Notes From the North Country

Picture this: a powerful white man walks into a room full of African American parents.  He tells them that he, the head of schools in a major American city, is going to close their neighborhood school.  The parents get angry.  They yell at him.  One woman calls him a racist.

Calmly, the man asks her what grade her child is in.

“Third.”

Okay, there are 70 third graders at this school, he says.   “Do you know how many third graders are reading where they’re supposed to be?”

The woman confesses that she doesn’t know.

“Six.”

That’s when he turns to the audience.

“Do any of you know if your kids can read at grade level?”

Let’s pause here and just admire the man’s arrogance.  Imagine if some educational bigshot came strolling into your town, put his finger on your chest, and asked, “You, there!  Do you really know if your child can read?”

“Well,” you might stammer, “I think so . . . “

“But do you know if she can read . . .  at grade level?  Is she . . .  proficient?  Hmm?”

Well, for about seven years, not long ago, that basically happened all across America.  This self-appointed guru came sauntering in and informed you that you were too stupid even to know how your own children were doing.  Well, he’d give you a hint: they’re also pretty stupid.

Soon he stopped picking on just poor black mothers and went after white mothers in the suburbs.  At one point he complained:

“It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from . . .  white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were . . .”

Starting to ring a bell?  

That’s right: that man I am talking about is Arne Duncan — who served as Barack Obama’s powerful Secretary of Education, has written a new book, and is still just as arrogant as ever.

This is not a great book.

***

That moment back in Chicago is a pivotal one in Duncan’s new book, How Schools Work.  The young Duncan, a wunderkind, has just been handed the reins of the entire Chicago school system and, faced with his first taste of opposition in the form of those angry parents, somehow wins them over with his truth-telling, and as he puts it, “learns to always run into the fire.”

Later on, when he tries this arrogant-guy shtick with the entire country, it doesn’t go as well.  Huge swathes of the American public basically tell Arne to go f-himself, thank you very much. We know how well our kids can read, bro.

But that night in Chicago?  His shtick sort of works. He plays the classic Great White Hope card.  These poor, black mothers lack political power. They live in a neighborhood that no one at City Halls gives a Rahm Emanuel about.  Now here comes the brash new white guy, the downtown suit, playing truth-teller, peddling Real Data, the kind that the bosses usually keep hidden, and he is shuttering the school because he cares.  Those mothers stop yelling and they listen — mostly because they have no other choice.

But that in itself isn’t weird.  Urban reformers and politicians play the Great White Hope card all the time.  Donald Trump, in his fashion, made this about as naked and even parodic as possible when he asked African American voters, “What do you have to lose?” This has been happening for a long time.

But what’s weird about Duncan is that he doesn’t just think he knows best.  He thinks the schools have been LYING.

That school he shut down?  Just before he pulls the plug, he goes on a little fact finding mission.  He stops by to take in an awards night, and, sitting in the back with a great big frown on his face, draws an all-time oddball conclusion:

“I’d attended an event . . .  celebrating the school’s achievement in science.  The problem was that while some students did deserve the accolades, the school itself remained miserable.”

Can you believe those lousy school teachers?  Celebrating mediocrity! They should have held a big “Why We Suck at Science” party.  They could have shown the kids their dismal test scores. Arne walks out in a huff, certain this event is evidence of a conspiracy:

“[The schools] had not presented the data to the parents.  Instead, they tried to craft a counter-narrative that the school was not as bad as it actually was . . .”

What a seriously odd thing to say.  But Arne says it over and over in the book — and, a quick glance through the archives confirms — all through his tenure as Bigshot Teacher Boss.

Schools are lying to parents.

***

But let’s break this down a bit.  Duncan is operating in a strange alternative universe in which he makes two odd assumptions:

1)  Poor, minority parents in crime-ridden, under-resourced neighborhoods have NO inkling that their children aren’t exactly getting a fair shake at a great education.

2)  If we just showed them the REAL DATA, they’d be horrified and would demand better for their kids.

This is such an odd misreading of reality.

First of all, let’s look at the first assumption: Parents have NO CLUE.  This is wacky.

Let me venture a guess.  Duncan indicates that these parents are poor, African American, and live in a neighborhood without a lot going for it.  My guess is that these parents know their kids aren’t exactly attending the world’s best schools. My guess is that they know their neighborhoods are neglected, and that nobody at City Hall cares.  They probably — if their schools are anything like the public schools on the wrong side of the tracks in Washington, D.C. — have noticed that their kids’ schools are old, crumbling, and lacking the basics, like textbooks from the current century — especially compared to the white schools across town, which basically look like mini U-Chicago campuses.  It was like this in Washington, plain enough to see for anyone with a car.  That’s why these parents are mad at ol’ Arne for wanting to close their school rather than throw it more resources in the first place.

I met these parents when I worked briefly at a Washington, D.C. charter school.  There was one young man, bright, personable, engaged in school — whose writing level, I realized early on, was at least three or four years behind his peers’.  His parents, at our conference, told me they knew that his neighborhood school had failed him. They described all the usuals — the fights in the halls, the lack of new books, the teachers — I remember this is the phrase they used — who had “retired in place.” They knew.

Then we get to the second assumption:  That if they just had some DATA, a light would go off, they’d demand better, and schools would improve.

This is so amazingly, off-the-charts naive — it’s the kind of thing I’d expect a college sophomore to blurt out after learning that, OMG, wealth inequality exists in the United States.  If only they had the correct data, they’d rise up!

Duncan seems to believe this is the case with the schools.

There are so many things to question here:

–People will only act if they see the data?  (Have you met “people” before? They act for lots and lots of reasons, but sadly “objective data” is not usually in the top 10.)

–Are we sure that standardized test data is really what any parent wants to act on?

–Are we sure that standardized test data is an accurate measure of . . .  anything?

–So historically marginalized and ignored people, all-too-aware of their own powerlessness — victims of discrimination their whole lives, from a system so wide and deep they can barely get their minds around it — are suddenly going to not only demand change in their schools, but somehow win the kind of money and resources needed to make a difference in neighborhoods no one in the broader city cares about?

But Arne expects us to believe that when he takes some of these parents a few blocks away to some of the white schools (Question:  Did they ride in his car?) they are shocked — positively shocked! — that white kids are getting a way better education. Imagine that!  Gambling happening . . .  at Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca!

You’re SUCH a truth-teller, Arne!  Whatever would we have done without you?

***

But I wouldn’t be writing about this if Arne Duncan were just some random, arrogant superintendent out in West Whogivesashit Kentucky.  No. Arne Duncan was the most consequential Ed Secretary of the last fifty years. He was a man very much in step with his times, and a man whose approach had a huge impact on a generation of students, teachers, and schools.  His arrogance, I’m afraid, is the arrogance of a whole generation of educational reformers, which is still very much in power.

What’s dangerous about them is that not only do they think they know better — despite not ever having taught in a classroom — but that they have the “data” to prove it.  I say “data” in quotes because the standardized tests that Duncan has always rested his case on — going back to that night at the school in Chicago — has always been proven flimsy and questionable by the real scientists, guys like Daniel Koretz, professor at Harvard and the author of The Testing Charade, who once sat in a room and told Duncan and his minions why they were wrong.  But Duncan didn’t listen. In order for him to be the Great Truth Teller, the Bringer of Data, he had to buy all-in on the notion of standardized tests that would give him that data.  When a scientist like Koretz warned him that an overreliance on a test would cause teachers to start doing test prep, not education, Duncan didn’t listen. When Koretz warned him that teachers might even start cheating to save their jobs and their reputations, Duncan didn’t listen.  When Koretz warned him that the data itself was deeply unreliable, Duncan didn’t listen.

Are you surprised?

His was the arrogance of so many ed reformers: Only OUR tools, our metrics, our standardized tests can tell you what’s really going on.  Without those, nobody ever would have known, including their parents, that poor and minority children aren’t getting a fair shake at their schools.  

Here’s the delicious irony in the whole thing.  It was only when reformers like Arne Duncan started tying teacher evaluations to standardized test scores that American schools actually started lying about what they were doing.

Arne made the system worse.  Before that, schools weren’t “lying” about their performance.  Please. Poor urban schools like the ones that Duncan castigates and closes down were doing the best that they can with the limited resources and seemingly unlimited societal problems being shoved in their doors every morning.  They are doing the best they can to be beacons of light and hope in the middle of incredible and staggering want. They know they aren’t Beverly Hills High. They know their students aren’t exactly reading Charles Dickens. But they also know that these kids too need to be celebrated.  They know that for these kids — and for their teachers — you have to walk into school every morning suspending your disbelief about the pretty apparent reality around you. You HAVE to believe that every kid can learn. You have to celebrate these kids. That’s what Duncan is really seeing when he attends that science awards night.  But Arne Duncan doesn’t get what’s going on — because he never taught in schools in the first place. He sees these schools in the stark, black-and-white terms of an outsider. Clearly they must be lying.

Good thing we had Arne Duncan around to show us what was really going on.

***

Now there is a point in all of this.  Duncan, I can tell, is writing this book in a way to show critics of his policies like me that his heart was in the right place.  This is true. These schools are lying, in a way, but not for the reason Duncan claims. In fact, it’s not even a lie at all. It’s permission.  We are giving permission for too many minority students to attend schools that definitely aren’t up to par. But we also permit them to live in crime-ridden neighborhoods, policed by departments that they don’t trust.  These neighborhoods were often created by racist policies that herded African Americans into modern ghettos with no hope of rising to the middle class. We permitted all of this — and it’s much vaster than the tiny little example of it in some elementary school in Chicago that Arne Duncan, do-gooder, stumbles onto six months into his term as schools CEO.  

It’s way, way bigger, my friend.

Look a little harder.

Yesterday evening as I was making dinner, I found myself reading a Washington Post article about the growing shortage of doctors in the United States.  Apparently, by the year 2030, we’re going to be short up to 100,000 physicians.  (Oh, perfect, I thought — right around the time I’ll be having to submit to regular prostate exams, I’ll have to drive 100 miles and wait three hours in line just to get one.)

In response to the shortage, the article’s author calls for doctors to — get this — spend less time in medical school.  That sounds crazy, except that, as the author notes, most doctors, after finishing college, spend an average of ten years (!!) getting trained!!  Perhaps, he asks rather modestly, that could be condensed by a year or two?

Reading this, as a high school teacher, my jaw just about dropped.  How different are the levels of preparation doctors get compared to teachers!  How different are the levels of training we, as a public, permit.   According to the article, the average doctor attends four years of college, four years of medical school, then “three to eight years to specialize in a residency or fellowship.” That’s 7-12 years of training doctors get beyond college.

Many teachers have none.  They major in education in college, then start teaching your kids at age 22.

It’s also possible in some places to teach with no educational training whatsoever.  I know.  I was this teacher.  There are plenty of school districts in the United States that are so desperate to fill positions — especially so-called “critical needs” areas (math, science, special education) that they’ll “provisionally” hire teachers who don’t even have teaching licenses yet, provided they’re on their way to getting them.  The organization Teach for America routinely sends college graduates into some of the toughest teaching conditions in the country with little more than a month of training.

Why such a difference between the education levels of teachers and doctors?  The simple fact is that we, as a society, wouldn’t permit doctors to be any less well trained.  Can you imagine walking into a hospital and meeting some twenty-three year-old kid with his stethoscope on backwards.

“Hi, I’m Dr. Jeff!  You can call me J-Man.  I’ll be handling your gall bladder surgery.”

“Heart surgery!”

“Sure.  Well, I’m a little nervous.  This is actually my first time!”

“Doing this particular surgery?”

“No, in a hospital!”

“But don’t worry,” he’ll add.  “I was a bio major!  At Princeton.”

It’s funny . . .  until you remember that we permit this all the time in our schools.

Don’t worry. This guy took some science courses.

Here I think about my own teacher training: just a single year of graduate school to attain a Master’s.  It was an intense year, surely.  I lived in the classroom, completed two semester-long internships, and took scores of grad classes . . .  But that’s just ONE TENTH of the training doctors get.  It’s no wonder that, applying to jobs that spring, I felt like a fraud.  My experience is hardly unique.  If anything, others were even LESS prepared than I was.  Most of the math teachers in my grad school cohort were already teaching as full-time, salaried employees mid-way through our grad school year — simply because our host schools were so desperate for math teachers that they’d take these completely untutored students on as vested teachers.

Why do we as a society permit this?  There are two reasons.  First, we think teaching is a noble calling, but we don’t think it’s particularly hard or sophisticated.  It’s partly cultural — we Americans have always been ambivalent, deep down, about learning.  Our belief in education has always been balanced against our reverence for the drop-out, the self-made, the street-smart, the up-by-your-bootstraps, the office-boy-to-corner-office, and the “I-never-let-my-schooling-get-in-the-way-of-my-education.” We’re Americans.  We’re suspicious of the ivory tower (or the Common Core).

We believe, quite rightly in many cases, that the best learning happens in the “real world,” with on-the-job mentors who aren’t necessarily “certified,” in places that are not traditional classrooms.  You learn by doing, we think.  Put kids out in the community, we think.  Set them up with internships, with community mentors.  We ourselves, as teachers, often feel this way deep down — because this is what our own training encouraged.

It’s partly historical — teaching is historically women’s work, and degraded as such, like nursing and other traditionally female-dominated professions.  Doctors, traditionally male, long ago established themselves as experts in their field, masters of a whole trove of scientific innovations that the lay person couldn’t possibly understand.  Meanwhile teachers have historically deferred to professors as the experts in their shared field.  Innovations in pedagogy are refined high above, and then teachers are told what to do.

It’s partly because teaching is so familiar.  We’ve grown up watching teachers our whole lives.  They don’t seem so special.  It looks easy.  It’s why we have a lot more respect as a society for airline pilots than for bus drivers.  Familiarity breeds contempt — or at least the feeling that we could do just as well.

The second reason that we permit such untrained teachers is that we teachers ourselves view teaching as a craft that should be picked up through experience rather than studied scientifically.  My whole training told me, “Take a few education courses — but these really aren’t very important.  Then go into a classroom, watch and observe for a short time, then start doing it.  Then, very quickly, get a job, disappear into your own classroom, and don’t ever get any meaningful feedback ever again.  You’ll figure it out!”

We educators are as guilty as anyone of this — we don’t take our profession seriously enough.  We see it as something you can just pick up, like riding a bike or throwing a ball, rather than the way doctors see their work: as a science to be studied, taught, and practiced for a long time under supervision before you’re able to go off on your own.  When I began teaching, veterans would say to me, “Wait until your third year — then you’ll get it down.” But what they were talking about was pure procedural knowledge: how to keep 25 moody teenagers on track while fielding calls from the office, requests to go to the bathroom, under-the-breath bullying, illicit texting, and kids wandering in fifteen minutes late with no books or pencils.  Those veterans weren’t saying that I’d understand how to effectively reach students with disabilities, or that I’d know how to give meaningful feedback, or how to establish a positive classroom climate.  They were saying that I’d understand how not to accidentally receive 103 four-page essays at one time, or how to quiet interruptions before they start.  They weren’t saying I’d be knowledgeable.  They were saying I’d be able to survive.

This summer, I attended the National Writing Project, and I became more and more convinced that the more I can learn about techinique and philosophy — the why, not the how in teaching — the more deliberate I can be in my practice, and the more successful — the more professional — I’m ultimately going to be.

It strikes me that it’s taken me nine years to get to this point . . .  the same amount of time that many doctors are trained for.

Maybe they have a point??

***

Alright, I am not seriously advocating for teachers to need nine years of training.  But what I am saying is that if we want good teachers in the United States, we need to train them like professionals.  And as I say, I am always struck by how little feedback I get or how little observation I get to do.  As teachers, we’re expected to go into our classrooms and figure it out.  Even most teaching internships, the meat of teacher ed programs, are famously hit-or-miss.  Many of these experiences are so short, it’s almost impossible to either observe or be observed for any meaningful amount of time.  This needs to stop.  We need to make teachers complete longer, more intensive internships, with more thorough observations, and with more systematic, evidence-based training.

And here’s another paradox: If we want better teachers, we shouldn’t make it easier to become a teacher, as many advocates claim.  We should make it harder.  Too many people believe that, if we tighten the regulations, that will stop talented candidates from becoming teachers.  They believe we should tear down the nets and make it easy for anyone to teach.  But that is wrong.  If we want to begin to attract the kinds of smart, committed people to teaching who are attracted to medicine, in addition to raising the starting salaries for teachers, we should raise the requirements to even get into educational programs.  Too many advocates deride even the most basic test score criteria, claiming that this keeps away good people.  It does not.  It only makes teaching seem unserious.  We need to raise the requirements.  Making it harder to become a teacher is the first step toward making it more attractive, I think.  It blew my mind to hear a commentator in the article about doctors claim that the AMA limits medical school seats.  I’m not saying we should do that, but we should definitely make it harder to get in.

Now I can hear the critics: “If you make it too hard to become a teacher, our teacher shortage will be even worse.  We won’t have anyone to fill our schools!”

What would we do??

Hmm, let’s think . . .   This is a classic case of supply and demand, isn’t it?  I wonder how the market solves these problems?  How does a business attract workers when they’re in short supply . . . ?

(I’ll give you a hint: it’s pretty much the opposite of what several of the states with the worst teacher shortages — Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, and West Virginia — have been doing for the last decade . . . )

Just a thought . . .

***

Look, I’m not saying teachers need to go to school for ten years after college.  What I am saying is that a shortage should never be an excuse to erode professionalism.  What I’m saying is that there’s a huge sweet spot out there — where we have not only more young people who want to teach and who stay in the profession, but also a better prepared, better educated teaching force.  These two elements are far from mutually exclusive — in fact, I’m saying that they can go hand-in-hand.

In the end, I think it’s simple:  If we’re going to be the champions of education, it’s not a bad idea to have a little bit more of an education ourselves.

Fellow Educators,

I have some concerns about proficiency based learning (PBL).

The first is the abbreviation.  “PBL” apparently stands for BOTH of our hot new initiatives:  proficiency based learning AND project based learning.  What gives?

Language aside, here’s the thing: Even though it’s been a herculean effort, we educators kind of like PBL.  It may be incredibly different than what we’ve known, but we like the way it teases out skills and knowledge from soft “transferable” skills — because that helps us design better lessons.  We respect the way PBL forces us to articulate exactly what it is we want students to know and to do.  We like how the bar is higher. We like how it’s not tied to standardized tests.  In a lot of ways, PBL forces us to be better teachers.  PBL feels — for lack of a better work — progressive.

You can see how much teachers like PBL up in Maine, now that PBL is under attack from the public there.  Even as parents, students, and legislators fret over unconventional transcripts, many superintendents and classroom teachers alike are rallying to PBL’s defense.  It’s not just that they’re bemoaning years of time and money down the drain should Maine pull the plug. It’s that they think PBL’s promising. And it is, especially compared with toxic educational trends of the last 17 years — the standardized testing sucking kids’ souls, the shady charter schools siphoning away students, the Michelle Rhee-style hiring and firing based on whimsical “value added” metrics.  Compared to pure evil, PBL looks like something worth fighting for, even if it is largely untested.

But I’m a little worried.  The public tires quickly of educational reforms.  PBL is already on the ropes in Maine, and I’m worried that Vermont’s sure to follow.  From my view, there are a couple of main problems with PBL. We educators need to fix these issues soon — otherwise we’ll end up tossing all the work we’ve done in just a few short years.

Here are a few of the concerns I have.

Raising the Bar

Every educational movement claims to “raise the bar.” But the placement of the bar is a complex negotiation between professional educators and the community in which they teach.  Under PBL we’re planning to raise the bar from a 60% (a passing grade currently) to an 85% (the equivalent of a 3 — a graduation-required grade) now.  We are raising the bar for graduation by 25 points?  

We’ll either be keeping a lot of kids from graduating, or lowering our standards to avoid this.  I think you know how that one ends.

Time

PBL promises us that “learning is the constant, and time is the variable.” The problem comes when schools, in a rush to move beyond mere “seat time,” start de-emphasizing attendance policies even more than they do now.  Right now, attendance is a HUGE problem.  We have kids missing 40% of classes and expecting to graduate.  If it’s this bad under a “time-based system,” I’m worried at how bad it could get under a proficiency-based one.  Let’s not lose track of the basics.

I’m also worried that while we should be crafting a system in which all children get the time they need to learn, instead we’re creating a system in which students , in a rush to complete their many, disparate requirements, see proficiency-based learning as a box-checking activity, to be completed as quickly as possible — without spending enough time to truly master the material.  And I’m worried teachers will be pressured to check them off before they’re ready.

Never mind the concern lurking in the back of all of our minds about PBL:  What happens when smart kids start finishing high school in three years instead of four?  Or in two years?

If we start insisting on proficiency to graduate, and proficiency is fairly low, won’t masses of kids simply rise only to that low bar?  Can a student at 16, with only two years of high school, truly be prepared for college?  Or for the world?

Too Much Data

Here’s another problem: proficiency grading promises more data about how a student is doing.  But more data is not always better.

The old report cards were simple: one grade per course.  The problem, reform advocates complained, is that an A or a C told us little about a student.  Proficiency grading parses that A in English into 12 categories: six content standards and six “transferable skills” (work habits).  That jams a lot of scores onto a report card.  How are parents and students supposed to understand?  Though I’m a teacher, I barely do.

Not Enough Data

And yet, even with so many categories, the new proficiency report cards don’t have enough data.  At least, not the kind that’s useful.

The question parents most often ask is, “How’s my kid doing?”

But a proficiency report card does not sound the alarm though like the old report cards did.  There’s often no easy way to mark “missing” in a proficiency gradebook, no easy way to waive the red flag.

The old system was good at this.  Perhaps we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater?

Teaching Work Habits

Under the old system, the threat of a zero on a missing homework assignment theoretically motivated you to do your homework.  But under PBL, the only place you’ll lose credit for missing homework is in the transferable skills.  But transferable skills don’t count toward your GPA, so . . .  why do your homework?

PBL responds:

“If you don’t do your homework, you won’t do well on tests and you won’t be marked proficient.  So kids will be motivated to do their homework” . . .

. . .  said no one who’s worked with kids, ever.

Kids Want Rankings

But kids’ elementary school report cards look just like PBL ones.  So what’s wrong here?

High school kids — the ones who want to excel — want to be ranked.  They know the stakes.  They’re up against more competition for fewer acceptance slots and fewer scholarship dollars.  You’ve got to stand out.

But under the 1-4 PBL system, you can’t.  Under the old system, a 92 (an A-) was a lot different than an 85 (a B).  But under PBL, they’ll both likely fall under a “3.” This is especially a problem because it’s not always clear to students how to achieve a 4.  In fact, on many assignments, it’s not even possible.  So that means the great mass of students pretty much live at either a 2 or a 3.  Look around an average high school.  Does that seem right to you?

I hear this complaint from students all the time.  Sounds like we’re not alone.

Rating Fever

We’ve gotten drunk on PBL.  We think we can break everything down into a sub-skill and rate a kid on it.  Where the old system mushed everything together, we’ve gotten carried away pulling it all apart and taming it into a million separate categories.

First, it’s not practical to rate kids on absolutely everything.  I think we’re finding that.  (Can anyone say, “crazy data entry”?)

Second, we risk turning education into a box checking activity for ourselves as well.  Instead of designing rich, integrated lessons that call on students to spontaneously create meaning, we’ve got to have it planned out ahead of time.  But the best teachers know learning doesn’t always happen that way.  You have to be awake to what the particular learners before you need.  You can’t just be checking boxes.

The Future?

While it’s tempting to think that proficiency-based learning is just another educational initiative bound for an all-too-predictable five- or six-year flight before falling back to earth, there is much to proficiency education that is tremendously promising — if it only has a chance to succeed.

If nothing else, proficiency education forces teachers to be more precise about what they want from students.  Even the proliferation of grading categories — befuddling to non-educators — is inspired by the noble goal of more carefully watching who’s mastering the material and who’s not.  The old system rewarded the kid who waited out his four years; the new system seeks to reward him only if he can read, write, and calculate. And on top of it all, states like Vermont have been confident enough to allow each school to work out graduation standards for themselves.

That said, if we don’t honestly own up to many of these issues, then and all the time, money, and training that has been poured into proficiency education will have been wasted if the reform doesn’t stick.  And if there’s one thing we know about educational reforms, it’s harder than we think to make them stick.  

After all, it may take some time before the “proficient student” replaces the “A student” in our national consciousness.

If it ever does.

A few months ago, I did something crazy.  Even though it’s what I want, and even though I’ve had time to get used to it, I still find myself wondering, “What the hell am I doing?”

Or, “Who am I to try this?  I’m just a teacher.”

Let me explain.

In my world, I’m realizing, things don’t change much.  Public schools are remarkably consistent.  Sure, kids don’t pass notes anymore — they text.  Homework isn’t on the board — it’s online.  And nowadays we practice active shooter drills and even talk about arming teachers.  Imagine!

But look closely and you’ll find the core of American high school has stayed strikingly similar for 75 years.  Every morning since who-knows-when, a bell has rung and sleepy-eyed teenagers have wandered off to the same basic classes, on the same basic schedule, for the same 180 days, to earn the same As, Bs, or Cs.  It’s ritual: the droning teachers, the hand-raising, the homework, the lockers, even the detention.  High school is comfortably familiar, its traditions etched into our collective conscious.  It’s a rite of passage.

That doesn’t mean it makes sense.  It doesn’t.  For instance, if I were checking kids’ incisors or tonsils, I’d get to examine one kid at a time.  Instead I’m teaching them to read and to show empathy and to participate in a democracy.  I get them twenty-two at a time.

For American schools, this too is tradition:  We know what works. We just can’t afford it.

Or can we?

Two years ago, a creative principal decided to do something about his students’ writing.  So he lightened an English teacher’s class load from five to four — and made each class a bit bigger (but not too much) to compensate.  Understand, teaching five classes is just as much a fixed reality for American teachers as the 180-day calendar.  It’s tradition.

But not this time.  Now the principal told the teacher to use that extra time — that fifth teaching period — to conference individually with kids outside of class.  This, he thought, would improve their writing.

Improve they did.

The results were immediate.  One month in, the teacher was pinching himself.  Suddenly he could really dig into kids’ writing and show them what his red pen comments never could.  But it was more than that.  Suddenly he could know his students as individual learners, as individual human beings, more than he ever had before.  This, he told himself, is what I’ve been trying for my whole career.

That teacher was me.  

That experience of being freed up to work one-on-one with kids on their writing — to diagnose the individual patient rather than the group — changed my outlook on what was possible in education.

We know what works.  This works.  Maybe this time we can afford it?

***

A year later — this winter — I received a Rowland Fellowship — a year-long, paid sabbatical awarded to Vermont teachers — with the purpose of investigating whether this new conferencing approach to teaching is a) as good as I think it is, and b) feasible for anyone else.  What does this mean?  For a whole year, I won’t teach.  I’ll visit other high schools and maybe even colleges to see if anyone else is doing this crazy conferencing idea.  I’ll read journal articles to try to figure out if any schools way, way back in time have tried this (hint: they have).  I’ll attend conferences.  I’ll interview kids and teachers to see what they think of the writing conference model.  I’ll research.  I’ll support my coworkers, who are brave enough to try out this new plan.  It’s the sort of chance you don’t often get in your professional life — the chance to step back from the day-to-day to really try to get it right.

And it’s not only generous of the Rowland family, but far-sighted.  In a time when we’re used to educational policy being driven by those farthest from the classroom — professors, politicians, even billionaires — the Rowland Foundation is built on the refreshing and frankly savvy idea that, given time and thought-space, it’s teachers themselves who have some of the worthiest ideas about improving education.

After all, schools are busy.  Teachers are busy.  We jam twelve months of work into a 10-month school year.  We rarely get to pause and reflect.  Too often, we flit from shiny new initiative to band aid reform, without giving anything a chance to work before we move on.  It doesn’t help that our policies are often subject to the whims of short-tenured administrators and to impatient legislators.

Paradoxically, it’s this constant blur of reforms that ensures none of it ever really sticks.  Add in a lack of money, the comfort of familiarity, and the sheer scope of the job of educating the masses, and all of it helps explain why today’s basic school structure looks remarkably similar that of 50 years ago.  There is an “immovable mountain” — as Rowland Executive Director Chuck Scranton calls it — in our way.  No change comes to schools without a lot of time, thought, and hard work.

And yet, change does happen.  The school where I work is remarkably forward-thinking and humane.  Even in my eight years as a teacher, I’ve seen a number of positive changes worked into the immovable system by diligent and committed educators.  I’ve seen it work — and I want to be a part of it.

As trite as it sounds, I took this fellowship because I wanted to make a difference.  And I’m incredibly excited to get to work.  But this does feel out of character for me.  I don’t usually think of myself as a leader.  The goal of the fellowship is not just classroom but school-wide reform.  The question is — can I “scale up” my idea to promote change beyond my own classroom or department.  That’s scary because that’s not how I usually think of myself.  I’m just a teacher.  When I look down the list of past Rowland recipients, I see leaders in the Vermont educational community: future principals, curriculum coordinators, even a future mayor.  I don’t see myself that way.  Motivating grumpy teenagers to pass in their Paper Towns essays is one thing.  Trying to nudge grizzled veterans with pedagogical war stories from the year I was born to fall in line with my wacky ideas is quite another.  Who am I to try to make change?

What if no one’s interested?

Then there’s the fact that what I’m selling may be impossible to spread beyond my classroom.  There are a hundred reasons why it’s too hard to teach only four classes and to conference individually with kids:  Teachers have always taught five classes. Teaching four will make classes too big.  One-on-one meetings take up too much time. It’s impossible to conference with all of your students every semester. Better to just do what we’ve always done: chat quickly with kids during a stolen minute or two in class here and there, or even 30 seconds when everyone else is working well.  Keep your classes small and try to make it work without the individual face-to-face time. Play the long game. Things are the way they are for a reason.

For months, I’ve been wrestling with these doubts.

The last time I remember feeling this way was back in 2003, when I first decided to write the book that would eventually become Let It Rain, the kayaking guidebook that was the passion project of my pre-teaching days.  The questions, the self-doubt, was all the same:

Who am I to do this?

What if no one likes it?

What happens if this doesn’t go well?

But there are always a million reasons why you shouldn’t do something.  Just like back in 2003, I have no idea how the next  year will turn out. I cannot know if my desire to change schools to establish more flexible teacher schedules and more individual instruction will be repelled by the immovable mountain.  I cannot know if the changes I’m hoping to make are at all realistic, or helpful to anyone besides me. But I do know that sixteen years ago I did not regret taking the risk that I did.

I have the sense that these feelings of doubt are again the ones that precede something important.  And something tells me that even if I fail, even if in five years there’s no trace of my reform left, I won’t actually have failed.

I am a big believer in the idea that every now and then — maybe once or twice in your career — you stumble onto something amid the myriad of temporary reforms that really works.  And if you don’t throw your hat into the ring, if you don’t fight for that cause to get its hearing, then you’re not playing the game for real.

Starting next fall, I’m in.

***

As a public school teacher, I could not have agreed more with President Trump last week, when he said, “We have to harden our schools, not soften them” in response to school shootings.

Trump’s directive was echoed by other conservatives.  Instead of fewer guns, they said, we need more guns in schools — especially in the hands of teachers.  We also need more metal detectors, more alarm systems, more cameras, and more security guards.  Again, I couldn’t agree more. 

The problem is, Trump isn’t taking things far enough.  After all, schools aren’t the only places that mass shootings occur.  Children aren’t the only ones who need protecting.  I think it’s high time we started “hardening” a few other places too.

Let’s start with one place that’s notoriously atrocious at security: our churches.  Just a few years ago some psycho opened fire during Sunday mass in South Carolina, killing nine worshippers.  Any good conservative knows these atrocities are easily prevented if our churches would beef up the perimeter. 

Let’s be realistic: it’s not like everyone gets into Heaven, right?  So why should just anyone be able to walk into a church?  Not only do churches open their doors to all comers on Sunday (where’s the armed guard?), but many of them leave their doors open all week long so people can wander in and pray.  Can you say, “soft”?  

Forget open hearts and open arms.  It’s time for metal detectors.  We’ll set up shop in the vestibule.  Want to take communion?  Better get patted down first.  Shooters would think twice if they knew Father Jack was packing heat under his robe.  The choir better be on key — and locked and loaded too.

***

But let’s not stop with our churches.  There’s another place that mass shootings have occurred — in fact, in 2015 in San Bernardino, 17 people were shot at one of these.  Frankly, they’ve always been soft.  It’s time to bring them in line with the modern crime environment. 

I’m talking about Christmas parties.  This year, instead of bringing a bottle of wine and a gift for secret Santa, bring your Glock, too.  No one’s crashing the Hadlock Insurance Group’s holiday get-together if they think Joyce from Accounting’s got a 9 millimeter tucked under that ugly Christmas sweater.  Bad guys take notice: you’re not just standing under the mistletoe, you’re standing in the crosshairs.

***

But forget churches and Christmas parties.  There’s another place that’s seen almost as many mass shootings as schools, and is just as badly in need of hardening.  Back in 2009, 13 people were killed in a shooting at one of these places.  Four years later, another shooting happened at the exact same one.  How weak is that?  If you believe that Trump’s got it right — and I do whole-heartedly — clearly these places need to work on getting tough.  Trump tells us that tighter security, more armed guards, better drills, and more employees carrying weapons will deter shooters.  So clearly these particular places need to step it up with all of those.

So what are these soft, soft targets?

Military bases.

Come on, U.S. military!  If Trump is right about guns being the answer, you all must be doing a terrible job.  It’s high time the U.S. military started working on getting more of their employees armed.  Because as we know, that’s what really works in preventing mass shootings.  I have no doubt that’ll improve their odds of deterring violence on military bases, just like it’ll work perfectly with American public schools.

It’ll all be pretty seamless, after all.  Even though most teachers have never shot a weapon, I’m sure they’ll have no trouble adapting to their new role as physical protector of their students.  After all, plenty of people sign up to put themselves in harm’s way — police, fire fighters, soldiers.  I’m sure that this new role won’t cause any of our teaching candidates to feel squeamish and choose another career.

After all, just because you love kids doesn’t mean you can’t love the idea of shooting guns at people.  I’m sure that even though we’ve got a perennial teaching shortage in the United States, and even though 50% of teachers leave the profession within five years due to poor working conditions, nobody’s going to be further deterred simply because they have to be prepared to, say, shoot an attacker in the face.  I can’t imagine that in addition to the hurdles faced by teachers — lack of time, money, and resources — they’ll be much bothered by the ever-present reminder that they might be attacked by an active shooter.  They’ll probably just forget about it, walking through metal detectors, practicing drills, and keeping a gun in their desk.  I’m sure that won’t dominate their thoughts.

And I’m quite sure that in addition to all of the roles teachers are expected to play — therapist, disciplinarian, role-model, snack-opener, writing coach, lunch monitor, bullying-preventer, and self-esteem-raiser, they’ll be just fine adding the role of security guard.

I’m sure that the serious implications that come with keeping a loaded gun in the classroom — “I would engage in a gunfight for your children,” and “I would kill another human for your children,” and finally, “I would take a bullet for your children” will all be easy for teachers to wrap their minds around.  I’m sure they won’t want to switch professions, especially if you don’t pay them any more, which, let’s face it, you won’t.

It’ll all work perfectly.  What could go wrong?