind of the closing lines of Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, written ten years after my recitation and ten years before the present:

Pass the parcel.

That’s sometimes all you can do.

Take it, feel it, and pass it on.

Not for me, not for you, but for someone, somewhere, one day.

Pass it on, boys.

That’s the game I wanted you to learn.

Pass it on.

When I read about someone saying, “High-stakes multiple choice testing is here to stay,” I think of the old story about the camel that poked its nose into the nomad’s tent. We know what eventually happened: the nomad was driven out. At each stage of the camel’s entry, the nomad might have told the camel to get out, but failed to do so.

The lesson we are supposed to draw from this fable is that when a camel’s nose appears at the tent-flap, we must keep it out. The lesson is not that when the nose appears, we must say, “The camel is here to stay,” and wave it in.

Another thought about the camel: it might do in the desert, but we keep it out of the garden.

Einstein is reported to have said, “Everything should be as simple as can be, but not simpler.” Einstein got it right, but the tendency to get it wrong—to make things simpler than they can be—is called the Reductive Fallacy[1].

Not all uses of this fallacy are whimsical: In education we suffer from a spreading rash of reductionism whose consequences are anything but whimsical. Much of the blame can be laid on the use by educationists of “proxy values” that are said to “represent” something unquantifiable. The problem comes when people start thinking they are that quality or other unquantifiable value. A good example came up in a recent New York Times article about talking to babies and toddlers. It discussed a twenty-year-old study showing that children from disadvantaged backgrounds hear 20,000,000 fewer words than their more privileged contemporaries by the time they get to kindergarten. The reductive fallacy is that all upbringing and education of young children are wrongly subsumed in the proxy value “number of words heard.” Some people took this reductionism so far as to rush into saying lots of words at Junior, or having screens say them. Such things as play, banter, peek-a-boo and love were sloughed off in the rush to word count.

The current reductionist myth is that school is to prepare students to take multiple-choice tests, and that teachers are to be rated by how successful the students are on those tests. The fallacious reduction is to say that performance on such tests is a proxy value for a successful education. The result is to throw away all other kinds of assessment, including some that are better able to assess the varieties of learning.

But there is an even worse effect: This focus on reductionism leaves education impoverished. Sometimes that impoverishment is at a fundamental level, as a BBC article notes in discussing the value of musical education. It turns out that disadvantaged students who study singing or play an instrument have an easier time learning reading.

I don’t want to be an instrumentalist about learning music: it is great for its own sake too. Earlier this week one of my students, who is in my school’s Senior Choir, came into my classroom singing Schubert’s Ständchen, a song with love lyrics by Ludwig Rellstab and a wonderful lilting tune. Whisper who dares!

And earlier this month I went on the school’s Drama Camp, which took place over the long holiday weekend. One of the dramatists is writing his Extended Essay under my supervision: I was surprised and delighted to see that the quiet gravity with which he approaches this less-than-favorite task was entirely replaced by a charismatic verve as he went through his dramatic work. He was the most notably differentiated student on the camp, but others were nearly as keen and talented. What can schools (and education departments) be thinking by abandoning this kind of learning for more multiple choice preparation? The answer is that they are thinking reductively.

Further wrong-headed reductionism occurs when we say that this kind of “enrichment” is only for “elite” schools. Today I went to see a movie called My Voice My Life, a Cantonese-language documentary about the production of a musical play in Hong Kong with a cast of blind students and (what pass in Hong Kong for) troubled teenagers from “Band 3 Schools,” as they used to be called. Though the documentary might leave unanswered questions, there is surely no question that an education with such an opportunity is better than one that has had such opportunities reduced out of existence.

What is right with this picture, and wrong with that one?

I have reported before on Loreto College, the Mancunian comprehensive school a majority of whose pupils come from impoverished wards of Manchester. The school is one of Great Britain’s best and has a 50% acceptance rate of its applicants to the ancient universities (Oxford and Cambridge). Loreto High School is now adding to the physical nourishment of its students, too, by hiring excellent chefs to prepare tasty and nutritious lunches in the school’s kitchens. The object was to get away from pink slime, white goo, green gunk, and steaming mysteries in gray and brown. What happens when the new dishes are rolled out? The students of Loreto sit down and eat their vegetables.

Consider by contrast other schools where, in lunch “hours” as brief as twenty-five minutes, Daddy’s little vacuum cleaner gobbles a Chick Fil-A or a Big Mac prepared by a “nutrition” company and supplied ready to go at the schools’ cook-free “kitchens.” The political and operational situation of these schools makes genuine nutrition impossible, but the refusal of students to eat such food would subvert even the best plan to fix good lunches.

What does the wrong picture typify on more than one level?

There is a striking parallel of the politics behind factory feeding to the inclusion of “education” companies in the rollout of the Common Core as a business model featuring morsels—gobbets?—whose “digestion” is assessed by multiple-choice standardized tests. Just as factory food provides junk nutrition, factory testing certifies junk education. The parallel is made nearly exact by my former colleague the public-university administrator, who reports that students at that university savage their demanding teachers in course evaluations, refusing the “dishes” set before them.

What are the people who report on the second picture telling us?

Many reports do not tell us what we need to know. They mention incidentally or not at all the complete failure of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) to come anywhere near the impossible goal it set for achievement in 2014—a goal that is still on the books. Nor are they paying any critical attention to the incipient impossibility of the goals in the sidestep plan, RAce to the Top (RAT).

Two Living Rooms and Two Elephants

NCLB called for universal proficiency by the end of high school. Since that elephant is politically impossible to remove from the living room, we now have a plan to tiptoe into another living room with another elephant[1]. The plan says, in effect, that a country that could not be made universally proficient in ten years by public education will now be made universally “college or career ready” in two or three years. What is more, this magical thinking appears to be accepted at face value by those reporting on it.

The Visionary Gleam Stops Here

Hence a recent report in The New York Times about the schools of Washington state, which stand to lose their Federal funding because they have refused to enter either of the living rooms. The reporter cast their decision as a “political” move to an “outdated” program whose “benchmark” is “all but impossible to achieve.” The whole truth behind this half-truth is that the “benchmarks” of both programs are all but impossible to achieve. What is more, the non-“outdated” program requires teachers to be evaluated by a demonstrably idiotic and ineffective system.  Is it possible that Washington, like the Montgomery County schools, could decide that enough junk is enough?

This is a blog about teaching and learning, where political comments on the current demonstrations in Hong Kong would be out of place. Nonetheless, among the images coming from the crowded streets, one kind stands out as due some notice here. I mean pictures of students sitting in the occupied roadways doing their homework.

In general Hong Kong is a very tidy and orderly place. Construction and other disruptions are accompanied by apologies “for the inconvenience caused.” People riding escalators stand to one side so that people who wish to step along may do so on the other side. People whose dogs do their business on the sidewalk carry away the business in a plastic bag or wash it away with a squirt bottle. The New Year’s Eve crowds on the Kowloon Waterfront are almost entirely free of fighting, staggering, and vomiting;  when the midnight fireworks are over, the crowd contentedly disperses, families and all, usually without incident.

So it should be no surprise that young demonstrators here remain mindful of their obligations as students while they are on the streets. For all that I was fascinated by Bill Buford’s book Among the Thugs, in which he did a journalistic report on his fieldwork among British soccer hooligans, Hong Kong seems to work counter to the crowd-dynamic he reported.

This state of things should give pause—though it probably won’t—to the proponents of “value”-“added” “metrics” that attribute solely to teachers all the “praise” and “blame” for students’ success or failure on standardized tests of their learning. No matter who is doing the teaching, in places where students would rather die than not turn in their homework, the scores will be higher than in places where they would not be caught dead turning in their homework.

There’s no way around it for the high-school teacher in touch with his pupils’ needs and responsive to their work: rolling up the sleeves is a part of a teacher’s life. I am going through an exercise from my Theory of Knowledge students on William James and will have an essay coming in from them Tuesday. Also on Tuesday: essays from the English students. We have a five-day holiday weekend next week, but it will be a working holiday, including a trip with some students. The good news is that some of my Grade 11 students are showing a remarkable keenness and affinity for ToK, a thing I do not usually see so early in this demanding course. The bad news is that I’m not finished yet, so I will not be writing my usual posting.

Oscar Wilde said that “work is the curse of the drinking classes.” I can testify that it is the curse of the teaching classes too.  I worked in private industry for a number of years before starting to teach, and I can report that at almost no time in “the other place” did I work as hard as I do teaching, even after having learned how to work smart rather than hard at some teaching tasks.

Fortunately, some of the grunt work is also aha work–the aha one says as the nickel drops, the face lights up, or the page coruscates.