I Can Shower and Dress in Seven Minutes.

That is an important skill for whenever the New York Times goes in for one of its "Room for Debates" on teachers.  The questions they debate are always rather, um...loaded.  You know, things like "Bad Teachers: Just About Twenty Percent or All of Them?"  or "Teacher Pay: Is It Way Too High, or Just Too High?"

Today's question is "High-stakes Testing: Let's Fire More Teachers", and they recruited my very favorite Pacific Research Institute anti-unionist Lance Izumi to opine ("Teachers Are Union-Loving, Children-Hating Demons").

I managed to control the snideness for the most part, but I did have to provide my learned thoughts on the issue.  And now I'm a wee bit behind.  Oops.

Unsent Letters

Dear Mikey One Percent,

Frankly?  I doubt you attended Kindergarten with forty three of your peers.  And I know - I know, with absolute certainty - that when it comes to academic performance, that Kindergarten class didn't get the results that my students meet by the end of August.  (Things have changed since you went to Kindergarten, dude, and it's not just the terrible union teachers and their tiny little classes.  The standards are years higher, too.)

But as always, I have to tell you that if you intend to double my students and my pay, I want to see you do it first.  Mikey, it might sound like a generous offer, but compare it to your income, and think hard about this offer.  (It's worth remembering that while, say, $125,000 may sound like an awesome amount of money for a teacher, the people proposing it make more than ten times as much.  And their pensions, insurance and so on are better than teachers', too.)

Given my typical class load, the forty four students you'll have will present some serious classroom issues, Mike.  At least six will have IEPs upon Kindergarten entry.  Eighteen to twenty will be on the young side - late October and November birthdays.  Thirty will not speak English, so start planning those ELD lessons now.

Four children will be in foster care; at least six more will be in kinship placements.  Two will be homeless; almost all of the rest will live in decrepit, violent and under-resourced public housing.  Eighteen will have witnessed or been personally involved in serious violence.  Twelve will have chronic asthma or other major health problems.

Forty three of them will qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and half will face food insecurity at home.  Twenty five will live in homes where no adult is able to find work.  Start stocking up on the snacks and school supplies, Mike: you'll need to use that excellent salary to supplement what your school and your families can't afford.

Based on your breezy comments, despite the challenges, you'll have no trouble ensuring all forty four read fluently by the end of the year.  They'll whip through their fifty sight words spelling test in five minutes before finishing twenty addition and subtraction problems.  Then they'll write a five sentence story before making a map of their neighborhood and creating a Venn diagram to compare insects and isopods.

And then you'll have the credibility you need to lecture me about school success, ineffective teachers and the good old days of fifty kids to a room.

Until then: shut up.

Not So Cordially,

E. Rat

Where Are These Eager Replacements?

Gary Rubinstein, a far bigger person than I am, has been writing a series of posts that are a "debate" (by email) with Whitney Tilson.

Having ADHD, I lack the patience and impulse control to deal with such people.  I don't approve of Mr. Tilson's profession, which I believe is morally suspect and bad for public schools.  And I definitely don't like his attitude, his inability to take data seriously, or his utter lack of reflection.

This, though, BEGS a challenge:

My bottom line: deliver results in the classroom for kids, or go find another profession. There is no shortage of college-educated adults who would be grateful for that job, especially in this economy! 


Mr. Tilson.

Get over yourself.

I personally teach at what is, for the third year in a row, an offically-designated "Hard to Staff School".  That's right.  There's something about my school such that people - college-educated adults who are "delivering results in the classroom for kids"* - leave.  Indeed, they leave without the prospect of future job.  They leave even though they're not beholden to a now-ended two year commitment.

I suppose it could be the terrible, child-hating veterans like myself scaring away these eager young educators.  But ancedata suggest otherwise: my Resident Teacher just signed on, so I didn't drive her away.  She'll be joining my long-time classroom volunteer, who moved back to the Bay Area to take a job at our school.

I suspect that it's the annual pink slip, the lack of supply money, the ongoing march of ten-hour days and weekends at school, the endless need to write another grant, attend another IEP or make another home visit, the relentless drain of media and education reformers denigrating your work, and secondary trauma visited by hands-on work with seriously traumatized children, families and communities.

Or it could be the worker's compensation-covered allergic reaction from mold, asthma aggravated by vermin infestations, and the prospect of yet another 15% pay cut if state revenues don't meet projections.

Whatever the case, Mr. Tilson, there aren't a whole lot of eager-beaver unemployed persons - even unemployed teachers - lining up to take the jobs at my school.  The District even chucks a little extra money at us as an enticement to take the job and stay.  It doesn't seem to have had a big impact, since we haven't cleared that list of hard-to-staff schools.

But there sure is a shortage of adults clamoring for my job.  And you're certainly unwilling to take it, no?


*As opposed to delivering results in the classroom for America's DVD producers or something.  I think that at Ed Reform School, they teach you to tack a "for the children" sentiment to every sentence you piously pronounce.

“I can study Vygotsky later,” said Tayo Adeeko, a 24-year-old third-grade teacher at Empower Charter School in Crown Heights. She was referring to another education school staple — Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet theorist of cognitive development who died in 1934. “Right now,” she added, “my kids need to learn how to read.”

Sure she can.  The problem is that while those kids may learn to read, they will be pulled, pushed and prodded into shapes not meant for young children.

Charter schools like KIPP spend a lot of time taking the child out of childhood.  Silent halls, enforced eye contact, upright posture and lots of drills - all done in uniform - may make for an excellent test-taker.  The student may be able to parrot back any number of reading strategies.  The child will have limited ability to get along with peers in unstructured environments, intuit rules for social conduct in new situations, and play imaginatively.

The problem with not studying Vygotsky is that the merry KIPPsters and their ilk don't understand childhood.  They see deficient, not different communities.  They see disorder, not youth.  And they have no business teaching kids to read until they've been taught what a kid is.

I'm not a fan of charter schooling in general, but as it enters more elementary and ECE environments the more nervous I get.  It's too easy to forget that children aren't little adults.  Even the most experienced Kindergarten teacher is going to need to remind him or herself of this over the year, because the teacher is an adult and operates within an adult world.  The child's world is different.

And the current approach to education is destroying it entirely.

ETA: Just because Vygotsky was a "Soviet...who died in 1934" does not mean his work is invalidated.  Also dead: Maria Montessori, Loris Malaguzzi (Reggio Emelia), John Dewey, Marie Clay and Jean Piaget.  They all had something important and true to say about children.


Similarly, I believe that those tired, dead old guys like Euclid, Plato, Einstein, Darwin, etc. are still considered relevant to their fields.

The Problem with Master Teachers

If you want to be a really great teacher, get out of the classroom.


Seriously, within weeks you will look back on your classroom days through a heady rose tint.

I don't know what causes this, but I do know it's close to universal.  Part of it is that if you're in a coaching job or ed reform job or marking time administrating, you are probably reading books and articles about pedagogy, management and all that noise.  These books are invariably written by people who have spent little time teaching, and the words are so nice and aligned on the page: look how easy this teaching thing is!  Just like a formula!

And hey, they're probably calling you a "Master Teacher" or "Teacher Leader" or something.  People start believing in their titles.

You likely are also observing teachers teaching.  Observation is great because observers see all kinds of things that the working teacher does not.  They are in a position to simply watch.  They can get up and move around to notice specific events.  They have no responsibility for management, content or results.

This means the observer is going to notice things the working teacher does not, and that can be an enormous help.  You may not know that the two students sitting next to each other are having a spat that day, or that what appears to be notetaking down the aisle is actually highly involved doodling (if I am a student in your class).

Of course, the observer may not know that the detailed doodling involving multiple colors of ink is a listening device, and if that student cannot doodle, there will be no recall (and rather more foot-tapping, note-passing and smarmy-comment-making).

See, the observer doesn't know the students.  Nor does the observer necessarily know anything about the management strategies in use.  Maybe the grumps in the back are actually working on problem-solving techniques and they're going to check in with the teacher after class.  But the combination of an all-seeing eye and a belief in one's own greatness makes it difficult for the observer to even remember to ask about these questions.

And the longer you're out of the classroom, the worse that superiority gets.  This is why I'm leery of Master Teachers, Instructional Reform Facilitators and similar who are out of the classroom for years on end.  I have the experience of watching these people reflect upon their teaching with rosier and rosier glasses every year.  They get harder and harder and more convinced they know what's going on, and their technical knowledge often is beyond compare.  But they aren't teachers anymore and they don't necessarily know how to put all that technique into practice.


This is why I think out-of-the-classroom jobs should be term-limited; three years out and then one in, say.  Or at the very least Master Teachers and Literacy Coaches and the like should be doing regular - more than once a week - demonstration lessons.  During my one year (I.  hated.  it.) out of the classroom, that's what kept me from a swollen head.  (Moreover, my demostration lessons tended to go really well, which gave me credibility when I did have suggestions for a lesson or a management problem.  And when I did have issues, I was honest about them and took the blame rather than assigning it to the students or the general teaching their regular teacher gave them.)

This would also help keep people useful.  I have more teaching experience than my principal and the staff IRFs combined.  I also like to read a lot, am a big nerd, and have had a lot of professional development especially in literacy, so my technical knowledge is pretty strong.  Can I learn from these people?  Of course: there is a reason why observation is a good thing.  I actually request more observation than I get; I had a mess of people observe in my room this year, but rarely for the purpose of providing me with feedback.  (And sadly, even when you tell the observers that you demand feedback in exchange for being on stage, they may not have any to give.)  On the ground at a high-needs school, though, my needs are fewer and I have fewer questions, so I get less support.  If these educational leaders were doing more in-classroom lessons and demonstrations, I'd be able to observe those myself and benefit from being the all-seeing eye.  I'd also probably notice things I want to know more about that I haven't thought of (and therefore don't think to ask).

This is why I'm leery of evaluation-heavy systems like IMPACT in DC: I know myself how the Master Teacher role - which sounds so supportive and pro-teacher - can turn evaluative and administrative.  No one is as awesome teaching as they think they are when they're not.

In other news, I am going hiking with some teachers today.  We are playing Raid E. Rat's Closet beforehand.

The Other Thing about Testing.

So despite all the time the standardized tests take - two weeks of administration, usually - they aren't very long or detailed.  I believe the elementary reading CST has something like 40 questions.

Based on the standards-weighting and released test item checking that statistical testing mavens do, this means that of those forty questions, 5% (two questions) probably test one minor morphological spelling pattern in English.  For instance, a 2nd grader's mastery of 2nd grade reading over an entire school year can be measured in part by whether he or she can correctly pluralize berry and fox.

He or she may have shown remarkable depth in inferencing characters' motivations, learned how to write a persuasive paragraph for a variety of audiences and be able to read third grade books.  Standardized tests can't test any of those skills very well, though.  So if this young reader is a lousy speller, that's 5% towards failing already.

There's an argument that skills like these are easy - easy to learn, easy to teach.  In some ways I am sympathetic: I represented my county at the state spelling bee years ago.  I'm an awesome speller (although not a competitive one: I intentionally knocked myself out because the whole thing was getting just too nutty and dramatic and bright-lighted).  Spelling is easy for me.

However - an no particular offense meant - I read a variety of blogs, receive many a letter or email and used to teach undergraduates.  If spelling is such an easy thing to teach, then based on the spelling I see, it's a wonder we manage to learn and teach anything.

It's not just "We have spell-check now"; even Laura Ingalls Wilder's prairie lawyers misspelled "hero".*  We have spelling bees because spelling is interesting and hard, and kids who are good at it deserve recognition.  Yet a child's learning - and a teacher's performance - can apparently be judged by it.

That strikes me as not just ridiculous but rigged, to be honest.

In other news, my students really like drapey draped dresses, and if I wear a McQueen vintage number with little gartery/harnessy things hanging on the sides, the kids will use these as additional handholds.  Also, I got the telephone wire + sticker glue paint project to work much more easily this year.  The trick is using not just non-glare report covers but the insides of those laminating pouches for cheap laminators.  Conveniently I know someone with a broken laminator and many leftover pouches.

Sadly, the incubator I received as a gift was broken.  I ordered a new one - once you promise chickens, you have to make it happen - which will hopefully arrive next week.  This means that on the day of filing for last year's $250 educator's deduction on my federal taxes, I managed to spend the savings.



*Side note: I spell well because I read a lot and always have.  I studied linguistics at the post-graduate level and have suffered through endless SB466 Reading First trainings on spelling patterns: that only gets you something if you will actually sit there and systematically and with conscious intent apply spelling rules.  You won't.

Enrollment Rolls Along

Not Confidential to Australians searching for "Trouble Gum" rodents: the animals in "Trouble Gum" are pigs.  Adjust your search accordingly.

We had some people come by to register yesterday: always nice.  I figure the people registering on the Monday after letters go out will probably be sticking around for August.

We also had a number of people stop by to tour.  I presume these people did not list our school and received it as their closest school with space.  Our school is cute (new mosaic going up and everything) and has cute kids, so I think we show well.  Besides, I'm pretty proud of our Kindergarten program, even its lazy, no-egg snails, and I like people coming to see it.

Occasionally we get a visitor whose smile is so fixed and body is so tense that I'm not sure why they bothered coming by.  After all, school sites are not EPC.  Indeed, your average school site's staff's heads are appreciably dented from run-ins with EPC.  It's not really in a school's interest to enroll a lot of people who don't want to be there.  And it's a lot of energy to try to convince people otherwise - energy I'd rather invest in the families who are enrolled.

The whole "hidden gem" thing kind of freaks me out.  It seems to suggest riches courtesy the PTA, and when you've spent the weekend laughing ruefully over the $250 teacher tax deduction for materials vs. the $2500 you spent last year, riches sound good.  There's something wrong with the notion that a school necessarily needs to be "fixed", though - like that it was broken in the first place.

Me, I think it's value systems and society that are broken.  The strongest correlation to test scores is class, after all.  "Low-performing" schools are usually high-poverty.  The number of children living in poverty in the United States is revolting, and the impacts of that poverty - long-term malnutrition, poverty-related health problems, environmental poisoning, unstable neighborhoods, early death - will be with those children (and all of us) for years to come.

Let's be clear: schools are badly funded.  Even in California, we're not being defunded as much as same-olded, with extra vigor, as this School Finance 101 piece shows.

I'm really not feeling the canard that those high-poverty schools are rolling in money, either.  There's this new idea being sold locally that the existence of some SIG schools (which are exceptionally well-funded right now, courtesy the federal government) means all high-poverty schools are having Bring Your Own Bathing Suit to Scrooge McDuck's Vault parties.  People who believe that should really do my taxes.

High-needs schools are low-seniority, and low-seniority schools are losing money on the average teacher salary formula SFUSD uses.  They may also receive funding for certain needs - for a counselor or a nutrition program - that would benefit all schools but are absolutely necessary at poor ones.

I don't know.  I prefer desegregated, diverse schools.  I'd love to have a big cash base underwriting Kindergarten arts and sciences.  I don't think we can get those without a real discussion about what we want children to know and be able to do, why we tolerate massive poverty and school underfunding, and how race and class privilege affect both how we understand the issues and what we want for ourselves and our own children.

I wonder what the locus of "unacceptability" is.  I suppose it's variable; for this family it's test scores and for this one it's diversity (or lack thereof).  I think that it would be possible to pull out a definition, and once you have that, you can talk about conceptions, assumptions and beliefs.  I don't think we're very good at having hard conversations though.

It is link day.

I have issues with KIPP.  If I could get over their issues with student and teacher attrition, I'd still have problems with their boot camp discipline - the kind of discipline that KIPP's overlords would never allow for their own kids, but are fine using on poor children of color.  Were I able to come to terms with the punitive management, the anti-union sentiment would get me, and even if I hadn't been raised by union laborers, I'd have to question the lack of cultural competence and remedial pedagogy that KIPP supports.

In short: not a fan.  I don't buy the hype, I find their rhetoric offensive and their theory of change racist and repugnant.

This is a report on the shenanigans at KIPP Fresno:

Notice to Cure and Correct

Perhaps, like me, you're curious as to what Mr. Tschang is up to these days.  I think I may have seen an update on Schools Matter, but couldn't find it.  However, a quick Google search presents this charter school network blog.  He's a "Regional Superintendent".

I don't believe bad conduct in one job should mean one is doomed for life.  I believe in redemption and righting wrongs.  It's possible that Mr. Tschang no longer believes starving children, cheating on federal programs and state tests, and the humiliation of kids in the name of discipline are acceptable policies.

The fact that he highlights his KIPP experience with nary a mention of the circumstances that led to his resignation, coupled with his denials and denigrations of those who spoke against him suggest to me that he has not had a change of heart.

You know, it gets tiresome hearing about the innovative innovations at those unfettered and fancy-free charter schools - particularly as they use their extra private money for heavy administrative chains like Achievement First has while I can look forward to my fourth annual pink slip as I total the hundreds of dollars I've spent this year on enabling creative, multimodal learning experiences in my classroom.

But when those innovations are abusive to children, it's appalling.

Once Bill Gates has taught a class of 31 Kindergarten students with the following demographics:

• 60% do not speak English at home
• 25% attended preschool
• 10% are homeless
• 40% have experienced family violence
• 100% live below the federal poverty line
• 60% live in a substandard federal housing project originally slated for demolition in the 50s
• 10% are in foster care
• 20% have experienced the death of a parent
• 10% have serious health problems
• 50% regularly experience food insecurity
• 10% have a documented learning disability
• 10% qualify for speech services

and gets them from where they are in August to on grade level by June, I will be willing to listen to him explain how states must raise class sizes and not pay me for the degrees and trainings that make it possible for me to do my job well.

Until then, perhaps he should focus more on solving underfunding rather than adapting to it.  For instance, a good capital gains tax would make a big difference.  Indeed, were Microsoft more willing to pay taxes owed rather than incorporate in offshore tax havens, we could take a goodly bite out of the problem.

What his argument boils down to is the deprofessionalism of teaching.  He is proposing a job that no one can do well for more than a couple of years - and even with just a couple of years, the emotional and physical strain of the work would have lasting health effects.

So, Bill?  Go get a college degree, a credential and get back to me then.  For now, I'm going to assume that you resent the fact I'm better educated than you and did not have to steal C prompt from the California shareware anarchists to make a living.

I'd Rather Be Broke.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

In return for the cash, the district was required to replace the school's principal and come up with a plan to turn test scores around. Former Starr King Elementary School Principal Christopher Rosenberg took the job.'

His plan was simple: Keep a laser-like focus on literacy. That's it.

That means no extra art, no additional science and no feel-good programs that can complicate the core mission.

That is the most short-sighted, depressing view of education that I have read recently.  If this truly describes what Muir is up to, then it's in thrall to the anti-child, anti-research forces.  All studies suggest, and strongly, that the best way to teach reading - particularly to poor students and students of color, like those at Muir - is to teach reading broadly.  Kids need reading across the content areas.  Kids need multiple, relevant access points to reading.  Kids need art and music.

And as a society, we need scientists, mathematicians and artists.  We need kids who enjoy reading and read broadly, with a critical eye.

The core mission is education, not test scores.  As described, this is an approach that will bring higher test scores.  It won't bring success.  I know that I can teach kids to read AND have plenty of time for painting.  There are pedagogical issues associated with this (mostly around management, for time issues, and around lesson planning, for layering one's content objectives), but it's possible and it works.  It just demands that you put your time and energy into teaching and learning, not cutting out the "extras".

...class sizes as small as ten students sounds really good, though.

Ad Hominem: Latin for "I don't want to deal with reality."

There is this attitude that we are supposed to take big dollar donations to education at face value. "It's about the children!", you see. And that's true enough, I suppose - although whenever I hear "It's about the children" I cringe, because if someone feels the need to distinguish their input into education by its child-centricity, they must assume that all other stakeholders are not all about the children.*

Any discussion about the values that these individuals and groups appear to espouse in their work is verboten.  Don't like how Deformer X makes money?  Think their industry is antithetical to free, public education?  Prepare to be accused of arguing against straw men.

What nonsense!  The ideals that underlie business interests that engage in education projects are obvious.  Indeed, they regularly state that schools should be like businesses.  They bring in business titles (CEOs, not principals, etc.).  They yammer about free markets and choice, about the power of competition.

These are corporate, capitalist business ideas.  It's what the deformers know, and what they believe needs to happen in education.  So why can't we also look at the actuality of their thought, the base of their ideas?

I think we have to.  Free markets may be wonderful things.  Alas, I'm afraid that John Arnold and his merry band of traders at Enron preferred market manipulation to real competition.  Although no one has ever linked performance bonuses to improved performance, I'm sure nice fat extra checks are quite exciting.  But I note that the performance that required multi-million dollar bonuses was so short-sighted and built on such false premises that we are in a financial crisis.  A long view suggests that these performance bonuses were not justified by objective data.

Going deeper, I think it's fair to ask if the corporate culture in which the deformers thrive is appropriate for our schools.  I'd say it's not.  PRCs and similar employee evaluation systems support the survival of the few and competition over teamwork.  I am obligated to teach all of my students and to ensure that each one masters Kindergarten standards.  I don't get to "fire" or refuse to teach the ones who "just don't get it".  My students need to learn to support each other, to work together and to be active participants.  These are key values for a cohesive, civil democratic society.  They are not the skills prized at hedge funds.

It's a cultural mismatch, and one with very clear outcomes.  We can run our schools like businesses to the detriment of communities and most kids.  A few superstar learners will come out just fine, though.  Or we can run our schools like schools and provide good outcomes for the vast majority of students.




*As I understand deformer talk, they are all about the children.  The dread unions are all about the big big cash dollars and child-destroying that due process rights bring.  The public education system as a whole is about destroying society through low standards, corruption and liberal ideals.  How it is that I am all about the money while hedge funds are all about the children seems factually invalid, but I'm sure they have some quantitative analysis to explain how I am actually becoming extremely rich while they are toiling away on pennies, all FOR THE CHILDREN.

Unified's Doings.

1. This is the first year of the "Central Office Redesign", or "What do you mean you don't know about our redesign?"  Unless you'd made it your business to read the Powerpoints the District entertains itself creating (this one had a cow theme, if I recall correctly), you may not have known a redesign was in the works.

This summer I sat on a panel of SFUSD educators.  We were asked about the redesign.  Of the five panelists, two were aware of its existence and neither of us were certain that they really intended to roll it out this year.  SFUSD also did a study of redesign awareness among teachers, helpfully pulling the teachers to be interviewed from the teachers who were at the central office over the summer helping write assessments to be used as part of the District-wide systems creation meant to accompany the redesign.

I'm guessing that knowledge about the redesign among that select group was pretty high.  In the end I was also interviewed for this study and my knowledge was pretty high, I suppose, but also far more skeptical (well, I'm assuming).

I am not really enjoying the redesign because it means that there are now some other people in power who have a different idea of what EDUCATION looks like.  Whatever the wallwalkers before them liked, they don't.  If it was standards, now it's objectives.  If Do Nows were in, now it's class meetings.  Whatever.  I have been teaching for a long time.  I have a documentable record of success in the classroom.  I am always interested in learning something new and whatever feedback I can get, but I am not adopting the latest craze in reform just because someone at 555 Franklin read a neat new book over the summer.  And at this point, how I do what I do in the classroom flows from what I believe education should be.  If I don't know your philosophy and you don't know mine, then it's very hard for your advice to be applicable to my situation.

2. I was going to yammer about the special education report, but what I think about that is so complicated that I had better not.  Also my laundry is done and I must hang up my harem-panted jumpsuit before it is too wrinkly to wear to school.  It is a key part of my hot-weather wardrobe.

Nothing Good Comes from Capital Letters.

As a field, education has got to be the most prone to reinvention of the wheel.  This happens on a classroom level.  Every day, precious prep minutes are wasted as a teacher tediously nudges a line around the screen in pursuit of perfect journal paper for her students - paper that a teacher down the hall perfected two years ago.  You can see it at the school level of course, and also in districts.  SFUSD, for instance, has had at least three different adoptions of Mainstream English Language Development over the last twenty or so years.

Wheel reinvention at the management level becomes sinister quickly, and is always occasioned by Capital Letters.  When new math becomes New Math and balanced literacy becomes Balanced Literacy, trouble awaits.  After all, balanced literacy is just the careful balancing of phonics and whole language approaches.   Balanced Literacy means you need Fully Trained Consultants, a rocking chair in every classroom (Ravitch's discussion of San Diego covers this key point lest you think I jest) and lots and lots of professional development binders.  Balanced Literacy means that there is not just a framework and a guiding philosophy but a checklist and a pile of naughty notes for bad teachers.  Balanced Literacy is expensive and teachers resent the cost and the back brace of a framework from which there can be no deviation; balanced literacy is cheap good teaching with lots of fun literature and interest and the freedom to take a roll around on the floor break as needed.

I suppose some of this happens in the interest of replication; if you have some kind of framework ("A Rocking Chair in Every Classroom") it's easier to roll something out across a district.  But when teacher and school initiative and adaptation to circumstances is less important than your Capital Letters, you have a problem.  Particularly when adaptations are obviously and objectively effective.

As I understand it, the premise of "Waiting for Corporate Takeover" is that

1. Public schools are very bad.
2. This is because they have teachers.
3. Teachers are very bad.
4. Especially when they have a union.
5. Our conclusion has nothing to do with the fact that we represent powerful union-busting interests.
6. Nor should our position as oligarchs who oppose civil servant pensions be held against us.

I hear that the august hedge fund managers, ex-Enron employees, Waltons and similar financing this film now have a new PR arm.  Apparently, they are Superman.

So here's what I don't get.  If the problem is teachers...the solution is hedge fund managers?

How does that work?  Certainly they aren't intending to pay taxes like regular citizens, thereby strengthening our public institutions.  And their "gifts" always seem to have too many strings attached - like union-busting, pension-killing, almighty dollar worshipping - to be heroic.

I am forced to assume that they're all applying for jobs in their local public school district.

YES!  They're going to be more irritating and harder to train than your average uncredentialed do-gooder, what with the Objectivism (to which I object) and the synergy and the cheese-moving and whatever else they're getting up to in the halls of finance, but I see financial opportunities.

I'm charging five hundred bucks for each worksheet I hand over, one thousand for every good substitute's phone number and a cool million to borrow my parachute for an hour.

I must put together a workgang next week so that we can paint "JOHN ARNOLD, APPLY HERE" on the roof of my school.  Four months and we'll have a fully-kitted sensory room and I will have the best wardrobe ever.

I Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident.

1. The ultimate purpose of hanging standards with wall displays is to please disaffected, out of the classroom and generally useless administrators who cannot be bothered to observe actual teaching and learning and therefore want to wall-walk to decide how useful you are.
2. Given the lack of knowledge about standards in the arts, standards-posting dumbs down schools by mandating boring, strictly academic wall displays of limited beauty and interest.
3. Given that California is more or less "between standards" right now, having adopted Common Core but teaching from the state content standards-aligned textbook adoptions, standards-posting is particularly useless at present.
4. When one has encapsulated asbestos that precludes anything being hung from the majority of walls in one's classroom, standards-posting is a real waste of space and time.

What with the redesign, all the schools have a new host of administrators to please, all of whom bring their favorite pieces of school reform for our immediate adoption. Given that education reform assumes negative practice needing amelioration/reform (hey, don't take my word for it: even the Rheecolytes over at the Washington Post say so in their style guide), they come looking for their pet answer to the reformer question ("Why do all you classroom teachers hate children so much?").

If I seem a little irked, well that's because I am, having never desired the affected disaffection associated with popular British acts of the 80s.

Not only have I outlasted many school reform programs, I've also lived through many different procedures for administrative walkthroughs, and have hosted visitors both local and federal (with a stop at state-level functionaries, who in my opinion are the worst.  Living in Sacramento does nothing good for one's joie de vivre, and man do they take it out on you).

There was the three-minute-and-a-sticky-note period, which wasn't so bad because at least they left a post-it that informed you what their general takeaway was.  (I also had a really great principal at the time, a natural teacher who left administration to go back into the classroom, and that principal left useful questions or comments.)  I have several copies of Good to Great and other insipid corporate screeds floating around for kindling, I mean for drinking games at parties.  (I do not condone book-burning, and I don't want these things back on the market, so they hide out at my house.  Besides, you never know when a freak blizzard might hit, taking all power and leaving subarctic conditions.)  There was the biweekly long visit period, the you will all be on the same page at the same time at least you will be when the Reading Lions people show up period...

In my old district, our school's Kindergarten team was a go-to place for other district teachers to visit.  Our kids did quite well on district assessments, our Kindergartens were always full and the state team never had anything concrete to pin on us.  That said, it was also very well known that we did not in fact follow our state-mandated program to the letter, as mandated with a mandate, mandately.

That's because we taught Open Court.  Open Court, if taught by the book in Kindergarten, will not finish introducing letter sounds until mid-May.  That's a real problem for Kindergarten writing.  The literature selections are horrible, bad enough that a trainer told a room of teachers that the purpose of readalouds in Kindergarten is not the enjoyment of literature but the teaching of reading strategies (these two being in a dichotomy, apparently).  Kids will only learn thirty-three sight words, too.

If you want academically high-performing Kindergarten students, you're going to need to massage that curriculum.  Sounds will have to be introduced earlier, you'll need more sight words and, unless you want to hate yourself, your life and what your students will become, you'll be selecting your own readalouds.  We did this.  It was so well-known that we did this that there is an ex-district, now state-employee who used to warn my trainer about me at the annual AB466 training.  (One year she even read my homework to see if I was putting any anti-Open Court sentiment in there.  Looking back, it's kind of amusing (E. Rat: SUPERVILLAIN!  Debonair criminal, subverting Open Court trainings with real linguistics and Whole Language principles!  Fetch me my cape and/or stylish trench!  I prefer black!) but then it wasn't, and she did manage to get a colleague of mine fired.  Our kids did well.

But for site visits, the District wanted us to sing the party line: flip the alphabet cards back over, hide the extra sight words, find the OCR big books.  They wanted us to lie to our fellow teachers, to say that we did use the curriculum just like they did, and our results were better because of our intrinsic yet learnable awesomeness.  If they'd just try a little harder, their students could also excel, because Open Court works.

Reading this, it sounds like Catch-22 level paranoia (only a lot less humorous and well-written).  Sadly, it's not; the district and the Reading Lions had convinced themselves that the program worked, and when it didn't it was the teaching - and despite knowing we weren't toeing the line, they held us up as an example of what they believed.

The other drag of visits is that invariably nine will be normal or even awesome days, and the tenth will be horrible.  The kids will not be fidgety (I have in the past been both reprimanded and praised for letting students fidget/not sit criss cross applesauce/getting self-regulation items), they'll be lethargic.  Or twenty will be on their game, but number twenty one is having a meltdown of epic proportion, requiring immediate attention and leaving the other twenty to notice the strangers and react appropriately (tension?  check.  strange adults?  check.  teacher stressed out?  check.  unpleasant noise?  check.  peer melting down?  check.  All systems set for pandemonium!)

And speaking of these meltdowns, high-needs schools are going to get more than their fair share.  In this class - like any other at my school - I have students who are currently homeless, whose parents have had custody terminated, whose family members are incarcerated, who have experienced family violence and sexual abuse, who are experiencing food insecurity, who have sensory integration issues that lead to overstimulation, who do not trust strange adults because no good has ever come from one, who...

If wallwalkers want to be welcomed, they need to have a sit down with school staff first and explain why they're there, what they are looking to do and how they plan to help.  They can then do the same for the students whose classrooms they'll be interrupting.  And then they're going to need to visit regularly and get down in it - look at some data, find out about the neighborhood, come every day for a week to see the flow and stay quite a while in each class.  Then their takeaways will be useful: an outsider, but an informed one, whose perspective can be welcomed.

Otherwise they're just looking to feed whatever notion of school success and failure was popular when they got demoted outside the classroom.

In other news, for the first time ever I wore apparel that was worthy of compliment in the eyes of one of the extreme Jeremy's fashionistas (not the nice young college kids who work there rocking 70s revival wear, the other ones).  Perhaps I can continue to win praise so that when choice items from 2010 F/W start appearing I will know about it first. (Funnel neck bird print dresses, you made your first appearance 1.5 years ago and at this point we're approaching full ADHD hyperfocus.  Come to Jeremy's. Sport attractive price tags.  Be the envy of my Kindergarten students.)

Looking forward to a pleasant weekend at home.

This is the response I sent to NBC.  There are instances of poor word choice and redundancy, but I will excuse myself since I wrote it at 5:30 in the morning in less than four minutes.

After significant consideration, I have decided not to attend this event.  It is a great deal of time outside my classroom; moreover, it is abundantly clear that the guiding principles of the Town Hall are antithetical to my own.  As a veteran public school teacher with a long record of success in the classroom despite the institutional challenges placed upon me, my students and our community, I have outlived a great deal of "education reform", any number of organizations explaining that it's not about the money, and the daily denigration of my profession by people with less experience and far less education than I have.

It is clear to me that the Town Hall will prioritize these voices.  Since I do not believe that there is any interest in opposing viewpoints, I do not feel it is in anyone's best interest that I attend.

I think that NBC has the power and ability to make sure that audience malcontents like myself keep their malcontented mouths far, far away from microphones.  I strongly doubt that I could get through "Waiting for the End of Public Education" without some snarky comments.  I mean, I couldn't get through "Contact" without some snarky comments, and I had to leave "Titanic" forty minutes in.  So I would be a known problem entity prior to the teacher panel.

The sad thing is that with ten years in public K-12, I HAVE outlived several reforms/programs, all of which were supposed to...well, do something:

• Reading First
• II/USP (aka "March of the Consultants")
• Small Schools (Gates Foundation iteration)
• Edison Schools
• Jr. 6th grade/moving 6th out of middle school/moving 6th back
• 20:1 class size reduction (SFUSD not included YAY)
• Full day Kindergarten (SFUSD not included)
• I could go on forever and ever but just making this list makes me jaded.

Take a break and then look what happens.

1. Although I think it's depressingly likely that Michelle Rhee ends up in California, compressing all issues in education to bad teachers and getting favorable press despite her proclivity to demean her allies by mimicking them in funny voices, I hold out the hope she ends up far, far from the Bay Area.

2. Man, take a one meeting break from reading SFUSD BoE agendas and the National Urban Alliance contract shows up again.  I don't really understand what these overpaid independent contractors have other professionals in presenting the same graphic organizers that totally blew teachers' minds fifteen years ago.  Nor do I really understand why the various NUA contracts are the biggest bugbear for budget watchers; SFUSD drops unrestricted money all over the place.  (Again: I do read those agendas, and contrary to the belief of those with financial control in SFUSD, education funding isn't that complicated.)

That said, piddly teacher stimulus or not, I still hold that the A #1 way to improve the learning experience of poor children of color is to dramatically lower class sizes, and if we have fat piles of money for contracts, I strongly support teacher contracts over consultant contracts.

Based on my reading of the gutted Harkin bill, I think the federal teacher bailout money could be used to hire consultants for PD, and that is just too depressing for words.

One of my Donors Choose projects got posted on the Stephen Colbert challenge.  Funded in an hour.  TV is powerful, I see.

Who is Paid for Performance?

I am tired of hearing that teachers should leap to embrace pay-for-(student)-performance schemes.  The fact that there is no reliable method for linking teacher pay to student performance - no testing instrument, no data collection scheme, etc. - should end the conversation, but it doesn't.  The amount of additional testing this would require also gets forgotten; I think we test enough as it is, and no matter how much it might add to my pay, I will destroy every #2 pencil in the world before my Kindergarten students take a standardized test.

Not to mention: pay for performance doesn't work.  Study after study after study demonstrates that it doesn't lead to increased performance in any domain, and ancedata suggest increased cheating under pay for performance schemes.

The argument that really gets me is the claim that CEOs and other corporate types are paid by performance, so teachers should be, too.  This is so entirely false that it leads me to question a claimant's intentions.

Blue and pink collar workers are generally employed by performance.  Doctors and lawyers are not.  Service industry employees are paid by performance; investment bankers are not.  Hedge fund managers make out just fine even when their investors don't.  Elected officials are not paid by performance.

CEOs are most emphatically not paid by performance.  CEOs make out just fine even when they are forced out; Mark Hurd is leaving Hewlett Packard with a cool twenty eight million dollars.  Let's see that in numbers:

$28,000,000.
Wow.

Maybe teachers should agree to bizarre compensation plans if and only if our pensions are as generous as Mr. Hurd's package, here.  The average state pensioner gets a whopping $24,000 annually - not too impressive, given that teachers pay into their pensions and get no earned Social Security benefits.

Tenure: I Have It.

Or: While I Admit the Persistently Problematic Issues Underlying Cat Macro Grammar, I Find Cat Macros Funny Enough to Borrow Their Structure; Alas, I Remain Unable to Utilize Their Non-Standard Grammar.

For all the alarmist rhetoric around tenure, one thing that's really really really really awesome about tenure (which I totally have...as you can see, I have not one whit of a problem with Valley Speak) is that it means I don't feel any particular need to keep my smart mouth shut.

Realistically, the number of Kindergarten teachers in SFUSD is not enormously large; the number of Kindergarten teachers in SFUSD at high-needs schools is even smaller.  It would not be that difficult to find out who I am, and it's not like I'm hiding my identity or the school at which I teach.  And why do I feel free to do that?  I have tenure!  La la la la la.

Teacher free speech rights are constrained within the classroom and without it as well.  Moreover, I have actually witnessed vindictive administrators moving against high-quality teachers because those teachers had the very bad idea to explain that Open Court had some issues.  (This did not happen in SFUSD.)

If you teach Open Court (California Edition) to the manual in Kindergarten, the kids get their last letter sound at the end of May.  This is utter insanity.  By the end of May, students will have finished off many of their End of Year assessments, and unless they picked up the last letter sounds on their own, they will have a lot of Open Court-caused misses on their assessments.

Additionally, Open Court's literature selections are...well.  Let's just say that an Open Court trainer told me once that the purpose of reading these selections was not that students would enjoy them; no, it was to practice reading strategies.  After all, we all have to do things we don't enjoy, right?

Dorothy Parker wrote a review of an A.A. Milne play wherein she claims to have shot herself in the head during a particularly twee scene.  This is where I wanted to do likewise.  I mean, this idea is wrong on so many levels I can't even begin to unpack it without instruments of self-harm near at hand.

And I'm not even getting into the Massive Flaw of Open Court: that it was written by Louisa Cook Moats, a woman who believes in the Language Deficit Hypothesis.  You know, a hypothesis absolutely destroyed by William Labov in the 1950s.  (Fun Fact: Vocabulary Deficits Don't Exist, Either...Unless You Don't Know the Difference Between 'Difference' and 'Deficit'.)

Okay anyway, so this teacher I knew questioned Open Court in front of an administrator.  Her comments were pretty mild and had teachers nodding all over the place.  When the administrator moved to shut her up, I also said some anti-Open Court things, and another teacher commented that the Louisa Cook Moats article we had just read had an underlying racist ideology of language.  (Teachers are smart.)

The administrator blew a gasket.  The kind where everybody in the  room gets a letter in the file and the principals of the offending teachers get a phone call.  (This administrator ended up working for SCOE and warned a trainer I had later about me and wanted to check my homework for that trainer.  This backfired astoundingly, but I digress yet again.)

So we have three naughty teachers.  Two of the naughty teachers have tenure and full credentials.  One of the naughty teachers does not.  That naughty teacher is laid off at the end of the year.  When it ends up that her position still exists and she is the most senior person laid off, she is not offered her job back because she was so naughty they fired her for cause (mouthing off to administrators).  Since we shared a room doing AM/PM Kindergarten, this means I teach two classes a day until they come up with someone to fill the position: a first year, uncredentialed newbie who is so low-functioning that she cannot bother coming to school before 10:30am.

Anyway, without tenure I sure wouldn't have a not-very-secret blog and I sure wouldn't be mouthing off to the BoE.  But I have it.  I suppose I should worry about anti-tenure forces and caches and all that, but honestly?  The Jeremy's new arrivals email looked promising and that's far more interesting than playing hide-the-opinion on the internet.

Let's be bold. REALLY BOLD.

I have been an avid reader of SFUSD BoE agendas for years.  I consider this part of being an informed educator.  If I want to advocate for my students, it's good to have the facts.  Board resolutions also help identify key buzzwords; if you want someone to take what you're saying seriously, it helps to align it to their priorities and their language.

Not to mention, it knocks Deputy Superintendent Leigh off his "This money stuff is too complicated for your little teacher brain to understand" game when you can ask some esoteric question about funding streams.

This year I also became an avid public commenter and organizer of public comments at Board meetings.  My role was to make sure we'd get an early speaking slot (we were often first because I called ahead) and to organize our key themes so that we got as many across in a pooled-time comment as possible.  I helped write public comments and add key facts and figures that supported our arguments and made sure we would have large banners and big turnouts.

GOOD TIMES.

Despite the fact that we were not ever that successful in our comments and the remarkable rudeness of our Board and Superintendent (many of whom really need to stop texting when teachers are talking, and talking audibly and laughing when a teacher is crying at the podium is poor form), we did win some big points.

For instance, it was fun having principals and other District staff call the school or email on the down low to let us know that they loved us and encouraged us to keep up the pressure.  I was not the only person who noticed Superintendent Garcia saying "That's not true!" when one of our teachers quoted from his own strategic plan.  I heard that Gentle Blythe was not too enthusiastic about the "SFUSD saves teachers' jobs" story in the Chronicle being illustrated by...a big picture of protesting teachers from my school.  And we all got rehired in the end - with some comments being made to various individuals that we'd been so noisy that big layoffs at our school were politically unwise (also legally unwise, but I digress).

Another outcome was that I got to mouth off to Deputy Secretary of Education Tony Miller.  But he had it coming.

What I learned from Tony Miller was that the administration apparently feels it needs to "be bold" in transforming failing schools.  Apparently, "boldness" is defined as the transformation-closure-charter-turnaround models proposed for persistently low-achieving schools.

So boldness, in essence, is reconstitution.  Boldness is getting rid of the teachers and administration.  Boldness is charter schooling.

Boldness is bunk.

Those aren't bold solutions!  Those are same old, same old.  Reconstitution doesn't work.  Charters aren't more successful than non-charters.  And administrator shifting, teacher transfer - it's been done.  It doesn't work.

Real boldness would mean real change.  It would mean dealing with infrastructure and equity issues that lead some schools down the road to failure.  Over a quarter of California's schools have endemic vermin infestation, for instance.  About the same number have failing physical plants.  My school has mice and ants.  We can't hang things on many walls in my classroom because of encapsulated asbestos.  Two of the windows have been broken for years, and paint is peeling everywhere.  There are holes in some walls.  I had no heat in my classroom for over a week this winter.  I run the sink and fountain in my room every day for two minutes to clear the lead pipes.  And my school is in good condition compared to those on the SIG list.

You know what would be bold?  A school rebuilding campaign.

Eighty percent of my students live in poverty.  Many have persistent food insecurity.  There is no grocery store in my community.  Many of my students have health problems associated with poor nutrition: anemia, vision problems, insulin resistance.

You know what would be bold?  A major increase to the Federal School Lunch Program and a community garden initiative.

California state funding per pupil has dropped nearly two thousand dollars over the past two years.  At my school, we ran out of yellow construction paper in February and sentence strips in December.  By March, we were on the last bits of copy paper and the laminator was out of commission.  Field trips were out of the question.  I spent several thousand dollars of my own money on my classroom and wrote twenty grants on my own time.

You know what would be bold?  A radically equitable funding system that provided additional money to high-needs schools.