Notes From the North Country

Why do people say, “Everyone should be able to have school choice”?

First of all, they do.  Second of all, why is choice a good thing?

I know why they say this, of course.  We live in a country that fetishizes the market, distrusts government, bows down to innovators, looks askance at credentials.  We’re a country of gated compounds, semi-automatic weapons, sections of New York that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade. We’re obsessed with competition.  Our favorite sport causes brain damage. Our president is definitely going to hell.

Dammit, don’t tell us what to do.  We’ll make up our own minds, thank you very much.  Give us liberty — and choice — or give us death.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I am 100% in favor of traditional school choice.  By that I mean private schools. Every child in America should be able to attend private school if he wants.  But that’s not what people mean when they say school choice.

Even without private schools, Americans have school choice right now — just not in the way they want it.  People have some magical ideas about what “choice” is and can accomplish.

Here are the things I don’t get.  

1.  When anyone says people are “trapped” in their local school

Umm, aren’t those people free to move?  If they lust after Springfield High, then move to Springfield.  Wait, you can’t afford to? Then get a better job. That’s how the free market works.

What’s that?  The free market isn’t fair?  It tends to sort winners from losers, not lift all boats?

And you want MORE of it, not less?

Come on.  Poor kids are still going to live farther from the good schools.  That distance plus the rigors of the application process will always discourage them from attending “better” schools.  So will entrance policies that either subtly discriminate toward students with disabilities, or can be gamed via test prep and resume padding.  The deck will still be stacked.

Meanwhile, the wealthier people will still want to be among their own kind.  Once their local schools are flooded with needy out-of-towners, they’ll pull their kids and put them in private schools.  Or they’ll move even further away and form wealthy people colonies all over again.

It has happened over and over.  That’s the free market, baby.

What, you don’t like?

2.  When people say, “It’s self-evident.  Everyone wants a choice.”

No.  As the writer Peter Greene has astutely pointed out, people do not want choice.  They want a quality school.  That’s different. As I’ve written elsewhere, I don’t think Vermonters living in the Stowe or CVU districts are saying, “Boy, I wish I had school choice.”

Remember how the Paul Ryan healthcare plan passed last year?  Me either. Why? Because no one wants choice. I don’t want the option of four different hospitals.  I want one quality hospital near my house. I don’t want to spend time leafing through the fine print of eighteen possible health plans.  I just want a cheap one that works.

Same with schools.  I just want a good one that works for my child.

3.  Here’s something else I don’t understand: Liberals who are against the ills of privatized healthcare and big business . . . who want to privatize education through charters and choice.  

So many Democrats decry the kind of wealth inequality perpetrated by free market capitalism.  But then they want to turn around and toss the keys to a bunch of fly-by-night charter operators?  Somehow private healthcare companies are the Bad Guys because they’re trying to make a living off sick people, but private school companies that want to make a living by skimming bright students and making fraudulent claims are somehow encouraging healthy competition?  Why is that?

4.  People who say “public education is a monopoly”

You’re telling me that a decentralized system of hundreds of thousands of local schools, each one run by its own, idiosyncratic locally elected school board — is somehow a monopoly?  Vermont alone has 264 school districts, each with their own board of directors. That’s not exactly a table of fat cats at Standard Oil bleeding the country dry.

If you don’t like what’s happening with your local school, you can attend board meetings, stand on the stump, bang your fist, even call up the local school board rep and vent to your heart’s content.  You can wage a campaign to get her fired. You can get elected yourself and hold the superintendent’s feet to the fire. Or the principal’s. I’ve seen it — over and over and over. It’s called local control.  We have it in public schools.

Monopolies don’t.

Now, is it a monopoly for those people in town?  I guess. But that’s like saying the police department is a monopoly.  Or the water company. Or the fire department. Like those services, education is not a commodity.  It is a civic responsibility.

But education is not a commodity.  It’s a public good.

5.  People who think choice leads to quality

It doesn’t.  Choice leads to competition, not to quality.  That’s a big difference. The market is good at creating competition for what it believes people want.  My town in New Hampshire has a lot of restaurant choices. Most of them, however, are not very good. They’re fast food — because that’s what the demand is for.  Choice promotes competition — but only for what people want. In my town, you’ll get quick drive throughs. You’ll get a hefty dollar menu. You’ll get a wide variety of cheap, processed food.  If MacDonalds was the only game in town, food wouldn’t be as fast, as cheap, or as varied. That’s what competition does. It fulfils demand — and there is demand for fast food.

But does the market produce quality restaurants?  Of course not. We don’t have any three-star Michelin cuisine.  Why? There’s no demand. The free market doesn’t promote quality per se — only competition.

Think about the implications.  People want their kids to get good grades and get into college.  Won’t that lead schools to compete for applicants by inflating grades and test-prepping the SAT and AP exams?  Or by simply spending more and more money on marketing, promising the moon and stars to parents (while neglecting teaching and learning)?

I sometimes think part of the reason public schools are so maligned is that they rarely spend time on P.R.  But do you really want to live in a world where they do?

6.  People who forget the math

Schools cost money.  A lot of money. Everyone forgets this.  Even tiny local schools routinely have yearly budgets totaling well into the millions.  The math only works if:

1)  Everyone in town is paying, even those with no kids (public school model)

2)  Only attending families pay, but tuition is very high (private school model)

Most private school tuitions today are in the $50,000 range.  Even imagining that we ended property taxes, can you imagine a universe on which most families could even manage half of that — for even one kid?  Me either.

So now you’re back at Option 1.  But why is it fair for some people in town to be able to take their money and spend it elsewhere?  What if I, as a resident with no kids, don’t like the local school’s approach and no longer want to support it?  I can’t take my money and spend it bankrolling another school I like better. But school-age parents can? How is that fair?

7.  People who don’t like roving gangs of youth criminals

Okay, no one likes this.  But that’s why we put lots of money into schools that give young people productive ways to channel their energies.  Otherwise . . . youth gangs.

But what about people who want to use public money to pay for private school?  Don’t those people still get to enjoy walking through town unmolested? How is that fair?

You know what I mean.  

8.  People who say, “All children should have access to a quality education”

Great.  Access. That’s like saying, “All teachers should have access to a great salary.” No thanks.  I’ll just take a great salary. “Access” gives me nothing.

Same with schools.  We’re so daunted by the prospect of turning around schools steeped in poverty that it’s like choice advocates have given up and want to give people “access” to the market, and let the chips fall where they may.  That’s a lot different than trying to make sure every kid actually HAS a good school.

In the end, that’s what choice is — it’s access.

And if you think about it, that’s the system we already have.  You can move where you want. Only, even though it seems fair, it isn’t.  

Markets never are.

Whew.  There’s a lot to digest in “Designing Our Future: A Blueprint for Transforming Vermont’s Education System.” First it was an internal memo obtained by VtDigger and then after that leaked, the agency decided to publish it for real.  They are careful to remind us that this is not an actual proposal.  They call it a “thought experiment.”

Here are a few takeaways:

1.  It was not just developed by education officials

As far as I can tell, this plan was started internally at the AOE, led by Secretary of Education Dan French.  But it’s hard to tell if any AOE staff participated. The members of the design team, other than French, that they do tout, are members of Phil Scott’s cabinet: the Secretaries of Commerce and Community Development, Digital Services, Human Services, the Commissioner of Labor, and staff from the Governor’s office.

Notice something?

No Vermont educators were involved.

(But as a teacher, you expect that.)

2.  The stakes are high — really high

Apparently under the new proposal, Vermonters would “come together as regions, and ultimately as a state, to save the state; increase affordability, resources for vulnerable populations, and economic growth.”

Save the state?

My, my. The things we put on our schools.

3.  This is a super-unrealistic bureaucratic power grab

The proposal calls for condensing all of Vermont’s tiny supervisory unions into four big regional ones.  Instead of a lot of different superintendents, we’ll have four. Instead of a bunch of school boards from every town, we’d have four.

Clearly this won’t ever happen.  Consider the vicious fights going on right now over Act 46 (including a number of lawsuits). I don’t think Vermonters have any interest in anything like this at all any time soon.  

And by that I mean “ever.”

4.  It’s riddled with economic anxiety

Ever since he came into office, Phil Scott has been hammering his point about our declining population.  Vermont schools are the “canary in the coal mine” — declining in enrollment and increasingly expensive. Every year around budget time Scott makes noise about cutting school costs, sparring both years late in the budget process, and just generally seeming like he has no idea how to work with lawmakers to control costs.  

His other big goal is to make sure Vermont schools are training workers who’ll stick around, get jobs, and pay taxes.

So this is not a document filled with lofty language about education.  This is a document about using schools to grow the economy. There is a focus on Career Technical Education (CTE).  There is talk of “equity,” but mostly equity of economic opportunity. Even school buses, for Scott, fit into the lens of job growth:

“If a local school does not provide transportation, parents have to make career choices to ensure that they have the flexibility to take kids to and from school, impacting an individual’s ability to fully participate in the labor market.”

Duly noted.

5.  The new proposal would fix these economic problems

If we institute this plan, they claim:

“ . . . employers can be sure of a reliable, consistent stream of employees, from those ready to work directly out of high school in skilled professions to those who complete graduate degrees in Vermont postsecondary institutions.”

But isn’t that backwards?  Vermont’s problem hasn’t been that we don’t have smart young people coming out of our schools.  We do. It’s just that they don’t stick around — because there aren’t enough good jobs. You can’t just expect a “reliable, consistent stream of employees” to be sitting around waiting on your call when there’s nothing available.  That sounds like something a bunch of business people would say.

6.  They want the curriculum to be guided by the local economy

That’s right.  Talk to business leaders first before you go handing out more pointless math homework — so that your pointless math homework actually has a point because it’s all about how to push around a mop.  

Yep, it’s time to “ensure that all education-focused decisions (not just those that affect CTE) were made in the context of regional economic and workforce development needs” and “better align secondary school education resources with economic need and innovation efforts in the region.”

Time to fix the curriculum!  We’re cutting art and music and focusing on a new class.  It’s called “Making Change at WalMart.”

I jest.  But as a teacher, I’m dubious.  For one thing, as I mentioned, they’ve got it backwards.  If you want good workers, stop outsourcing. Offer jobs that pay good wages.  Offer stability. Offer dignity. Don’t complain no one’s “prepared” to work long hours for no money.  Also, don’t complain that local kids — whose parents’ jobs you cut twenty years ago and made them fight and scrap for a living while raising kids — aren’t whizzing through the school system on their way to Master’s degrees.  It doesn’t work that way. For kids to have opportunities, it helps if their parents had well-paying, stable jobs too.

If no one’s prepared for your jobs, ask yourself why not.  Don’t blame schools. Businessman, heal thyself.

7.  CTE is hot

That’s right — Phil Scott wants workers.  CTE — Career Technical Education — is mentioned 29 times in this report.  Meanwhile Flexible Pathways are mentioned once, and Proficiency-Based Learning not at all.  These cabinet types want to “Reduce the negative stigma of CTE” and foster “consistent practice and transparency in what CTE ‘counts for re high school graduation requirements.”

And — if you’re a undergrad focusing on CTE, you’re about to hit the jackpot.  Scott wants “consideration of existing educator contract terms, moving toward a more holistic, shared approach that appreciates the relevant skills CTE teachers may bring to the table.”

In other words, get ready for pay day!

8.  As a matter of fact, Vermont schools are focusing too much on academics at the expense of CTE

Here is what they say “must be given up” if we’re to “thrive”:

“Siloed curricular development and scheduling approach between general education and CTE, as well as relative over- emphasis in general education on academic preparation, at expense of career readiness and life navigation skills.”

I wonder if “life navigation skills” (LNS) will be the next hot term?

“Sorry, Mom, I can’t work on my homework.  I’m working on my Life Navigation Skills.”

“But you are playing Fortnite!”

“That’s right — I’m navigating life.”

But let’s step back.  Academic skills are — overemphasized?

Remember that “career readiness” is actually one-half of the phrase “college and career readiness” — which is really code for “the Common Core” — a huge, untested set of standards foisted on states like Vermont by the Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top.  It’s worth remembering that schools were forced to focus almost exclusively on basic academic skills precisely because of big, top-down federal mandates like Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, and the Every Students Succeeds Act — all of which required districts to drill down on basic math and English at the expense of arts, music, CTE, and yes, LNS.

So don’t hit us.  We were just doing what we were told.

9.  There would be a statewide teacher contract

Not to go unmentioned is this little tidbit, too, which Phil Scott has been dreaming about ever since he took office:  “Teachers would become state employees of the single statewide school district. There would be one teacher contract.”

As much as I don’t want that, I will say that there are three pay tiers in Vermont ed: 1) the small schools, which pay nothing, 2) Chittenden County and the rich schools like Stowe, which pay the most by far, and 3) everyone else.  I switched from category 1 to category 3 after my first year of teaching. I jumped up $11,000 — and was better supported and had fewer discipline problems. Small schools in poor towns can’t compete for the best staff. It’s a fact.

10.  It calls for statewide school choice

The biggest controversy around this proposal so far is around a relatively small part of the document:

“Students would have statewide school choice among all the public schools, technical centers, and non-sectarian independent schools approved by the Agency.” (Emphasis mine.)

Former Ed Secretary Rebecca Holcombe, who resigned her post last year after what I imagine were some pretty major differences with newly elected Governor Scott, wrote a scathing critique of this plan.  As always, she’s worth reading.  I had no idea that many Vermont private schools lack the ability to teach students with disabilities — while happily receiving public money.

And this document was written by a bunch of Republicans.  So school choice — not surprising.

11.  School choice is an “equity” issue

“Equity” is a hot word on the left right now, especially in education circles (and especially pertaining to race).  Of the two big conferences I’ve attended this fall, both were centered on equity.

Meanwhile it’s always fun to hear the left’s language co-opted by Republicans:

“[This plan] would also remove current disparities between students who, because of their district of residence, can exercise a choice about which school to attend, and those students who have only one school in which they can enroll free of charge. The current governance framework is arguably inequitable in this respect . . . ”

But that’s missing the point.  The inequity isn’t that some children have choice.  It’s that some children have good local schools while others don’t.  I have a feeling no one attending Stowe or CVU is saying, “Gee, I wish I had more school choice.”

12.  The report cites some misleading data on education spending

After citing declining enrollment, the proposal states:

“Unfortunately, Vermont’s education spending has not decreased at the same rate. According to the National Education Association, in the 2015-2016 school year Vermont’s per pupil expenditure was $23,557, or $2,000 more per pupil than New York who spent the second most. This compares to a national average of $11,787 per pupil.”

Yes — but no.

According to the 2015-2016 NEA report, Vermont did spend $23,557 per pupil, ranking us first in spending.  But actually not. The next year’s report revised that number down to $19,417, ranking us sixth.  Our 2016-2017 spending is down even more — to $19,399.

Why didn’t the report mention this?

(And Rebecca Holcombe suggests further reasons why these numbers are skewed, claiming that our per pupil spending is more like $18,000 a year.  Again, read her piece.)

13.  Vermont Schools should become brands and have PR campaigns

This is where the report really gets all Republican.  More from the file of “we should run schools like businesses.”

You see, even though this plan would strip local democratic influence and shutter local schools, the public would be more informed — thanks to the handy PR personnel these new mammoth districts would hire:

“Each education region or district would have one (or more) FTE position for a communications professional who reports directly to the superintendent. This person would be responsible for public and media relations, communications strategy, building communications policies, plans and best practices . . .”

Okay, okay, fine . . .

“ . . . and serving as an ombudsman for the region.”

Wait . . .  what?

Let me get this straight:  No more locally elected representatives, but at least you’ll have an regional ombudsman on your side?  (And he’s also the guy in charge of district PR?)

This whole idea sounds less like communication and more like good, old-fashioned marketing:

“In this way the communications team . . . in addition to serving the Agency of Education’s communications needs, would provide services to regions through a client relationship similar to a PR agency.”

It’s almost as though these Republicans are swapping community schools for quasi private ones:

“Regionalization of communications services . . .  would also give each region an opportunity to define their brand and build a public identity that new members of the region can get behind.”

Out with your silly local traditions, and in with regional brands!

“One can imagine the Champlain Valley schools, for example, building a brand identity and community spirit that is distinct from the North Country Regional Schools or Central Vermont School System.”

Yeah right.  I’m sure people in Thetford would feel a really shared sense of “community spirit” with the people of Rochester.  Go Central Vermont!

It’s a corporate approach.  Make up for gutting local traditions by peddling a corporate version of them.  There is nothing sadder to me that the way the 99 Restaurant in my town, having edged out Mom and Pop, covers their walls with pictures of local sports teams.  You’re not from here and you never were. You just want our money. Stop pretending.

14.  The Scott Plan is going to Make our Schools Great Again

Now this is where the report is really reaching.  Not only will we reduce costs, but our schools will become so great under the Scott Plan that outsiders will want to move to Vermont just for the schools:

“Finally, each of the advances under the new system . . .  could help sell the state as an ‘education destination’ focused on rigorous personalized education, equity in opportunity for all students, and strong ties between both academics and career readiness starting in the elementary grades.  A marketing campaign designed to draw in more young families and keep graduating college students within the state could be relatively simple to develop based on these novel features.”

So you’re telling me we’re going to cut spending on education, consolidate schools against the will of local communities, increase staff-student ratios, and slash the number of superintendents watching over districts . . .  and suddenly people will want to move here just for the schools?

Come on, it’s easy.  

Just take away local control, community schools, offer kids a choice between a school 60 minutes away or one 75 minutes away, jack up regional pride via some good PR, let local businesses set curriculum, sprinkle in some magical CTE  . . .

And sit back and watch young families flock to Vermont.

Good luck with that.

Here is what fatherhood is like with an infant.

A few weeks back, my younger brother, who is single, texted me.  It was Saturday night, he was sitting in a bar in Harvard Square, waiting on a date, sipping a cocktail.

I texted him back:

“I just pushed James around the kitchen for 20 minutes in his stroller while running the vacuum cleaner because this all stops him from screaming.”

The parents of an infant are basically high class hostages.  Except our captor wears hats with rabbit ears and is incapable of using the toilet.

His main tool of oppression is the scream.  To someone used to the smooth tones of rational disagreement — or even the sarcastic repartee of teenagers — a true scream is surprisingly jarring.  These are not muffled sobs at a funeral, the raised voice of the spousal reprimand. This is someone terrified of being killed. My son sounds like Jack Woltz in “The Godfather” waking up next to a severed horse’s head:  “Ahhh! Ahhhhhhhhhh!” Listening from another room, you’d think his mother and I were trying to pry out his spleen using pliers (while forcing him to listen to Celine Dion). When in fact we’re just trying to dress him in an adorable outfit.

Isn’t it odd that infants are born screaming like banshees but cannot laugh or smile for months?  What does that say about humanity? Does that somehow explain Fox News?

If the scream’s not enough, he’ll take it to the next level. Parents quickly realize that those medieval torturers and Dick Cheney apologists had it right: Sleep deprivation works.  A week into fatherhood, I felt like I’d spent a month in Guantanamo: “I’ll confess! Anything!”

But the tyrant doesn’t make his demands clear.  That’s part of his genius: he keeps you guessing.  Sometimes, he wants to be fed. Other times, he no longer does — but wants to make the point that you missed your window. You just don’t know.

He’ll even manipulate you with good behavior.  The first few nights, my wife and I alternated between bleary-eyed incoherence when our son couldn’t sleep, and a strange anxiety when he could.  We’d had the fear of god put in us about SIDS. So after we hadn’t heard a peep from him for hours, we became convinced he was no longer breathing.

“James, wake up! Wake up!”

When he woke up and started screaming again, it was almost a relief.

But it’s not easy to get to that point. Getting your baby to quiet down is sort of like brokering international peace.  It takes a long time, and you have to be prepared try everything. Pushing the stroller while running the vacuum — who knew?

But it’s a fragile peace.  Your new overlord is vigilant. The other day, after 20 minutes of rather exhausting rocking, I’d finally gotten my son to sleep. Then — the arrogance of it! — I paused to scratch my chin. That was it. Game over! Back to Square One. Enjoy twenty more minutes of high pitched howls. Maybe next time you’ll learn, Dad?

Babies get lots of books. But I have a feeling no one’s still going to be giving him books when he’s ten or fifteen.  Why is that? Do we only believe reading is possible in that slim margin of time before kids discover phones and Fortnite?  Are we saying, “Eh, just get him through ‘Pat the Bunny’ and then hope for the best. That’s about all our president can do, anyway”?

Living with an infant requires a comfort with bodily fluids that can take some adjustment.  You’ve got to be prepared to get peed on, vomited on, and drooled all over. It’s like living in a frat house, except without the comfort of alcohol.

Infants are terrified of not being able to eat immediately.  See, they’re not capable of learning anything until they’re four months old, so every time they’re hungry, they don’t remember they’ve got two full-grown slaves waiting at their beck and call.  My son seems to require the reassurance of sleeping right on top of his food source, which happens to be my wife. That’d be like if I couldn’t bear to sleep more than a few inches from a t-bone steak and a pint of beer.  

Come to think of it, that’s sort of what you need to do as the father of an infant if you want to guarantee you get a full meal.

I can’t help thinking how strange it is that infants are actually incapable of learning.  That’s so weird — but then again, he’ll re-enter that state between the ages of 16-21. I’m hoping in between we can jam a few things in.

What redeems all of this of course is the notion that someday he’ll choose a lucrative career and buy his parents a sprawling beach house and / or multi-story yacht.

That and how cute he is on a minute-by-minute basis.

The Trump Plan for Education Makes a lot of Sense

Whenever I hear people say, “education hasn’t changed in 100 years,” I’m always amused.  These people have no idea how many truly fascinating and innovative reforms have come and gone, and come and gone — all long before you or I were even born.  

Take one initiative which at its height affected 15% of the schools in the country.  It was called the Trump Plan.

No, not Donald Trump.  J. Lloyd Trump.

Back in the late 1950s — right around the time The Donald was collecting his first million (courtesy of the savings bonds his father had prepared for him) — Dr. J. Lloyd Trump was a professor of education at the University of Illinois.  He was also a member of the National Association of Secondary School Principals. In the late 1950s, they developed a committee called the Commision on the Experimental Study of the Utilization of the Staff in the Secondary School in response to a nagging problem facing public schools.

People always look back at the 1950s as some idyllic time in American public education, but if you go back and read the history, you realize that 1950s-era schools still struggled with the same intractable, inherent issues we puzzle over now.  

Like teacher shortages.

Here’s J. Lloyd Trump, writing in the early 1960s:

“The changes urged in this report result from studies which themselves grew out of the search for solution to a nationwide problem: how to improve education despite an acute shortage of teachers.  In 1955, a year before the studies began, 45,000 more teachers than were readily available were needed in high schools.”

Look at that.

The problem was so bad that the Association of Secondary School Principals established the Commision in 1956.  They spent four years of studying new ideas from “nearly 100 junior and senior high schools across the United States.” All of this was bankrolled by the Fund for the Advancement of Education and The Ford Foundation.  

“The World faces a simple fact,” Trump writes plainly.  “It may not long survive as we know it.”

“The practical question is” Are the schools ready for the job?  There is considerable reason to say they are not.”

Trump calls the Commission’s findings no less than “the story of the coming of a new kind of secondary education in America” in response to “a complex of problems which have never been experienced, collectively, before.”

So what were their ideas?  What was the Trump Plan?

***

In 1959, during the study, Trump wrote a hugely influential booklet — it wasn’t very long — called Images of the Future.  Its ideas became known as the Trump Plan.  Here are its opening words:

“The secondary school of the future will not have standard classes of 25 to 35 students meeting five days a week on inflexible schedules.  Both the size of the groups and lengths of classes will vary from day to day. Methods of teaching, student groups, and teacher and pupil activities will adjust to the purposes and content of instruction.”

Reading these words from 1959, I was struck by how modern they sound.  Of course, Trump was wrong about the schools of the future — they do have standard classes and inflexible schedules.  But it was surprising to read such a radical idea being proposed so long ago during an era we think of as stodgy, homogeneous, and traditional.

The Trump Plan was anything but traditional.  

***

Flexible Class Sizes and Meeting Times

Trump’s whole idea is that learning should happen in three different settings in high schools: large-group lectures, small group discussions, and individual study.  Let’s say you’re taking American Lit junior year. Sometimes you’ll meet in a huge group — like 100 or even 200 students — all the American Lit students in the same grade, together — to hear lectures.  Other times, you’ll be in groups of 15, discussing ideas. Still other times — a lot, by our current standards — you’ll be off on your own working during the school day. The big lectures, the discussion groups — it sounds a lot like college.  But it doesn’t stop there.

Not only should class size be flexible, but so should the weekly schedule.  Trump proposed dividing up the school day into short (30 minute) modules (“mods”) of time.  That allows the same class to meet for different lengths of time per week. For example, English class might meet for 30 minutes on Monday for a big introductory lecture, but then for 90 minutes later in the week, for a long extended period of writing time.  

Both of these ideas make a lot of sense on paper.  For example, Trump defends his large-group lecture idea by reasoning that it’s a waste of time and money for two teachers to give the same lecture to five groups of twenty students.  Instead, pool their kids and give one lecture to 200 students at once if you have the space. Same goes for his idea (and here’s where it feels really modern for those of us in Vermont) that time should be a variable.  Trump believes that scheduling classes should be flexible — where and when the large groups and small groups meet should be up to the discretion of the instructor. Again, this makes a lot of sense. Why should classes always last for the same amount of time?  We are so trained as teachers to fill the time we’re given — instead of teaching for the amount of time we need.

That’s a big, big difference.

***

The Four Kinds of Teachers

Trump doesn’t stop there.  Because this report is really about using staff more effectively, he drives deeper, proposing a new, four-tier model of a teaching force — one that looks much more like a hospital’s than a traditional school’s:

Regular teachers:  Trump advises two different levels here: teacher specialists and general teachers.  The general teachers only help with discussion sections and aren’t always full-time.

(This is interesting — the notion of two different levels of teachers.  Sort of like the distinction in some districts with “Master Teachers.”)

Instructional Assistants:  These people grade assignments, set up labs, confer with students about progress, provide the teachers with reports, and generally do what Trump calls, “aspects below the professional level of teachers.”

(This category sounds a lot like nurses, compared to doctors.)

Clerks:  These people make photocopies, grade objective tests, “keep records” (one imagines they could update gradebooks these days . . . ), take attendance (oh, god, please do!) and “other clerical duties.”

(Wait, teachers could have secretaries?)

General Aides:  These folks supervise students while they’re at school — during independent study, in the cafeteria, etc.

(This is the age-old complaint of every teacher who has to sacrifice an hour a week to supervise lunch duty: “Can’t we just pay someone to do this?”)

***

Once again, this section makes a lot of sense.  Can you imagine if teachers had someone to grade their papers for them?  I remember years ago reading off-handedly that the famous math teacher Jaime Escalante (he of “Stand and Deliver” fame) hired a grader out of his own money in order to free up time to prepare lessons.  Can you imagine — someone to grade our work for us?

I wonder:  Would teachers want this?

Sure, it would remove our biggest time burden, the part of teaching most of us hate the most.  But would it rob us of our familiarity with individual student learning trends?

(Well, not if these same assistants would be writing up reports for us to read about student progress, right?)

And can you imagine if we had someone to enter our grades for us?  It’s no secret that Proficiency Grading requires us to double and sometimes triple report — a huge tie-up of time for teachers.  If we could outsource this work to data entry managers, wouldn’t this save us tremendous time and annoyance?

***

The Trump Plan was amazingly influential.  By the early 1970s, fully 15% of American schools were using some variable — particularly the flexible schedule, which was termed the “flex mod.”

Of course none of these changes lasted.

By the late 1970s, the flex-mod schedule had almost vanished from U.S. schools.  So had any other vestiges of the Trump Plan. The problem of course was that the Trump Plan, while innovative and daring, in many ways represented the height of technocratic disconnection.  It looked great on paper, but out the real world, it fell apart.

I mean, how do think it went having 100 9th graders sitting in a room together listening to a lecture?  I’m going to go with, “A complete and utter disaster.”

Same goes for the flexible schedule idea, which sounds like a total logistical nightmare.  Our students struggle to remember what day it is (and sometimes, after a week with teenagers, I do too).  Inflexible schedules exist for a reason — they’re predictable. And when you’re dealing with crowds of moody adolescents, some small measure of predictability is, you know, kind of a good thing.

And what about the different levels of teachers?  

This never got off the ground.  Basic opposition comes from both sides.  The anti-teacher side says, “Teachers are menial workers anyway and don’t deserve secretaries.” This is a strain of thinking that fundamentally does not see teachers as professionals.

The other side, the pro-teacher camp, says, “This is just J. Lloyd Trump trying to deal with a teacher shortage by putting a bunch of less qualified people into our schools.  We need to circle ranks and make sure only certified teachers are in front of kids.”

For my part, I think that having too many cooks in the kitchen can be more trouble than it’s worth.  Imagine the discrepancies when you’ve got a major assignment given by a teacher that’s then graded by someone different, and possibly less familiar with the content and requirements.  And then a third person entering the grades? Sounds like it’s probably just quicker to do it myself.

***

The flex-mod schedule soon enough gave way to the Reagan Revolution and A Nation at Risk, which spawned a whole new “back-to-basics” era — more core classes, a return to traditional schedules, and a call for more teacher certification requirements.  By the 1990s, schools were experimenting with block schedules — a way for teachers to use time more flexibly within traditional classes, thanks to longer periods of time — while maintaining the predictability of a traditional bell schedule. Today, most schools in New England employ some form of this plan.

Still, the ideals of the Trump Plan live on in education today, albeit in much humbler forms.  I see echoes of it in the concepts of “flexible groupings” within whole classes. I see it in the advent of the “workshop model” in English teaching — with its division of class time into whole group mini-lessons, small group discussions among students, and independent work time — all divided up into small “modules” of time during a longer (70-90-minute) period of class time.  

This is the way of bold new innovations in education.  They burn brightly for a time, then seem to die out — only to be absorbed into the existing system, refined by busy educators eager to cull what works and apply it to what they’re already doing.  They rarely change the existing structure of the system, but modify it and enrich it in small but often meaningful ways.

That’s why, the next time that someone says education hasn’t changed in 100 years, you can just ask, “What about the Trump Plan”?

With the advent of Act 77 one question that many Vermont schools are asking themselves is: what type of schedule best supports proficiency learning?

Proficiency learning, after all, rids schools of seat time requirements, replacing them instead with simple, bottom-line subject area proficiency requirements.  The familiar phrase under this new system is, “Learning is the constant and time is a variable.” This surely implies that our daily school schedules must change — perhaps radically.  Yet few Vermont schools have actually changed their schedules. Nor have many schools in the other states that have tossed seat time requirements: Maine or New Hampshire. There are two classic high school schedules, and most schools in New England retain some version of one or the other: either a traditional, 7- or 8-period, 46-55 minute-long classes, or 65-90 minute-long, four period “block” schedules.

I must admit, up until this year, when, as part of my fellowship, I stepped up to co-chair the committee tasked with overhauling the schedule, I knew next to nothing about the subject.  Since we started meeting a month ago, I’ve gone straight down the rabbit hole of scheduling research, spending my time poring over old books, journal articles, and other schools’ schedules. What has surprised me most has been how fascinating it’s all been. I think that this is the mark that you have chosen the right profession: when you actually enjoy learning about the esoteric details, the nitty-gritty of whatever it is you’re doing. A kayak coach I knew once called this true enjoyment, “fascination with the process.”

What’s most interesting is that I finally feel as though I’m understanding the structures that have shaped my daily work for so many years without my knowing it. It’s like when you become a parent yourself and your own parents begin to explain their own parenting decisions — the philosophies and expectations that invisibly but powerfully shaped your own upbringing. Suddenly you’re on their level. I had no idea the debates that have been raging for generations about the use of time in schools. Now, finally, I’m starting to understand the limits I’ve been operating under for so many years in the several schedules I’ve been part of. It’s tremendously liberating. 

A year ago, when I was applying for my current fellowship, an interviewer asked me if my school had a “block schedule” and I stumbled over my words because I did not know what this was.  In fact, I even struggled to remember precisely how long our daily periods were. Now, almost a year later, through educating myself, I have become almost fluent in the foreign language of school schedules.  When I look at a school’s day, I can almost immediately divine exactly what is going on, what is being prioritized and what is not, and speak with the cut-to-the-chase jargon of a car mechanic speaking about cars or an accountant speaking about finances: “Oh, that’s a skinny Monday set up with an A/B block the rest of the week and an alternating thirty-minute intervention / advisory after lunch.”

I have learned the fascinating political history behind school schedules too.  The traditional, factory-model schedules of the mid-20th Century soon gave way to more experimental flexible schedules of the 1960s and 70s, before returning to traditional in the wake of the post-”A National at Risk” 1980s, and then morphing into block schedules during the 1990s and 2000s.  

But where does that leave us today with proficiency learning?

***

The notion of time being a variable implies a flexible schedule.  The elephant in the room is this: It might be very well possible to graduate in two years instead of four.  Or it may mean that other students, who might have snuck across the graduation stage simply on their daily compliance and work habits, will be newly exposed, taking five years instead of four to solidify truly proficient skills.  We’re not, in a basic sense, sure exactly what will happen. But we do have a feeling that we’re going to need something different in our schedule, something that more honestly reflects the flexibility the system demands.

What sort of schedule do we need?

One school of thought, perhaps the most radical, says that now is the time to “blow up” the traditional grammar of school — not only the traditional daily use of time, but the yearly use of time (semesters) and the division of traditional subjects in various separate classes.  Proponents of this approach are often interested in models like the one used by Colorado College. Here students take just one class at a time, for four to six weeks, all day, every day. Then they have a few days off, before starting another. The classes are project-based, interdisciplinary (team taught by several teachers), with work done in teams, often outdoors or at least outside of a traditional classroom.  “Intensives” they’re sometimes called.

Advocates of this approach feel that true proficiency learning is multi-disciplinary, student-centered, and project-based.  Behind their reasoning, I believe are several ideas:

1.  Proficiency learning prioritizes skills over content.  Instead of requiring students to be able to name the historical eras of American history, they must be able to solve problems and to communicate.  Content’s taught in a classroom, but skills — especially the sort of “real world” skills proficiency aims at — are best taught outside in the “real world.”

2.  Going along with that, proficiency learning is biased toward doing, rather than knowing.  It’s designed to measure the performable (“performance indicators”), the demonstratable.  Think of it as the part of your driving test where you actually have to drive.

3.  Because there are now flexible pathways to pursue learning, students should be allowed to roam free from traditional curriculum to demonstrate proficiencies in new ways.  Not just some students but all students should be able to do this say advocates.

On the other side of the spectrum, the most traditional thinkers believe that a school’s schedule should stay largely the way it is, with one exception: it should allow for periods of flexible time (“flex time”) to reperform, to reteach, to personalize instruction as demanded by proficiency learning.  Advocates of this approach generally prefer one of two ideas: either a daily period of flexible time for students to meet with teachers, or a weekly “flex day” allowing for the same, in longer blocks.

Behind this reasoning, I believe are several different ideas:

1.  Owing to a variety of administrative and logistical realities, classes themselves should not attempt to be variable lengths of time.

2.  Student-led teaching, project-based learning, and other pedagogies implied in proficiency learning are very possible to conduct well within a traditional classroom setting, and in fact should be taught here, owing to the above-mentioned variables and realities of running a large school.

A number of schools in New England already incorporate 30-minute flexible daily periods (often called “Callback” or “Flex Block” when students can check in with teachers) — with varying success.  A few schools already employ flex days, during which students can work on remediation or enrichment or proficiency based project learning. (One influential model seems to be the one coming out of Baxter Academy in Portland, Maine’s first charter school, called Flex Friday, during which students work on “student-managed, long-term projects that are relevant to each student’s interests and goals.”)

A final idea about how to divide time comes from proponents of something in the middle of the previous two approaches.  These advocates promote a schedule in which the length and frequency of classes themselves are flexible from day to day or week to week.  There are two ways of doing this:

1.  The “team” model — in which four or five content teachers teach on a team together and are thereby free to combine together for projects or to set the schedule flexibly depending on what each class is doing.  This approach, while popular in many middle school models (often called the “core” model) tends to only work in high school for freshmen, owing to the number of electives and tracked classes.

2.  The flexible schedule, which was tried extensively in the United States in the 1960s, often called a modular schedule, or a flex-mod schedule.  In this set-up, the day is divided into short 30-minute “modules” and each class can elect how much time it needs weekly: 30 minutes, 60 minutes, or 90 minutes.  

The flex-mod was no joke.  By the early 1970s, it had been adopted by as high as 15% of all American high schools.  But ten years later, it was almost gone, largely due to several questions that lurk behind any such flexible use of time:  

1.  To what extent can students, particularly less academically motivated students, handle unstructured free time during the class day?  

One of the reasons cited in the article above for dropping the flex-mod was student “abuse of time.” And one of the big questions of the flex-mod was how to supervise large numbers of students in order to free up teachers to meet individually with small groups or with individual students.  Do you let them roam the halls? Put them in study halls in the library? Supervised by whom?

Most adults I know, for example, struggle to be productive during their free time.  Yes, we may tell ourselves that if we only presented more interesting lessons and projects to students they would use their time well, but again, even adults shirk their responsibilities in favor of time-wasting diversions, and many of us, I believe, deep down crave some kind of deadlines and “supervision” to force us to get down to business during the work day.

2.  How many logistics can you make teachers responsible for before they get burned out?  

Most teachers I believe, and I surely count myself in this, are fairly amenable to the time constraints we’re given.  I’ve taught in 45 minute blocks, and I’ve taught in 90 minute blocks. I can make it work. But the idea that teachers will be responsible for crafting lessons fitting into different blocks of time each week, I believe, is to hand already busy teachers another logistic that they don’t need.

This gets to the larger point as well: managing 800 teenagers and 65 staff in a single building requires some level of predictability and organization.  We beat up on schools for batch-processing, for being too regimented, but the fact remains that schools require some level of structure and supervision.

In the end, I don’t think anyone has the answers about what the new proficiency system will require in our use of time during the school day.  But it remains an exciting time in Vermont to explore fundamental questions that have captivated the minds of educators for many generations. I never thought I myself would become so captivated by something so seemingly pedestrian as scheduling.  But we value what we give time to — and so far from being a dry study of minutes and hours, scheduling is truly our utmost expression of philosophy and values.

Here’s something I learned a few years ago as a teacher: not all time is created equal.

Right now in Vermont, proficiency learning says, “Time is a variable.”

And yet, time is most decidedly NOT a variable.  We do not have infinite time to educate our students.  The future is coming at them, hard and fast. Thirty-five years ago, “A Nation at Risk” called for more class time and a longer school year.  We got neither. Instead, we must make due with the time that we have — just 180 days.

But what if there was another variable we could adjust to make that set amount of time more meaningful?

There is.  Not all time is created equal.  Who says that we must always teach whole-class groups of students?  Why must we always meet together in full-sizes?  A few years ago, I started meeting with students outside of class, like a college professor might require for a seminar class.  The results were dramatic. Suddenly I had time to get to know students as individuals, to diagnose problems. Doctors don’t treat en masse. Why should teachers?

Don’t get me wrong, whole-class instruction is important.  Building community, getting students to practice speaking to and listening to each other, and teaching cooperation are all incredibly important, particularly in our age of a fraying social fabric.  In fact, knowledge, as a coworker of mine would say, is actually generated in these sessions — the purposeful yet unpredictable and exciting search for the truth through debate and conversation.  Talk helps us make sense of our world. You need that, and you need others to do it.

And let’s not forget that lectures (direct instruction, we call it today) is an incredibly efficient way to disseminate information.

But — must we meet in groups all the time?  As an introvert, I strongly disagree. The best talk, in my life, happens in deep conversations with one other person.  The people who I know and am known by best are those who see me away from others, when we’re one-on-one. Surely we must have some time for true face-to-face, individual attention — and not during the “drive-by” moments (as a coworker terms it) during work time in class, when you’re putting out fires, or closing illicit browser pages, or providing, at best, short mini-lessons, or brief exhortations to keep going, these are not the ideal time to get to know an individual student.  You need time away from the busy classroom, freedom to talk, to question, to understand where each unique human being is coming from.

I am not advocating some sort of therapy session, but a purposeful, work-based conference time during which you can focus not on telling the student the right answer, but on — as a doctor would — diagnosing the root cause of misunderstanding.  The errors we make on our way to true mastery are often highly individual, and the best correction is to make us comfortable enough to voice these misconceptions plainly, so that they can be addressed.

Ray Bradbury wrote, “If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.” Yet the challenge is in probing deeply enough with students to the point where you are hearing them share their true points of ignorance.  Or — more accurately — not just their ignorance, but the blank space that exists in their developing brains where reasoning should be. So many students in high school have, quite literally, no script, no points of reference, no internal dialogue to regulate their actions.  This includes the usual teenage boneheaded-ness about booze, cars, and condoms, but it also encompasses just about every step in the academic learning process. How do you know how to choose a topic for an essay? Or how to factor a polynomial? Or how to study for a big test?  Or how to navigate your way through a complex project? We adults forget, but usually, for teens, there’s a big blank spot on the map where the metacognitive script should be. That’s okay. That’s normal. That’s what we’re here for. But we need to know.

That is why I strongly believe that you must make students comfortable enough that they will talk to you.  Not so that they will tell you their stories (although that can be helpful when generating topics for essays), but so that they will reveal their budding thought processes, and be open to gentle correction, augmentation, help with developing a “script” for future issues like this.  This is good teaching right where they need it most. If they do not open themselves, if you do not have private space with one student at a time for them to reveal where they are, you are probably only correcting the outward externals, the manifestations, not the root causes. You will see the misplaced commas, but you will not hear the reasoning behind them (“You’re supposed to put a comma in the middle whenever you have two really long words.”) How many times was a private misconception you had in your head addressed by a teacher’s lecture?  Or even by a discussion in class?

Want to be humbled?  A scattershot plot of your students’ brains following even your most dazzlingly clear lecture would probably shock all of us.  It would reveal some kids who heard and took us exactly as we’d hoped, but it would also reveal some wildly disparate, far-fetched interpretations, based on misunderstandings at such a basic level we’d have never expected it, or based on kids zoning out, or based on strong opinions or prejudices we’d not anticipated.  It’s all out there, vibrating in their heads, but how are you going to get in there and teach right into it?

How are you going to make the time (which is definitely not a variable) meaningful?

I realized all this when I learned how to fly airplanes a few years ago.  Far from the sort of informal, “Just go for it and see what happens and try not to do anything illegal” approach I’d taken with past hobbies (including the sister sport of hang gliding), learning to fly airplanes was an exercise in mastering heavy science content (meteorology, aerodynamics, mechanics) that I imagined I’d left behind the second I realized “Physics for Poets” class completed my completed my science requirement in college.  Again and again I found myself reading new terms in pilots’ textbooks but only partially understanding. There was a great blank space where full knowledge should have been, and instinctively I ran to fill this space with my own private explanations. Often this took the form of differentiating between two new terms I’d just learned. I understood the definitions, but not how one related to the other. In other cases, the definitions were so sparse that even my basic understandings were papered over by all kinds of places where I simply had to fill in the blanks with my own guesses.  For instance, I remember having some really wacky ideas about what the heck the dew point was. Sure enough, when I inadvertently uttered one of these aloud, my instructor, a mild-mannered many-decade veteran of the skies, gave me one of those, “What the hell gave you get that idea?” looks.

Keep in mind, I’m a well-credentialed adult.  I keep up with mortgage payments. I make lists before I shop.  I’m not driving my car into the side of maple trees from time to time.  I’m not playing Fortnite in lieu of attending to basic human needs. I’m not consuming whole bags of spectacularly colored Frito-Lay products directly before attending school in the morning.  I’m not 17 years old.

Imagine, in other words, how our students are doing with the dew point.  

Or more complex stuff like, say, the American Revolution.

But how are we to know unless we listen?  And how are we to listen if we’re meeting each child in groups of 20 or 25?  How are we to listen meaningfully if we are also supervising 19 others during class while conducting short “drive-by” conferences during class?  Wouldn’t it be more efficient to toss out some measure of whole-group instruction and trade it for private conferences — two or three per semester — five per year?  Couldn’t ten or 15 minutes with a student face-to-face mean more than whole semester’s worth of mis-timed and mis-aimed lecturing?

In the end, isn’t the discovery of better, more efficient means of reaching kids the whole thrust behind chucking the Carnegie Unit and measuring only a student’s proficiency?

In the end, isn’t that the true personalized learning?

Here’s the thing about the Carnegie Unit — about the whole traditional system of education that’s being challenged right now by proficiency learning:

The Carnegie Unit’s a sham.

Here’s why.  Right now, we pretend to award credit to students based on time.  But there is no meaningful requirement for how much time.  Sure, kids are required to attend high school for four years.  They have to take four years of English, three of math, and three of science — plus a year of phys ed, a year of health, and two of social studies.  But within those big blocks of time, kids are free to be absent as often as they want.  Public schools have no minimum number of days or hours that you must attend.

But what about truant policies?

At anywhere I’ve ever worked, they don’t mean a thing.  Sure, we put strongly worded policies in the handbook, but we don’t follow them.  They’re so hazy and — more often — so flexible that they might as well not exist.  I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve sat in where students who’ve missed whole months of class are leaning on the administration and teachers to let them pass.  Some of this, in the lower grades, is pure social promotion.  But most of it, in high school, comes from a place where real compromise is needed: there is a strong cultural pressure to pass from grade to grade with your peers and to finish high school in four years (even if you are not ready).  No one wants to fall behind or to repeat.  But there is also a chronic attendance problem, especially among low income students.  It comes from illness, from work conflicts (yes), and from family obligations.  Early in my career, I tended to dismiss it.  I don’t miss days — neither should you.  Suck it up.  But the reality is much more nuanced and even heart-breaking.  I need to stay home this week to care for my mom.  My dad left the house and I need to take care of my little brother.  I was sick and we can’t afford to go to the doctor.  I’ve been bullied and don’t want to come to school.  There’s so much more there than meets the eye.  You shouldn’t just swing the axe of truancy and be done with it.

And we can’t anyway.  Public schools, I’ve found, unless they’re willing to risk being seen as unfeeling and harsh (and risking more kids simply giving up and dropping out) really have no recourse.  A kid’s gone for two weeks, comes back and says, “I was sick” and what can you do?  Request a doctor’s note every time, for every kid?  Go to the mat with parents about a kid really being sick the whole time?  (I’ve done that; it’s not pleasant.) What if a kid misses a few classes to go to France on a field trip?  Or to volunteer at the local elementary school?  What are you supposed to do?  Say, “No, you can’t do that”?  Penalize the kid?  What would that make you?

My latest challenge has been “appointments.” Kids will sidle up to you on Day One and inform you, “I will be missing class every Friday” (we only have class two or three times a week, so this is a big miss) “because I’ve got an appointment.” So right there she’s missing 40% of class time.  What are you supposed to do?  She’s not lying.  Most of the time, you quickly understand that her appointment is related to serious emotional challenges, which are often readily apparent.  And you know that these appointments, sometimes quite a distance away, are hard to schedule.  What are you going to do?  Draw the line and say, “No, please miss some other class”?  Draw the line and say, “You’ll pay a serious grade penalty” and then go eight rounds with her irate parents, and your own administration (which, if you work at a halfway progressive and compassionate school, will strongly discourage this sort of attitude on your part)?

No.  Instead you tell her, “Of course.  I understand.  Say no more.  But I will expect you to make up the work.”

But deep down, even if she makes up all “the work,” you know she’s missing a lot.  All of the peer interaction, all of the discussion and debate, all of the off-the-cuff learning, all of the communal creation of knowledge and the chance to be challenged face-to-face.  She’s not there for any of it, and there’s nothing you can do.  The cruel irony of course is that it’s always the students who need this practice the most who have these “appointments” during school time.

And we as a school have no leg to stand on because of all the school that is missed because of commitments from within the school itself.  Once, just once, I would like to hold an English test during a soccer game.  “Sorry, Coach,” the kids would say, “I’d like to play in the championship, but I’ve got to leave early for English class.” My, how the tables would turn!  Both semesters last year, my last period classes were gutted because of sports commitments.  One school I worked at pulled band kids from class biweekly for “sectional” practice.  Others siphon kids off for clubs, projects, concerts, field trips, assemblies (a real challenge for middle school teachers), or meetings with counselors and specialists within the school.  What can you do?

The numbers add up.  Anywhere I’ve taught, it’s not unusual, when you count up not only whole-class absences (which are reported) or partial class absences (which are not) for students to miss more than 15 school days per year, a rate that qualifies under the federal definition of “chronic absenteeism.” That’s 8% of school missed, right there.  It goes higher.  Every year I’ve always got a crop of at least three or four kids who miss about 20% of their classes (roughly 40 school days a year).  That happens more than you’d think.

This effects how you teach.  It’s part of the reason our system is the way it is.  Absences will kill you as a teacher.  It is so much work to get absent kids their materials, particularly if that involves catching them up.  You could sink all your time into keeping track of who is late with what, or who missed what (and often, that’s what happens).  Kids will email, or stop by, and say, “What’d I miss?” and that eats up more time than you’ve got.  They’ll need a list of assignments, materials.  You’ll put it online ahead of time, but they won’t understand what it’s about.  You’ll say, “check with a classmate” but you know that’s not a good system.  You’ll tell them to turn in work within two weeks, but they won’t, and you’ll end up chasing them down.  They’ll sit in class when they return — they couldn’t catch up or do work, after all, they were sick — and look bored because they have no idea what’s going on.  They’ll start chatting, pull people off task.  “You really couldn’t do any work while you were out for two weeks?” you’ll wonder.  But what are you supposed to do?

So you change your approach.  You become conscious, all the time, of incentivizing attendance.  It’s partly from a management standpoint, but it’s also from a “what you value” standpoint.  You know that if kids aren’t in class, they aren’t practicing the skills of discussion.  They aren’t grappling with the content.  They aren’t, most of the time, doing much at all.  It also comes from a place of fairness — namely, fairness to the kids who do show up.  If your policies are too compassionate toward the absent kids, you actually make it more attractive to stay home and make up the test on your own time, in a week when you’re good and ready, than to show up on test day, without extra studying time.  Take a day off, your system tells them, and work on the big essay at home over the weekend.  The kids who come to class on the due date, with their essays done, they’re the suckers.

This is especially a problem with presentations.  Kids will mysteriously be absent on presentation days.  Then they’ll be absent again next class.  Then they’ll come back in a week and a half (I am not even joking; I see this all the time) after you’ve moved onto the next unit, and tell you they’re not ready because they were sick the whole time.  It goes on and on.

That’s not fair to the kids who were there — but in trying to be compassionate people, in trying to recognize that time truly can be a variable, that is the message that we inadvertently send to students.

So you change your grading.  You grade participation.  You grade classwork that cannot be made up.  Sometimes you even come out and grade attendance (I have never done this, but many college classes do).  You know it’s not enlightened to grade compliance, but you also want to send the message that showing up is important. 

After all, isn’t showing up kind of important at, say, any job, ever?

But in the end, no matter what we try to do as educators (and I have tried everything), it is impossible to ensure every student attends every class.  It all comes back to the fact that the Carnegie Unit is a sham.  We have no meaningful requirement of how much time a student must spend in high school. 

If we did have a meaningful seat time requirement, it would say, “You must take four years of English class.  For each year, you must attend at least 90% of your classes.”

But that’s impossible.  How would we enforce that?  And what about the kid who was there, but not there — daydreaming?  What about the kid who disappears to the bathroom to text his girlfriend for 15 minutes every class?  How could you account for this time?

The fact is, time has always been a proxy for learning.  It’s easier to use time as an administrative tool for measuring learning than it is to agree on a system of measurement to actually measure learning.  But even the true use of time as a requirement is almost impossible.  The Carnegie Unit is not a requirement; it is at best a recommendation.  

***

And so that is why what we’re trying now, this proficiency learning, this experiment, is deeply instructive.  It puts the lie to the old system of time by forcing us to look closely at what it promised to be, and what it really was.

But the new system still must answer to these same challenges.  If anything, kids will be even more inclined to skip now that we are removing the unenlightened practices of yore, like grading compliance and attendance.  Proficiency promises that students will be a) so thrilled with the new ways of teaching (project based learning!  a personalized learning experience!) that they will be chomping at the bit to come to school, and b) so focused on attaining proficiency that they’ll realize on their own that, since it’s all about competency, they’d better show up.  Teachers will be forced to design assessments that you cannot pass if you don’t attend class.  Otherwise, well, to paraphrase a speaker who once chided us for being angry when kids reach for phones, your classes might just be a waste of time.  

Meanwhile we’ll be using the transferable skills to grade all the other compliance-y stuff — like doing the work, and taking responsibility.  Kids will have to prove they have these qualities, or else they won’t be able to graduate.

It’s a good change, an idealistic direction to go in.  But will it work?  I don’t see any way this will make it easier to catch kids up who miss class.  I don’t see any way this fixes the in-class content they miss.  And if anything, the new goal of time being a variable, and of endless re-takes on tests and quizzes only further incentivizes sporadic attendance.  The new goal of flexible pathways does the same thing.  We risk having the same old truancy battles, but fought over in the transferable skills, which risk seeming like fluff if we’re not careful.

The old system was wrong, but it was a solid, time-tested kind of wrong.

Is the new system better?  I’ve worked too long and hard at real, intractable problems embedded in the school system itself to say anything much beyond this:

I’ll believe it when I see it.

 

Amazing, isn’t it, how much difference a sense of humor makes?

This fall, we were sitting in a staff meeting, groping our way through the dark, trying to understand how to teach in a proficiency-based classroom.  As usual, we were all confused.  We had been talking about how, in a proficiency system, “Learning is the constant and time is the variable.” Now a coworker was making an impassioned speech about the impossibility of something or other.  Things were getting tense.

“You know what your problem is?” another coworker piped up.  “You’re still hung up on this western concept of time.  Proficiency learning means you’ve gotta move away from that.”

Everyone laughed.  It was a great moment of relief.

But every joke contains a kernel of truth.  The unspoken truth here was the idea that proficiency learning, with its insistence that we move “off the clock” requires us to do things that often seem to run counter to common sense.

Treating time as a variable for instance.  Let’s take a look at this idea for a moment and tease out the implications.

***

First of all, let me say at the outset that I agree with the move in this direction.  Education has needed this change for a while now.  For too long we’ve been content to pass kids along who haven’t really learned.  We’ve needed this reminder, this proficiency learning, to remember that compliance is not learning.  Sitting still in a seat for four years is not learning.  We must have clearer learning targets for students too, and real clarity about what they must know and do.  It cannot be a mystery.

But there were reasons behind what we did.  It’s just like Ted Sizer’s classic 1984 book, Horace’s Compromise.  Public schools, as a friend of mine sometimes says, are only set up to be just so good.  The old system, which was unjust, which we needed awakening from, was an inherent compromise between too little time, to few resources, and too many students.  Let’s not forget that proficiency learning was born in the 1960s as mastery learning (called learning for mastery at first) — researcher Benjamin Bloom’s answer to the inherent compromise of between the ideal (a one-to-one tutor for each kid) and the reality (25 students for each teacher).  Bloom designed a system which allowed for — not true personalization (where a teacher really meets with kids to find out where they are and tries to weave their interests into the curriculum), but personalized *pacing*.  He had kids moving at different paces, taking what he termed “formative” and “summative assessments” (still our words), all graded and monitored by a teacher.  You’d have to score 90% on an assessment before moving on; if you didn’t, you’d receive tutoring until you could.  Time as a variable.

It was honest, but it was a compromise.  Once you open up time as a variable, once you’re not cutting the cord at the end of a unit and moving everyone on, pretty soon you’ve got 25 kids in 25 very different places.  It’s a teaching nightmare.  How do you balance reteaching the kids who need this with introducing hard new material to kids who need that?  You can’t do that easily in clipped little tutoring moments during class.  You can’t do drive-by introductions to the quadratic formula, or to The Scarlet Letter.  You need carefully planned lessons — simply not deliverable during brief interactions.

Plus, with 25 kids in different spots, you quickly lose any sort of class community.  But these common learning experiences should be a fundamental part of teaching students to work with others, and an integral part of creating a cohesive classroom.

And then there’s another awkward fact.  Kids expect to be keeping up with their peers.  It’s very discouraging to be stuck in the mud in Unit 2 while your peers are racing through Unit 17.  It’s more humiliating, I believe, to be taking longer than to be merely scoring lower on tests.  At least your low grades are theoretically private.  But if you’re still stumbling on beginning-of-the-year stuff?  That’s public — and that’s embarrassing.

Put another way:  it’s far more humiliating to graduate from high school a year late, marching across the stage with a bunch of younger kids, than it is to graduate with a low GPA, which no one knows about.  So we make trade-offs as educators.   My wager is a lot kids would drop out rather than suffer the humiliation of graduating later.  But that’s exactly what proficiency says.  Time is a variable.  Take longer than four years if you need to.  That’s totally fine.

(Yeah . . .   if you live in some other country than America.)

Let’s not forget too that high school is a cultural institution, not just a place to learn.  And the public has it ingrained in their heads that kids graduate from high school in four years.  The push to get across the finish line in Year Four is a cultural weight like almost no other.  We’ve created an inflexible model: finish high school in four years, or you fail at life.  Say what you want, but that’s what it is.  No cute, progressive rhetoric will easily reverse this.

So how do you deal with the reality that all kids learn at different rates?  One answer has ALWAYS been tracking.  Put all the kids who need more time in their own class.  That way, the teacher can give them the help they need, because they’re in similar places.  You can still have class cohesion.  AND you can target them more clearly.

And . . .  we all know how that goes.

Okay, so maybe tracking’s ills are well document (WELL documented).  So maybe instead of that, you give the kids who need it more time by keeping them in regular classes, but also putting them into special support classes, too, where they get extra time to master the material.  Okay, fine.  But — tracking again.  Plus, now their schedules are so locked up with support classes that they can’t take anything they’re interested in, any art classes, or PE, or have any free time to work on their homework.  That’s not an easy decision either.

Maybe what you do instead is to “personalize” education by hooking all the kids up onto specialized computer software that uses algorithms to tailor the curriculum toward exactly what they can do.

That’s the temptation of all proficiency or competency-based instruction: to turn instruction into discrete little pieces, micro-badges to be accomplished, then moved on from.  It just lends itself well to that.  That’s why you see competency learning included in so many online learning programs, so strongly associated with “personalized learning,” which has its roots in blended, online learning.

***

The awkward question behind all of this, of course, is, “Isn’t the ability to complete something in a given time period essential in the ‘real world’?” After all, no matter what job you end up working, I can pretty much assure you can NOT show up late the first day and expect your boss to say, “Don’t worry.  Time’s a variable.”

The idea of there only being a finite amount of time to complete material is connected to a very old American tradition of self-reliance.  We respect people who can get it done under pressure of not enough time.  It’s where our respect comes from for athletes who perform when “there’s no time left on the clock.” It comes, too, from our insatiable competitiveness as Americans, from our economic competitiveness.  Produce more goods in less time.  Make change — now.  Get it done more efficiently.  Take shorter lunch breaks, get in early, stay late.  Time’s -wasting.  Time’s not a variable; time’s precious.  Can you imagine any state governor anywhere, actually saying, “Yes, please, children, take longer than four years in high school.  We’re more than happy to wait until you’re truly ready to join the work force.  And we’re happy to keep paying, too”?

Me either.

Time’s not a variable.  We’re a nation that’s always on the clock.

***

Lastly, the notion of the old system — of giving everyone the same length of time (60 minutes to master a math lesson, 180 days to pick up Algebra, four years to learn what you need to know in high school) is something we do because we consider it fair.  We Americans pride ourselves on equality of opportunity.  Everybody gets the same chance.  Within that system, some people may get better grades than others.  But everyone, theoretically, had the same opportunity.  Time is our measurement of that.

This sense of distributive justice — everyone had the same opportunity — is very deeply ingrained in us as Americans, and, I believe, as human beings.  If you can’t learn what you need to know in that time, that’s on you.  I’m not sure, but that sounds very American to me.

And it strikes me as a tall, tall order to imagine getting away from that.

When I was in high school, I hated history class.  All that dry history in all those heavy textbooks felt dead to me, obsolete.  Hardly surprising, of course — like many teenage boys, I had about as much empathy as a piece of scrap metal.  But the older I get, the more vital and urgent studying history seems.

That’s because I’m realizing more and more how alive is the past, how still it shapes us in ways we hardly understand.  I think sometimes of George Santayana’s famous dictum about those who cannot remember the past being doomed to repeat it but I think even more often of William Faulkner’s: “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.”

I think about this a lot, for instance, when I reflect on how to be an American means to be intimately tied up with racial discrimination in ways that we can barely begin to untangle.  We’ve made progress, but the past still haunts us.  We’re not past it yet.

I remain committed to the idea that the only way out of the grip of the past is to understand it.

I try to live this in my teaching.  I try to teach my students about the complex history of pernicious influences: of marketing, of discrimination, of pervasive cultural attitudes.  You can’t get past something until you know it.  That, to me, is the gift of a liberal education.

(This is why I’m always confused when I hear English teachers say they’d like to do more “interdisciplinary” teaching.  How are you really teaching anything at all if you are NOT incorporating history into your lessons?)

I am struck by how few would-be school reformers have a sense of history.

Here’s one of the favorite pitches I’m starting to see from ed reform groups.  This one comes courtesy of a group called XQ, which markets itself as “an open call to the nation to rethink and redesign the American high school.” They link a video on the front page of their website that makes an argument I see being used more and more by reformers:

In the last 100 years . . .

. . .  cars have changed a lot

. . .  phones have changed a lot

. . .  and everything else has changed a lot, too.

But our schools have stayed EXACTLY the same!

Often I see references to “factory model of education” or the Carnegie Unit, or to the Committee of Ten.

Why, goes the argument, are our schools so obsolete?

Then comes the pivot:  We need change right now, urgently.  Not small, incremental change, but big, bold, radical change.  Then, buzzwords: innovate, equity, disrupt, achievement gap, college and career ready.  In this video:  “learn by doing,” “focus on the future,” “spark curiosity,” “build community,” and “unleash potential,” “solve real world problems,” and “ask students what they think.”

Next you’ll get the call for whatever method they’re pushing.  Sometimes it’s school choice or charter schools.  Other times it’s “greater accountability” (although that seems to be easing out of fashion).  Right now it’s usually some version of “personalized learning” — which basically means anything at all.  That’s mainly what this video is selling: Hey, no more seat time!

And guess what, they’re not pushing an idea.  They’re not evil overlords.  They’re asking us to “reimagine education” . . .  you know, by organizing a competition that pits cash-strapped schools against each other by dangling huge piles of dough.  Wait a second . . .  I think I remember something like this.  Could it be that the winning bids are supporting some of the ideas that XQ is pushing, like personalized learning?  Hmm.  I think I remember this plan — didn’t we have some kind of “competition” like this . . . and it got us more testing and teacher evals tied to test scores?  And isn’t XQ headed by Russlynn Ali, former former assistant secretary at the US Department of Education under . . .  Arne Duncan?  Funny.  Feels like we’ve been down this road before.

Now, look.  There is nothing wrong with this.  Education always needs reforming.  Teachers and educators always need pushing.  We should always be evaluating what we’re doing.

But if you want to reform something, first you need to know what’s going on.  And that sort of simplistic, “Can you believe how OLD these schools are” rhetoric does not generate in me much confidence that you have any clue that you know what you’re doing.  (Neither, for that matter does naming your think tank, “XQ.”)

Before you break out the old “schools haven’t changed in 100 years” argument, do your homework, or at least start asking some questions.  Here are some:

–Wait, have you been to a school?  Most schools look quite different than even 30 years ago: projectors, screens, laptops, and (dammit!) cell phones.  Classrooms are full of kids getting distracted by their cell phones.  XQ is bankrolled in part by Steve Jobs’ widow, so . . . . thanks for that, Steve!

–Hmm, maybe some schools still look like that because they’re starved for money, compared with, you know, phone and car companies you also show?

–Or . . .  maybe there’s a good reason schools not all schools are totally wired up with technology?  Maybe it’s because there is some a-historical need to keep kids focused, reading real-live books, and talking to other, real-live human beings.  Maybe you don’t need or even want a whole lot of tech to do that?  Think about how different a living room might have looked 100 years ago compared to now:

1918:  You might have seen a family sitting around a wood stove together, talking, telling stories, and perhaps reading aloud to each other.

2018:  Yeah, they’re all on devices.

Is that new picture any better?

–What about the idea of personalization?  Isn’t that something teachers have been working for years and years trying to do?  We had other names for it, of course, like giving “choice” and “differentiating” or “incorporating students’ interests,” but how does that balance against the kinds of communal experiences that we also know kids need, too?  How does that balance against the high-stakes standards that are still very much in the air (you know, the ones we got after “competing” for Race to the Top money)?

It’s always weird when age-old ideas, like building in choice to your lessons, come back repackaged as some wildly new and innovative thing.  Has to be sort of like when someone who has been making due just fine is suddenly told that she needs to buy the latest and greatest product to finally make it possible for her to do just the thing she has always done well on her own.  That’s not called reform; that’s called marketing.

Learn your history.  Ask yourself: why have so many reformers failed, proposing exactly what you’re proposing right now.  Wait, you didn’t know that they have?  Yep, exactly the same thing, including the same promises that sweet, sweet tech would fix everything.  Your ideas are as old as student-centered learning, as old as John Dewey, or the Dalton Plan, or the Eight Year Study, or Progressive Education, or schools without walls, or open classrooms, or Mastery Learning, or a thousand other movements and methods that have washed over the shores of schools, mostly for the good.

But if you believe that all these great movements failed (which I don’t, but which you evidently do), then . . .  why was that?  How exactly will yours be different?

It’s always ironic when those people who would reform education have not learned to do their homework.

You have to learn about the past before you hope to change the present.  Because the present is not just influenced by the past, it’s often another iteration of the past, come around again.  The old battles are fought, we forget about them, we swing too far the other way, then we come back.  We try the same stuff again, we pick up old toys and play with them.  We tinker, in Larry Cuban’s great phrase.  The cycle continues.

That is what Faulkner meant.  The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.  It’s present, it’s happening right now, repeating itself anew in ways many of us are asleep to.

Too often reformers, in their zeal, fail to adequately study the thing they’re trying to change, underestimate how vast and alive something like public education really is.  They don’t know it.  And they don’t know its history either — history very much alive in the ever-present debates about student-centered vs. teacher-centered, about the importance of time in learning (and how best to measure it), about the need for organization vs. flexibility.  These debates roil, and the past repeats itself, and shapes the present in ways the reformers don’t see.  They travel down the same roads as their predecessors, not caring to realize the obstacles that await: the strength of traditional school as a cultural institution, for instance.  The sheer size and scope of managing 800 teenagers and 70 teachers in a single building.  The innate conservatism of many teachers and parents when it comes to that cultural institution of school.  The past’s grip on all of us.

If you want to make change, real, lasting change that outlives the videos and the money and the PR, you can’t underestimate history.  And you cannot misunderstand it.

Because then you’re doomed to — well, you know the rest.

Over the past year, as I have begun to read more about education, I’ve become more conscious of what I would term the “Reform Industry” in the United States: the web of companies, foundations, philanthropies, and advocacy groups that insist that public education is 1) in crisis, and 2) must adopt whatever their chosen idea is right NOW.  Because I have this remarkable fellowship opportunity this year to drive school change (thanks to the Rowland Foundation), I’ve gotten to be in both worlds at once: the world of day-to-day public school teaching, which was all I’d ever known before, and the world of policy, school change, and school reform, a more rarefied place I’d rarely spent much time in.

In doing so, I’ve started to see how much educational policy in the United States is shaped by people who don’t teach now and in many cases never have.  Or certainly not for any stretch of time, and not in anything remotely resembling a public school.

It strikes me that many of the reform groups calling for major changes to public education — those who would seek to charter-ize or privatize education, break unions, tie evals to test scores, push software — are often strikingly ignorant about what exactly goes on in most public schools.  They’re not privy to the tremendous successes happening every day, the ingenuity of individual teachers and students, and — dare I say something so heterodoxical — the wisdom of the way the public education system itself is set up.

(I know, I know — how dare I?  We need RADICAL change — RIGHT NOW!)

Even as someone trying to enact very SMALL change in a small public school where I have actually worked for the past eight years, I am struck by how continually surprised I am at the good work going on IN MY OWN SCHOOL that I had no idea about.  For example, it wasn’t even until this year, as I started stepping outside my own classroom, that I really understood some of the innovative alternative programs our school offers for students.  We have several programs in particular that, when I started explaining them to people I’ve begun meeting from other schools in Vermont drew amazed remarks.  I’d never thought much about them before, but everyone else was quite impressed.  These programs, these bright, creative teachers are content to go along every day, keeping a low profile even in their own building, content to keep their successes where they belong: among themselves and their students.  They know.  The wider world, including teachers just across the hall, often do not.

This happened to me again this fall when, interested in studying promising literacy practices, I stumbled into some remarkably high-quality ones going on in the elementary schools right in my own district, staffed by driven, experienced professionals, well versed in research, and, in one, case, a nationally-sought-after writer and workshop leader.  Who would have thought?

I keep learning about the wisdom within the system.  It’s when I propose something crazy and someone tells me, “We already have that; it’s called . . . ”

***

Now here’s the thing.  If this sort of thing is still surprising to me, in my own school, just imagine how little the wider public or the policy-makers and string-pullers know about our successes?

Public schools have a PR problem.  It’s very difficult to simultaneously teach well and also promote yourself.  You’re so busy trying to prep, grade, instruct, contact parents, deal with kid problems — that you don’t have a lot of time and creativity left over to promote all this great work you’re doing.  There are always a few teachers who sort of do this — they put up pictures of their kids doing some project on social media.  But it’s a drop in the bucket.  I’m reminded of this whenever I try to communicate with parents about what we’re doing.  Most teachers I know are *great* salespeople.  Anyone who can convince teenagers to read Thoreau is by definition pretty darn good at the dark arts of persuasion.  But when it comes time to go the next level and promote our work beyond the classroom (say, to our students’ parents in any kind of consistent way), well . . .  I’m usually too exhausted to even start.

Compare this then to the other side — to the public school “reformers” — the philanthropists, advocates, and think tankers who’re constantly trying to remind us that public education is in crisis and needs to do exactly what they want it to do, right now.  On our side, we’ve got a bunch of tired, overstressed teachers with state college degrees and sensible shoes.  They’ve got cellars full of writers and spinners, loaded down with fancy MBAs and Advocacy degrees, some with a year or two slumming it in a TFA school, white saviors, now setting to work building whole shinning castles in the sky: websites, conference presentations, white papers, articles, policy presentations.  They’ve got the money too — Gates and Zuckerberg and all the venture capitalists who do things like throw $175 million at a new start-up ed company like AltSchool, founded in 2013 by some ex-Google workers.  The only thing we’ve got 175 of is essays tonight to grade.  This fight’s not fair.

It doesn’t help that journalists who write about education don’t usually talk to real teachers either.

I don’t think the answer is for teachers to do better PR, although I do wish we could.  Instead, I’m starting to think that the answer is that more teachers need to stay abreast of what’s going on out there in the bigger world beyond their classrooms — the world of advocacy, the world of policy.  We need to do more to call these know-nothings on their you-know-what, to push back and remind them that we’ve got a lot of hard-won wisdom too, and that sometimes things are what they are not because of mediocrity or complacency, but because the business of educating a diverse citizenry with public financing is a complex negotiation.  As a bonus, maybe we can remind them that the history of education is littered with the graves of would-be reformers who underestimated entrenched problems.

You can’t fix a thing until you understand it.  That much I am beginning to appreciate this year.  And how complex a thing is even a single, local public school — how varied, how churning, how constantly alive and changing.  And how vast and broad is this country — some schools still paddle their kids, while others wire them up to computers all day and send them out into the ether, while others are palaces, and some, just across town, have bars on the windows.  How broad an wide the world is, and the schools in it.

But we must let them know — we need them.  We need reformers and critics and the unconverted — because they are right.  We do need to get better.  We can always do better.  That’s part of the dream of a nation devoted to forming a more perfect union.  But that means that we must ensure they understand us first.  We must hold THEM accountable, too — to ensure that those outside our schools have a clear picture of exactly what’s going on inside.

Because in the end, informed reform is the only effective reform.