Ms. Bullen’s Data-Rich Year

April 25, 2014June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

You ever across something while browsing online, and wish you hadn’t? I believe it was Tosh.0 that did a segment called “Things You Can’t Unsee.” Sometimes they just gross you out, or cause emotional distress, and sometimes they’re just inappropriately violent or pornographic or just plain wrong.

This one is none of those, except perhaps ‘just plain wrong.’ It’s from the OKSDE website, and of course it’s about Data-Tracking, and Value Added Measurement, and all sorts of other bureaucratic verbiage designed to disguise a much simpler phrase, “blame everything on teachers whatever it takes.” It’s also the death knell of my efforts to focus on the positives in education.

Here is what the State of Oklahoma – and the State Department of Education in particular – thinks of you, the teacher, represented here by dear Ms. Bullen:

I know you can’t read the small print yet, but already a few things are clear:

(1) VAM / TLE / State Data in General is designed to consciously require a giant graphic full of small print to even begin to understand.

(2) The OK SDE / State Legislature is glad you’re not married and thus presumably lack any sort of a family, otherwise you’d never be able to put in the kind of time outside the school day we’re expecting. So much for a pay scale based on having a spouse with a real job! [Confused Reader: “But, married women can use the ‘Ms.’ – it’s marital status neutral, that’s the whole point.” Me: “Clearly you’ve never been to Oklahoma.”]

(3) The OK SDE / State Legislature is under the impression you are approximately nine years old. (In which case I suppose it’s just as well you’re not married.) On the other hand, if you can find Waldo in this picture, you may get a sticker!

Let’s take a closer look at a few parts of this wonderful chart:

(4) On zooming in, I think we have a much better idea why Ms. Bullen is not married. Elective cosmetic surgery is such a risky venture – just ask Kenny Rogers, Bruce Jenner, or Ms. Bullen. Yikes!

(5) How wonderful that Ms. Bullen is able to use one of those pesky PD days before school begins for something so unlikely to develop her as a professional. Instead, she can spend her time labeling, tracking, and otherwise pre-judging her students based on how they did last year. Given that she’ll have approximately 170 of them, this might take several days, comfortably cut off from her department, administration, or other professionals. But all the best educational studies show, of course, that the ideal way to tap into a child’s full potential is to form judgments about their abilities and potential before you’ve even met them!

(6) It seems I’ve been a little unfair in assuming this will all be on Ms. Bullen, as Joey apparently comes from a very involved two-parent family. Plus, Ms. Bullen’s principal has nothing but time to help design IEPs for all 1,246 students in the building, so that’s not really a problem – unless he or she also wishes to complete all 73 levels of the required Teacher Leader Evaluation System for every adult in the building as well. But, some of the burden can be shared by the many Tutors and Trainers in the building.

Hey, you know what would be fun? Let’s each stop for a moment and see if we can remember the name(s) of the Tutor(s) and Trainer(s) in our buildings who will help us with all of this when it’s our turn…

How did you do? If you came up with “none of these positions even exist,” you get another sticker, just like they do in Tennessee!

(7) You are expected to create an IEP for each and every one of your students before school even begins! (Step Two) Setting aside the fact that this is insane, it’s still nine full steps before Step Eleven, where an ‘early warning system’ (which appears to be an iPad app) will send an alert to a strange man in the room that Joey is off-track, or failing. Presumably the strange man will tell Ms. Bullen, who can call Joey’s very involved parents in to look at the full-sized mural she’s devoted to the Chutes & Ladders version of Joey’s educational journey. Thank god there’s finally a way to know when students are failing – other than the fact that they’re, for example, failing.

(8) You are expected to immediately discard the approximately 170 IEP’s you’ve spent weeks creating so you can “adjust instruction on the fly” (Step Three) based solely and exclusively on the perceived reactions of Joey. We can only hope the 34 other students in the room are not offended at the impact this must have on their individualized learning experience. At the same time, this is a great moment – it’s the only point in All 18 Steps that assumes for even an instant that you (represented here by Ms. Bullen) have any idea what you’re doing without consulting a few dozen spreadsheets of data. But don’t worry – you won’t be stuck teaching ‘on the fly’ for long!

(9) You will have plenty of time to meet one on one with each of your students (Step Six) to discuss their behavior, attendance data (which is different from attendance… how?), and performance, as well as what Joey’s parents want for him – during the one moment in which is overly involved parents are conspicuously absent. You’ll set some individualized goals for the year to replace that IEP you developed before you met him, then threw out in Step Three.

Assuming you have approximately 168 students, and that each of these meetings take about 10 minutes, that’s only about… 28 hours each week. Or is it each month? I’m not sure how often this one is supposed to happen. Let’s assume it’s just once – it’s not like Joey’s performance, behavior, goals, or attendance are likely to change throughout the year. So we’ll just use that extra 28 hours floating around during, say… October. Nothing that important happens in October anyway.

(10) I’m not sure what “Data Coaches” are (Step Seven), although each school apparently has several (they must share office space with all the Tutors and Trainers – no wonder Oklahoma schools are so darned inefficient with how they spend district money!) Apparently while teachers celebrate their one collective decent idea, the Data Coaches do some sort of ceremonial handshake – or perhaps it’s a dance. I’m not familiar with that culture, but I’d really like to see that. There simply aren’t enough dances based on hard educational data.

(11) The Building Principal, on the other hand, reviews “performance data” with Ms. Bullen, but don’t worry – he does it to “support and empower,” not “admonish” (Step Eight). You have to remember that Ms. Bullen is nine years old and unlikely to marry due to a botched elective cosmetic procedure – she cannot be treated like an adult and simply discuss how things are going with her class. Wait! I mean… with Joey. Just how things are going with Joey.

(12) We’ll skip ahead a few steps to where you can’t leave for the summer until you make sure Joey and each of your other 167 students are properly tracked and categorized for the next school year (Step Sixteen). It’s important Joey not have any input on what he might be interested in or challenge himself by taking advanced coursework. We don’t want to risk student engagement in a way that might threaten the data! It would actually be more efficient to simply divide the classes by socio-economic status, race, or educational level of whatever parental units happen to be in the picture, but we might miss a few outliers that way. So, we stick to DATA.

(13) Because you haven’t spent nearly enough time in data meetings for Steps One through Sixteen, and are assumed to have no idea how the year went based on the formal and informal assessments you give throughout the year, your relationship with each student, or anything else that might indicate you have a pulse, you’ll meet with your principal some more and work on your own Value Added Measurement numbers (Step Seventeen).

(14) This would be a great time for Ms. Bullen to lower than neckline a bit and talk to that building principal about making sure she doesn’t have any ELL, Integrated, or otherwise low-performing classes next year. Although she has a heart for struggling students like Joey, they’re totally killing her VAM scores. As Roster Verification and Teacher Linkage become dominant, she’s growing rather resentful of any little turd that hurts her scores and means she’s not getting the merit pay those Pre-AP teachers probably will. I suggest some aggressive accessorizing to distract from those rectangular lips.

(15) You and the other district teachers will spend your summers looking at data on your own time (Step Eighteen), although you’re barely paid for the required 180 days you’ve already spent at school. Only when you pass through the gate painted to look like that trip to Six Flags you can never afford are you free to begin tracking and prejudging next year’s students based on their test scores.

Of course, you’re not in this profession for the summers, or the money, or the remnants of hope you had only a few years ago – that’s not what teaching is about. You have something better than a sense of purpose to what you do, or remnants of self-respect, or even the resources to take your family on even a modest trip – you have data.

Congrats Ms. Bullen! You may have low VAM scores, endless meetings, no summers to yourself, and no money to try to fix that botched surgery, but you’ve had a data-rich year!

First Class, or Coach?

April 22, 2014June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal ~ 1 Comment

Teachers who also coach – or coaches who also teach ‘real’ subjects – get a bad rap. When you see a teacher on TV or in movies who’s being played for laughs, it’s almost always a coach (and a history teacher at that). I’ve several times been at the front of the room leading brief introductions at the beginning of a workshop when some well-intentioned dear lady will give her name, and where she’s from, and lament that besides herself and maybe the new teacher next door, her department is all coaches, so…

Obviously we’re supposed to know the rest, and nod sympathetically. Except for the third of the room who coach various things.

So… awkward. Often the phrase “Some of the Best Teachers I Know are Coaches” makes an appearance. Next time I’ll have to ask it how “Some of my Best Friends are Black People” is doing these days – it’s been too long.

Is this fair? Is this one of those things with enough truth to sustain itself, although no one wants to come right out and say it? Is this yet another flaw in the public education system, begging to be addressed by a Gates Foundation grant or some sort of higher-standards legislation?

I haven’t done a formal study or anything (hey, some of us work for a living), but I’ve worked with and around a wide variety of coaches in a rather large district for 15 years now. I’ve been nominally “in charge” of a number of them as Lead Instructional Motivated Curriculum Alignment and Assessment Facilitator. (We haven’t used simple names for things since the late 90’s – no one actually knows what any given room or title actually indicates anymore, so we wander around confused much of the time.)

I’ve led professional development in various guises across multiple states over the past ten years, and inevitably a good chunk of the teachers I meet either are or know coaches. It always comes up. We talk. I learn. Often, pastry trays are involved.

I don’t coach myself, nor am I qualified to do so, but I have seen Remember the Titans about 19 times. I thus consider myself supremely qualified to make some confident statements about coaches who teach, and teachers who coach (and come to think of it, I’m pretty sure these are the same thing). I’ll number them to lend artificial authority to each statement.

(1) Coaches coach for the same reasons teachers teach. Most public school educators signed up because at some point they wanted to help kids. They wanted to make a positive difference in some way by getting involved. We’re idealists at heart – or were, before the acronyms caught up with us and stomped the last bit of hope out of our calling. Teachers who are tired of being stereotyped as unable to get ‘real jobs’ or assumed to have gone into education because they simply weren’t qualified to do anything else should stop doing the same thing to the folks who teach next door to them in the morning and coach in the afternoon.

(2) Successful coaches are usually successful teachers. The time demands of coaching may limit the extent to which they labor over their grading or lesson plans after hours, but that’s true of many good classroom teachers with ‘real lives’ outside the classroom. Some may even lean a little heavily on more orthodox lessons and strategies. But few effective coaches are ‘dead weight’ in the classroom. The skill set and mindset of the two are simply too closely aligned. And the guy who is faking his way through 1st – 4th periods with worksheets and VHS documentaries is probably not accomplishing much on the field, court, or ice either.

(3) Coaches are evaluated publicly and often by the performance of students who may or may not be demonstrating what they’ve actually been taught. Annoyed by those good ol’ boys who are obviously given classes during the day simply to fill the slot and justify their position? Frustrated at how impossible it is to push a coach with mediocre classroom skills aside to make room for a ‘real’ teacher? If your tenure and paycheck (the one used to buy your kids clothes and food and such) relied largely on how things go Friday night, I suspect you’d be easily distracted from that flipped-model inquiry-based cross-curricular collaborative journey you were trying to scaffold. You might even make a few calls to your staff and revisit some plays or other logistics. This is not a ‘coach’ problem – this is a structuring problem.

(4) Coaches work long hours for pitiful stipends. You remember when you sat down that one afternoon and started trying to figure out how much you, as a highly qualified classroom teacher, actually make per hour? Coaches learn not to do that math – especially that ‘how many kids do I have multiplied by what babysitters charge’ version that’s popular from time to time. Many of them are keeping much longer hours for much less per than you or I would tolerate if it were our Lunch Duty stipend or Safety Training Coordinator compensation.

(5) Thank god for kids in athletics. They may or may not be my shining academic stars, but discipline problems they are not. An email or phone call to their coach solves almost any problem – academics, attendance, or attitude. I wish I could require ALL of my students to be involved in extra-curriculars.

(6) Coaches will mess with you by playing to your preconceptions. I see it all the time in workshops – the self-deprecating humor, the inside jokes. Maybe this is merely a ploy to lower expectations (especially on those required in-district days), but I suspect it’s usually just amusing to watch the rest of us be all smug without admitting it to ourselves.

(7) Coaches understand vertical teaming better than we do. They’re also far more likely to spend hours evaluating and analyzing their own performance and that of their kids with game film, statistics, or other unforgiving rubrics. The focus on individual responsibility within effective group work is a staple of most team sports – they don’t even work otherwise – and is applied to Those of the Shorts & Whistle just as consistently as to those in their care. And ‘grit’ – that most recent breakthrough suggesting that giving up every time something is difficult is NOT a great life plan? Yeah, old news on the court, field, or ice.

I’m not suggesting we ignore legitimate problems. I am suggesting that there are times that, instead of pushing our coaches to attend more PD, we should be asking them to lead some of it. We’d probably all be better off.

Related Post: “Extra” Curriculars

John Wilkes Booth – Reader of Novels

April 13, 2014June 4, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal ~ 1 Comment

The great profusion of children’s books protracts the imbecility of childhood. They arrest the understanding, instead of advancing it. They give forwardness without strength. They hinder the mind from making vigorous shoots, teach it to stoop when it should soar, and contract when it should expand…
Youth almost habitually seek amusement. The youthful intellect requires relaxation from a close attention to literary acquisitions: and to relieve the wearisomeness of such attention, books of amusement are generally sought, and read with avidity… Important then is it, that impressions made during the tender impressible years of childhood and youth, should be such as shall tend to prepare, rather than unfit the mind for respectability, real enjoyment, and permanent usefulness in riper years…
Rarely will a youth engage with assiduity, or even without disgust, in a study requiring mental exertion, immediately after his mind has been relaxed and debilitated; his taste, if not his heart corrupted; and his soul kindled into ardour at scenes of imagined bliss, which probably he will never realize, but which will only prepare his mind for bitter disappointment.
ON NOVEL READING (from The Guardian; or Youth’s Religious Instructor, 1820, pp. 46-49) via www.merrycoz.org/books/NOVELS01.HTM

You can find the most fascinating stuff on the internet. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a soul-sucking beast which will eventually destroy us all, but in the meantime OMGBUNNIES!!!

One of the coolest finds of the past 30 or 40 decades is www.merrycoz.org, a bewildering treasury of rare 19th Century writing edited, organized, and editorialized with love by the site’s creator, Pat Pflieger.

The mother lode is the collection of rare 19th Century literature for young people – including contemporaneous commentary on what they should and should not be reading:

Novel-readers spend many a precious hour in dreaming out clumsy little romances of their own, in which they themselves are the beautiful ladies and the gallant gentlemen who achieve impossibilities, suffer unutterable woe for a season, and at last anchor in a boundless ocean of connubial bliss. Nor does it require much previous mental cultivation to enable one to indulge in these visionary joys. The school-boy and school-girl, the apprentice, the seamstress, the girl in the kitchen, can conjure up rosy dreams as readily as other people; and perhaps more readily, as it requires but little reading of the sort to render them impatient of their lot in life, and set them to imagine something that looks higher and better.
In fact, the Cinderella of the old nursery story is the true type of thousands of our novel-readers… Ella, sitting among her native cinders, is a very prosaic individual, addicted to exceedingly prosaic employments, and fulfilling a destiny far removed from sublimated romance. But touched by the wand of the good Fairy, Ella is transfigured, her coarse garments are robes of magnificence, the mice are prancing steeds, the pumpkin is a coach, and she rides in state, the admiration of all beholders, and weds the prince triumphantly.
The modern Ella, sitting among the cinders, has indeed no good Fairy to confer sudden splendors upon her; but her place is well supplied by sundry periodicals, designed for just this style of readers. And so Ella invests her six cents weekly, and reads, and dreams. According to the flesh, she bears an honest, humble name, busies herself with a cooking stove, or a noisy sewing-machine, and with all her matrimonial anglings, perhaps has never a nibble. In her other capacity she is the Countess of Moonshine, who dwells in a Castle of Spain, wears a coronet of diamonds, and to whom ardent lords and smitten princes make love in loftiest eloquence; and she is blest.
But, as Napoleon once observed, there is only a step between the sublime and the ridiculous. At any moment the coach of state may relapse into its original squash, the prancing horses again become mice, the costly array turn once more to rags; and the Countess, sweeping in her trailing robes through the glittering crowd of admiring lords and envious ladies, subside into her former simple self, with the hideous onions to be peeled, or the clattering machine to be kept in motion.
NOVELS AND NOVEL-READING, by Rev. J. T. Crane (from Popular Amusements. Cincinnati: Walden & Stowe, 1869; pp. 121-152) via www.merrycoz.org/books/CRANE.HTM

Gotta watch those crazy novel-readers; next thing you know, they’re going to reach higher than their station in life. In his defense, the good Reverend Crane also condemns dancing, card-playing, and baseball – so maybe he wasn’t all bad. He was incidentally the father of Stephen Crane – you know, the… um… novelist. What fun family dinners THOSE must have been!

The implications in terms of women’s issues, social class expectations, the tensions between faith and fancy, are all enormous, and too complex to even begin to tackle here (by which I mean, I have no idea what half the things I just said actually mean). Most often, fiction was compared to alcohol – fine in moderation, and if it were of the highest sort, but quick to overtake one’s tastes and one’s good sense until everything of value was destroyed by the devil in paperback.

I don’t believe in the “Elvis Fallacy”, an argument that goes something like this:

(1) People used to be offended by Elvis’s music and the pelvic motions he stole from Forrest Gump,

(2) Most people now consider Elvis harmless and figure people were overreacting, therefore

(3) Nothing a public figure does, no matter how explicit or horrifying, should be challenged or called offensive, because… Elvis!

Nevertheless, it’s worth considering some of the hand-wringing and soul-lamenting going on in these passages regarding reading that would today be considered rather tame compared to a truly violent, godless, porn-romps like The Hunger Games or The Fault In Our Stars.

Besides, novels killed President Lincoln:

In the foul stroke that laid low the honored head of our late president we witness the force and emphasis of a stage-actor’s education superadded to the morals of slavery. Crime is fearful enough when its blame is chargeable to a bad enterprise, and can be distributed among a million men, but it grows more fearful when a single villain leaps ahead of his class and concentrates all their wickedness into one enormity of his own.
The education of John Wilkes Booth had fitted him to act the part of murderer of our President. It had familiarized him with every species of tragedy till a murder meant nothing more to him than a move on a checker-board…
Does any young man feel as if he would like to be educated to do as daringly and dexterously as did Booth? Let him keep on, then, reading the bloody tales of the weekly story papers, or the flashy, ten cent, yellow-covered literature sold in almost every book store. He will soon learn how to be a hero of the approved romantic type. But, young friend, if you have any regard for your character, your future standing in society, the credit of your families, your own peace and the welfare of your souls, let such reading alone! Why should you suffer yourself to trace hour after hour the foul workings of human revenge, jealousy, malice and corruption, because some writer has woven them into intoxicating fiction? God has better pastime for you; better literature than that for your leisure hours. There is no aliment for the mind in that reading. Rather never read a printed line. Such material stimulates only the bad in your nature.
BOOTH AND BAD LITERATURE (from The Youth’s Companion, May 11, 1865, p. 74) via www.merrycoz.org/yc/BADLIT.HTM

There’s a pretty tasty bit that follows about the difference between offal-fed meat and meat fed on solid corn, but I worried it might lose something on the modern audience. “You are what you read” seems to capture it pretty well, though.

I was warned in my youth about my demonic rock’n’roll albums (I burned more classic vinyl in good faith than I can afford to replace on a public school teacher’s salary), the perils of playing Dungeons & Dragons (yeah, yeah – bring it on, ye envious trolls), and later the violence promoted by video games (if aliens ever line up suicidally to drop down on me one at a time, I am SO ready), movies, the interweb, the ‘rap’ music, etc.

Now the same fervency goes into fears that our kids will never learn to read or write because of texting, will never learn to listen or focus because of their phones, will never learn to properly use a telegraph machine or address an envelope because of their, um… lack of a need to ever, ever do those things. We’re supposed to be worried – really worried.

And I won’t lie – some of my students don’t inspire me daily. We may need to learn Mandarin or Russian before I can die peacefully via ruling of some ACA Death Panel. I don’t understand the things they’ve made popular in modern music, movies, or the YouTube. And tights aren’t pants.

But many of them do inspire me, and encourage me, and amaze me, with their wit, their drive, their insight, their souls, and their aspirations and ideals. A ridiculous number of them have every intention of going out and changing the world in ways both large and small, and several of them just might. They understand the difficulties and requisite suffering required to accomplish such things, but figure they’ll find a way through or around whatever comes up.

Crazy dreamers, those kids. Must be reading too many novels.

All I Need Is This Lamp…

March 27, 2014July 31, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal ~ 1 Comment

If you want to completely derail any meeting of three or more educators – teachers, administrators, curriculum coordinators, outside consultants, or whatever – ask what our priorities should be.

You know, as educators – what are our priorities for the kids? It’s hard to make a good plan without a clear target, so what are we trying to accomplish – you know, ideally?

It’s a pretty easy question until you try to limit yourself to a reasonable number.

Love of learning, of course. Critical thinking, which we define as ‘analyzing information effectively.’ Analyzing information effectively, which we define as ‘critical thinking.’ Oh – and reading. Lifelong readers. And independent learners – is that the same as ‘love of learning’? Maybe it is. But that’s it – just those.

Oh! College & Career Ready – that’s on the website, so we need that one. And citizenship. Social skills. Character. Maybe some content – just basic stuff like the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Amendments, the major Court Cases, the most important Elections and Legislation and not just Social Studies, but the Scientific Method and just basic science stuff, you know? I realize it’s Oklahoma, but SOME science wouldn’t be completely out of line…

And of course Shakespeare, the Bible, MLK, which reminds us – primary sources, understanding other cultures and points of view, charts and maps and statistics, and bias, and order of operations in math class, functional grammar and sentence structure, and – OH! Responsibility. That’s more important than all the rest except for all the others that are more important than all the rest.

But we should stop there. Those are the two or three MOST important things.

And who won the Civil War. Then we’re done.

We said ‘Reading,’ right? Oh – RIGHT! Writing – did we say writing? We MUST teach kids to write effectively. To different audiences. About different things. Things they’ve read about.

But just those. That’s not so –

Oh! Oh oh oh oh – can we add ‘media skills’? Is it too late for that? It is? Oh, but, um… it’s really… well, OK.

I can’t resolve this even in my own mind in 2014, but I can offer two rather compelling insights from nearly two centuries ago – and one’s not even directly about public education (but it so totally is). Both are edited excerpts of longer documents, the originals of which are quite Google-able (or you can just email me at [email protected]) if you’re so inclined.

Document #1: Report of the Workingman’s Committee of Philadelphia On the State of Public Instruction in Pennsylvania (1830)
[This committee was appointed September, 1829, to ascertain the state of public instruction in Pennsylvania, and to propose appropriate improvements.]
The original element of despotism is a MONOPOLY OF TALENT, which consigns the multitude to comparative ignorance, and secures the balance of knowledge on the side of the rich and the rulers.
If then the healthy existence of a free government be, as the committee believe, rooted in the WILL of the American people, it follows as a necessary consequence, of a government based upon that will, that this monopoly should be broken up, and that the means of equal knowledge, (the only security for equal liberty) should be rendered, by legal provision, the common property of all classes.
In a republic, the people constitute the government, and… [they] frame the laws and create the institutions, that promote their happiness or produce their destruction. If they be wise and intelligent, no laws but what are just and equal will receive their [approval], or be sustained by their [votes]. If they be ignorant… they will be deceived by mistaken or designing rulers, into the support of laws that are unequal and unjust.
It appears, therefore, to the committee that there can be no real liberty without a wide diffusion of real intelligence; that the members of a republic, should all be alike instructed in the nature and character of their equal rights and duties, as human beings, and as citizens…
Document #2: Horace Mann Advocates for Public Libraries (1840)
[Mann was the most influential educational reformer of his day. His influence radiated out from Massachusetts, where he did much to improve the common schools by securing better buildings, higher salaries, and superior teaching methods through teachers’ institutes and normal schools.]
A library will produce one effect upon school children, and upon the neighborhood generally, before they have read one of the books, and even if they should never read one of them.
It is in this way: The most ignorant are the most conceited. Unless a man knows that there is something more to be known, his inference is, of course, that he knows everything. Such a man always usurps the throne of universal knowledge, and assumes the right of deciding all possible questions. We all know that a conceited dunce will decide questions extemporaneously which would puzzle a college of philosophers or a bench of judges. Ignorant and shallow-minded men do not see far enough to see the difficulty.
Now those children who are reared without any advantages of intelligent company, or of travel, or of books—which are both company and travel—naturally fall into the error of supposing that they live in the center of the world, that all society is like their society, or, if different from theirs, that it must be wrong. They come, at length, to regard any part of this vast system of the works of man, and of the wisdom of God, which conflicts with their homebred notions, as baneful, or contemptible, or non-existent…
Now, when this class of persons go out into the world and mingle with their fellow men, they are found to be alike useless on account of their ignorance, and odious for their presumption…
A library, even before it is read, will teach people that there is something more to be known.

What Are We FOR?

March 25, 2014July 31, 2023 ~ Blue Cereal

This was the post that prompted me to set up an actual blog, shortly before the #OKEdRally in OKC on March 31st, 2014. It was also the first thing to get a response I liked better than my actual post. Both are reproduced in full here:

What exactly are we for?

I think this is worth considering anyway, but particularly so for Oklahoma educators planning on storming the Capitol in a few weeks. You never know, after all, who might ask.

History shows clearly how much easier it is to unite against things than to agree on the best alternatives. Anyone keeping up with events in Egypt, Syria, or dozens of other places in recent years knows this is still so. Even my students are quick to rally in opposition to my periodic efforts to play a little Coltrane or even Cannonball Adderley in class, but have yet to reach a convincing plurality regarding other musical options.

Browse Facebook or Twitter or the popular blogs, and the things we are against quickly become evident. Common Core is clearly the devil, as is standardized testing in general. Charter schools are the devil, usually hanging out with Vouchers – also the devil. Arne Duncan is the devil, along with Bill Gates, Jeb Bush, and occasionally even President Obama. Teach For America is the devil (this is one I particularly do not fathom, but that’s a discussion for another day), the new SAT is the devil, college admittance offices are the devil, and the two combined mean the College Board and that new fella in charge are the super extra devil. Pearson actually IS the devil, but nevertheless still clutters the list, and Janet Barresi, while NOT the devil, acts as a sort of PR agent on his behalf, showing a loathing of public schools and public school teachers you’d not automatically expect from a State Superintendent – although it does somehow illuminate this childhood favorite:

But were all these swept away tomorrow, what would we wish in their stead? What are we FOR?

Yes, yes – I know we’re for ‘the children’ and ‘the future’ and world peace and curing the common cold. I know the intangibles, but what SPECIFICALLY do we support? Do we sincerely trust a sort of “local control laissez-faire” approach to our schools? To everyone else’s schools? Is there a system of accountability or assessment we could live with? Or even design? A strategy we’d be willing to implement? Even a philosophy or set of priorities on which we generally agree?

We’re marching against many things, I assume, but the only one I’m aware we’re marching FOR is money. This is completely valid and important. We cannot starve ourselves into pedagogical and academic success. But I worry about the messaging – an unpleasant consideration, but a critical reality nonetheless.

If we rally and chant and hold up our signs (let’s watch our speling pleaze!) solely to kill accountability and demand money, maybe throwing in some cheap personal attacks on state leadership, I fear we will have difficulty persuading the average Oklahoma voter we bring something worth supporting… something worth paying for when no one seems to have much, and something that offers a digestible but optimistic direction we’d like to take their kids, their state, and their pocketbooks. Worse, I fear we perpetuate a rather unpleasant stereotype of teachers and our priorities – an image which, however unfair, has perhaps largely contributed to the presence and power of all those horrible things we’re against.

So before loading up the busses, finishing the signs, or even forwarding that next link, consider pondering what it is we want TO happen at least as vigorously as what it is we’re trying so intently to prevent or overthrow. Just in case anyone asks.

UPDATE: The best response that came to this post when it was on the other site came from Lisa Witcher. Lisa is a long-time educator and involved parent whose bio I suppose you can Google – or simply ask her about – if you simply must know more. In the meantime, follow her on Twitter – @MzWitch11

Recently, I read a blog that asked what is our education rally on March 31st for… Here are some thoughts –
Let’s fund education in the same spirit, philosophy or economic logic that permits tax breaks to the very wealthy and to the businesses that would drill here anyway. Let’s be for spending a ridiculous amount of money on our children and on our children’s children. Let’s be for funding education so that no principal has to decide between paper or a teacher’s aide.
Government officials have asked how much is enough. Enough occurs when there are not 38 kids in my son’s history class, when every computer can be updated, when every leak can be fixed, and when every teacher can raise two kids on his/her salary without applying for free/reduced lunch.
While I will refrain every day from littering Facebook with what I am against, I can banter for days about what I am for. I am for an educational system that reaches for the top of the bar instead of relinquishing its ambitions to being 49th. I am for a state that treats its teachers more like royalty and whose elected officials act more like servant leaders than members of an archaic feudal system. I am for your kid, your neighbor’s kid, my kid and every kid – because they are worth it. What am I for? I am for learning; I am for letting students and teachers discover how learning happens. When they are able to discover that scientific, artful moment together, the students’ pathways are infinite, spectacular, and life-promising. What am I for? I am for putting children at the center of every decision instead of politics. Those decisions do require funding – but they require so much more than just money.
There are those that will reduce the plight of public education to sound bites – but until you have heard a child emote because he/she finally understands – all you have heard is noise. Those that are trying to destroy public education see it as a billion dollar industry capitalism has yet to tap – they do not see the faces of four year olds who only need an equitable chance to learn and change our world.
What is March 31st for? It is for [insert your favorite child’s name here]. My favorite children deserve the best Oklahoma has to offer. Heaven help us if we settle for just the sound bites.