Sugar Candy Mountain

I believe in the promise of online education. I really do. I think it has the potential to radically transform the way we teach and learn, by knocking down the walls of time and space and challenging every assumption we have about how schooling must be done.

However...

When Michael Horn talks about how online teaching can change the role of the teacher and liberate her from a wide range of administrivia, I have to take issue. It certainly can. It certainly could. But it many cases, it's not.

Yes, online curriculum takes over a lot of the burden of direct teaching. In theory, this should free up teachers to work one-on-one with students and do a lot more performance-type assessment. And I'm sure there are places where this is happening. But we need to be aware of what else is happening.

Administrators are looking to online learning to save them money, and that's not a bad thing. There are many places where using online learning can increase efficiency and even upgrade educational services being provided (think of what it can mean for students on home medical leave, compared to what they've traditionally received). But the combination of districts' desire to shave budgets and for-profit providers to show a profit leads many online school providers to load more and more kids on the backs of fewer and fewer teachers. In my own experience, I saw the provider I worked for change from having each part-time (10-15 per week) teacher manage 50 students to having them manage 60, and then 70, and then more.

Now, 70 students may not sound like all that many if you're shoving them into physical classrooms. Traditionally, at a high school level, that could be as few as two class sections, which a 15-hour hire could easily handle (well, not easily, but she could deliver a lecture and run for the hills). But in online education, those 70 kids could be taking a wide range of classes. You may have a handful in English 1, a larger handful in English 2, a bunch in English 3, a bunch in a whole array of electives, and so on. The idea of a "prep" doesn't exist in online education, which means even a part-time teacher may have to teach 10 different classes simultaneously. And if this is a part-time teacher, you can bet she's doing this work after coming home from a full day of teaching her "real" students all day in a physical building. So she comes home (exhausted), feeds her kids and puts them to bed, and then has 2-3 hours to attend to these virtual students...70 of them spread across multiple classes. What level of quality instruction is she going to be able to provide?

Oh, you say, but that's OK, because she's not really "teaching" the class. Wrongo, Mary Lou--she absolutely is. She may not have to prepare or deliver lectures, but she needs to work with students, grade papers, in some lead class discussions (synchronously or not), and so on.

With full-time hires, it's both easier and harder. Easier because the virtual kids are the one and only priority--they're not the "other" kids attended to after a full day of work. So it's easier to manage time and do what's needed. On the other hand, for-profit school providers are ramping up the load for full-time teachers to as many as 300 students.

Now, let's get real. If you're teaching 300 students simultaneously, even if you're not providing the direct instruction, how closely can you really work with them? How much authentic assessment are you going to be able to do. English teachers: what say you? How many essays can you correct, per week?

The providers understand this, so to protect their profit margin (and let's face it, they have to protect their margin or they're dead), they scale down the performance assessments, little by little, and rely more and more on auto-scored assessments. They won't remove the teacher-graded components (well, some will), but they will definitely make them fewer and further between, to give the teacher more time for that one-on-one service. With 300 kids. And God help them if they're not able to keep pace with the rest of their section, because keeping pace is sometimes pushed for more manically in online schools than in traditional schools, because the district is paying for each kid and damn sure wants to see that kid complete the course. If they can't complete the course with Provider X, they'll switch to Provider Y, so the incentive is not, exactly, to maintain high levels of rigor and demand performance from students.

So I'm not saying Horn is wrong. I'm just saying we need to see clearly what's really going on.

Outsourcing Trivia

The alarmists are all atwitter about this idea of "outsourcing memory" to the Internet, as detailed in this report published in Science. We won't know anything anymore! We'll lose our ability to remember anything! We'll Google knowledge forever!

Well. Maybe we will. We have the ability to be profoundly stupid, after all. But call it a possible result, not a necessary one. It all depends on what you upload/outsource, and what you decide to teach, learn, and remember.

In the report, they discuss an experiment in which people were asked to type in 40 pieces of trivia. Some were told that the facts woule be saved; some were told they would be erased. Predictably, the ones who were told the former soon forgot the trivia. As would I.

BECAUSE IT'S TRIVIA.

In in oral society, you have to remember everything. Or, since you can't remember everything, you have to have people whose job it is to be the rememberers and reciters. In a literate society, you can find information in books...but you don't always have access to the books, so there are certain things you just have to know. The only thing that's changing now is that we have faster and easier access to information. But that doesn't mean we don't need to know anything.

The task for us, as educators, is to separate the wheat from the chaff. Yes, you can turn to Google for all kinds of information, but what are the things you just flat-out need to know, in order to be able to ask the right questions of Google? There are random facts and there are foundational facts. Random facts are perfect for Internet searches. Foundational facts create the context and the conceptual basis of fields of knowledge. Does a student need to memorize and recite back an entire textbook anymore? I see no reason for it. For the rest of his life, he'll have access to most of the allegedly-interesting facts contained within the book. But what are the facts that build the conceptual knowlege that a student will need, to understand biological systems, or how angles relate to each other, or how poetry uses imagery to touch emotions?

I need to understand what poetic language does, in order to lead a full and rich life. I do not need to remember the difference between a Petrarchan and a Shakespearean sonnet; I can look that up.

I need to understand what drives countries to colonize and conquer other countries, in order to make sense of the world around me and see new threats as they emerge. I do not need to remember exactly when Britain colonized the Indian sub-continent; I can look that up. But if I want to understand the sweep of history, I should know roughly when it happened, and how those events contributed to the larger time period.

I need to understand the concept of area, and what information I would need (and what process to undertake) in order to figure out how large a rug to buy. And while it would be nice to be able to do the multiplication in my head, perhaps I don't need to, anymore; there are calculators built into pretty much everything. BUT...I'd better know that multiplication is needed, and which numbers should be multiplied together.

People who don't want to have to grapple with the tough questions facing us love pretending that babies will always get thrown out, any time you say the bathwater needs changing. But it just isn't so. "Do nothing; change nothing" is not a viable response anymore. "Leave us alone and let us do what we've always done" won't work. The sky is not falling. :et's look the thing square in the face, see it for what it is, what it can be, and what it shouldn't be, and act accordingly.

The Threat of Influence

Intrigued by a tweet, I clicked over to this article on "The Most Influential Educator in America." The list of nominees is not, in itself, controversial--although clearly, some people are confusing the word "influential" with "beneficial." Apparently, a person can't be influential if you think she's wrong.

What I found interesting was the dialogue below the article, in "comments." Someone disses Wendy Kopp because, the person says, she's created a business model that imagines teaching as a stepping stone to other careers. How dare she! So, again, apparently evil isn't influential.

But is it evil?

First of all, do we really think it's a bad thing to inject more people into the American bloodstream who actually know what it means to be a teacher in a classroom? What it takes? How HARD it is? Don't you think that breaking our version of the "thin blue line" would help the cause of teachers in policy arguments, both in Congress and in the news? Don't you think the old, "you get off work at 3:00 and have summers off, so shut up" argument would diminish if more peope, in more walks of life, really understood the world of the classroom teacher?

But that's a minor quibble. The more interesting point, I think, is that we seem to refuse to acknowledge that difficult choices must be made--that we can't eat our cake of publication and have it, too. Roads are diverging in the wood, and we, being one traveler, can't take them all.

Here's what I mean: We know that, by and large, we're recruiting teachers from the bottom quarter of college graduating classes. We know that many teachers leave the profession within the first five years of practice. I think we can assume that, by and large, the ones who leave are the ones who have other job options available. Maybe that means they're "smarter" or better educated--who knows? But a lot of people leave. We know that teacher effectiveness is a significant determining factor in student success (even though older studies seemed to suggest otherwise). And we know that professional development, as it's traditionally done, isn't really increasing teacher effectiveness. So what are we supposed to do?

A) We could increase teacher pay to attract better candidates into teaching as a life-long career. But there are a hundred reasons why that isn't happening and isn't likely to happen any time soon, except in isolated cases. See: unions, pensions, the larger economy, and people's bizarre contempt of teachers.
B) We could invest heavily in intensive, long-term, work-embedded professional development to increase the effectiveness of our current cadre of teachers. That would be lovely, but I don't see it happening anywhere, probably because schools are starved for money, the unions often balk at mandating things like PD, and no one can ever agree on what information or skills, exactly, lead to increased effectiveness. Not that we don't know--we all know--we just all know differently.
C) We could re-cast teaching in community-service terms more than in lifelong-job terms, to attract quality candidates who are willing to do the job for a little while before moving on to other careers. That's the TFA model.

Is there a choice D? I can't think of one. Either improve the people you've got, replace the people you've got with "better" people, or augment what you've got with "better" people on a temporary basis. I guess choice D would be "do nothing."

If you have a choice D in mind, let me know!

Anyway, the point is, things can't get better AND remain the same, unless you think things are as good as they could possibly be, right now. And nobody thinks that. And yet, we get angry at people who are trying to change things. We say, "just leave teachers alone," which is absurd. What we're doing right now may well be intrusive, over-regulatory, and ineffective, but that doesn't mean we should just walk away and let each individual teacher do whatever the hell she wants, in isolation from the rest of the school, like in the good old days.

First of all, the "good old days," if they were really all that good, had a completely different teacher corps than we do today. They had what amounted to a captive population of well-educated women, most of whom who couldn't find other jobs, except for nursing and secretarial work. Think about the women who are currently lawyers, investment bankers, doctors, and business executives--smart, driven, amazing women--and assume that if we were back in the early 1960s, a large subset of them would be classroom teachers. And then tell me nothing has changed.

So, again: change who's in the classroom, somehow, or deal with who you've got.

What about Finland and Singapore? Everyone is crowing, these days, about how they don't regulate their teachers to death, or mandate a curriculum, or test their students every ten seconds. All true. But in those countries, they can "leave the teachers alone" because they've invested HEAVILY in them before they reach the classroom. So they have a pretty good idea what they're going to do once they get there. In our country, on the other hand, a principal can't have any clue what his teachers may or may not know, think, or be able to do as educational practitioners. They've all come from different schools, different pre-service programs, maybe even different states, all with different requirements, training mandates, curricula, and philosophies. So good luck being an "instructional leader" in your school.

Change it, one way or another, or figure out how to deal with what you've got and get better results.

There are a lot of people out there who have tried to do the latter and have found it impossible. So they've tried to find ways to change the paradigm. Some of them are succeeding. Either the new models they create will be effective, in which case we can make them spread, or they'll prove ineffective, in which case we'll cross another idea off the list and try something else. But at least we'll have learned something. At least we'll have tried.

I call that influential.

"Should we kill the liberal arts major?"

No.

Unless you're talking about one particular liberal arts major who's done something horrible and deserving of death. In which case: Maybe. But if you're talking about the major in general, concpetual terms, then No.

This question is the basis for an article in Salon. It includes many, many face-slappable moments. Or, at the very least, moments where you want to hit your own head against a wall.

Here is a short list:

Is the recent college grad with the psychology major now working as a babysitter because she majored in psychology? Or is it, perhaps, becuase, as she says, she was a lousy student? Or is it, perhaps, because we're in a lousy economy with high unemployment?

Are young people majoring in the humanities unemployable because they can't "do anything with their major?" Meaning they should have majored in something more do-with-able? And if that's true, then what, exactly, is that more-do-with-able major?

The liberal arts are supposed to teach you how to read and write and speak and think. Last time I checked, those skills were all highly transferable into a number of jobs. You ought to be able to "do" a lot with those skills, even if your major was not narrowly defined as a jobs-training program. And there are PLENTY of people currently employed who do a lousy job of all of those things, so it seems to me we should be doing MORE on the liberal arts, not less.

So no, there aren't all that many job openings for "poet." But a decent career counselor at a college should be able to steer an English major into almost any job he wants. Virtually every employer out there is despearately seeking people who can process information and communicate clearly.

Of course, if you insist on defining the liberal arts super-narrowly, then yes, perhaps they are "useless." If you think the actual educational content of being an English major is limited to knowing and being able to share facts about particular pieces of old literature, then your skills may not be very transferable. If you think the actual purpose of learning history is limited to knowing and sharing facts about particular times and places, without any transferability of themes and concepts to our own world, then yes, you're not much use to anyone outside of academia. But who ever said those things were the points of those fields of study?

Well, maybe some lousy professors did. I'll grant you that. We have far too many people teaching their subject from deep within the chamber of expertise, where things only matter for their own, pure, Platonic essence-y sake. We don't do a good job of connecting the benefits of being a well-rounded and thoughtful person, and the skills acquired through deep reading, writing, and discussion, with the outside world of work. So shame on us.

But if the problem is too-narrowly-focused teachers and courses, then come on, guys--let's fix that bathwater of focus; don't toss out the baby of, you know, our entire history and body of knowlege.

Also, just by the way, if we really are going to start talkong about college as nothing more than a jobs-training program, then good luck trying to suck $100,000+ out of families for the privilege of attending.

Training may make you an employee, but education makes you a person.

One Way or Another

The never-ending tug-of-war over education reform continues, with the Common Core side digging in its heels to avoid getting pulled into the mud pit by newly energized small-government types. It's the usual policital arguments over regulation-vs-trust-the-professionals and activist-federal-government-vs-state-sovereignty. And as with all the other areas of life over which these dichotomies have imposed itself, the arguers treat their position as Simply Right--correct because it's God's way. And when both sides of the battle claim that God is on their side, you can bet the result will be blooshed.

So let's put aside whether God and George Washington would have approved of government regulation of education. It's not helpful. Let's first ask: What is actually going on in education? Why does it need help? Do we even bother to diagnose our problems anymore before prescribing a cure? Republicans think a tax cut is the right response to both a surplus and a recession. Democrats think government programs are the right response to personal and infrastructure problems. It's like a doctor prescribing a drug just because he likes the drug, with no thought to whether it's an appropriate cure to the disease. "You know what I love? I love that Lipitor stuff. Works like a charm. I use it for everything."

Why do some people believe we need Common Core standards, and then maybe assessments, and then maybe curriculum? Because no one knows what the hell anyone is teaching in the classroom. From room to room, you may find absolute chaos within a single course. Forget about from school to school, district to district, or state to state. Even if the teachers are all using the same textbooks, what they teach diverges.

So why is that? Before we impose new standards, let's pause and remember that the old standards didn't actually solve this problem. Why is there so little agreement over what should be taught within a single course?

Is it that there's a huge spectrum of content-knowledge within our teacher corps, and teachers tend to teach what they know best? If so, then imposing new standards won't change anything...unless that change leads to a change in the way teachers are trained and prepared.

Ah, but we have wildly divergent training and preparation demands from state to state. Some states demand a Masters degree; some don't. Some states demand a degree in the subject area; some are ok with an Education degree. Some require a test; some don't.

Is the problem that there's a huge spectrum of excellence and achievement within our teacher corps, with many of the best and brightest in the field leaving the profession within five years? We hear that said very often. Is it that the corps is simply not capable?

That argument, it seems to me, lies at the heart of the tug of war. Countries like Finland and Singapore do not regulate their teachers or their curriculum. HOWEVER, they make damned sure that the best possible people are placed into those roles, going so far as to subsidize the education of their best young people, if those young people choose to become teachers. Then they pay them well, make nice buildings for them to work in, and provide an ample social infrastructure for parents, to help them send healthy and well-prepared children into the schools.

And then, having done all those things, they leave them the hell alone. Because they trust them to be self-monitoring professionals.

We do none of those things. We allow our neediest schools to be pits of despair, with bars on the windows and food on the floor. We demean and insult our teachers. We subsidize them not at all, encoruage them not at all, and pay them poorly. We allow the bottom quarter of our college classes to enter the profession, because everyone else has "better" options. We have an economic system (and personal levels of material greed) that demand all parents work, full time, and refuse to raise taxes to provide supervision and enrichment to children outside of the home.

So why do we feel the need to regulate every aspect of the teacher's life? Simple. It's because we don't trust them.

Personally, I don't trust oil executives and investment bankers to do their jobs properly without regulation. They have not earned my trust. But we have to look at the nature of that loss of trust to figure out what, exactly, needs regulation. Same here. If teachers don't know the subject they're teaching--teach them better. If they're not as competent as they should be--support and train them better. If we're not attracting the right people into the job in the first place--make the job more attractive and competitive.

But that's hard, isn't it? Much easier to write regulations.