Notes From the North Country

One of the popular new terms in education, certainly in Vermont but also nationally, is “personalized learning.” For the past two years everyone has been talking about it in my school and state.  Same goes for its sister term, “personalized learning plan.”

About a year ago, I began to realize that not only was everyone talking about personalized learning, but they were using it to mean wildly different things.  That’s a problem when the law requires it to be practiced (as it has in Vermont since 2013).

So what is personalized learning?

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For starters, here’s a pretty classic take from Katrina Stevens, a Deputy Director in the Office of Educational Technology at the D.O.E.  She lists ten different organizations . . . with ten different definitions of personalized learning.

“[T]his is a common occurrence in the early stages of disruptive innovation in any field,” she assures us, eventually concluding, “We hope that the field can converge around a definition that accounts for the key aspects.”

Two weeks ago EdWeek devoted an entire issue including some great articles to this question.  But even though they did a nice job highlighting the wildly disparate ideas teachers and policymakers are throwing around, I wanted to get to the heart of the matter and find out where exactly this term came from in the first place.

Where It Came From

Most educators’ first exposure to “personalized learning” came in 2012, during the second wave of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative.  After the (shall we say) mixed results of the original 2009 Race to the Top, Arne Duncan realized that targeting whole states with monolithic, top-down dictates might not be the most nimble way to enact change.  So instead he rebaited his hook and began dangling his piles of cash in front of individual school districts in return for their adopting wacky new ideas that Duncan and his cronies had cooked up.  Guess what the first one was:

Absolute Priority 1: Personalized Learning Environments (PLE).

To meet this priority, an applicant must coherently and comprehensively address how it will build on the core educational assurance areas to create learning environments that are designed to significantly improve learning and teaching through the personalization of strategies, tools, and supports for students and educators

There was only one problem.  No one, including some pretty important stakeholders, had ever heard of “personalized learning”:

The American Association of School Administrators is seeking clarification on the idea of “personalized learning plans.” These are the name of the game since all applicants must make them a central part of their plans. AASA has some questions about what exactly the department has in mind.  The definition within the criteria is vague and not common in the school/educator community.

Hey, no big deal, guys.  It’s just that we kinda, sorta need to know a few little details:

The group wants to know how these plans are actually different from techniques such as differentiated learning, Response to Intervention, or individualized instruction . . .  The group also is wondering if schools will have legal liability for personalized learning plans, like they do for individualized education programs for students in special education.

Good questions.  So here we are, trying to drive change, and we’re not just pushing some newfangled idea, but a genuinely brand-new term that no one has ever heard of.  How could it work?

That was 2012.   One year later “personalized learning plans” were required by law in Vermont.

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It’s always neat when educational reform people invent a new term out of thin air.  It usually means they’re trying to repackage something — like the way that what we now call “proficiency learning” used to be called “competency learning” — and before that, “Outcome-Based Education” (and before that, “Mastery Learning”).  Nothing wrong with a little rebranding, right?

In this way, “personalized learning” is really a softer way of saying “blended learning” — which in itself is a euphemism for computer-based learning.  When I began teaching in 2010, small-town Vermont students still had to physically switch to larger regional high schools if they wanted to take more varied courses (which they often did); three years later, even kids at the mid-sized school I taught at were diversifying their course load (or recovering credit) by taking online courses.  Three years after that, the first adaptive software program made its way into our curriculum.  So the learning-by-tech was always there, it was just a question of to what extent it would be permitted by official school and state policy.

But think like a tech company.  Facebook didn’t vacuum up all our data by leveling with us about what they’re doing.  No.  You can’t just come out and call what you’re doing “computerized learning” or even “blended learning”; that makes people nervous.  We want our kids to have access to technology, but we don’t want Big Brother Mark Z teaching our kids; we want real human interaction with skilled educators and with diverse peers.  A little credit recovery here or an online Latin class there is one thing; learning math and English in front of a screen is another.  Plus, we’re suspicious of data-mining.  In short, there’s really no way a state as liberal and right-thinking as Vermont would ever wave into law anything that sounds too tech-heavy.  So you’ve got to rebrand it.

And everyone likes education that is “personalized,” right?  That sounds progressive, child-focused.  Plus, it sounds plausible: like some kind of sensible use of technology to personalize; our Amazon accounts give us recommendations, right?  Our YouTube accounts do it.  Why not some small slice of our schools, too?  Play up the individualizing and play down the screen-time.  To this day, this split exists in teachers’ understanding of “personalized learning: either student-centered and progressive, or tech-focused, using adaptive software in concert with more traditional instruction.  It’s all things to all people — a big tent that waves everybody inside.

And don’t underestimate the impact of a fresh, new term.  The AASA was right to question how Personalized Learning differs from the familiar buzzwords of yore:  differentiation, individualized instruction, or Response to Intervention.  The main thing is, those terms have been tried already.  Most educators who started teaching when I did tried and tried to “differentiate”; it was a great idea, but it was really hard work — endless, really.  Teachers have such an inherently impossible mission that more often than not they’ll hunt eagerly for new ideas from self-proclaimed “experts” — particularly if the solutions seem time- or labor-saving (a favorite false promise of tech device after tech device that educators have fallen for). Personalized learning has that allure: “Maybe, finally, we could truly personalize instruction . . .   if we just had the right technology.  And now we do!” Don’t fall for it. It’s happened before.

But we did fall for it.  We are.

If you have any doubts about what this is, look at the backers.  Not surprisingly, a big player pushing personalized learning has been iNacol — The International Association for K-12 Online Learning.  Even they struggle to explain it clearly, with a whole page on their website devoted to trying to define personalized learning, one that reflects the schism between traditional individualized learning and learning-with-tech:

With student-centered, personalized learning, we can identify students’ unique needs and address them. Teachers possess powerful tools to personalize instruction and utilize real-time data for feedback to intervene exactly where each student needs it most. It is about optimizing learning every day and maximizing the amount of learning per unit of time.  (Emphasis mine.)

Want to bet they’re not talking about the subtle skills of interpersonal communication?  Reading between the lines, you can see they’re talking about adaptive software that can tailor a lesson to a specific student based on an algorithm.

There’s just enough progressive-speak in here to a) make them NOT sound like tech pushers, which they know educators and parents are suspicious of, and b) make them sound like they almost know what they’re talking about:

The shift toward personalization changes the dynamic between the teacher and student. Educators take on new roles as mentors, coaches and facilitators, and power and control shifts to the students. By giving students ownership over their learning and grounding learning in their interests and passions, they feel valued, motivated and in control.

Keep in mind, at the time this was written, nobody even knew what “personalization” meant.  But iNACOL is already promising that it’s going to “change the dynamic between teacher and student.”

In case you were doubting their progressive credentials, they even cloak themselves in the garb of social justice:

We strive to disrupt the structural inequities driving the systems we’ve inherited. Access to high-quality, appropriately designed learning models and technologies can and should drive equitable opportunities and outcomes.

(That’s another hot term right now: equity.)

But in the end, the International Association for K-12 Online Learning is really interested in one thing and one thing only:

‘School’ is no longer defined merely as a physical space . . .  Anytime, anywhere learning that bridges formal and informal learning experiences is connected through the effective use of advanced technologies. Digital learning modalities combined with competency-based progressions prove fundamental to modernizing education systems that meet each student’s unique needs.

That, I think, is what “Personalized learning” was originally intended as.  You can’t come out and say that, of course, but this term would not exist unless edu-tech advocacy groups were pushing a new model designed to sell software.  In this approach, kids are hooked up to algorithm-based programs with the teacher hovering nearby as a “consultant.” All kids have “personalized learning plans” — an idea that fits with our age of online social media profiles and which sounds promising, but which might also act the same as any other online profile — platforms for data companies to harvest students’ personal information.  

The whole system is lubricated by competency-based (or “proficiency-based”) credits, which  are the merit badges that students can collect while working online. Think about it: in order to allow students to secure credit for learning that is not taking place in a traditional class setting, you’ve got to get rid of that cumbersome seat time requirement.  So you hide your arguments for new tech toys in progressive-speak about the restrictiveness of the Carnegie Unit and how a student’s age should not be the deciding factor in when she graduates. You want to free up the market to splash your tech products around? Then you’ve got to get schools to give up the old rules and the old system.  You do that by serving up reheated John Dewey with a dash of social justice (“structural inequities”) — and of course a lot of talk about how schools haven’t changed at all in 100 years. The right-wingers will like the bottom-line-style insistence on every student attaining competency/proficiency and all that talk about breaking up the traditional school model (when it comes to education, Republicans are generally far less “conservative” and more radical than Democrats).  And the left-wingers like the “student-centered” language about personalizing instruction — something they also liked about differentiated learning, and Response to Intervention — but this is less jargon-y AND it’s something new. Educators, meanwhile, love anything that seems remotely student-centered, especially on the heels of the Standardized Testing Era, which treated each kid about as individually as a prison inmate. Plus, teachers are generally a desperate lot, always looking for a new tool to help them do what they already know is an impossible job.  Besides, when you get it passed as law (like in Vermont), teachers have no choice in the matter. Again, we’ve seen worse.

I also think this has a lot to do with the nexus of edu-tech advocacy companies (such as Summit Learning, backed by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative) and the policy makers of the Democratic Party under Barack Obama and Arne Duncan.  There has, for a long time, been an alliance between Democrats and Silicon Valley. There are some signs that that friendship may be slowing, as lawmakers grow more focused on the challenges of regulating private companies that have, for all intents and purposes, privatized the public square.  There is also a growing exasperation with Mark Zuckerberg, I think, as well as an increasingly push from younger voters for a certain ideological purity, one more and more hostile to the political influence of large corporations, even those once seen as countercultural and progressive. We’re already seeing backlash against the more overtly tech-heavy examples of personalized learning, like the protests against the Zuckerberg-backed Summit Learning led by parents in Cheshire, Connecticut and even by students just recently in New York City.

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So that, I think, is where we got personalized learning: from educational reformers with painfully little real knowledge of how schools run, pushing “disruptive” online learning technologies.  They invoke just enough progressive talk to slip through, and — viola! Vermont, perhaps the most progressive state in the country, mandates it all — flexible pathways, personalized learning plans, and proficiency based learning.

They did all this just a year after the term first came to national prominence, when nobody, not even national educational groups, knew what it was.  We still don’t.

Not long ago, I had the chance to visit Clayton High School, a public school just outside St. Louis, Missouri that, since 1966, has provided the English department with the equivalent of 40% more teachers than a normal public school.  This extra staff has allowed each teacher to teach just 60% of a normal student load, and to meet individually with each student ten times a year for twenty minutes each, making an additional 200 minutes a year of individual writing instruction.  This is true face-to-face “personalized learning,” in which experienced teachers react to and teach individual students in ways no computer ever can. These teachers at Clayton challenge, inspire, and bond with their students in conferences outside of class, and in doing so they have created the strongest English program I have ever seen.  Yet this conferencing schedule is a significant amount of work, to the extent that while no other department in the school enjoys such a program, no other department wishes to. Furthermore, the program is a tremendous expense, to the point that years ago, in its infancy, the school administration had to choose between this English program and new lights for the football stadium.  To this day nearly every year the expense comes under close scrutiny by the school board. It’s great work — if you can get it.

We must never forget that there are no easy answers in education if we are to truly “personalize” our teaching.  If the United States truly valued this already, we would have smaller classes than the 30 or 35 that swell inside many American classrooms.  We must also not make the mistake that generation after generation of reformer has made — imagining that some new technology will magically relieve us of the challenge of teaching individual human beings, who are as diverse as the leaves on every tree in the forest.  Although algorithms do their best to approximate, and everywhere in the media companies micro-market to us, still no computer can know an individual child as well as a skilled teacher can, something the student cries from Summit Schools make painfully clear. We must also not make the mistake of thinking that computers — even highly intelligent ones — can read our children well enough to know or to inspire them.  There is a big difference between being recommended a new song by an algorithm in YouTube and being recommended a new song by a friend who knows our tastes well. The former recommends to us what we already know we want, the latter shows us what we never knew we did.

I believe a good teacher can do the same for us too.

Let us keep this in mind as we make what we will of “personalized learning” and its ilk.  

There will surely be more of it to come, under many new and different names.  

The Origin of the Workshop Model

One of the most influential approaches to teaching English / Language Arts for the past 30 years has been the “workshop” method — sometimes called “writing workshop” or “reading workshop” or “that Lucy Calkins thing that my district forces us to do under threat of torture.” While this approach only occasionally touches American high schools, it has been hugely influential in American middle and especially elementary schools, many of which teach literacy primarily through this approach.  

Because it’s so prevalent, it’s easy to forget that the workshop model was once hugely innovative, a provocative departure from traditional teaching.  I can remember my own sixth grade teacher using this approach back in 1993, then seeing it again when I began teaching in 2007. Eleven years later, at the NCTE conference two weeks ago, I heard seminars promoting it.   Today it remains at once passe but also cutting edge and progressive, depending on what grade level you teach. It has both hardened into orthodoxy and also remained elusive, hard to do well; pre-packaged and consumerized, yet innately responsive and individual.  It is, in a word, influential.

So where did it come from?

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I had been wondering about this question for quite some time.  Fortunately at the NCTE conference, I happened to pick up a fascinating book, Children Want to Write.  It is a retrospective on the career of former UNH professor Don Graves.  Graves was a middle school teacher, a principal after his second year of teaching (!!), and an influential writer/researcher.  What I had not realized was that Graves contributed more to the field of children’s writing instruction that anyone else in the 20th century.  Don Graves didn’t invent the modern writing workshop, but he was the major force in its birth — and he did it by accident. He did it alongside a talented young researcher whose fame later eclipsed his own.  He received tremendous criticism at the time, some of it founded, some of it not. He did not mean to found a new method of teaching. Like so many discoveries, Don Graves’ happened partly by accident.

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Graves started teaching seventh grade English in 1956.  Two years later, he became principal of the school, and found himself teaming with the school janitor to discipline students.  One of their most ingenious solutions was to catch a boy who’d been climbing up to the ceiling of the boys bathroom to unscrew a water valve by coating the handle in purple residue from carbon copy paper.  Graves and the janitor simply looked for the boy with the purple fingers. By 1973, Graves had won the NCTE’s award from promising research, for his study of second graders. During this time he joined the UNH faculty and came in contact with Don Murray, war veteran, college flunk-out, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and already then a hugely influential writing professor who’d begun cracking open the teaching of writing in order to understand how to teach it.  Murray, particularly in his 1969 book, A Writer Teaches Writing, sought to push writing instruction past the formalism that dominated public schools and colleges, as co-editor of Children Want to Write Tom Newkirk writes:

At the time . . .  writing instruction was tightly regulated . . .  Topics were assigned, all errors were marked, outlines were required for all longer papers, a five-paragraph structure was imposed, all papers were graded, and there were no readers other than teachers. In lower grades, teachers listed the words to be used on the blackboard.

Murray and Graves were appalled by this overregulation, believing that it stunted the expressive possibilities of writing, not to mention that it killed the joy. It imposed a compliant student role, rather than the role of the writer. It ignored the most necessary condition for writing – having something to say to someone . . .

In many ways, the educational system at the time Don Graves began his research was one that taught both reading and math in conscious, systematic ways, but not writing.  Graves’ major accomplishment was to adopt Don Murray’s “process” approach to writing instruction in the elementary classroom — to teach young children to write like professional writers.

And so it was that in the early 1980s, Graves, alongside his research assistant, Lucy Calkins, began the Atkinson Study, based at Atkinson Academy in New Hampshire, a K-5 school believed to be the oldest co-ed school in the country.  This became the laboratory, the incubation site, where the writing workshop first took form.

What’s interesting is that creating a new model of teaching was not Graves’ goal.  The Atkinson study was designed to research children’s writing processes and to report observations and recommendations.  Instead, as Graves, Calkins, and the Atkinson teachers began taking the techniques of advanced creative writing seminar workshops and trying to fit them to elementary classrooms, many of the practices of the modern writing workshop began to develop: the mini-lesson, the “Author’s Chair,” pre-writing activities, and the writing-conference-in-progress.  

It was this last technique that was particularly revolutionary.  No longer were teachers the high priests of grammar, the arbiters of quality, the assigners of topics, but instead listeners — Graves was a great one — who tried to understand where children were coming from in order to specifically tailor their lessons to just what each student needed.  This idea of teaching the individual child, rather than simply aiming at a roomful of children, was particularly influential. Graves initially advised teachers to do most of their teaching in individual conferences — a truly radical way to approach instruction. Indeed, one of the biggest innovations of Atkinson Academy teachers — and later of teacher-researchers like Nancie Atwell in Maine — was to design classroom systems that kept children engaged and gave teachers the freedom to be able to circulate the room to conference.

Graves reported his new findings in his groundbreaking 1983 book, Writing: Teachers and Children at Work.  Several other influential books were published a few years later by teacher-researchers in the Graves orbit — In the Middle by Nancie Atwell, and The Art of Teaching Writing by Lucy Calkins, which described the application of the ideas of the Atkinson study to middle school and elementary classrooms, respectively.  

Curiously, the workshop approach rarely caught on in high school English classrooms.  This has had the effect of making the workshop approach, even 35 years later, feel cutting edge when applied to secondary curriculums.  Just last year, teacher-researchers Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher published 180 Days: Two Teachers and the Quest to Engage and Empower Adolescents, a book that updates Graves’ writing workshop methods for modern high school classrooms.  

On the other hand, the writing workshop has not only caught on in elementary schools, it has if anything become de rigueur.  In my school district a fair number of elementary educators have attended seminars at Teachers College at Columbia University in Manhattan led by Graves’ former researcher, Lucy Calkins.  Calkins has created a corporate empire based on marketing and teaching the workshopping method, and predictably for someone so influential, she has been criticized for promoting a one-size-fits-all model of literacy instruction.  Teachers I know who’ve attended her seminars have joked about her resistance to criticism of any kind. This is particularly ironic, given the nature of writing workshop:

[Calkins] was known as a champion for flexible, creative teaching, uniquely attuned to children. “If we adults listen and watch closely,” she wrote in 1986, “our children will invite us to share their worlds and their ways of living in the world.”

And while this impulse continues to inform aspects of her approach, she has tended over time to become increasingly focused on enforcing her own methodology; many of her techniques limit children’s genuine engagement with reading and writing. This insistence on only one way to do things, not surprisingly, has translated into a demand that teachers quiet their own impulses, gifts, and experiences, and speak in one, mandated voice.

It’s hardly surprising, of course, that what was once vital, new, and fresh can become locked into orthodoxy later on, especially when so much money is involved.  Calkins was once paid a no-bid $5.4 million contract to revamp literacy instruction in 100 New York high schools over three years, and often charged $1,200 just to send one of her instructions into schools for a single day.  

I’m also struck by how, despite its prevalence in elementary schools, the writing workshop is so often taught without its most important component: conferencing with individual students, due to the ongoing challenge of fitting these moments into a chaotic classroom.  I’ve met many elementary teachers who would love to conference, but can’t, and I remember Calkins specifically pointing out this danger in her 1986 book about writing workshop. Kittle and Gallagher do it too, repeatedly, in their new book. It’s always the place that’s easiest to cut corners.  It feels so difficult, so time-consuming, and sometimes, so ineffective (we rarely get through more than 5 or 6 conferences in a session). And yet — all good teachers of the workshop method, going back to Graves and Murray, agree: it is the most important element of the whole set-up.

In this day of faux-individualization — whether through airy goal-setting sessions (“personalized learning plans”), or through the shortcuts of technology (“blended learning” or “personalized learning”) — we often boast about teaching individual students, yet we forget how hard that really is: how time-consuming, how apparently inefficient and unsystematic, and how it requires us to slow down and really listen to where a child is.  Calkins calls this “researching” — and this was at the heart of the Atkinson study: listening to children, trying to understand where they are, and only then making decisions about how to teach them as individual skills. It’s not for nothing that conferencing has been called the least efficient but most effective form of instruction.

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So that, in short, is where the modern writing workshop comes from.  If you’re interested in learning more, I recommend that same book that I just read:  Children Want to Write, a story about Don Graves’ career, edited by Tom Newkirk and Penny Kittle.  It comes with a DVD (remember those?) of remarkable videos from the Atkinson study, showing Graves and Calkins interviewing young children about their writing process.  From this study grew the seeds of a national movement, one that influenced a wide, wide variety of American children, over several generations.

I hold this study up as a model of the type of work all educators should be doing: of listening to and reacting to individual students, of forming new, adaptable solutions to classroom conditions in order to grow and change and to integrate new ideas.  It’s very different than the sort of top-down approach fostered over the past twenty years in American education, one in which politicians or policymakers, most of whom lack direct classroom experience, attempt to foist large-scale change on American classrooms under penalty of law, with the goal of increasing standardized test scores to further a political agenda or political career.  The writing workshop evolved out of a very different model: a partnership between university researchers and public school teachers and, yes, students, all of whom conspired to create something that had never been seen before in schools.

Whether this approach will ever catch on wide-scale in high schools I think is doubtful, though it is beginning to happen more and more.  I am only just beginning to put this question in my sights this year and to ask why workshopping never took hold. One clue I found in the new book about Graves comes from one of the most trenchant criticisms of the Atkinson study, by Chicago professor and researcher George Hillocks, who published a meta-study of writing research in 1986 that I very much hope to read in the next few weeks.  Hillocks criticized what he called Graves’ “natural process” that allowed writers to develop freely with minimal teacher intervention as being unreliable. I just quickly scanned the report and found this:

Throughout the research by Graves and his colleagues, for example, changes in writing behavior tend to be attributed to natural development. For example, in discussing four types of revisers, Calkins (1980b) claims that “transition revisers” (one of the types) “had developed higher standards for themselves” (p. 339), the implication being that higher standards are developed internally as the natural result of efforts to write. One result of such inferences is that the researchers recommend that instruction be largely reactive, allowing children to write when and what they wish, with minimal intervention from the teacher. But the i. “…ence that children developed higher standards for themselves and by themselves may be wrong. Without controls for instructional variables, there is no way to establish the causal relationship.

According to Children Want to Write, Hillocks contrasts Graves’ “natural process” unfavorably with Hillocks’ own approach, the “environmental mode” — which instead of just letting kids choose topics and structures and write about whatever they want like the workshop model, emphasizes entering each unit “with a carefully designed set of gateway activities” designed to scaffold and support students, while still allowing them to write about meaningful topics, and to make their own mistakes.  

Frankly, this approach sounds much more like my own approach in the high school classroom, one that blends the process writing approach of Graves, the conferencing and the listening from the teacher (and, because these are older students, from each other) with the more prescriptive, traditional approach that sees everyone enter the same genre study unit, hear the same time-tested mini-lessons, and generally move much more closely at the same multi-draft pace than it sometimes seems a pure workshop model allows (in which students can start and end various drafts, write about different topics, and just generally be in very different places.  Perhaps that’s not fair — Newkirk and Kittle suggest Hillocks is not fair to Graves, but I’m interested to read.

It’s sometimes hard to imagine adopting a full-on workshop model in high school partly for the reservations I’ve expressed above.  The workshop — particularly the writer’s notebook — while making a lot of sense, still give me a feeling of students being adrift.  I am much more comfortable providing a bit more guidance — structured brainstorming and creative writing activities in class designed to pull out solid ideas, rather than taking down the nets and really letting students collect ideas totally on their own.  I am not expressing this well, but it’s a reservation I still have as a high school teacher about the workshop model that Graves ushered into elementary and middle schools: it feels just a little too free. Penny Kittle and Kelly Gallagher have written admirably about their efforts to situate the workshop in high school settings, so surely it works, but if I’m being honest, it still feels like a leap of faith.

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Either way, the workshop model is now — as it was in 1983 — a tremendously promising model of instruction.  Since then it has been developed for reading in addition to writing. It stands more than anything as exactly the sort of researcher-practitioner collaboration that we need in order to innovate.  It also represents a “bottom-up” model that goes against the grain of the educational reform of the past twenty years. This practice was started by teachers and by professors who’d been teachers.  It was developed in close partnership with schools and with children — really listening to them and understanding what they needed, right up close. A standardized test can never do that. A personalized learning software program, a computer, can never do that.  Only a human being with an extraordinary mind and ability to really hear what a child is saying — someone like Don Graves — could pull that off.

Here’s to the innovators.

It’s amazing how little we know about the words that shape our lives.

It’s fascinating to me that many of the basic terms fashionable in Vermont education — terms that so dominate my professional life right now, cause me late nights trying to restructure my gradebook, long meetings with coworkers trying to redesign curriculum, and philosophical debates with colleagues and students trying to get our minds around — terms such as “personalized learning,” or “proficiency-based learning,” or “personalized learning plan” — are terms whose origins I haven’t the faintest understanding of.

Suddenly, with the passing of Act 77 in 2013, the word rippled down through schools that everything was changing.  We started throwing around all these new terms, we had to change schools, and nobody knew where any of this came from.

We all thought this was alright.

Question the changes, we did.  But understand where they came from?  We simply didn’t have time.

And yet, five years after this law was passed and reverberated around our state, I find myself curious to learn where it all began.

It’s fascinating.

The other day, during some free time, I began investigating.  What I’m fast discovering is that the story of educational history in the United States is a story of constant churn: of ideas come up with and then quickly employed on huge, vast scales, only to be abandoned almost immediately, only to reappear a decade later under a slightly different name.  It’s a big, glorious mess.  And it’s a lot of fun to untangle.

More than that, I think this is important work.  Many of the terms that are quite literally shaping our children’s futures now in Vermont have quite nebulous origins.  It’s important to study where these “innovations” came from, and who was in the room for their adoption, in order to understand precisely what we’re looking at.  The careful study of history can liberate you by helping you understanding more clearly your influences.  The more perspective you can gain on a reform or movement, the more accurately you can judge or question or modify it.

So over the next week, I’d like to do that with a few of our current educational concepts here in Vermont.  I want to take a deep dive the best I can, to find out where they came from, and why we adopted them.

I’ll start first with “Personalized Learning.”

Last week, I spent an afternoon with some of Vermont’s best educators talking about the topic du jour: proficiency based learning (PBL).

We discussed a reservation that our students have about PBL: they can’t separate themselves as well under a 1-4 system as under the old 0-100 system.  There’s a big difference between an 80 and an 89. But under the new system, those are both ranked as a “3”: no difference. There’s a huge difference between a 70 and an 89. But under the new system, those might be scored as a 2 and a 3, respectively.  To students, there’s not a lot of difference between a 2 and a 3.  In their minds, why try so hard?

Like it or not, we are a nation obsessed with competition.  It’s hardwired into our DNA. We’re obsessed with the idea that America is a meritocracy.  If you work hard, take risks, and make the most of yourself, you’ll prosper.  There’s no rigid caste system, only open, unfettered competition.  The sky’s the limit.  That’s the American Dream.

Of course, it’s a dream steeped in a long, complex story of racial hypocrisy.  There is, in fact, a rigid caste system, and the playing field is about as level as the north face of the Matterhorn.  Some players show up without shoes.  Some players aren’t thrown the ball.  Some aren’t even allowed into the game.  But that doesn’t mean we’re not still obsessed with competing.  Capitalism is the name of our desire — free markets, survival of the fittest, the up-by-your-bootstraps, the self-made, the self-reliant.  We worship at the feet of Adam Smith and Ralph Waldo Emerson.  We may lie to ourselves about how fair it all is, but deep down, it’s who we are.

It’s tied up, of course, with our obsession with equality.  We have high-minded and noble ideals about all Americans being created as equal.  This too is bound up in an infinite web of hypocrisy and hidden, system discrimination.  And yet, even this high-minded goal is inextricably tied to competition.  We want to believe that everyone is equal . . .  but for the purposes of being able to compete in the same no-holds barred capitalist arena.

Look at our language in education.  It’s all about “giving students a chance to compete in the global marketplace.” Look the major moments that have driven our perception of public schools: Sputnik (economic / scientific competition with the Russians), a Nation at Risk (economic anxiety about Japan), the standards reform movement (more economic anxiety).  Any reformer worth his salt from the last 30 years has loved to point to our international test scores as evidence that, in our former Ed Secretary Arne Duncan’s words, “South Korea kicks our butt in everything educationally”  or as former DC schools chief Michelle Rhee said, “You know what you should not like? The fact that China is kicking our butts right now.  Get over feeling bad about the federal government and feel bad that our kids are not competing.”   

Hell — the word “competitiveness” is right there in the mission statement of the Department of Education:

“[Our] mission is to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.”

Look at that.  Nothing about fostering a democratic republic.  Nothing about preserving freedom and liberty. Nothing about living fulfilling lives, or nurturing empathy and understanding between citizens.  It’s all about competition. You might say that’s practically our national educational goal.

So why are we surprised when our students — who we’ve trained to value competition — object to a new grading system that deemphasizes it?  We can certainly *say* that we want to give rid of GPAs and tracked classes and a traditional 1-100 scale, but what I’m suggesting is that competitiveness is so integral to who we are as a nation that any educational system that doesn’t satisfy that need is doomed to fail.

In the end, there’s a lot that’s good about PBL, but like many reformers, we in Vermont are in danger of trying to make change too quickly.  We must be honest with ourselves about what Americans really value about education — and how we can turn this desire for equality of competitive opportunity to our own ends.  PBL can, if done correctly, help everyone compete more effectively — by ensuring that all learners are proficient before graduation.  But we’ve got to make sure that we recognize the reality of the system we’re operating in.  Let’s not forget that PBL was voted down in Maine because of these same competitive anxieties.  We’re a different state than Maine, but not that different.  We’re still Americans. 

And Americans love to compete.

I was thinking the other day about Proficiency Based Learning.  I was thinking about the reams and reams of data that we’re now required to assess and report.  We’re spending hours and hours recording and posting data . . .  But why?  Who really cares?

Supposedly it’s for parents, students, and us.  But students are mostly indifferent, if not confused, the parents are definitely confused, if not indifferent, and the last thing we educators are going to say to ourselves is, “I just spent six hours entering grades.  You know what I’m going to do now?  Thoughtfully mull over the data for a few more hours!  Let’s see if this’ll lead to divorce.”

Even I can’t decipher students’ report cards anymore — there’s too much data.  It’s like my Verizon bill, except without the “being ripped off” part.  Don’t give me eight pages of indecipherable fine print.  There’s something dishonest about it.  It’s like they’re saying, “Hey, don’t blame us when you finally learn that we’re extorting you!  It was right there all along on page 72b.”

Our new proficiency report cards aren’t quite that bad.  If anything, they’re coming from the opposite place.  It’s like we’re saying, “Okay, okay, here’s EVERYTHING POSSIBLE that we can measure — we’re going to publish it ALL.  Nothing being hidden here, okay?  We’re being COMPLETELY TRANSPARENT!”

Because we educators suffer from some serious professional anxiety when it comes to accountability.  After all, that’s been the watchword of every reform for the past twenty years.  No Child Left Behind was supposed to “hold schools accountable.” The idea was, collect all the data on how every sub-group is doing.  Then — publish it.  Shame the losers into doing better by labeling them.  More publishing.  If that doesn’t work, fire them.

It didn’t improve education.  But it certainly had an effect on teachers.  Many lost jobs.  Some lost their schools.  Some were even sent to prison, having been so pressured to produce that they cheated.  This was all in the name of data-based accountability.  Is it any wonder that now, still under the last vestiges of NCLB, even a progressive state like Vermont is falling all over itself to show how much data we can be super-transparent about?

It fits with a much wider, longer narrative, too — one in which schools get blamed a lot, whether it’s because America is losing the space race (we took the hit for Sputnik), the world economy to Japan (A Nation at Risk, 1983), the fight for racial equality (NCLB in the early 2000s), or the world economy again (see statements by “Duncan, Arne”).  We know we’re going to be blamed for the problems, and that we’re never going to get credit for the good stuff (such as the tech boom of the 1990s — no one ever seemed to give us credit for that).

That’s why, I believe, we now feel compelled to push out mountains of data to our students, through the wonderfully “transparent” online gradebook, updated (ideally) to the hour.  We’re so scared of being labeled “unaccountable” that we might as well set up a system that gives everyone everything on a kid at all times.  Be transparent.  Give ’em the data — on everything.

Sure, it comes from a noble place.  You could even say that we didn’t come up with this system consciously in order to justify ourselves.

But then again, we didn’t come up with this system, did we?

We never do.

Why is anyone acting as though the FBI will not get to the bottom of this case?  Seriously, I know it seems hard to imagine, but despite what Donald Trump would have you think . . .  the FBI is really freaking good at what it does.

No, the FBI is not going to get a definitive answer on what happened in that bedroom.

But whether this party happened in the first place, and whether Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford were both there?  I think they can manage that.  Why are we even thinking this is going to be hard for them?

After all, there are tons of leads.  For one thing, there is a date on Kavanaugh’s calendar — July 1, 1982 — when he went to a party at Tim Gaudette’s house with many of the boys who supposedly attended the party Blasey Ford referenced in her testimony.  Go talk to some of those guys.  Visit Gaudette’s house, see what it looks like, and if it matches Blasey Ford’s description.  Talk to Chris Garrett (“Squi”) — who dated Blasey Ford and supposedly introduced her to Kavanaugh.  See what he knows.  Start talking to some of the other guys, like Mark Judge.  Remind him of a few details from the case, and see what he has remembered.  And what about Blasey Ford’s friend, who she says was there — Leland Keyser.  Talk to her a little more, see what she remembers.

This is nothing revolutionary.  This is what a good law enforcement agency does.  Local police departments do it all the time.  You talk to people.  You ask them pointed questions, you remind them about dates, you get them to tell you things they remember.  Those things they tell you give you leads, maybe other people to talk to, other houses to visit.  Someone remembers something — “Oh, I remember Christine Blasey was really upset about something that happened the night before — I think it was at this party at . . .” — and then, BOOM, you have a fresh lead.

People are acting like just because some of these people have made statements through their lawyers saying they don’t remember this party, that it never happened.

Friends, in the real world, when a crime is committed, just because potential witnesses say they don’t remember, that doesn’t mean anything.

Hell, that’s when a good investigator is just getting started.

Mark Judge claims he doesn’t remember?

For professional investigators, that’s not a dead end.  That’s a starting point.

***

But here’s the problem:  If the FBI does its job well, that may do it more harm than good.

Grant my premise that the FBI is probably going to turn up some reasonably credible evidence that Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh attended the same party in the summer of 1982, corroborating specific details (house location, floor plan, event participants) given by Blasey Ford.

Or perhaps the FBI identifies a witness who was most definitely at the party, and most definitely claims the incident did take place.  Maybe someone even saw Blasey Ford run down the stairs, upset . . .

Say the FBI comes out with this.  What do you think Donald J. Trump is going to do?

A)  Throw a giant parade for the FBI, declaring a “tremendous effort.”

B)  Tell the Senate, “Back the drawing board; find me another justice — but make this one ethical.”

C)  Blast the FBI on Twitter and Fox, calling the whole thing “a partisan witch hunt!” by “Rod Rosenstein and his Angry Democrats” and tarnish the bureau’s findings to the point where 1) half the American public believes him, and 2) Republican senators feel pressure to IGNORE the FBI’s findings and vote Kavanaugh in anyway.

I’ll take “C,” Vanna.

If there’s anything Donald Trump hates, it’s a free press and an independent system of law enforcement.  Everything that he has done since he has become president is aimed at making the justice department into his personal weapon.  He wants the Attorney General to be his fixer.  The FBI Directory should take a loyalty oath.  If the FBI turns up credible evidence that rains on his Supreme Court parade, Trump’s going to take it as a personal insult.  Why aren’t they loyal to him?

He’s going to keep trying to tear them down, in doing so tearing at the fabric of the rule of law in this country.

This case isn’t just about the courts.  It’s about having independent law enforcement unafraid to show a tyrannical president what he doesn’t like.

We’re about to see what happens then.  I think I have a pretty good idea.

Someone forwarded me this link the other day.  It describes #outofmypocket — a movement to share how much teachers spend on classroom supplies out of their own pockets.  While this didn’t take off in quite the same way as last year’s social media posts about teachers’ low paychecks and second jobs, I was taken aback by some of the stories.  The site estimates that 94% of teachers spend their own money on classroom supplies, and some posters spent thousands of dollars on markers, glue sticks, even on notebooks.  And can you imagine a school district cruel enough that they make teachers buy their own tissues?  It happens.

From what I understand, it’s pretty routine for elementary teachers to send out a list of supplies parents and children are expected to provide each year.  Yet in many schools where the parents cannot afford these items, it’s none other than the teachers who end up eating the costs.

This is hard for me to picture.  As a public school teacher, I have never spent money on school supplies for students.  Then again, I am a high school teacher; I barely need any supplies.  But the ones I do need, my school has always, unthinkingly supplied.  I have never bought tissues.

That said, I could imagine doing it.  I buy food for students, for celebrations.  I remember a coworker, now deceased, whose homeroom students, after her death, were astounded when they calculated the sheer amount of money she spent bringing in croissants over the years.  She cared.  It showed.  That was just one small way.  She’d have considered any talk about money beside the point.  She loved those kids.  Just like lots of teachers do too — they care so much about kids that they’d rather go broke than let a kid go without.  Say what you want about teachers, but they put their money where there mouth is.

But what if they didn’t?

Remember how that poor professor at Evergreen State in Washington, Bret Weinsten, got run out of town two years ago by the irate mob for objecting to that weird practice they were proposing?  It was called “Day of Absence” and the original idea (not the wacky form Weinstein questioned) was actually quite powerful: all POC (which means “People of Color,” in case you’re not Woke [which means “Super Cool” in case you’re not “super cool”]) would spend the day “absent” from campus in order to show the impact of POC in the life of the community.  Nice.

Well, here’s my modest proposal:  Maybe next year teachers should have a Year of Absence for Our Wallets.  Instead of buying supplies, take what the school budget gives you.  No money for tissues?  Let them use their sleeves.  The kids want to color with actual markers?  Tell them to use their imaginations.

I wonder what happens?

Actually, scratch that.  It wouldn’t work.  You know why?  Because the things teachers give kids with money from their own wallet?  You can’t measure those on what matters to the purse-holders: a standardized test!  Crayons and markers?  Learn your times tables, brats.  Construction paper and glue sticks?  We have a world economy to dominate.  Picture books to learn to read?  Everyone knows what happened to Mr. Bunny Rabbit already — he didn’t do his STEM homework, so he couldn’t compete in a global economy, and he was baked into a pie by his rivals, the Chinese.  Quit blubbering.

That’s why teachers do it, I think.  For the kids whose parents can’t provide this stuff, no one’s going to notice if they don’t have it . . .  except their teachers.

God bless ’em.

(And raise their salaries.)

***

Speaking of schools, and wealth, this past week, as part of my Fancy Fellowship, I had the chance to visit perhaps the wealthiest school district in Vermont to deliver a life changing lecture . . .  scratch that, I was sitting in a windowless conference room drawing on chart paper and trying not to drink too much coffee.

Anyway, for such a wealthy district, I was taken aback by what a cruddy facility they have.  “They spend their money on staff, not on buildings” is what I heard.  Makes sense, but still.  This place was terrible: vintage 70s, open classrooms (why was this ever a good idea?), secretaries and guidance staff stuffed into closets, windowless rooms, a cafeteria that looks it’s at a motor inn that’s going out of business, bathrooms like Fenway Park and Mad River Glen’s.  It was grim.  And I have a high tolerance, folks.

Anyway, the most shocking thing to me, a jaded denizen of some glittering palace over in Montpelier, was the lack of a common space.  When I walked into this high school, I was met, first, by a weird, impersonal buzzer that I could not figure out how to operate.  (“Oh, well,” I thought, “maybe high school doesn’t want me.  But you know who I bet does?  My local alt-right hate group . . . “) After I finally made it inside, I was ceremoniously confronted by a small holding cell space.  It wasn’t quite a brick wall, but it was close.  Go right or go left, it seemed to say, but don’t linger here.  Do you get what I’m saying?  There was no common space.  Where I work, visitors immediately enter a huge, soaring atrium — two stories tall, with skylights and plants and tables to sit at and plenty of open space.  You’ll see kids sitting at tables together, teachers milling around talking to kids and to each other, sometimes you’ll see the principal chatting with everyone.  Not only does it look a whole hell of a lot more inviting than a holding cell, but it functions to route everyone, at some point in their day, into the same common space.  Everyone passes through the atrium; all the wings of the school flow through it.

I once read about some tech company — it’s so hard to remember the names of them, isn’t it? — I think it was called Moogle or Racebook or Crapple — that specifically designed their headquarters so that employees from different divisions would be bumping into each other and (the thinking went) hashing out innovative ideas (such as the ability to order a take out burrito while completely intoxicated — wouldn’t that be cool?)  Well, the same things happen where I work.  I’m always running into colleagues and students in the atrium.  I’m always having inspiring discussions with them, saying incredible things to them, such as, “Why are you avoiding me?” or “Is it because you haven’t been to class in months?”

So as you can see, having common space isn’t just convenient, it’s community-building.  Architecture is important.  That’s why I think that schools that have no leisurely common gathering space, no places that belong to the public, outside of more utilitarian spaces like the cafeteria or library, is missing out.  It’s like a having parks in your city, or an old-fashioned town square in your village.

It’s good for the community soul.

***

The last thing I want to mention about schools today also has to do with this glorious atrium of ours.  But this one’s a little more dark.  Bear with me.

Do you ever have a moment where you’ve been fighting for something, and you’re losing, and you’re sort of resigned to it, but then something so utterly ridiculous happens that you realize just how badly you have already lost, and you can only laugh at your abject stupidity for ever thinking you had a chance in the first place?

No?  Well, I did.

Twice over the last few weeks, I have “caught” students playing first person shooter video games.  I say “caught” because they were making no attempt to hide it.  They were in the middle of a crowded atrium.  On their school-issued computers.  In a public high school.

I was sort of speechless.  This would be like having the gall to read a Charles Murray book in the middle of the dining hall at Middlebury College.  So I went up to the young man, who was actually sitting where middle schoolers normally sit, and I asked him if he had given a single thought to the symbolism of his actions.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “I’m in high school.”

As if that was what I was worried about.  Actually, it is — you are in a high school, my friend.  That’s the problem!

Maybe we haven’t quite lost the fight, but we’re definitely on the floor and bleeding.  Nothing more perfectly symbolizes what we’re up against with school violence.  Nothing more perfectly shows that we need to address the root of the problem, not the surface of it.  I am not saying that video games cause school shootings.  Far from it.  I am saying that violence so saturates our world that putting more guns in schools is so far beside the point, it’s insane.

That’s all I’ve got for this week.

Some Thoughts on the West

1.  Every year, after about my second run, I start to remember the rapids.  Then I don’t come back for a year.

2.  If you are with a group that doesn’t want to hike up and run the top rapid, find another group.  An open boat is no excuse.

2a.  Because that’s the best rapid, that top one.  The dam.  The chaotic eddy scene.  The horizonline.  The wave train.  The surf wave.  That steep right turn just below, with the big pourover on the right, where the river’s at its pushiest.  I could spent all day up there.

3.  Has the West always been so warm?  That was bathwater.

4.  Here’s how you know you’re getting old.  You pull something in your neck . . .  before you put on the river.  Maybe it was a “riding shuttle” injury?  Maybe it was a “standing in line for shuttle” injury?  I’m 36, by the way.

5.  Nowhere else in New England do you see what you see at the West.  NOWHERE.  I saw at least four tandem open boats.  I saw at least twenty C-1s.  I saw at least 100 solo open boats.  There were duckies . . . and shredders . . .  and riverboards . . .  and stand-up paddle boards.

Where are all these people from?  Why don’t I see any of them on the Dryway?

6.  My gear is sort of locked in the mid-2000s.  I need to get me one of those new river runner boats.  Party Brrap, Ripper, Axiom . . .  They look fun.  That’s a good trend.  I never liked the whole microscopic playboat era.

6a.  I would never buy a Jackson.  Nothing personal.  But the whole smiley face icon thing . . .  just the wrong branding for me.

7.  The best move at the Dumplings is the old school ender in a long boat at the ender spot near the bottom.  The second best is the pillow move in the center slot at the top.  The least best move is what every single boater in this video is doing.

8.  Hit the boof at Boof Rock and then turn around and catch the big wave right below and you are doing just fine.

9.  Real slalom boaters walk the shuttle . . .  with no shoes.

9a.  Real open boaters pull their canoe on a cart, then fold it up, and put it in the boat.  Done and done.

10.  I love burgers.  I consider myself a burger connoisseur.  Here is where you can get some of the best burgers in Vermont: the Three Penny Taproom, the Farmhouse, the Worthy Burger.  Here is where you can get the best burger in Vermont: the food stand at the West take out after a long day of paddling.  Food never tasted so good.

11.  They used to hold the slalom National Championships and US Team Trials on the Dumplings.  A lot.  That fact that they stopped says nothing about the West.  It says everything about slalom’s priorities.  Instead of beautiful rivers like the West or the Savage, now we race on plastic legolands like Charlotte or concrete ditches like Dickerson.

12.  In fact, lots of interesting stuff happened at slalom races on the West.  Jim Snyder first conceived of squirt boating at the West, while watching a racer inadvertently dip his stern.  Eric Jackson, founder of Jackson Kayaks, met his wife at a race on the banks of the West.

13.  Sometimes I hear people brag on the shuttle about how many runs they’ve done.  Seriously?  If you’re doing more than about three runs, you are not working the river enough.  Learn to catch eddies.

14.  You never appreciate what kind of shape you used to be in until you can’t make the same moves you used to.   I could see where I wanted to go, I just couldn’t get there.

15.  Jamaica?  Where the hell did that come from anyway?

16.  I tired myself out pretty quickly and just started began floating.  That was within sight of the put in.

17.  If I had to pick one event that really captures the essence of the boating community in New England, in all its quirkiness and character, I’d pick West Fest.

There’s just something about it.

It’s a river that brings us out.

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

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

“Third.”

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

The woman confesses that she doesn’t know.

“Six.”

That’s when he turns to the audience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starting to ring a bell?  

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Schools are lying to parents.

***

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

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

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

This is such an odd misreading of reality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are so many things to question here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

Are you surprised?

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

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

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

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

***

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

It’s way, way bigger, my friend.

Look a little harder.