Pop quiz, Imaginary Reader! Why are diamonds expensive?

              It isn’t because they’re rare. In fact, diamonds are more common than other gemstones. Diamonds are expensive for two basic reasons. The first is that De Beers wants them to be expensive. The company has enough control over diamond mining that they are able to withhold most stones from the market, creating an artificial scarcity that keeps prices (and profits!) high. The second is symbolic. For most people, the most valuable and meaningful piece of jewelry they will every buy or wear is an engagement ring, and every woman knows that diamonds =love and commitment. The image of a sparkling diamond solitaire has been so thoroughly drilled into our daydreams that a ruby or sapphire just wouldn’t seem right—even if it was more expensive. Couples feel that they really need a diamond because a diamond ring represents their relationship in a way that nothing else can, and so they are willing to pay for it.

              What does this have to with education, Mrs. Gradgrind?

It neatly illustrates two concepts that I want you, my oh-so-elusive readers, to keep in mind for the rest of this post. It illustrates the relationship between scarcity and price, and the funny habit people have of confusing signifying power with intrinsic or organic value. All of that is, in turn, related to education because of this: https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/ny/2019/07/15/what-should-it-take-to-graduate-in-new-york-a-new-committee-will-make-recommendations/?comments=true#disqus_thread

It’s an exceptionally irritating read, so I’ll be a dear and recap it for you. NY lawmakers are establishing a commission to examine high school graduation requirements and suggest changes, up to and including scrapping some of the Regents. The irritating part is the confusion, evident in this article, about the value of high school diplomas and the way that having or not having one impacts people.

You see the article takes it on faith that the ultimate goal of the school system – and, by extension, the committee examining graduation requirements—is to raise graduation rates. It seems that the committee is going to focus on the Regents’ exams in light of this presumed goal, and will ask How much does passing the state’s vaunted Regents exams improve graduation rates, student achievement, and college readiness?

So, what’s wrong with that? Lots of things, even setting aside the odd assumption that a test should improve graduation rates (memo to the committee: the purpose of a test is actually to determine who has learned what). The focus on graduation rates and on providing ‘multiple pathways’ to graduation is inspired by a belief that everyone should graduate from high school. I think that it’s probably for the best that they don’t.

Have you lost your mind, Mrs. Gradgrind?

No, I have not. Remember those diamonds. Why are they valuable again? That’s right – because the supply is tightly controlled. Because the supply is controlled, the price is high. Because the price is high, not everyone can have one. Because not everyone can have one, everyone wants one.

Why is a high school diploma valuable? Because not everyone has one. Graduating from high school is worthwhile because a high school diploma is a meaningful differentiator between prospective employees. High school graduates don’t earn more over a lifetime because they’re better at Algebra II but because their possession of a diploma puts them ahead of any dropouts in the application pile (and also because they are likely to be more motivated and future-oriented, but that’s a different post). That means they will have an easier time finding jobs, and finding better jobs. A high school diploma is also, like a diamond ring, a symbol whose meaning is so broadly recognized that no one thinks about it anymore. Employers may not be terribly interested in an applicant’s knowledge of world geography or freshman biology, but they are very interested in that applicant’s ability to follow directions, complete assigned tasks, and learn new information and procedures within a reasonable time frame. Completing high school signifies a baseline ability to do all of those things, and to do them better than peers who dropped out. It’s like a stamp on an applicant’s resume saying ‘I am probably more trainable than many of my peers’. College degrees, of course, do much the same thing at a higher level of differentiation. So, what do you do if you are a hiring manager? You hire the guy who is stamped trainable over the guy who isn’t.

Let’s imagine, for a moment, what would happen if the presumed goal of our educational system were ever achieved and 100% of students graduated from high school. What would be the value of a high school degree then?

Nothing. It would be worthless, because it would no longer signify much of anything. Having a high school diploma wouldn’t help anyone get a job, or a better job, because every other applicant had one too. It wouldn’t communicate any meaningful information about a person, other than that they were probably 18 or over. It would not represent trainability, or responsibility, or intelligence any more than the ability to walk and chew gum does today. Even if divine Providence intervened to ensure that all of those graduates really were literate, their diplomas still wouldn’t mean anything. Look down at that lovely 1-carat solitaire on your left hand, ladies. Now, imagine that literally everyone has one just like it. I can see your collective look of consternation from where I sit. It would still be just as pretty and just as sparkly, but you wouldn’t want it nearly as much because it wouldn’t have the same symbolic value. It would become less valuable by being universally accessible. High school diplomas would work the same way if everyone had them. Even if they, somehow, represented increased learning, they would no longer symbolize any special achievement, and so no one would be willing to pay even a small premium for them.

The fallout from such a situation would be intriguing. I think it would have the smallest effect on the best students, specifically those who always intended to go to college and had pretty strong test scores and GPAs. It would have less of an effect on them because high school completion is not a powerful discriminator within the pool of college applications; for them, it’s just a baseline requirement. I think that students who were most profoundly affected would be those who do graduate under our current system, but with real effort. I’m thinking of those students who struggled to pass the Regent’s and may have had to retake some, those who are probably not college material but who were determined to have some sort of qualification. Those kids would no longer have access to a meaningful credential, because the credential within their reach would no longer be meaningful. Of course, reformers aren’t focusing on either of those two groups. They are focusing on the kids who tend to drop out under our current system. Would a 100% graduation rate help them? I don’t think so, for all the reasons we just discussed. The diploma the state twisted itself into knots to give them would no longer mean much of anything, and so they might as well not have it.

If we want high school diplomas to be expensive, to be meaningful, to have a positive effect on graduates’ lives, and to help them build their futures, then we can’t give one to everyone. An accomplishment could be defined as something that many people fail to do. If no one fails then there is no accomplishment and so no benefit.

I, of course, do not believe that the sole or even the primary end of education is remunerative employment. I’ve focused on that because one of the key arguments for this persistent focus on graduation rates is that education offers paths out of material poverty. I’ve also focused on that because we are talking about public schools and one of the main reasons that the public is willing to invest in public education is the economic benefits of an educated populace. I do not see how large increases in the graduation rates will improve economic outcomes. High school diplomas are not magic wands that make poverty disappear. Jobs do that. A credential that doesn’t help you find a better job because it doesn’t set you apart from others is not much of an investment. If it’s not much of an investment, then maybe it shouldn’t dominate our efforts and we shouldn’t throw out any and all standards in order to make it more accessible.

              Check this out, from The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/08/the-radical-case-for-teaching-kids-stuff/592765/.

It is, to summarize, an explanation of why the current, Common-Core inspired approach to reading has tendency to worsen the very achievement gaps that our ‘every student succeeds’ philosophy was meant close. Simply put, the article argues that achievement gaps are widening and scores are declining because schools don’t teach anything. They don’t teach any actual things, that is. Today’s schools focus instead on amorphous concepts and skills like ‘comprehension’, drawing inferences, and, my personal favorite, critical thinking. Can anyone tell me how critical thinking differs from regular, old, uncritical thinking? I didn’t think so.

When I say actual things, I mean facts. Information. Dates, definitions, events, and processes that are relevant to various academic subjects. Today’s schools have deliberately deemphasized the teaching of information, like the date of  the battle of Gettysburg, or the capital of Kansas, or who developed the polio vaccine, or how a bill becomes a law. Such actual things are mentioned in passing, or even ignored entirely, because teaching them would (as he standard explanation goes) rely too much on memorization, recitation, and listening to a teacher speak, and so would not be sufficiently rigorous and engaging. If students’ reading skills are strong enough, the thinking goes, then they don’ need a teacher to teach them any actual things because they can acquire all the information they need from all of the wonderfully rigorous reading that they are going to do. Just as soon as they get their skills in drawing inferences and critical thinking up to par, they will easily become informed on all manner of things, without ever having to memorize anything or listen to a lecture!

The article does such an excellent job of explaining this approach and its results that I don’t feel the need to recap any further. Seriously, go read the whole thing. It’s the first piece of educational journalism I’ve seen since I started teaching that isn’t hogwash. Instead, I want to talk about the why. Why did we stop teaching actual things? Why are we so focused on skills that we can barely even define, much less convey to children? Despite my extremely mild moment of snark earlier, I don’t think it’s really because of the Common Core. Common Core standards are less restrictive than most people seem to realize and do not actual mandate any particular teaching methodology. They’re really just goals, and they do not, on their face, prescribe any particular route towards reaching those goals. So, why can’t we teach any things? I have two ideas.

First, if we are going to teach real things, we are going to have to make some decisions about which things to teach. Are we going to teach the date of Gettysburg, or the date that Captain Cook reached the coast of Australia? Are we going to teach the capital of Kansas, or the latitude and longitude of the pyramids of Giza? Should students first learn about the achievements of Jonas Salk, or of Daniel Hale Williams? Should we begin a semester of history with the Magna Carta, or the codes of Hammurabi? We could teach any of these things. We could teach every thing. We cannot, however, teach all of the things. No one knows all of the things that are worth knowing or that are helpful to know, so we must, if we are going to teach real things, make choices. Choices imply judgement, and that is what we fear most. If we begin a social studies unit on geography by having students memorize the principal rivers and mountain ranges of the continental US, then we fear that we might thereby imply that the principal rivers and mountains of southeast Asia are less important and less worthy of our students’ attention. We don’t want that; we are afraid that such an implication might come off as ethnocentric or make our southeast Asian students feel ostracized, so instead we teach none of those things. Instead, we invite our students to think critically about why different countries on a map are in different colors, and tell ourselves that it doesn’t matter if they can’t find their hometown on that map. If we begin a unit on American literature with A Scarlet Letter, then we cannot also begin that unit with The Secret Life of Oscar Wao. That might be a judgement. That might imply that we think Hawthorne is better than Diaz, and we don’t want that. We don’t want to think, or even seem to think, that some writers and books are better than others, and so we don’t teach writers and books. Instead, we give students texts with no context and ask them to ‘draw inferences’ from them, without ever addressing the question of whether or not they are worth reading.

If we try to teach actual things, then we will have to choose which things are most important. Those choices would necessarily imply values. Teaching specific things would also mean teaching that those things are important and necessary—and the other, omitted things are less important and necessary. Because modern schools are allergic to values, we find ourselves unable to teach things.

My other theory is similar but not identical. The extreme focus on skills, to the detriment of things, also embodies a peculiar philosophy of thinking that infests our contemporary schools. It’s difficult to describe. I think it is best expressed as a belief that all intellectual activity is analogous to a simple mathematical formula. Today’s teachers and administrators talk a lot about demonstrating their thinking as ‘replicable steps’ and giving students checklists and charts to guide them, step by step, through complex intellectual processes like analyzing metaphors or explaining how an author’s background might affect his arguments. Perhaps an example would help; this year, I was ordered to use a new curriculum that was even more ‘skills based’ than other curriculums used at my school. One of the lessons in this highly-regimented curriculum was supposed to be about understanding symbolism in fiction. The heart of the lesson was showing students a set of ‘replicable steps’ for understanding symbolism in fiction (theoretically, any fiction). This set of steps began with ‘identify a symbol’ and ‘think about what that symbol might represent’. The idea was that this set of steps could be the functional equivalent of the formula for finding the area of a triangle. If you know the formula for the area of a triangle and you can do basic arithmetic, then you can find the area of any triangle, with any measurements. Big numbers! Small numbers! You can figure out any and all triangles.  So, this innovative curriculum relied on the assumption that, once you know the steps for understanding symbols, you can understand any and all symbols. Common symbols in obscure books! Obscure symbols in popular books! Doesn’t matter, because they will all yield themselves to the same set of replicable steps. This is the approach modern schools advocate for everything. There are replicable steps for understanding a fictional character’s motives and formulas for identifying an author’s bias in primary sources. Every act of cognition or recognition can, according to today’s teachers, be expressed as a neat and efficacious formula.

This is garbage. The moment I read this lesson mentioned above, I had a flashback to a pleasant afternoon on my college lawn where I prepared for my 19^th-century literature class by reading Bleak House. I came across a passage where he narrator describes a ray of sunlight casting a bend-sinister across Lady Dedlock’s portrait, and I got it. Lady Dedlock was Esther’s mother. All the threads seemed to come together in my hand and I galloped towards the end, with increased alertness to details that might bear on my realization and greatly enhanced sympathy for Lady Dedlock. I was able to interpret that symbol not by using a series of replicable steps, but by knowing the meaning of a band-sinister. Had I not known that, I would not have recognized it as a symbol at all. I certainly would not have been able to apply any sort of formula to it. The formula method for thinking doesn’t work, so what’s the deal? Why are educators so invested in it?

I believe that it is because, if all thinking is a formula, then anyone can do it. You can drum the formula for the area of a triangle into any skull, however thick, if you keep at it long enough. Give anyone a calculator and they can apply that formula. If all thinking is formulaic, then all thoughts are accessible to anyone. If all ideas and understandings come from proper application of the right replicable steps, then intelligence and insight don’t really exist. There would be no such thing as bright people with good ideas and dull people with vapid ideas; only people who knew the formula and people who didn’t. If all thinking is formulaic then an intellectually egalitarian utopia is, theoretically, achievable.

So, when teacher bang on about skills and avoid information and facts, they are doing two things. They are studiously avoiding value judgements and hiding from the idea that some people might not ever understand some ideas.

High-stakes for whom?

Let’s talk about so-called high-stakes testing. We’re all familiar with the term, and most of us are vaguely familiar with at least some of the tests. The English and Math tests administered to all students in grades 3-8 are of particular interest to New Yorkers. They’re the focus of most of our instruction for most of the year, and the subject of innumerable worried articles in our local newspapers. They sparked the opt-out movement on Long Island and in other middle-class areas and have been the focus of much wrangling between the city, the DOE, and the teacher’s union. Despite the arguing, the tests are administered every year. Huge amounts of time and money are devoted to preparing for the tests, administering, scoring them, and creating detailed statistical analyses of the results.

So, what’s the deal? Why are tests administered to school children worth such angst and arguing? Surely the results of these tests must be terribly important, if they get people so worked up.

People who are directly involved in the NYC school system would probably be surprised to learn what is done with the lovingly-tabulated score reports, charts, graphs, and spreadsheets that track student scores on the individual, school, and citywide level, even disaggregating the data by race, gender, native language, and disability status.

Practically nothing is done with them, and what is done is surprising.

Test scores cannot be used as the primary basis for promotional decisions. To translate that out of edu-speak and into the form of English used by actual humans—your kid doesn’t have to pass the test to move on to the next grade. Although test scores could, theoretically, be a part of promotional decisions, they aren’t. Your kid will go on to the next grade if got passing scores on his report card. Even if he didn’t, he’ll probably still move on (more on that another time). Test scores may, sometimes, be used to make placement decisions for entering ninth-graders, but that’s about it. That’s the only real ‘stake’ the kids have in tests—so I don’t think we can say that they are high-stakes for them. Any parent or teacher will tell you that using the tests as promotional criteria would be wildly unjust because they are not an accurate or sufficient measure of what students have learned.

Contrary to popular belief, the state tests scores aren’t used to rate teachers either. We do get an end-of-year rating, calculated  through a Byzantine process that does include a totally different set of tests (more on that later, too) but the Common Core tests that make the news do not make up any part of our rating. That means those scores aren’t and can’t be used for hiring, firing, promoting, etc. You’d never know it from the way teachers tend to behave, but we don’t really have much of a stake in those tests. Despite all the hours we devote to them and the lectures we give our students about taking them seriously, they have no individual consequences for us at all. Any teacher or administrator, and most higher-ranking education officers, will tell you that using test scores for employment decisions would be wildly unjust because they are not an accurate or complete measure of what happens in a given teachers’ classroom.

All that data is used for something, though. It’s used to rate and make decisions about schools. It’s a complex and virtually impenetrable system, but state tests scores are one key component in deciding whether or not a given school should receive increased oversight, go into receivership, or (eventually) be shut down. Of course, that’s not going to happen to very many schools. For the majority, their scores will just be something to brag about or to bemoan. For some schools, however, those scores are going to make a huge difference. In some schools, those scores are going to mean massive restructuring, increased workloads, increased oversight, lost jobs, and ruined careers. You won’t hear much complaining about this. You will hear a lot of people agreeing that underperforming schools need to change or be closed, that equity requires dramatic action to ensure that all students have ‘access’ to a quality education.

What’s going on?

It seems to me that this use of data is wildly illogical and internally contradictory. It seems to be the state’s (and the city’s) policy that test scores are not reliable enough to make the relatively minor decision of whether or not an individual student should go on to the next grade –but are reliable enough to make the major decision to shut down a whole school. They not reliable enough to make the comparatively low-stakes decision to fire (or promote!) any individual teacher—but are reliable enough to make the much larger decision to fire a whole school’s staff and force them to reapply for their jobs. How does that work? If test scores can’t give you an accurate picture of learning for one student, or one classroom, how can they give you an accurate picture of learning for a school?

Can anyone explain this to me? Can anyone explain why test results are an unfair means of judging a student or a teacher, but a fair means of judging a school?

It seems to me that it ought to work in the opposite direction—I can easily imagine a situation where an average school has a few teachers with noticeably higher test scores; it seems to me that such data could tell you which teachers are doing better than you would expect, given the environment. I can imagine a high-performing school with a few classes of lower scores; such data might tell you which teachers are doing worse than you would expect, given the environment. If we consider students, the same general idea applies. If you have a class with low-to-average scores and some students perform well, you might reasonable conclude that they have learned more than their peers in the same environment. If you have a high-scoring class and some students with poor scores, you could reasonably conclude that those students do not measure up to their environment.  I cannot see how it works the other way. If the scores of my students in my class don’t tell you anything meaningful about my performance as a teacher, then how can the average scores of the whole school tell you anything meaningful about me or my students?

It makes no sense. Either the test scores are reliable and important data, in which case they can and should be used to make both individual and school-level decisions, or they are not, in which case they should not be used to make any decisions.

So, what’s up? What kind of game is the DOE playing? I have a few ideas.

Let’s take students first. In 2018, 46.7% of NYC students were proficient in ELA. 42.7% were proficient in math. If these tests were used to make promotional decisions (as they were, once, meant to do) then more than half of the city’s kids would be left back a grade. Imagine the outcry. There’d be blood in the streets, and I am not being hyperbolic. People would simply not accept the idea that half the kids in the city are unprepared for the next grade.

Now, let’s think about teachers. This is trickier. It’s not as easy to find information on the exact passing percentage of different teachers’ classes. Instead, let’s think for a moment about the factors that might influence any given teacher’s proficiency rate. Imagine, for a moment, that you teach a self-contained special education class. Your proficiency rate is going to be low. It is going to be low because your students have disabilities, and those disabilities are probably going to be reflected in their scores no matter how great you are at your job. That used to be a common-sense proposition.

Now, let’s imagine that you are a teacher with a high percentage of English Language Learners in your class. Your proficiency rate is probably going to be low because your students are trying to learn a new language on top of learning the actual content of your subject, and that’s not easy. Also, the ELA test has to be taken in, you know, English. Those kids will probably do poorly even if you are an amazing teacher. That used to be a common-sense proposition as well.

Now, let’s imagine that you teach 7^th grade English in a school where the majority of students failed the 6^th grade ELA test. They also failed the 5^th grade ELA test. They failed 4^th grade, and they failed 3^rd grade. They weren’t tested before that, but you know from their 2^nd, 1^st, and kindergarten teachers that they weren’t performing up to grade level back then either. Your proficiency rate is probably going to be low, because a majority of your students were behind from the moment they walked through your door. If a student walks into your 7^th grade class reading at a 4^th grade level (as many do) and walks out reading at a 6^th grade level, then you have done your job. That kid has learned, and you have taught. He’s still going to fail that 7^th grade test.

Now, let’s imagine that you teach 7^th grade English in a school where the majority of students passed the 6^th grade test. They also passed the 5^th, 4^th, and 3^rd grade tests, and their kindergarten teachers tell you that they walked in the door on their first day already reading ‘see spot run’. Unless you seriously screw up, they will probably pass that 7^th grade test.

So, you can’t fire teachers based on their students’ test scores because you’d end up firing a whole slew of awfully good teachers who accomplished a lot, given the raw material. You can’t promote or reward teachers based on their students’ test scores because you’d end up rewarding a whole lot of teachers who are quite good, but not any better than those peers who had less raw material.

Making employment or promotional decisions based on the tests would require the educational system to either engage in some outrageous injustice, or admit some very uncomfortable facts.

If more than half of the city’s students fail these tests, if they fail despite all the hours and all the money and all the effort that their teachers and their schools pour into teaching them—then maybe some of these students are just not going to pass. Maybe some of these students are so hampered by their early childhoods or their home environment or their IQs that even heroic efforts won’t be enough. Using test scores for promotional decisions would drag these speculations into the light, and we can’t have that, so we don’t use them for promotional decisions.

If there are many dedicated and hard-working teachers who design careful lessons and still have a high failure rate, then maybe teachers aren’t the sole or the primary determinant of student success. Maybe other factors outside the classroom have an equal or greater impact on students’ ability and willingness to learn. Firing teachers based on test scores would bring these questions to the fore, and we can’t have that, so we don’t use them for employment decisions.

We can’t admit that all this sturm und drang about test scores was useless, though, so we’ve got to use them for something. We’ll use them to make decisions about schools. Average school scores are far enough removed from individual schools and teachers that we can talk about them without asking uncomfortable questions.

This is an anonymous blog, but I’m still tap-dancing around the issue because it is that radioactive.

What if some students just can’t learn some things? What if there are some students who aren’t likely to ever be ‘proficient’, even with good teachers and well-planned lessons? Let’s not even touch on the question of why (in this post, anyway). Let’s not even ask if students are disadvantaged by their home environment or their social-emotional skills or their word deficit or their IQ. Even the barest suspicion that some students might be unlikely to learn, for whatever reason, would require us to revamp all of our assumptions about how education works and about who is to blame when it fails. It would require us to confront the idea that education, like life, is not and cannot be equitable.

So what do we do, if we are DOE officials? We screw around with data and our use of it, so that we don’t have to ask uncomfortable questions. It’s easier to close down a school and make appropriate mouth-noises about accountability and equity than it is to fail thousands of students and admit that, for unknown reasons, they don’t seem to learn much.

Let’s brush up against the third rail

What is the third rail in today’s NYC DOE? Why, ‘equity’, of course. If you have a pulse and live in the continental US, then you know that NYC has been beset with complaints regarding the lack of ‘equity’ in our public schools. Chief among these complaints has been the hand-wringing over admissions to our specialized high schools, which is decided by a remarkably well-designed test known as the SHSAT.

According to our fearless leader, Richard Carranza, the SHSAT is woefully inequitable. He has made this determination based on the pitifully low percentage of black and Hispanic students admitted to said specialized high schools. It is worth noting that he has not one word to say about the content or scoring of the test itself. It seems that the ethnic composition of admitted students is prima facie evidence that the test is appallingly discriminatory.

What’s really going on here? Why do so few black and Hispanic students do well on the SHSAT? Time for a story from Mrs. Gradgrind!

I hope this does not reveal too much but…I teach middle-school English in a predominately black and Hispanic school. If I remember correctly, our current enrollment is 2% white and 3% Asian, with the remainder being black and Hispanic. Last spring, the school received a grant to fund free SHSAT test prep for interested 7^th grade students. I attended professional development to teach in this program, and became interested in the design of the exam. The SHSAT is comprised of 2 sections, one on math and one on reading comprehension and language. I will discuss the reading/language section, as that is what I know best. The reading/language section of the exam is further divided into two subsections. One, the larger portion, is straightforward reading comprehension. Students read a selection of fiction and non-fiction and respond to multiple-choice questions about the main idea, the author’s point of view, the inferences that can be drawn from specific lines or passages, etc. In content and in format, it is almost indistinguishable from the state Common Core exams that every student takes every spring. The other section is about grammar. Students are asked to identify and correct grammatical errors in sentences or short passages and to revise short passages for clarity and organization. This portion of the test is virtually unprecedented in the standard middle school curriculum.

After attending training last spring, I taught after-school test prep for 7^th grade students, and quickly realized that I need to devote all of my time to the grammar section. I needed to devote all my time to this section because my students had never heard of pronouns and had never been taught the difference between a comma and a semi-colon. I was assigned five hours for the spring, and told that instruction would continue in the fall, when these students returned as 8^th graders.

That never happened. When we returned to school in the fall, nothing was scheduled. Then, we were told that we needed to put together a new roster of interested students. Then, we were told that we needed to wait to see how much funding was available. Then, the tests were upon us, and there was no time to provide any additional instruction. All of this happened even though funding for a full ten hours of instruction had already been provided.

This spring, I was once again asked to provide SHSAT prep classes for 7^th graders. I did so, with the awareness that five hours in the spring would probably be it. I designed my lessons around high-yield topics, focusing only on grammatical concepts that I knew would be assessed on the SHSAT and that would be unfamiliar to my students. We did subject-verb agreement. We did verb tenses. We did pronouns. We did commas, apostrophes, and commonly-confused comparatives like ‘then’ and ‘than’.

The kids ate it up. In every one of those five sessions, they told me that this was entirely new to them, that they’d never been taught about the difference between the past and the past progressive or about when to use and comma with a coordinating conjunction and when to use a semi-colon. They told me that they wanted to learn these things. Several students specifically said “why don’t we do this in class?”  In every one of those sessions, they were attentive, hard-working, and absolutely focused on taking notes. I am now confident that all of those students will be able to answer questions on the grammatical skills we discussed.

So, what’s the problem? The problem is that I was given five session in which to teach all of English grammar and syntax. I could have spent five sessions on commas alone. My kids didn’t know any of this. No one, in all their years of schooling, had taught any of this. Now, in October of their 8^th grade year, they will sit for a test that assess their understanding of English language conventions – after five hours of instruction. We covered a lot, but there is so much more. We hardly touched on modifiers. We had no time at all for prepositions. We never went near the difference between compound and compound-complex sentences. When those bright and charming black and Hispanic students sit for the SHSAT in the fall, they will understand verb tenses and the difference between possessive and objective pronouns. They won’t understand much else, though, because they haven’t been taught much else. Most of them will, therefore, score poorly. They are unlikely to be admitted to specialized high schools, even though they have as much capacity to learn as any other child. The mayor and the chancellor will cause another stir about those horrible, racist tests, and will not stop to ask if there might be any other explanation for the poor performance of our minority students. They will assume that the only reason for black and Hispanic children to fail a test is racism—it certainly couldn’t be because the test assess things they were only taught for five short hours.

But, Mrs. Gradgrind (asks my imaginary reader) I thought you weren’t going to talk about the details of curriculum and lesson planning? I thought you were going to take a broader and more conceptual approach? Why are you ranting about semi-colons?

Because the semi-colons are the symptom of a larger problem, dear reader. Some say it’s because of the Danielson. Some say it’s because of an excessive focus on group work, or on project-based learning, or on ‘rigor’. Some say it’s all the fault of a pernicious educational philosophy called constructivism, where students are assumed to have ideas and knowledge lingering somewhere deep inside them, that teachers must simply elicit and facilitate. Whatever the ultimate cause, there is a profound problem haunting he DOE; teachers are expected to not teach.

What does that mean? Well, that means we are not supposed to lecture. If a teacher were so bold as to talk to the class for fifteen or twenty minutes, explaining a grammatical concept and discussing a number of examples—that would be ineffective. You can’t engage students in learning by explaining things they don’t know. If a teacher were to give a quiz in which students were asked to find and correct errors in subject-verb agreement—that would be ineffective. Questions with only one right answer are a level 1 on the Depth of Knowledge framework. If a teacher gave a homework assignment in which students were asked to write 3 sentences using the verb ‘run’ in the present, past perfect, and future progressive tense—that would be ineffective. It wouldn’t provide multiple entry points for students with non-verbal learning styles.

But, Mrs. Gradgrind, (as my imaginary reader is thinking) what do you mean? Do you mean that prevailing educational philosophies cause teachers to ignore basic grammar? Well, yes. That is precisely what I mean. If you are an NYC teacher, you know that projects and ‘student-centered’ learning lead to good ratings. Lectures and memorization and quizzes lead to bad ratings. So what do you do? You give student projects and discussion activities oriented around fuzzy concepts like ‘themes’ and you certainly do not give quizzes on appropriate comma usage. You wouldn’t want an administrator to walk in on a ten-minute lecture on punctuation. Definitely ineffective.

But, Mrs. Gradgrind, can’t you teach grammar from within the DOE’s instructional preferences? Ha. You try it. Go ahead. Design on a discussion activity on verb tenses for students who have never heard a lecture on verb tenses. Come up with a rigorous project on punctuation for students who have never taken and passed a quiz on punctuation. It is entirely possible to have fascinating and rigorous and meaningful conversations about grammar; grammarians do it all the time. The trouble is, those grammarians have first mastered the basic rules. Our students do not master the basic rules because lessons on those basic rules would not be fascinating and rigorous enough to please our fearless leaders.

This isn’t all about teachers and their ratings, either. In my years as an English teacher, I have worked with 3 different city-provided curriculums. Not a one of them has included any framework for teaching basic grammar and syntax.

What does any of this have to do with equity?

Everything. There are good teachers in minority classrooms in this city. There are smart, knowledgeable people who walk in to classrooms full of minority students every day. Every single minority student in this city has access to teachers who know how to use f*ing commas. This knowledge is not conveyed from teacher to student because it isn’t supposed to be conveyed. We are supposed to facilitate. We are supposed to engage. We are supposed create projects. We are not supposed to simply…state what we know while students listen. Our minority students, therefore, complete endless projects and reflections. They spend countless hours drawing pictures and creating posters about how various characters in expurgated novels make them feel. They spend five hours listening to a knowledgeable adult explain verb tenses. In a typical NYC classroom, the students’ preexisting interests are king, and the teachers’ knowledge is devalued. Because lecturing isn’t entertaining and diagramming sentences isn’t engaging, we don’t do those things. We cater to students’ and administrators’ preferences and we pander to the idea of ‘student-led’ learning, and we forget that there are some things students can’t learn without being led. We are so obsessed with respecting students’ interests and prior knowledge that we forget that they are supposed to be learning from people who know more than they do. Wasn’t that, once, the whole point of school?

Those Asian and white students are different. They go to private test prep. They go to cram schools, and they use online programs where you can best your ass that the teachers lecture. They demonstrate. They talk about commas for hours on end without interruption and those Asian and white kids take notes. They learn how to use commas, even if their learning process wasn’t ‘rigorous’.

This is the inequity, Mr. Carranza. The structures and preferences of the DOE prohibit me from telling my students what I know—which is, after all, the most efficient educational method imaginable. Asian and white kids have after-school teachers who are allowed to actually teach. I am only allowed to facilitate.

Minority students fail tests because the DOE cannot or will not acknowledge that teachers know things that students need to hear. They fail because the DOE cannot acknowledge that drills and practice and quizzes must necessarily come before ‘rigor’ and ‘discussion’.

Let me lecture on commas, Mr. Carranza, and my black students will do as well as any Chinese kid in the five boroughs. Let me give weekly quizzes on verbs and my Hispanic kids will do as well as any Korean kid in this state. Limit me to projects and discussions and rigor and these unfortunate—but not untalented—children will continue to fail. That’s the real inequity, that I cannot teach them as I would in a saner and less progressive system.

Translating eduspeak into something like English

Dear Imaginary Reader,

              Perhaps I should have told you this sooner, but I possess a rare and mystical talent. I have the ability to not only read and comprehend reams of educational jargon, but to translate it into something that nearly resembles clear and comprehensible English. Although this ability has been detrimental to my career (because it annoys principals and staff trainers), it has provided hours of priceless entertainment during professional development.

              So, I have decided to periodically share this ability with you, my readers who are nonetheless loyal because nonexistent. I will, from time to time, find examples of deliberately opaque educational babble and tell you what they really mean. This week’s gem comes straight from that bastion of obfuscation, Edutopia. While I gaze into my crystal ball of clear language and pick up my magical quill that allows me to write what I mean, you can read the whole garbled mess here: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/deficit-model-is-harming-students-janice-lombardi

Ready? Let’s start making sense from nonsense!

              “Students know their shortcomings, and so many — especially minority males — act up, act out, or drop out to rebel against the prevailing, unsubstantiated notion that all one has to do is work harder.”

Students know their shortcomings, and don’t particularly want to work harder. They want to overcome their shortcomings by not working harder. We play into this notion by pretending that hard work doesn’t work. We have been unable to find any examples of people overcoming their shortcomings by working harder. We use fancy words like ‘unsubstantiated’ and ‘prevailing’ so that we can pretend this isn’t all nonsense.

              “Unfortunately, some educators work from this deficit model, which means they believe that if underserved students worked harder, they would achieve.”

It’s much better for educators to believe that students won’t achieve if they work harder. Or, alternatively, that they will achieve by working less. Whatever, as long as they don’t think people achieve by working hard. We really love saying ‘deficit model’ because it allows us to pretend that we understand tricky concepts like economics, even though we don’t. Also, it amuses us to call students ‘underserved’ because it makes teachers sound like arrogant, ultra-hip bartenders who ignore your requests for a fifth Jack-and-Coke. We hate it when that happens.

              “High school teachers believe that high-poverty, black, and Hispanic students are 53, 47, and 42 percent less likely to graduate from college compared to their white peers.”

High school teachers don’t believe that because it has any relationship to reality, or to well-documented facts. They believe it because they’re mean. Also, high school teachers’ beliefs = fate. If your teacher believes that you might not graduate from college, then you can’t. Your high school teachers are really Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos in disguise.

              “Those standards and expectations must have reachable, intermediate acceleration goals for students.”

Students aren’t like humans who need to work in order to do things. They’re like cars who need to accelerate to go places. Adopting a nonsensical metaphor totally changes the facts of how people learn. If you’re a good teacher with high expectations, your student will be able to go 0-60 in 3 seconds. If you are a highly effective teacher, your student will win the Indianapolis 500 on foot.

              “We set up mandatory tutoring with teachers during study hall and after school to bridge any gaps. One student with home circumstances that might limit most has been tutored in Algebra 1 for almost the entire year. He’s persevered and, in his words, is finally “getting it.”

Setting up mandatory tutoring is not the same as requiring students to work hard. It’s completely different, because we didn’t use the word ‘work’. That kid isn’t ‘getting’ Algebra because he worked at it, it’s because he persevered. See? Different word. No relationship at all to working hard.

              “At Garza ECHS, we scaffold the accelerated learning experiences from the known to the unknown.”

We’ve developed a revolutionary approach to teaching where first we establish what students know, and then we teach them things they don’t know! No one ever thought of doing that before–it’s all ours. We call teaching a ‘learning experience’ because it sounds even more revolutionary. Also, we’re not entirely certain what a scaffold is or does, and may have confused it with a ladder.

There’s more, dear reader, but my eyes are starting to bleed from the strain of finding meaning in that word salad. Mock the rest for yourself!

Or, content-free goals

So, what’s wrong with setting ‘college and career readiness’ as our schools’ primary goal? If I were like some smart-mouth middle school students I know, I would just write ‘everything’ and be done with it. I’m sure my non-existent readers are glad that I’m not like that at all.

The primary problem with setting ‘college and career readiness’ as our guiding star is that no one ever tries to specify – is, in fact, very careful not to specify—which colleges and which careers we mean. That omission is probably, like most questionable DOE policies, overflowing with good intentions. We couldn’t possibly try to predict what sort of colleges any student or cohort of students might want to attend – could we? That’s up to the students, after all. If we tried to prepare them for a local community college when they wanted to go to Harvard, we would be sending them a discouraging message about their capabilities. If we went the other way, and tried to prepare them for Harvard when they planned on attending a local community college, we would be sending a discouraging message about their hopes for the future, subtly implying that their goals didn’t live up to our standards. Either way, we would be committing the cardinal educational sin of teaching our students things like ‘values’ and ‘priorities’. We can’t have that. Instead, we try to prepare our students for an imaginary, generic college and an equally imaginary, generic career.

The trouble is that colleges and careers aren’t all the same, and I am emphatically not talking about the pure g-loaded cognitive demands of different courses of study at different institutions. I do not doubt that courses in HVAC repair at a technical school are likely to be more cognitively demanding than Grievance Studies at a baby Ivy. I’m talking, instead, about those messy values and priorities that we don’t teach (see my previous post). I’m talking about what might be best described as habits of mind, which would include one’s beliefs on the purpose of learning and overall life goals. I’m saying that different colleges and careers require wildly different habits of mind.

Consider, for example, St. John’s College, widely known for its Great Books curriculum and seminar-style teaching. There, students don’t have traditional majors. Instead, they all learn ancient Greek grammar. They all engage with music and the arts, and they all learn about history, law, philosophy, and theology. What habits of mind would a student need to succeed at such an institution? He would likely need a deep-seated belief that learning is valuable for its own sake, whether or not it is directly and tangibly connected to any particular career. Considering the wide range of subjects studied, he would likely need to believe that all domains of knowledge are or can be interesting. He would probably need to be unusually comfortable with diving into subjects that are entirely new. What habits of mind would a student need to succeed in seminar-style classes? Perhaps he would need a genuine love for intellectual conversation. Perhaps he would need an openness to correction and challenge.

Now, let’s think about that above-referenced HVAC program at a local community college. What would a student need to succeed there? That student might need exceptional patience, suitable for engaging in detailed and potentially tricky tasks. That student might need to be methodical and observant. That student might need to find satisfaction in performing his work well, whether or not other people recognized its real significance. He might need to derive enjoyment from tangible, observable results.

What about something more in the middle of this spectrum, like business administration at a mid-ranked state school? What would that student need, other than avarice? He would probably need a very definite opinion that the purpose of higher education is to build a comfortable lifestyle and socially-respectable career. He would probably need an ability to ‘network’ (which really shouldn’t be a verb). He would need to embrace the idea that man is an economic animal, who responds predictably to rational incentives – embrace it enough to act on it, even if he was too smart to really believe it. He would need to believe (or at least hope) that his courses will enable him to walk into a corporate environment and know exactly what he’s doing. He would need to believe that increased productivity is good in and of itself, and he would need to believe that sometimes-dreary work was worth a paycheck that might be long in coming.

None of these habits of mind are the same, and no one student can acquire all of them. Some of them are even contradictory. They are, however, just as important to college and career readiness as any of the academic skills that our classes purport to teach and our tests purport to measure. A student with a business administration mindset is likely to miserable and unsuccessful at St. John’s College – and vice versa.

The question for K-12 teacher then becomes, which of these habits of mind should we teach? The answer, at least in NYC, is none. We can’t or won’t try to predict what sort of studies might be best for our students, so we fool ourselves into thinking that all students can be simultaneously prepared for everything, and that so-called skills without values will allow them all to succeed at some non-existent, value-neutral college. Since no such place exists, we can’t prepare them for it. In our desire to prepare our students for everywhere, we end up preparing them for nowhere.

On why we don’t get what we don’t know enough to want

              Let’s discuss Chesterton. In examining the great English public schools (think Eton, not the American definition of ‘public school’), Chesterton expressed significant doubt about the ultimate value of their aims, but none at all about their ability to achieve those aims.[1] He explained that the public schools were successful on their own terms because “the managers of our public schools did know what sort of boy they liked. They wanted something and they got something; instead of going to work in a broad-minded manner and wanting everything and getting nothing” (197). We may not have much to do with English public schools, but the principle outlined here is most applicable to the crisis facing NYC in particular and urban schools in general.

              What Chesterton means here is that being a stereotypical English gentleman may or may not have been a good thing and producing English gentlemen may or may not have been a useful aim—but there could be no doubt that Eton and Harrow did, in fact, produce stereotypical English gentlemen. They produced them because they knew ‘what sort of boy they liked’. They had a clear and articulable vision of the ideal Etonian; they knew how such a boy would speak and how he would carry himself. They knew what such a boy would like to read and what sort of society he would frequent. They knew what sort of moral principles he would own, even if he did not always live up to them. They even knew how he would dress for dinner and could gauge the precise degree of his enthusiasm for sport. Whether or not their ideal Etonian was a good man or a good citizen or a good Christian was almost beside the point; they had an ideal, that ideal was evident to and broadly supported by their students’ parents and their broader society, and so they were able to, in many cases, achieve their ideal.

              Our NYC schools, by contrast, have no such ideal. Quick, tell me – how would the ideal graduate of a NYC school dress for dinner? You don’t know and neither does anyone else. To use an example more immediately related to our purported aims—what would the ideal graduate of an NYC school like to read? You don’t know that either. What sort of career will the ideal graduate of an NYC school pursue? You don’t know that either. No one knows that, because NYC schools have consistently and firmly refused to settle on any coherent and concrete set of desired outcomes. We don’t want to tell our students what they ought to be or what they ought to do or how they ought to act and, therefore, we have little to no influence over what they become.

We don’t want to limit our students, or impose our own judgements on them, or try to make them conform to our standards. We refuse to tell them which books are good and which are not, and so they read whatever they like or nothing at all, as they like. We refuse to tell them which moral principles are good and which are bad, and so they end up with whatever principles they can scrape together from other sources or, as often as not, none at all. Our intentions in all this may be laudable; we may adopt this refusal to make definite judgements or set definite aims out of a liberal-minded desire to let students develop along the paths that seem best to them. But we cannot, then, complain if the paths that seem best to them are not at all like the paths that their teachers and principals might have vaguely and silently envisioned.

              But, Mrs. Gradgrind, (I imagine you saying) don’t we have standards? Doesn’t the Common Core give us a set of concrete and desired outcomes? Yes and no. Those lists of standards do give us guidance as to what students ought to be able to do; it gives no guidance whatsoever as to what they ought to be. We shouldn’t confuse the two; doing a particular writing task in response to a set reading passage is not the same as being a voracious and curious reader. Furthermore, those standards are almost entirely free of any sort of context or ultimate aim. We may tell students that they need to be able to ‘cite textual evidence to support their inferences’ so that they can pass a test on citing textual evidence, but we never tell them how being able to do this particular task or pass this particular test will help them become anything good or valuable. We never tell them because we don’t have any clear conception of what it is good or valuable to be. We are, therefore, unable to convince our students that acquiring these skills is at all important. It’s rather like telling our students that they need to practice their skills in playing checkers, so that they can pass a test on playing checkers. Unless they have a burning native desire to be professional checkers-players (which they probably do not) they will simply roll their eyes and wonder why the adults around them seem so fixated on checkers. Forgive the rambling simile, dear reader—the point is that all these standards are just signposts on a path leading to nowhere, because they are not directly connected to any end result. Their only purpose is to measure the progress of students; they say nothing about the sort of man that a student should become, and so they, on their own, will never be enough to give real purpose to our schools.

              But, Mrs. Gradgrind, (you are probably saying, as you shake your head at me) we have other goals! What about college and career readiness? What about success? What about good citizenship? Don’t these things give shape and purpose to our schools? Again—yes and no. In future posts, we’ll take these purported aims of our schools system one at a time and we will see why they are far too amorphous to be meaningful outcomes.

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[1] G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World, New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1910,  pp. 195-6.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

Dear Reader, welcome to my humble blog! I’m your host, your tour guide to the madness that engulfs NYC schools, and the little devil sitting on your shoulder, urging you to engage in some badthink of your own. First, let us establish some ground rules using the ever-popular question and answer format.

What is this blog about, Mrs. Gradgrind?

It’s about most things (but not everything) that affect or happen inside of NYC schools. That means it’s about teaching and occasional learning, it’s about teachers and administrators, it’s about students, and it’s about the sometimes-delusional and even outright sadistic policies that affect us all.

What is this blog not about, Mrs. Gradgrind?

It’s not about the minutiae of curriculum or varying pedagogical approaches. It’s not about raising students’ test scores in any direct or concrete sense. It’s sure as hell not about decorating your classroom with multi-colored poster and cutesy charts.

There are so many education blogs, Mrs. Gradgrind. Why should I read yours? Don’t you know I have 97 essays to grade by tomorrow?

I do know that, dear reader. I also know that you are sick unto death of reading essays with little structure, ‘creative’ punctuation, and a total lack of anything resembling an idea. This is going to be way more fun. Come and procrastinate with me!

You still haven’t told me what makes this blog different, Mrs. Gradgrind.

I was kind of hoping you’d have inferred it by now. What makes this blog different is that it is going to take a more broadly theoretical approach than is usual in the education world. I am not going to talking about backwards design, or differentiation, or ‘fun activities to keep your kids engaged at the end of the year!!!!’. I am frankly uninterested in the nuts-and-bolts of your classroom (or mine…) and I have solemnly vowed to stop blogging forever if I ever use the words ‘exit ticket’.

I am terribly interested in figuring out why the NYC schools (and so many others) are such a God-awful mess. Am I not contradicting myself there? If I want to know why the schools are dysfunctional, shouldn’t I be fascinated by every single comma and pre-scripted question in a lesson plan? No, I’m not and I shouldn’t. One of my favorite writers, GK Chesterton, said it best when discussing the commonly-held but wildly erroneous belief that concrete and practical problems require a concrete and practical solution: “A practical man means a man accustomed to mere daily practice, to the way things commonly work. When things will not work, you must have the thinker, the man who has some doctrine about why they work at all. It is wrong to fiddle while Rome is burning, but it is quite right to study the theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning” (116). NYC schools are burning and we will not, therefore, spend our time dwelling on mere daily practice. We will attempt to establish and communicate some doctrine of how learning happens and what learning actually is, of who our students are and who we are, and who we would wish to be. We will be wildly and unashamedly theoretical; since teaching is a supremely human endeavour, we may even wade into such wild waters as the nature of man.

Got it–sort of. But, Mrs. Gradgrind, I still don’t know what badthink means.

Yes, you do. You may not be able to define it, but you absolutely know it when you see it. Badthink refers to all of the ideas that the education establishment has informally (and in some cases formally) banned, so that speaking of them can get you into formal or informal trouble. Badthink includes IQ. It includes the scandalous proposition that not everyone can or should go to college. It includes the sneaking suspicion that some students behave badly because they have free will and make choices. You know what badthink is; you just try not to think about it.

Who are you anyway, Mrs. Gradgrind?

I’m you. I’m the teacher down the hall, the cranky one who drinks too much coffee, or the tired one who cries in the ladies’ room, or the obnoxiously perfect one who only complains after a drink or two. I’m not about to tell you more than that, and I think you can understand why.

After all of that reading, Mrs. Gradgrind, I’m feeling disengaged! I demand that you amuse me! Learning should be fun!

Ok, fine. Try this on for size: a sketch that I wrote while bored out of my mind at today’s interminable professional development.

‘A dialogue between a new principal and an old teacher’

Teacher: Good morning! Welcome to our school. My name is…

Principal: What are you doing wrong? Test scores went down. It’s your fault.

Teacher: Good morning! I’d like to talk about a behavior issue I’m having. You see, one of my students….

Principal: Suspensions are inequitable! Children don’t learn from people they don’t like. Build a relationship!

Teacher: Good morning! I have a couple of questions about this new curriculum…

Principal: We gave you the books, do what they say! You have to modify, you can’t just use the lesson plans from the books!

Teacher: Good morning! I’d like to talk about test prep. I was thinking that after school….

Principal: You can’t teach to the test, you have to engage students with authentic learning activities. And you have to get test scores up!

Teacher: Good morning! Can we talk about that last observation? There were a couple of comments….

Principal: Ineffective, Ineffective, Ineffective!

Teacher: I quit.

Principal: Good riddance!