Gadfly’s Top 10 Articles of 2021 – Shouts in the Dark

December 27, 2021 stevenmsinger Accountability, bloggers, Budget, capitalism, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Competency Based Education, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, Diane Ravitch, edtech, Education, Facebook, Healthcare, history, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Media, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, School Choice, Schools, Standardized Testing, student teacher relationship, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, Uncategorized 2021, coronavirus, COVID-19, education, end of the year, New Year, pandemic, Politics, roundup, schools, Students, teachers, teaching, year in review

I work very hard on this blog.

It’s not exactly easy to fit in so many articles – 53 so far this year – between teaching full time.

And I’ve been doing it for 8 years – since July 2014.

In that time, this site has earned 2.3 million hits – 218,603 just this year.

I’m proud of the work I’ve done here.

I haven’t changed the world, but I’ve been heard. Occasionally.

As a classroom teacher, that’s really what I’m trying to do. In my everyday work, few people whose grade I’m not calculating actually listen to me. And even then it’s not always a given.

I want to believe my words have an impact – that policymakers read what I write and consider it before offering new measures and revising old ones.

But as time goes on, I wonder if any of that actually happens. These days my writing feels more like a shout in the dark than anything else.

At best, from the comments I often get on my articles (and the fact that 14,887 people have signed up to follow my work), it seems at least that I am not shouting alone.

We are all yearning to be heard.

These are the cries that most of us seemed to have in common this year:

10) Top 6 Administrative Failures of the Pandemic Classroom

Published: May 22

Views: 3,014

Description: This is a postmortem on the 2020-21 school year. Here are the six policies that really weren’t working from social distancing, to cyber school, hybrid models, and more.

Fun Fact: I had hoped that laying out last year’s failures might stop them from being tried again this year or at least we might revise them into policies that worked. In some instances – like cyber school – there seems to have been an attempt to accomplish this. In others – like standardized testing – we just can’t seem to stop ourselves from repeating the same old mistakes.

9) Why Does Your Right to Unmask Usurp My Child’s Right to a Safe School?

Published: Aug 17

Views: 3,151

Description: It seemed like a pretty easy concept when I first learned it back in civics class. Your right to freedom ends when it comes into conflict with mine. But in 2021, that’s all out the window. Certain people’s rights to comfort (i.e. being unmasked) are more important than other people’s right to life (i.e. being free from your potential Covid).

Fun Fact: This was republished in CommonDreams.org and discussed on Diane Ravitch’s blog.

8) Stop Normalizing the Exploitation of Teachers

Published: Nov. 26

Views: 3,716

Description: Demands on teachers are out of control – everything from new scattershot initiatives to more paperwork to having to forgo our planning periods and sub for missing staff nearly every day. And the worse part is that each time it’s done, it becomes the new normal. Teaching should not be death by a million cuts.

Fun Fact: This was another in what seemed to be a series of articles about how teaching has gotten more intolerable this year. If anyone ever wonders what happened to all the teachers once we all leave, refer to this series.

7) Top Five Actions to Stop the Teacher Exodus During COVID and Beyond

Published: Oct. 7

Views: 5,112

Description: Teachers are leaving the profession at an unprecedented rate this year. So what do we do about it? Here are five simple things any district can do that don’t require a lot of money or political will. They just require wanting to fix the problem. These are things like eliminating unnecessary tasks and forgoing formal lesson plans while increasing planning time.

Fun Fact: Few districts seems to be doing any of this. It shows that they really don’t care.

6) I Love Teaching, But…

Published: Dec. 20

Views: 5,380

Description: This is almost a poem. It’s just a description of many of the things I love about teaching and many of the things I don’t. It’s an attempt to show how the negatives are overwhelming the positives.

Fun Fact: This started as a Facebook post: “I love teaching. I don’t love the exhaustion, the lack of planning & grading time, the impossibly high expectations & low pay, the lack of autonomy, the gaslighting, the disrespect, being used as a political football and the death threats.”

Published: Sept. 30

Views: 6,422

Description: Policymakers and pundits keep saying students are suffering learning loss from last year and the interrupted and online classes required during the pandemic. It’s total nonsense. Students are suffering from a lack of social skills. They don’t know how to interact with each other and how to emotionally process what’s been going on.

Fun Fact: This idea is so obvious to anyone who’s actually in school buildings that it has gotten through somewhat to the mass media. However, the drum of bogus learning loss is still being beaten by powerful companies determined to make money off of this catastrophe.

4) You’re Going to Miss Us When We’re Gone – What School May Look Like Once All the Teachers Quit

Published: Feb. 20

Views: 9,385

Description: Imagine a world without teachers. You don’t have to. I’ve done it for you. This is a fictional story of two kids, DeShaun and Marco, and what their educational experience may well be like once we’ve chased away all the education professionals.

Fun Fact: This is one of my own favorite pieces of the year, and it is based on what the ed tech companies have already proposed.

3) The Teacher Trauma of Repeatedly Justifying Your Right To Life During Covid

Published: Jan 16

Views: 9,794

Description: How many times have teachers had to go to their administrators and school directors asking for policies that will keep them and their students safe? How many times have we been turned down? How many times can we keep repeating this cycle? It’s like something out of Kafka or Gogol.

Fun Fact: It may not be over.

2) Teachers Are Not Okay

Published: Sept. 23

Views: 14,592

Description: This was my first attempt to discuss how much worse 2021-2022 is starting than the previous school year. Teachers are struggling with doing their jobs and staying healthy. And no one seems to care.

Fun Fact: My own health was extremely poor when I wrote this. I was in and out of the hospital. Though I feel somewhat better now, not much has changed. This article was republished in the Washington Post, on CommonDreams.org, and discussed on Diane Ravitch’s blog.

1) Teachers Absorb Student Trauma But Don’t Know How to Get Rid of the Pain

Published: Nov. 10

Views: 40,853

Description: Being there for students who are traumatized by the pandemic makes teachers subject to vicarious trauma, ourselves. We are subject to verbal and physical abuse in the classroom. It is one of the major factors wearing us down, and there appears to be no help in site – nor does anyone even seem to acknowledge what is happening.

Fun Fact: This one really seemed to strike a nerve with my fellow teachers. I heard so many similar stories from educators across the country who are going through these same things.

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Why High Stakes Testing Was Cancelled This Year (and Probably Will Be Next Year, Too)

May 16, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Civil Rights, college, Competency Based Education, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Cyber Charter Schools, Data, Democrat, Democrats for Education Reform, Donald Trump, edtech, Education, Eugenics, Every Student Succeeds Act, John King, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Pennsylvania, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Racism, Republican, School Choice, school closings, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, small class size, Special Education, Standardized Testing, standards, Student Mobility, student privacy, Students, Teachers, Technology Competency Based Education, coronavirus, COVID-19, Depersonalized Learning, distance learning, ed-tech, edtech, education, high stakes testing, personalized learning, Politics, schools, standardized testing, virtual learning

There are at least two silver linings to the current Coronavirus catastrophe for education.

One – with nearly all public schools closed, March was the first month since 2002 without a school shooting.

Two – districts nationwide cancelled high stakes standardized tests in April and May.

Taken together, these are two victories that no one could have predicted before November.

Gun safety restrictions remain laughably lax in the US compared to the rest of the world. And our system’s reliance on high stakes testing to hold schools and teachers accountable for economic inequalities and racially biased standards has been thoroughly criticized for nearly a century.

In short, the virus succeeded where policy did not.

The pandemic’s other effects have been more damaging as students, parents and teachers have struggled to move education online at home.

Teachers are seeing high absences especially among poor, underprivileged and special needs children. Not to mention worries about the quality and depth of education provided virtually and the stress it places on families.

To make matters worse, the situation seems likely to continue in some form when next school year begins in the fall.

With the COVID-19 virus likely to endure spreading unchecked due to a lack of adequate health screenings, the time it takes to make a vaccine, and an unwillingness by the government to save everyday people from the economic consequences of a nearly stopped economy, not to mention an increasing unwillingness among people to continue thorough social distancing procedures, schools may be left to solve the crisis themselves.

There’s been talk that when schools start up in August and September they may simply continue with cyber curriculum. Or they may open the physical buildings with safety protocols including half day classes of smaller size to keep students a safe distance apart.

In any case, the question of standardized testing arises again with a vengeance.

While there is some wiggle room, federal law (The Every Student Succeeds Act) requires all public school students be given standardized tests in grades 3-8 and once in high school.

The U.S. Department of Education waived that mandate this year because of the virus.

That was great news – a sound decision from a government agency known more for market solutions than rationality.

The question remains: why did the department do it?

Whether staffed by Democrats or Republicans, this doesn’t sound like them.

Why was this exception made and will it be extended again given that the circumstances may be little different in 2020-21 than they were in 2019-20?

The answer seems to be rooted in the tests, themselves, and the economic circumstances which create and sustains them.

WHY TESTS WERE CANCELLED

In late March, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said that her department would streamline the paperwork for states to request a waiver allowing them not to give high stakes testing this year and that the government wouldn’t use this year’s testing data in future school accountability ratings.

DeVos said in a statement:

“Students need to be focused on staying healthy and continuing to learn. Teachers need to be able to focus on remote learning and other adaptations. Neither students nor teachers need to be focused on high-stakes tests during this difficult time.”

How did we get here?

Well, imagine a world where this didn’t happen.

Before DeVos made her statement, some states like Colorado and Texas had already eliminated testing requirements without waiting for a response from DeVos.

If the federal government hadn’t answered these requests in the affirmative, it would have had to engage in an open power struggle with the states over control of public schooling.

This would be especially damaging for a Republican administration because of the party’s stance on state’s rights.

However, even if we put aside this power dynamic, the decision was inevitable.

CORPORATIONS FIRST

All of these assessments are the property of private corporations. These include Harcourt Educational Measurement, CTB McGraw-Hill, Riverside Publishing (a Houghton Mifflin company), and NCS Pearson.

States purchase the right to use these tests but assessment material is the ideological property of the parent corporation. And so they want it guarded from theft.

That’s why nearly all high stakes testing requires proctors – people whose job it is to set up, monitor and secure the testing environment. They make sure test takers don’t cheat, but they also are responsible for ensuring no information about specific test questions leaves the assessment environment.

This is true for standardized assessments at the K-12 level as well as college and certification tests.

I know because I’ve spent every year of my teaching career employed as a proctor throughout most of April as my students take the Pennsylvania System of School Assessments (PSSA) tests. But also when I got my degree I had to go to a designated testing center where I could be monitored as I took a series of assessments necessary to get my certification.

I had to sign in, empty my pockets including giving over my cell phone, and submit to being observed by the proctors and video surveillance. I even had to sign out and back in when I needed to use the restroom.

With physical classrooms closed, there was simply no way effectively to do this.

The College Board tried anyway with an abbreviated Advanced Placement test taken online from home this month to disastrous results – glitches, server issues and a failure by the organization to take responsibility.

However, the problem isn’t essentially technological. These assessments could be given online. Many districts do exactly that, but with teachers in the room acting as proctors.

The technological infrastructure may not yet be in place for widespread virtual testing, but that’s not an insurmountable hurdle.

Test security is a much stickier issue – without real, live people policing the environment, testing information would be at risk.

Rival companies could get access to trade secrets. The value of scores could come under scrutiny due to concerns of student cheating. And the tests, themselves, would for the first time be visible to parents and the general public.

TESTING SECRECY

As a classroom teacher, I get to see these infernal tests. I get to see the questions.

They are not good. They are not well-written, well considered, developmentally appropriate or even good at evaluating student understanding of the knowledge they claim to be assessing.

But up to this point, anyone who gets to see the tests is sworn to secrecy including the students.

The kids taking these exams – regardless of age – are no longer treated as children. They are clients entering into a contract.

At the start of these tests, they are warned of the legal consequences of violating the terms of this agreement.

THE PSSAS

In particular,the PSSAs require students to read the following warning on the first day of the assessment:

DO NOT PHOTOGRAPH, COPY OR REPRODUCE MATERIALS FROM THIS ASSESSMENT IN ANY MANNER. All material contained in this assessment is secure and copyrighted material owned by the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Copying of material in any manner, including the taking of a photograph, is a violation of the federal Copyright Act. Penalties for violations of the Copyright Act may include the cost of replacing the compromised test item(s) or a fine of no less than $750 up to $30,000 for a single violation. 17 U.S.C. $ 101 et seq

So the first act of testing is a threat of legal consequences and possible fines.

In the commonwealth, we also force kids to abide by a specific code of conduct for test takers. They must enter a quasi-legal relationship before they are even permitted to begin.

Much of this code is common sense. Get a good night’s sleep. Fill in bubbles completely using a number two pencil.

But some of it is deeply disturbing.

For example, students are told to “report any suspected cheating to your teacher or principal.”

They have to agree to be an informer or snitch to a government agency. My students aren’t old enough to vote or even drive a car, but they are directed to collaborate with the government against their classmates.

In addition, they are told NOT to:

-talk with others about questions on the test during or after the test.

-take notes about the test to share with others.

Students are compelled into a legalistic vow that they won’t break this code. On the test, itself, we make them fill in a bubble next to the following statement:

By marking this bubble I verify that I understand the “Code of Conduct for Test Takers” that my Test Administrator went over with me.

As a test administrator, I am not allowed to move on until all students have filled in that bubble.

Technically, we are not making them promise TO ABIDE by the code of test takers. Perhaps we lack that legal authority. We are, however, making them swear they understand it. Thus we remove ignorance as an excuse for noncompliance.

As a proctor, I have to sign a similar statement that I understand the “Ethical Standards of Test Administration.” Again, much of this is common sense, but it includes such statements as:

DO NOT:

-Discuss, disseminate or otherwise reveal contents of the test to anyone.

-Assist in, direct, aid, counsel, encourage, or fail to report any of the actions prohibited in this section.

So even teachers technically are not allowed to discuss the test and should report students or colleagues seen doing so.

And according to the “Pennsylvania System of School Assessment Directions for Administration Manuel”:

Those individuals who divulge test questions, falsify student scores, or compromise the integrity of the state assessment system in any manner will be subject to professional disciplinary action under the Professional Educator Discipline Act, 24 P.S. $ 2070. 1a et seq, including a private reprimand, a public reprimand, a suspension of their teaching certificate(s), a revocation of their teaching certificate(s), and/or a suspension or prohibition from being employed by a charter school. [emphasis added]

CORPORATE VULNERABILITY

If students were allowed to take these tests unsupervised at home, all of this legal protection would disappear.

The corporations would be much more exposed and defenseless.

THAT’S why the tests were cancelled this year.

It wasn’t because anyone rethought the value of high stakes tests – though they should have. It wasn’t because anyone had considered standardized testing’s history in the eugenics movement – which they should have. It wasn’t because anyone was worried that giving these tests would take away precious academic time – though they should have.

It was to protect the business interests that would be at risk otherwise.

THE DYSTOPIAN TESTING FUTURE

The need for proctors is a problem that the testing companies know about and are working to eliminate.

In fact, they’ve been trying to line things up in their favor for years.

Their answer is something called Competency Based Education (CBE) or Proficiency Based Education (PBE). But don’t let these names fool you. It has nothing to do with making children competent or proficient in anything except taking computer-based tests.

Paradoxically, it’s sold as a reduction in testing, but really it’s about changing the paradigm.

It’s a scheme that ed tech corporations privately call stealth assessments. Students take high stakes tests without even knowing they are doing it. They’re asked the same kinds of multiple-choice nonsense you’d find on state mandated standardized assessments but programmers make it look like a game.

This safeguards the tests because kids aren’t aware of being tested. Constant micro-assessments blend in with test prep curriculum until there is little to no difference between the two. Academics gets dumbed down to the level of multiple choice and critical thinking is redefined as asking “What does the questioner want me to think?”

Yet the results could still be used to label schools “failing” regardless of how under-resourced they are or how students are suffering the effects of poverty. Mountains of data will still be collected on your children and sold to commercial interests to better market their products.

But that’s just how it is used in schools today.

The potential is to make this a replacement for physical schools.

It’s a disaster capitalism reform tailor made for the Coronavirus age, but not yet ready for large scale implementation.

Imagine a world where there are no schools – just free range children plopped in front of a computer or an iPad and told to go learn something.

No schools, no teachers, just gangs of students walking the streets, stopping along the way to thumb messages to each other on social media, play a video game or take an on-line test.

That’s the world many ed tech entrepreneurs are trying to build.

One thing they need is a pet policy of DeVos and the Trump administration – Education Savings Accounts (ESAs).

Normally, the federal, state and local government collect taxes to fund an individual child’s education, which is then spent at a public or charter school.

However, ESAs would allow that money to go elsewhere. It could go to funding the tuition at a private or parochial school like a traditional school voucher.

Or it could be used for discrete education services provided by the ed tech industry.

It’s almost like homeschooling – without a parent or guardian in charge.

The idea is often called a learning ecosystem.

But it’s just a single person cyber school with little to no guiding principles, management or oversight.

Education is reduced to a series of badges students can earn by completing certain tasks.

Reading a book or an article gives you a badge. Answering a series of multiple-choice questions on a reading earns you more badges. And if you’ve completed a certain task satisfactorily, you can even earn a badge by teaching that same material to others.

It’s the low wage gig economy applied to education. Children would bounce from a few hours of Khan Academy videos here to a software package there and Voila! “Modern” education!

And as an added benefit, the badge structure creates a market where investors can bet and profit off of who gains badges and to what degree on the model of crypto-currencies like Bitcoin!

Make no mistake, it’s not about improving the quality of education. It’s about providing the cheapest possible alternative and selling it to the rubes as innovation.

It’s school without the school or teachers.

CONCLUSIONS

This is where the testing industry is going.

This is where we would be today if the legal framework were in place and the technology were widespread, adequate and capable of safeguarding corporate intellectual property without the need for test proctors.

In the short term, this is good news.

As long as the pandemic keeps school buildings closed or keeps them running at less than capacity, the chances of mandating high stakes testing during the crisis goes down.

On the flip side that’s detrimental to student learning in the here and now, but it does offer hope for the future. It at least opens the door to cancelling high stakes testing in 2020-21 like we did this year. And the longer we keep those tests at bay, the greater likelihood they will go away for good.

However, the people at the testing corporations are far from stupid. They know that each year we forgo the tests proves how unnecessary they are.

A coalition of six neoliberal organizations warned against cancelling the tests nationwide in March.

“As the coronavirus pandemic evolves on a daily basis, it would be premature to issue blanket national waivers from core components of the law. Thus, case-by-case consideration of each state’s needs is, at this time, most appropriate,” said a letter signed by testing industry lobbyists including John King, the former secretary of education and head of the Education Trust.

They have the future mapped out – a future with immense earnings for their companies and shareholders.

We must be fully aware of what is happening and why if we are to have any chance of opposing the next disaster and coming out of the current crisis with better school policy than we went in.

If we are to safeguard an authentic education for our children, we must learn these lessons, ourselves, now.

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The First Taste is Free: Ed Tech Follows Drug Dealer Sales Techniques with Schools During Coronavirus Crisis

April 4, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, Budget, California, capitalism, Charter Schools, Child Predators, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Common Core, Competency Based Education, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Cyber Charter Schools, Data Mining, edtech, Education, Healthcare, Learning, Local Control, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, Special Education, Standardized Testing, standards, student privacy, Students, Teachers, Technology Big Business, Computers, coronavirus, Corporate Education Reform, drug dealer, economics, ed-tech, edtech, education, educational technology, for-profit, Politics, Profit, public schools, teachers, technology

“Pst! Hey, Kid! Come here!”

Educational technologies are a multi-billion dollar industry.

“Who? Me?”

The coronavirus pandemic has closed schools across the globe, and districts have tried to solve this problem by putting their classes online.

“Yeah, you. I’ve got some… candy I want to give you.”

Nearly every ed tech company has offered help with this processes.

“Oh boy! I sure love candy… Wait a minute! How much does it cost?”

Teachers, parents, students and education activists are wary of educational technologies in the classroom, and research backs them up. Ed tech has been shown to widen socioeconomic divides, it hasn’t lived up to its promise of increasing academic gains, and – perhaps most tellingly – Silicon Valley executives restrict their own children’s use of technology and send them to tech-free schools.

“Nothing. It’s free.”

These for-profit corporations are offering limited time promotions – they’re providing additional services for free that would normally be behind a paywall.

“Oh goodie!”

Districts are jumping at the chance. They’re encouraging teachers to use apps, services and software that have never been tried before locally in an attempt to abide by continuity of education guidelines written by departments of education.

“That’s right. Absolutely free. But if you want some more, next time I’ll have to charge you a little something…”

So when the pandemic is over and classes eventually are reopened, a great deal of the technology that schools used to get through the crisis will no longer be on the house.

Continuing to use them will require an additional fee, and if districts end up budgeting for them, the money has to come from somewhere. So that means fewer books, field trips, tutors, classroom aides, and – yes – teachers.

In short, well-meaning governors, law-makers, administrators, school directors and even educators are participating in a program that in the long run may enrich private corporations but not be in the best interests of the students we’re supposed to serve.

I bring this up not to stop schools from using online learning during the crisis. Unfortunately that ship has sailed. Nor do I voice my objections to criticize teachers, parents or students. We all have to do what needs to be done to get through all this.

However, it is vital that we are aware of the compromises being made today so as to better avoid the pitfalls ahead.

When teachers use Zoom, Google Classroom, or any of dozens of other ed tech products during this season of social distancing, we must be aware that these should only be temporary measures. Do not resign yourself to any of this becoming the new status quo.

When classes resume, we can’t simply go back to normal. Nothing can ever be normal again. Normal is what got us into this mess – a society ill equipped to meet this pandemic – ill equipped to take care of its citizens, provide basic resources, equity and put people before profits.

The post coronavirus world must be one of universal healthcare, a social safety net for all and a robust, fully funded system of public education. We cannot allow it to be a dystopian world of edu-tech vulture capitalism where the economics of street corner drug pushers is used to dictate how public money is spent.

There are many clear reasons why.

First, education technologies are almost completely unregulated. Cybersecurity and student privacy laws are woefully out of date if not entirely nonexistent.

These applications collect a torrent of data on students. So do teachers, in fact, to calculate grades. However, if an educator were to share this information with outsiders, she could be sued. But if a corporation did the same thing, it falls into a legal no man’s land.

Each state has different laws denoting the limits of privacy.

The main federal law safeguarding student data privacy, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), was written in 1974 before much of these technologies even existed. It hasn’t been significantly amended since 2001.

So it’s left to individual districts, administrators, school boards and teachers to navigate these murky waters.

They end up trying to decipher the individual terms of service agreements and privacy statements with these companies that are often full of legal loopholes. In many cases, decision makers don’t even bother or give the job to school lawyers unversed in cybersecurity concerns or law.

While Congress has neglected its duty to regulate the industry, the matter is important enough that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) put out a strong warning. Two years ago, the Bureau cautioned consumers about the risks of classroom management tools like Class Dojo as well as student testing and remediation applications like Classroom Diagnostic Tools and Study Island.

The FBI warned schools and parents that widespread collection of student data involved in these applications could cause safety concerns if the information is compromised or exploited.

The Bureau was concerned about ed tech services because many are “adaptive, personalized learning experiences” or “administrative platforms for tracking academics, disciplinary issues, student information systems, and classroom management programs.”

And these are many of the same applications being used today for distance learning initiatives.

Education advocates have been sounding the alarm for years.

Commonsense.org – a nonprofit studying education issues – conducted a three-year review of 100 ed tech companies. It concluded that 74% of these businesses hold the right to transfer any personal information they collect if the company is acquired, merged, or files for bankruptcy. And since many are start-ups, this often happens.

The authors wrote that there is “a widespread lack of transparency, as well as inconsistent privacy and security practices” in how student information is collected, used, and disclosed.

Leaking student data is often not a security failure. It’s part of a company’s business model.

This is valuable information about one of the most lucrative demographics in the marketplace. Companies use it to help sell products targeted directly to consumers. And they can even sell student data as a commodity, itself.

For instance, imagine how much more effective the hiring process would be if businesses had access to applicants school attendance records. Imagine if businesses had an applicant’s entire academic record.

Employers could buy vast amounts of data and use algorithms to sort through it looking for red flags without fully comprehending what was being compiled. Imagine an applicant being turned down for a job because of low middle school attendance but not being able to explain that this was due to a legitimate illness.

There are reasons we protect people’s privacy. You shouldn’t have to explain your score on a 1st grade spelling test the rest of your life or have the need for special education services damage your credit rating.

Yet all of these things are possible when student data is up for grabs.

No one is protecting our children from this kind of mercantile future – one which will only be exacerbated if we allow educational technologies to become common place after the current crisis.

And tightening our student privacy laws, will not solve everything.

Hardly any attention is being paid to how these technologies can be used for harms unrelated to business and industry.

Tablets, laptops or monitoring devices such as cameras or microphones could be exploitable by tech savvy criminals – especially since many ed tech programs allow remote-access capabilities without the user even being aware of what is happening.

Pedophiles could use this data to find and abduct children. Criminals could use it to blackmail them. Other children could use it to bully and harass classmates.

It’s hard to imagine how children could be protected on such devices without increasing surveillance and thereby running similar risks. Using them will always involve a chance of endangerment so they should be kept away from the youngest and most vulnerable potential users.

How did we let ed tech get so out of control? Like so many problems of the pre-coronavirus world, money was allowed to dictate policy.

Global venture capital investments in ed tech finished 14 times higher by the end of the decade than they started. Investments went from $500 million in 2010 to $7 billion in 2019. And insiders expect that to triple in the next decade to more than $87 billion.

The two biggest spenders by far are China and the US.

Yet enthusiasm for such technologies are not nearly as prevalent among educators.

A 2019 study of educator confidence in ed tech conducted by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt found that 60% of teachers were concerned that implementing technology tools could damage the student-teacher relationship.

Moreover, education research in the United States concluded these technologies only widen the gap between different socioeconomic groups. Global initiatives like the One Laptop per Child program, which distributed 25 million low-cost computers with learning software to children in the developing world, failed to improve language or math results.

Meanwhile, students seem to be telling us they prefer more old school methods of instruction. Studies have shown preference for everything from physical books over eBooks to having “ordinary, real-life lessons” and “a smart person at the front of the room.”

Parent Blogger Alison McDowell has studied these issues in more depth than nearly anyone else. She warns that adaptive applications become the gatekeeper of children’s educations. They only allow students to move on once they’ve demonstrated mastery on a previous academic standard – or at least once they’ve been able to guess which one answer a programmer thought correct:

“The “personalized learning” model conditions students to view themselves as independent operators, free agents attempting to navigate a precarious gig economy alone. Screen-based isolation and an emphasis on data-driven metrics steadily erode children’s innate tendencies to creative cooperation. Which is ultimately better for society, an algorithm that learns each student in a classroom and delivers a pre-determined reading selection that they review and are quizzed on online, or a human teacher who selects an all class reading in which there is lively debate? The first scenario forecloses creative thought in service of data generation and reinforces there is but one correct answer. The second opens up chances for students to gain new insights while limiting opportunities for digital surveillance.”

Ed tech may allow us to stumble forward during the coronavirus quarantine, but it is not a central part of a healthy education system.

It may play a limited role in remediation and augmentation, but it cannot be the fulcrum around which everything else revolves.

I’d like to see a new education system built from the ashes of the old where every child has the chance to learn, a system that forgoes standardized testing and corporate-written academic standards for individualization and human interaction. I’d like to see a world where charter and voucher schools are things of the past, where schools are integrated and differences valued, where teachers and learning are respected and esteemed.

That is not an ed tech centered world. It is a student centered one.

It is a world where our priorities are such that even the promise of the new and the free won’t encourage us to indulge in practices that put our children in greater danger.

It is a place where the pusher has no power because his product is seen for what it is – treacherous and unnecessary.

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How Did America’s Schools Cope with Spanish Flu vs. Coronavirus?

March 30, 2020 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, absenteeism, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Chicago, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Competency Based Education, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Cyber Charter Schools, edtech, Education, Florida, history, home school, Homework, Journalism, Learning, literature, Local Control, Media, New York, Parents, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, school closings, Schools, Special Education, Student Mobility, Students, Teachers, Technology Chicago Schools, coronavirus, cyber school, distance learning, education, epidemic, Florida, history, New York, online learning, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Politics, public schools, school closings, Spanish Flu, teachers

They say history repeats itself.

And if you’ve read any accounts of the bygone days of yesteryear, the current crisis certainly appears like a rerun.

Look at all the closed businesses, frightened people venturing out wearing face masks or self quarantined in their homes. It sure looks a lot like 1918.

The Spanish Flu epidemic that swept the nation a little more than a century ago bares more than a passing resemblance to COVID-19, the coronavirus. And the ways we are trying to cope with the situation are in many cases modeled on what worked a hundred years ago.

For instance, when our ancestors enacted social distancing policies to flatten the curve of infection, their infrastructures were better able to save lives. When they didn’t enact such policies, death tolls were greater.

That’s one of the major reasons many of us today are shut in our homes waiting this whole thing out. We want to give the hospitals a chance to deal with the cases that come in without people all getting sick at once and making a run on ventilators.

However, history has less to say about how we handle things like education.

After all, our forebears didn’t have as unified a response.

In general, closing schools was better to stop the spread of disease than keeping them open.

But what about actual academics? How did our progenitors make up missed work?

There-in lies a tale.

America’s school system seems to have met the crisis in three separate ways.

They either closed entirely, remained open or forced teachers to educate at a distance.

Wait. Educate at a distance? In 1918?

Yep.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

PITTSBURGH

Let’s begin in my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

City officials didn’t take the matter seriously enough and as a result, Pittsburgh ended up with the highest death rate of any major city in the country. The Spanish Flu killed at least 4,500 people – a smaller total than cities like Philadelphia, but it represented more than 1 in every 100 residents. Nearly 24,000 people sought treatment at local hospitals.

According to reports made to the city health department, things got so bad that at the epidemic’s worst, someone in Pittsburgh got the flu every 70 seconds and someone died from it every 10 minutes.

This resulted in a casket shortage across Western Pennsylvania as far away as Greensburg. Even in distant Ligonier, signs were posted along Lincoln Highway warning motorists, “You stop at your own peril.”

City officials were at least partly to blame.

Though local colleges and universities such as the University of Pittsburgh, Duquesne, and Carnegie Tech all closed their doors near the start of the outbreak, city public schools initially were kept open.

In early October, State Health Commissioner B. Franklin Royer made the decision not to close public schools, though Pittsburgh school administrators decided that anyone who was coughing or sneezing should be sent home.

However, as Kenneth White put it in his 1985 article “Pittsburgh in the Great Epidemic of 1918”:

“Enterprising students quickly discovered that a pinch of snuff or pepper, inhaled in school, provided a sure passport to freedom.”

By October 22, city council reviewed a report that 27,357 children – about one-third of the student body – were absent from school. Of this number, council knew of 6,070 students who had the flu and 53 who had died. In addition, many parents kept their children home for fear they’d get sick.

Only then were city schools closed – about three weeks after the epidemic took hold in the area.

Some surrounding districts like Ben Avon had closed schools as early as October 5. But many had followed the city’s example and suffered similar consequences.

Pittsburgh schools reopened on November 18. Though the Spanish Flu was not completely gone, it came back in two more waves through the area – however, neither was as devastating as the first crash.

I can find nothing specific about how surviving students made up missed academic work. Only that they missed 19 school days of class during the closure.

NEW YORK CITY

New York City reacted in a similar fashion as Pittsburgh but with different results.

While Pittsburgh’s mortality rate was nearly 1 in 100, New York’s was 4.7 per 1,000. City officials recorded approximately 30,000 deaths out of a population of roughly 5.6 million resulting from influenza or pneumonia.

However, just like Pittsburgh, New York kept its schools open.

In an October 5th New York Times article, Health Commissioner Royal S. Copeland explained his logic behind the controversial decision to keep students in class:

“New York is a great cosmopolitan city and in some homes there is careless disregard for modern sanitation… In schools the children are under the constant guardianship of the medical inspectors. This work is part of our system of disease control. If the schools were closed at least 1,000,000 would be sent to their homes and become 1,000,000 possibilities for the disease. Furthermore, there would be nobody to take special notice of their condition.”

In short, Copeland figured the schools could do a better job of ensuring children’s safety than their parents.

In class, teachers were expected to give each student a daily medical inspection and report the results to the school nurse and/or medical professionals.

According to Francesco Aimone in “The 1918 Influenza Epidemic in New York City: A Review of the Public Health Response”:

“School nurses and medical inspectors were instructed to follow up on teacher inspections and conduct home visits on absentee students to determine whether “… they or members of their family are sick, that physical examinations be carefully made, and that dry sweeping [in their home] be discontinued and ventilation sufficient.”

Many disagreed with Copeland’s decision including the Red Cross of Long Island.

Former Health Commissioner Dr. S.S. Goldwater put the blame squarely on the teachers who inspected students with “almost criminal laxity” and found the follow-up inspections “lamentably weak.”

CHICAGO

However, a similar strategy in Chicago didn’t repeat New York’s success.

Keeping schools open in the Windy City more closely emulated the situation in Pittsburgh.

According to a timeline of preventive measures published in the American Journal of Public Health by Chicago’s Health Commissioner Dr. John Dill Robertson, city schools weren’t closed because officials didn’t think children were getting sick more than adults. They thought it would be better to keep students indoors where they could be watched for symptoms.

However, children ended up dying from the flu in Chicago at a higher rate than their parents.

Like in Pittsburgh, any student who coughed or sneezed was immediately sent home – though eventually this also came with a mandatory home quarantine.

SMALLER TOWNS

Officials were more sensible in smaller towns like Adrian and Tecumseh, Michigan.

In both municipalities all schools were closed by the end of October when the epidemic began there.

By Dec. 12 there was a plan to reopen, however that was revised as the death toll continued to rise. Schools ultimately remained closed until January 1919.

Schools made up the missing days of class by extending the remaining year.
They stayed open for 30 minutes beyond their usual dismissal time and held half-day sessions on Saturdays.

Another small town that wasn’t taking chances was Pontiac, Illinois.

Not only did officials close the schools, they ended up using them as field hospitals for the sick.

Moreover, when classes were cancelled, school age children were forbidden from leaving their homes unless they had to run an errand. Anyone with the flu was immediately quarantined in his or her home.

Schools were closed on October 15 for what was originally supposed to be just five weeks. However, when the second wave of the flu hit, the closure was extended.

Things got so bad that from December 3rd through January 1st, school buildings were used as a hospital to treat those with the flu.

By early January, the worst had passed and schools were reopened. Beginning on January 10, 1919, the high school held an extra session on Saturday to help make up some of the missed class work.

This seems to be the general pattern. Larger cities tried to push on and keep things as normal as possible – with usually disastrous results. Smaller towns took more serious precautions and limited the death toll.

LAKELAND, FLORIDA

And then there’s Lakeland, Florida.

Leave it to this district in Polk County to be the oddball.

On Oct. 10, the schools were officially closed. But not really.

Superintendent of Lakeland Schools Charles Jones and Polk County Board of Public Instruction Superintendent John Moore ordered teachers to continue to report to work so they could help any students who needed remediation.
Jones wrote in the local Ledger newspaper:

“While the teachers will meet at the school building each day for the purpose of assisting any child who is deficient in certain subjects or all subjects, yet I want it understood that the pupils may see the teachers at their homes any time for instruction.”

Such instruction could be given over the telephone, if necessary, he added.

Moore took the matter a step further saying in a resolution published in the paper that teachers who failed to report to school or help students could have their pay docked.

Much of this proto-distance learning involved communication in the local paper.

Its pages included assignments from teachers to students and even teachers home phone numbers if students needed help.  Examples of these assignments included reading passages from Shakespeare to drawing a map of North America.

IMPLICATIONS

The strangest thing about this incomplete survey of school responses is how much our current system is acting like Lakeland, Florida.

Almost all present day schools are closed with students supposedly self quarantined at home. This helps flatten the curve and minimize the chances of infection.

However, instead of waiting for the crisis to pass before addressing any academic deficiencies, many districts are requiring distance learning.

Teachers are being made to go in to school buildings or work from home creating online courses from scratch with little to no training.

True, this doesn’t expose educators to an added risk of catching the virus, themselves, but it does seem a bit mercenary.

We’re in a public health crisis where thousands of people are getting sick and dying. And the thing ourschool administrators are most concerned about is continued academic performance. They’d rather keep going with whatever quality of instruction can be provided in slapdash fashion than wait until it can be provided in the best possible circumstances.

They’d rather risk leaving behind those students without Internet access or whose special needs can’t be met online. Anything rather than extending the school year?

It’s interesting to compare today’s solutions to those of yesteryear.

Why didn’t more districts in 1918 try to make teachers instruct students through the newspaper and over the phone? Why didn’t more districts make teachers go to school buildings and even students homes during an epidemic?

Are we really doing the right thing by emulating those solutions?

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Virtual Learning Through Quarantine Will Leave Poor and Disabled Students Behind

March 25, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Budget, capitalism, Child Predators, Civil Rights, Competency Based Education, Corporate Education "Reform", Cyber Charter Schools, Donald Trump, edtech, Education, Learning, No Child Left Behind, Parents, Philosophy, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Schools, Social Justice, Special Education, Students, Teachers, Technology Betsy DeVos, Computers, coronavirus, distance learning, ed-tech, edtech, education, education policy, educators, IDEA, Politics, Poverty, public schools, schools, Special Education, teachers, technology, virtual learning

In the wake of the coronavirus crisis with most people self quarantined at home, schools across the country are shut down.

Some offer (or are considering offering) distance learning over the Internet.

However, this poses problems.

Not all student services can be provided via computer.

And not all students even have a computer, online compatible device or Internet access.

Should our nation’s public schools soldier on anyway and provide some kind of learning experience for those not thus encumbered at the expense of those who will be left behind?

The U.S. Senate’s proposed coronavirus aid package includes a provision to waive existing federal law that requires all schools to provide services to special education students. Removing this specification would allow districts to move forward with virtual learning without having to worry about meeting the needs of their special education students.

Advocates worry that even a temporary suspension of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) could have devastating long term effects on students with disabilities and ultimately remove the requirement upheld for the last 45 years that they receive a free public education.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos offered a gleeful statement in favor of dispensing with protections for students with autism, cerebral palsy, learning disorders and other special needs:

“It was extremely disappointing to hear that some school districts were using information from the Department of Education as an excuse not to educate kids. This is a time for creativity and an opportunity to pursue as much flexibility as possible so that learning continues. It is a time for all of us to pull together to do what’s right for our nation’s students.

“Nothing issued by this Department should in any way prevent any school from offering educational programs through distance instruction. We need schools to educate all students out of principle, rather than educate no students out of fear. These are challenging times, but we expect schools to rise to the occasion, and the Department stands ready to assist you in your efforts.”

The Department of Education issued a Fact Sheet that went even further:

“To be clear: ensuring compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act (Section 504), and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act should not prevent any school from offering educational programs through distance instruction.”

This is tantamount to prioritizing the education of some students over others. In short, if we follow DeVos’ guidelines, we will be saying that regular education students are more important than students with special needs.

It is a dangerous precedent.

However, perhaps even more dangerous is the abdication of any responsibility for, even complete erasure of any mention of poor students without Internet access.

This just underlines the importance of legislation. Special education students have IDEA. Poor students have nothing. There is no right to education for them at all.

If there had been some legislation specifically enshrining the rights of the underprivileged, however, it is clear this administration would be likewise proposing measures to dispense with it.

I understand that we are in a crisis. I understand that some think it is better to take half measures so that something gets done rather than nothing.

However, the coronavirus outbreak is expected to be a temporary situation. It may last weeks or months, but it will not last forever.

We want to do things in the best interests of children now, but we also must be aware of later. And trying to meet some kids needs now while writing off a large chunk of the rest would have a huge negative impact later.

If we educate just the privileged kids, we will be worsening the socioeconomic gap between students – a gap that is already too wide.

According to the most recent federal data, nearly 7 million students in the United States do not have Internet access at home. That is about 14 percent of all U.S. students. And of those with online access at home, 18 percent do not have home access to broadband Internet so they would also have difficulty retrieving lessons or participating in Zoom meetings online.

Moving to distance learning on the Internet would leave tens of millions of children behind.

Is this really what we want to do?

In addition, there is the question of quality.

Few teachers are trained or have experience with distance learning. They will probably be able to provide some kind of learning – but it will almost certainly not be the best they could be providing.

Moreover, there are real questions about the quality of learning that CAN be provided in a virtual environment even under the best of circumstances.

Cyber schools are a perfect fit for some students. Older and more mature students would probably have an easier time adjusting to it.

However, many students – especially younger ones – need the face-to-face interactions of school to get the most out of the experience. Forcing them into a mold that may at best be unsuited to them individually and at worst developmentally inappropriate will only cause them undo trauma.

I understand that everyone wants to appear like they’re doing something to meet the challenges provided by this crisis. However, sometimes the best thing to do is nothing.

One day the quarantine will be lifted. At that point, we can reopen the schools.

This may mean a few months of summer school. Or we could extend the 2020-21 school year to make up the difference.

Neither are perfect solutions. But they’re both better than virtual learning.

Neither require us to write off our poor and special education students.

And THAT is the most important thing.

Public schools don’t have to settle for whatever fad is offered from disaster capitalists.

We can still do what’s right for our kids.

All of our kids.

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Public Schools Can Recover from the COVID-19 Quarantine by Skipping High Stakes Tests

March 15, 2020March 15, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Competency Based Education, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Cyber Charter Schools, edtech, Education, Healthcare, Learning, literature, Local Control, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, school closings, School Funding, Schools, Scripted Lessons, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, Technology, Toxic Testing annual testing, coronavirus, COVID-19, edtech, education, high stakes testing, Politics, public schools, quarentine, schools, standardization, standardized testing, teachers, teaching to the test, technology, Test Prep, test-based accountability

There is one plus from being sick during a global pandemic.

You get perspective.

While all the schools in Pennsylvania are closed for at least the next two weeks to help stop the spread of COVID-19 (colloquially known as the Coronavirus), I self-quarantined a day early.

No, I don’t think I have the virus, but I’m not taking any chances.

Still, sitting here at my laptop with a steaming mug of tea, I’m filled with optimism.

My symptoms don’t match those of the virus – no fever, no dry cough, no difficulty breathing, no runny nose or sore throat. I just sneeze occasionally, have an intermittent wet cough and feel a bone deep fatigue.

Probably not the culprit sending the world into shutdown mode. But best to rest up anyway.

I’m also filled with a deep sense of gratitude that I’m a public school teacher.

My last class was a rough one – 7th graders running around the room with half written poetry demanding instruction, guidance, reassurance. My morning 8th graders were likewise rushing to complete a poetry assignment – frantically asking for help interpreting Auden, Calvert, Henley, Poe, Thomas.

What a privilege it has been to be there for them! How much I will miss that over the few next weeks!

Who would ever have thought we’d go into self quarantine to stop people from getting infected?

It says something about us that what seemed impossible just a few days ago has become a reality. We actually saw a problem and took logical steps to avoid it!

I know – we could have done a better job. We could have acted more quickly and in many areas we haven’t done nearly enough (New York, I’m looking at you).

But what we have done already shows that human beings aren’t finished. We have massive problems waiting to be solved – global climate change, social and racial inequality, the corrupting influence of money in politics, etc. However, we CAN do the logical thing and solve these problems!

No matter how crazy it seems now, tomorrow could be filled with rational solutions. If only we allow ourselves that chance.

So my spirits are high here in my little hollow nestled in with my family.

But being a teacher I can’t help thinking about what’s to come next.

Eventually this whole ordeal will be over.

Schools will reopen. Things will get back to normal. Or try to, anyway.

The challenge will be attempting to overcome the month or more of lost schooling.

Some will be thankful they relied on virtual schooling to fill in the gaps. When this whole crisis began, officials chided us to make preparations for “teleschool” in case of just this eventuality.

I’m glad we didn’t.

Frankly, (1) it would have been a huge cost that schools don’t have the money to meet and (2) it would have been money down the drain.

There is nothing innovative about sending kids on-line to do their assignments. The majority of work that can be done that way is of the lowest quality.

That’s workbook nonsense that the laziest and most checked out educators of generations past gave to their students to keep them quiet.

We see students in China who are being educated that way finding ways around it – giving their education apps low star reviews in the app store so that they’ll be removed, etc.

Here in the USA, all children don’t even have access to the Internet. They rely on the local libraries to get online – not a good idea in a pandemic.

So most schools have had to do without.

School is cancelled for about a month or so, and then – hopefully – it will return.

The question remains – what do we do when we get back to class?

We could extend the school year, but families have vacations planned and other obligations. This wouldn’t solve much and frankly I don’t think it will happen unless we’re out for longer than expected.

I anticipate being back in school by mid April or so. That would leave about a month and a half left in the year.

This really leaves us with only two options: (1) hold our end of the year standardized tests and then fit in whatever else we can, or (2) forgo the tests and teach the curriculum.

If we have the tests, we could hold them shortly after school is back in session. That at least would give us more time to teach, but it would reduce the quality of the test scores. Kids wouldn’t be as prepared and the results would be used to further dismantle the public school network.

Much better I think is option two: skip the tests altogether.

Frankly, we don’t need them. Teachers observe students every day. We give formal and informal assessments every time we see our kids. We’re like scientists engaged in a long-term study taking daily measurements and meticulously recording them before coming to our year end conclusions called classroom grades.

In my classes, I think I could teach just about the same material in the remaining time if I didn’t have to worry about the high stakes tests.

In 7th grade, this would mean finishing up our almost completed poetry unit – having kids put together their poetry portfolios and sharing them. Then we’d begin our final novel of the year, “Silent to the Bone” by E.L. Konigsburg, talk about mystery stories, reader perspectives and how truth impacts fiction.

In 8th grade, we could likewise finish up poetry with some presentations on students’ favorites from the assigned group. Then we could read the play version of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” and selections from Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.”We could discuss propaganda, prejudice and compare the historical perspective of Europe and the United States.

In both cases, we might have to forgo a year-end project, but at least we’d cover the majority of what we proposed at the beginning of the year.

Students would leave their respective grades with just about everything we set out to give them. They’d be prepared and ready to meet the challenges of the coming grade.

That seems a worthy goal to me.

But I hear someone ask – what about the standardized testing? Won’t students be less prepared having skipped over those assessments?

The answer is no. They would not be less prepared.

They would be better educated without a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads.

The shame is that this alteration in schedule would probably only last one year.

In 2020-21, we’d probably reinstate these standardized assessments.

This is at least a month of wasted schooling. If we got rid of all the pretests and administrator required teaching-to-the-test, we could clear up a good 9-weeks of extra class time.

Imagine what teachers could do with those surplus days!

My 8th graders could read the whole of “Mockingbird,” for one. instead of just selections. My 7th graders could read another entire novel – probably Paul Zindel’s “The Pigman.” Not to mention the addition of more women and writers of color, the extra time for creative writing, an emphasis on finding your own point of view.

And for me that’s the benefit of this COVID-19 crisis. It shows us what could be – what we could do if we were only brave enough to try.

Happy self-quarantine, everyone!

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The Coronavirus Could Be A Big Moneymaker for EdTech Companies

February 27, 2020 stevenmsinger absenteeism, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Child Predators, Civil Rights, Common Core, Compassion, Competency Based Education, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Cyber Charter Schools, Data Mining, Democrat, Donald Trump, edtech, Education, Healthcare, Homework, Learning, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Republican, School Funding, Schools, Student Mobility, student privacy, Students, Teachers Betsy DeVos, cdc, coronavirus, disease, Donald Trump, edtech, education, pandemic, Politics, school, school closings, teachers, teleschool

There is a special place in Hell for people who cash in on tragedy.

But that place is reserved for the super rich – and that’s all that matters in Donald Trump’s America.

Federal officials are urging schools to prepare for possible disruptions due to the coronavirus – a disease that originated in China last month and has affected more than 77,000 people worldwide (of which more than 2,600 have died).

Only 14 people have been infected in the U.S., and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) writes on its Website that the “immediate health risk from COVID-19 is considered low” for the average American – especially those who have not traveled recently to Wuhan, the surrounding Hubei Province or elsewhere in mainland China.

However, this is certainly scary news for anyone – especially parents, teachers and students.

In fact, federal officials singled out schools at a press conference on Tuesday about possible responses to the disease if it gets worse on these shores.

Nancy Messonnier, a director at the CDC, said:

“You should ask your children’s schools about their plans for school dismissals or school closures. Ask about plans for teleschool.”

To which every teacher in America responded, “Teleschool!?”

So we’re worried about this disease which is somewhat more deadly than the flu – NOT primarily because of the risk to students’ health or lives; NOT because of the risk of it going undiagnosed due to the disincentive of rising healthcare costs; NOT because we’re woefully unprepared due to Trump firing the entire U.S. pandemic response team two years ago and then not replacing them!

No! We’re concerned mostly because KIDS MIGHT MISS SCHOOL!!!!

But, hey, no worries because the Trump administration figures this new and unpredictable disease which typically causes symptoms like fever, cough and shortness of breath can be circumvented with… cyber school?

Limit kids exposure by letting them stay at home and do their lessons on the computer.

And if they have an online management system where teachers give virtual assignments and kids turn them in through the cloud, even better!

Thank you, education technology firms! You have saved American education. Again.

What a pile of crap!

Let’s get one thing clear. This suggestion has nothing to do with student well being. It is a blatant attempt to turn a potential pandemic into a cash cow.

EdTech already is a multi-billion dollar industry. If we successfully tie navigation of disasters with this sector, profits could potentially climb through the roof!

As it stands now, technology companies are lined up outside our schools pretending to provide the best the 21st Century has to offer to solve every school issue from excessive tardiness to lack of motivation to academic decline.

And now they’re offering the cure to the coronavirus – or at least the cure to any pedagogical delay that might result from school closures – either precautionary or due to an outbreak.

First of all, if schools close because of this disease, students will be scared. They aren’t going to be able to focus on academics.

Kids would need love and understanding – not more homework.

Second, not all kids have Internet access at home. Many of our most underprivileged children need to go to a public place like a library to get online. So if we require students to submit assignments this way during a closure, we’re forcing them to increase their chances of infection at a public place or get behind in their work. Not exactly fair.

Third, the kind of lessons you can provide through “teleschool” are subpar at best.

This is the automated checkout counter of school. It is the robocall customer service of education.

Most children need real live human beings to achieve their best. That’s why you just can’t give a kid a math book and – Voilà – they know how to reduce fractions!

Sure, they can try to muddle through a computer program or do virtual work and submit it online. But how is that really different from the bad old days when the most checked out educators would disseminate a worksheet to the class and then hide behind a newspaper at their desks?

This is the kind of curriculum we used to criticize teachers for and that very few modern day educators could get away with in our modern public school system – UNLESS they do it behind a computer and/or software package.

This is not being “future ready” or “innovative.” It is the worst practices of the past repackaged so a bunch of suits at the corporate offices can cash in.

Finally, it opens students up to severe privacy concerns. In 2018 the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) warned that EdTech solutions like these often put student security at risk.

Much of this software asks for and saves student inputs which can be compromised or actively sold to third parties.

These are “adaptive, personalized learning experiences” or “administrative platforms for tracking academics, disciplinary issues, student information systems, and classroom management programs.”

Pedophiles could use this data to find and abduct children. Criminals could use it to blackmail them. It could even be sold to unscrupulous corporations or exploited by other children to bully and harass classmates.

And, in fact, such things have happened.

While it may be frustrating to makeup missed schools days, doing so doesn’t have the same risks and – eventually – provides kids with the same quality of education that they miss.

It just doesn’t offer opportunities for corporations to make big bucks.

Advocates claim online tools like Class Dojo and Apple Classroom provide unique opportunities that have never been available before for such teleschooling.

However, we’ve always been able to do this stuff – just not so easily on a computer.

Schools have always been able to send workbooks home with students full of drill and kill assignments. They just rarely did so because we all knew the quality of such workbooks was mediocre at best.

Compared with a flesh-and-blood teacher and the interpersonal interactions of school, this was poor return on the community’s investment in their children.

Teleschooling is pretty much the same thing just with flashier bells and whistles.

It’s no wonder that this is the kind of solution we get from an administration that thinks Betsy Devos should head the Department of Education.

Why would we trust the same people who can’t figure out how to contain the coronavirus to solve its impact on education?

Sadly in an age when the human genome has been successfully mapped and bio-weapons are a real tool at the disposal of unscrupulous governments, one can only be skeptical of a mysterious new virus that suddenly shows up in a country like China experiencing massive pro-democracy protests. That’s one way to get disaffected citizens off the streets.

And now the same disease has come to our shores on the eve of the 2020 Presidential election. You’ll forgive me for admiring what could be the most effective means of voter suppression in modern politics!

This may be an unlikely scenario – especially given the degree of secrecy and competence it would require – but if history has taught us anything, it’s that the powerful will stop at nothing to keep their power.

Beyond mere financial gain, some may hope that teleschooling in the wake of predictable disasters could dumb down our children’s education just enough to deprive them of that lesson, themselves.

The best way to stop skepticism is to undercut the education of the next generation.

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Top 7 Ways Technology Stifles Student Learning in My Classroom

July 31, 2019July 31, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Close Reading, Common Core, Competency Based Education, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Data Driven Instruction, Data Mining, edtech, Education, Learning, Parents, Philosophy, Politics, privatization, School Choice, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, student privacy, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology Competency Based Education, Depersonalized Learning, ed-tech, edtech, education, individualization, language arts, Learning, literacy, personalized learning, Profit, public schools, reading, schools, standardized testing, Students, teachers, teaching, teaching to the test, technology, Test Prep

As a middle school teacher, I have real concerns about the ways technology is used in the classroom and the effects it’s having on students.

That does not make me a technophobe.

The fact that you are reading this article on a blog – a regularly updated Website containing personal writings or a weB–LOG – should prove that point.

I use technology in my everyday life and in many ways find it indispensable.

However, that does not mean I embrace all uses of technology just as criticizing some forms does not mean I think we should get rid of them all.

But after 17 years of teaching, I have legitimate concerns about what all this technology is doing to our students and our schools.

I have seen technologies come and go. Some – like a computerized grade book – have been extremely helpful, and I would not want to have to do my job without them.

Others have fallen by the wayside, been discontinued or proven a waste of time or even worse – they’ve become impediments rather than assistants to student learning.

In general, I think we have become too reliant on technology in schools. We’ve welcomed and incorporated it without testing it, or even reflecting upon whether it promises to offer better pathways toward student comprehension and discovery or whether it merely offers flash and novelty devoid of substance. And perhaps even more frightening, we have not investigated the ways in which using these technologies actually puts student privacy and intellectual growth at risk.
So, without further ado, here are the top 7 ways technology stifles student learning in my classroom:

1) It Stops Kids from Reading

I’m a language arts teacher. I want my students to read.

I could simply assign readings and hope students do them, but that’s not practical in today’s fast-paced world. When kids are bombarded by untold promises of instant gratification, a ream of paper bordered by cardboard doesn’t hold much of a claim on their attentions.

So like many teachers, I bring reading into the classroom, itself. I usually set aside class time every other day for students to read self-selected books for about 15 minutes. Students have access to the school library and a classroom library filled with books usually popular with kids their age or popular with my previous students. They can pick something from outside these boundaries, but if they haven’t already done so, I have them covered.

In the days before every student had an iPad, this worked fairly well. Students often had books with them they wanted to read or would quickly select one from my collection and give it a try.

Sometimes when there was down time in class, when they had finished assignments or tests early, they would even pick up their self-selected books and read a little.

What a different world it was!

Now that every student has an omnipresent technological device, this has become increasingly impossible. I still set aside 15 minutes, but students often waste the time looking for an eBook on-line and end up reading just the first chapter or two since they’re free. Others read nothing but the digital equivalent of magazine articles or look up disparate facts. And still others try to hide that they’re not reading at all but playing video games or watching YouTube videos.

Even under the best of circumstances, the act of reading on a device is different than reading a printed page.

The act of reading traditional books is slower, closer and more linear. It’s the way teachers really want kids to read and which will most increase comprehension.

Reading on a screen is a product of social media. We scroll or scan through, seeking specific information and clicking on hyperlinks.

The old style of reading was transformative, absorbing and a much deeper and richer experience. The newer style is more superficial, mechanical and extrinsic. (And, Yes, I’m aware of which style of reading you’re engaged in now!)

To be fair, some students actually prefer reading eBooks on devices and may even experience the richness of the original style. But they are few and far between. Usually students use the devices to escape from the deeper kind of reading because they’ve never really done it before and don’t understand what it really is. And when they have this choice, they may never find out.

2) It’s a Distraction

As a teacher, I want my students to be able to focus on one thing at a time. There are situations and assignments that call for multitasking, but usually we need students to be able to look at text closely, examine an argument, identify figurative language or write creatively, etc. They can’t do that if they’re constantly checking their devices.

We have to admit that iPads, laptops, social media, etc. are addictive. If given the chance, many teenagers will spend hours there. Heck, many adults will, too. It’s common for students to rush through assignments to get back to watching videos about the latest on-line gaming trend Fortnite, or listen to music with earbuds, or others such things.

Technology is usually associated in their minds with entertainment, not education. I’m not saying that technologies don’t have their place. If you want to look up information quickly, devices are great. But the most common words I tell my students on any given day are “Apples up.” In others words, turn your iPads face down and focus on the lesson at hand.

3) It’s Unhealthy

For most students, technology is not a novelty. It is something with which they already have a lot of experience. Many studies find that kids between the ages of 13-18 spend up to 18 hours a day in front of a screen.

Why are we adding to that in the classroom?

Children need face-to-face interactions. They need to learn social skills, how to communicate with people, not screen avatars. They need time outdoors, time to get up and move around and interact with the world. Heck! They need unstructured time where they actually experience boredom and have to find ways to cope.

We’re robbing them of these skills by giving in to the electronic nanny. And it’s creating children who are less able to survive without that technological crutch.

As technology has become more widespread in my classes, I’ve noticed attention spans decreasing. So has self control, mindfulness and an ability for critical thinking.

4) It Costs Too Much

Public schools are already grossly underfunded. We have to pick and choose the most effective tools to help kids learn. Technology is often very expensive and takes away valuable money and resources that could be better spent elsewhere.

And the way these technologies are marketed is often reminiscent of the drug trade. The first uses are free. But if you want to expand, it will cost.

Even those that don’t demand briefcasefulls of cash often recoup their costs by collecting and selling student data.

In the school system, we are privy to an enormous amount of information about the children in our care – information that we are tasked with keeping safe. Ed tech software and technologies also routinely collect data on students. But they are not as constrained or legally responsible for it in the way schools and teachers are.

Some of the data technologies collect is indeed necessary for whatever task they perform – tabulating which questions students get correct and incorrect, etc. However, much of it is unnecessary for those tasks – information about student preferences or marketing information.

We have no guarantee that this data is secure. The FBI has warned schools, parents and students of information breaches at these ed tech companies. And the contracts these companies have with schools and/or users are shady at best. They don’t guarantee your data will be secure, don’t accept liability and even when they do, they routinely warn that their policies can change at any time without warning – especially if they go bankrupt.

These are costs too expensive to pay.

5) It Has Never Been Proven to Help Kids Learn

Educational technologies’ claims about student learning outcomes are based on faith not facts. There are few (if any) long-term, large scale, peer reviewed studies showing that most technologies are effective educational tools.

This is partially because they’re too new to have been around long enough to be adequately tested. Moreover, the field is flooded with “studies” payed for by the same companies or organizations being studied – which is like having McDonald’s tell you the McRib is nutritious. Some small-scale peer reviewed studies have been done, but the results have been inconclusive.

We are literally unleashing these devices and software applications on children without knowing their full effects.

Ed tech is a market-based solution to an academic problem. It is the triumph of big business over pedagogy.

Our children deserve better than this.

6) It Perpetuates Bad Pedagogy and Assessment

Ed tech is almost always organized around standardized testing. It takes the multiple choice test as the ultimate form of assessment and arranges itself around that paradigm.

Software basically teaches to the test. It shows users the kinds of questions that will be asked, how to solve them and then gauges their success by giving them test-based questions.

It’s ironic because the marketing departments of these corporations usually sell this junk as “personalized learning,” “individualized learning,” or “competency” or “proficiency based education.” They want you to think that the program is tailor made to the user when it’s actually just a prepackaged mess. If you can’t answer a question of type A, you don’t get to move on to a question of type B. That’s all.

This can be an effective method for increasing test scores – if students aren’t so tuned out by the experience that they don’t engage with what they’re being presented – which is what I often find with my students when I’ve been forced to subject them to this nonsense.

However, learning how to take a multiple choice test on reading is not the same as learning how to read and understand. It is not the same as interacting with, comprehending and forming an opinion about that reading.

This is not the best way to teach just as having students fill out endless worksheets is not, nor is even having a flesh-and-blood teacher do endless test prep.

It is brainwashing – teaching kids to think like the designers of a test when we should be teaching them how to think for themselves and like themselves.

7) It Undermines Public Schools and Teachers

Ed tech companies are not philanthropies. They are in this business to turn a profit. And the best way to do that is to displace and disrupt the public education system.

There is an entire testing and school privatization industrial complex out there trying to prove that traditional public schools are bad and need replaced with business solutions.

These aren’t just charter schools or private and parochial schools cashing in on vouchers siphoning tax money away from children and into their private pockets. These are ed tech companies, too.

The ultimate goal is to get rid of the very concept of school, itself, and to replace it with on-line cyber schooling that can be accessed anywhere without the need for any living, breathing teachers in the mix. Or at best, they want to reduce the teacher to a mere facilitator. It is the device and the software that teach. It is only the human being’s job to make sure the student is engaging with the technology.

This is not in the best interest of students. It is in the best interests of companies and corporations.

When we give away our responsibilities, our autonomy, and our humanity to these businesses, we are selling out our children.

I’m not saying that all technology is bad or even that it should never be used in the classroom.

But we must approach it with caution and intelligence. We should always know why we’re using it, what end we expect it to have and fully comprehend the consequences.

Otherwise our children will be left to pay for our own shortsightedness.

Like this post? I’ve written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

Busing and School Segregation Used for Politics not Policy

July 8, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Bernie Sanders, Betsy DeVos, California, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Competency Based Education, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Democrat, Democrats for Education Reform, Donald Trump, edtech, Education, Election, Elizabeth Warren, Learning, Local Control, Media, Obama, Parents, Politics, Prejudice, President, privatization, Racism, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Supreme Court, Teachers, Technology, voting, White Allies, White Fragility, White Privilege Bernie Sanders, busing, charter schools, Democrats, education, education policy, Joe Biden, Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, neoliberal, Politics, Privatize, public schools, school segregation, schools, segregation, standardized testing

If children of all races went to the same schools with each other, it would be harder to treat them unequally.

Moreover, it would be harder for them to grow up prejudiced because they would have learned what it’s like to have classmates who are different from them.

And though most people agree with these premises in principle, our laws still refuse to make them a reality in fact.

Perhaps that’s why it was so astounding when Kamala Harris brought up the issue of school segregation and busing at the first Democratic debates.

If you’re anything like me, for the first time these debates made Harris look like a viable contender for the party’s Presidential nomination to face Republican incumbent Donald Trump in 2020.

But then she immediately contradicted herself when people actually started to take her seriously.

During the debates, Harris called out front runner and former vice president Joe Biden for opposing court-ordered busing in the 1970s as a way of combating school segregation.

The California Democrat and former federal prosecutor rightly said that 40 years ago there was a “failure of states to integrate public schools in America,” so “that’s where the federal government must step in.”

But her star-making moment was when she made the whole matter extremely personal.

“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day,” Harris said. “That little girl was me.”

The tactic was so successful that Biden has been fumbling to apologize and explain away a history of obstructing desegregation ever since.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted after the debate showed Biden had lost half of his support among black voters since earlier in June.

Meanwhile, the Harris campaign was quick to cash in on the political capital she earned by selling t-shirts with a picture of herself when she was in school with the emblem “That Little Girl Was Me.”

It could almost be a masterclass in how to make a political point to both boost your own campaign and change the narrative to improve national policy.

That is if Harris actually backed up her rhetoric with action.

Unfortunately, she has been tripping all over herself to keep this a criticism of Biden and not let it become a policy prescription for today.

While perfectly happy to support busing as a measure to stop segregation in the past, she seems much less comfortable using it to stop our current school segregation problems.

Because even though the landmark Supreme  Court decision that found racial segregation to be unconstitutional – Brown v. Board of Education – is more than 60 years old, our nation’s schools are in many places even more segregated now than they were when this ruling was handed down.

So the question remains: in some areas should we bus kids from black neighborhoods to schools located in white ones and vice versa to ensure that our classrooms are integrated?

Since the debates, Harris has waffled saying busing should be “considered” by school districts but she would not support mandating it.

In subsequent comments, she said she’d support a federal mandate for busing in certain situations where other integration efforts have not been effective or when the courts have stepped in to provide the federal government that power. However, she does not believe that either of these conditions have been met.

Frankly, it sounds a whole lot more like someone desperately making things up as she goes along than someone with a true plan to fix a deep problem in our public education system.

She rightly attacked Biden on his record but then came up short trying to prove that she would be much different, herself, if elected.

However, that doesn’t mean all Democratic candidates are so unprepared. A handful have detailed integration policy proposals.

The most obvious is Bernie Sanders.

In fact, it is a cornerstone of his “Thurgood Marshall Plan for Education.” Not only would he repeal the existing ban on using federal transportation funding to promote school integration, he would put aside $1 billion to support magnet schools to entice more diverse students. However, the most ambitious part of his desegregation effort goes beyond legislation. Sanders promises to “execute and enforce desegregation orders and appoint federal judges who will enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act in school systems.”

Sanders understands that the courts have largely sabotaged most desegregation efforts in the last 40 years.

At least two Supreme Court rulings have taken away the federal government’s power to enforce Brown v. Board. The first was 1974’s Milliken v. Bradley ruling which established that federal courts could not order desegregation busing across school district lines. They could only do so inside districts. So in big cities like Detroit – where the case originated – you have largely black city schools surrounded by mostly white suburban ones. The ruling forbids busing from city to suburban districts and vice-versa thereby destroying any kind of authentic desegregation efforts.

More recently, in 2007, the Supreme Court’s Parent’s Involved decision put even more constraints on voluntary busing programs.

Sanders is acknowledging these problems and promising to select judges to the bench who would work to overturn these wrongheaded decisions.

To my knowledge, no one has yet offered a more comprehensive plan.

However, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary and San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro comes in at a close second.

As you might expect, his school integration plan focuses on real estate and housing issues. According to his Website, Castro’s plan includes:

“Fulfill the promise of Brown v Board of Education through a progressive housing policy that includes affirmatively furthering fair housing, implementing zoning reform, and expanding affordable housing in high opportunity areas. These efforts will reduce racial segregation in classrooms.”

In other words, Castro hopes to work around the courts by incentivizing integration in neighborhoods which would also increase it in our schools.

It’s a good plan – though perhaps not enough in itself.

Unfortunately, there are reasons to doubt Castro’s sincerity here. Unlike Sanders’ plan, Castro’s education policy statement is littered with jargon right out of the school privatization, edtech and high stakes testing playbook. These are, after all, the same people who have worked to increase segregation with the promotion of charter and voucher schools.

For instance, the second point of his plan is called “Reimagining High School” – a monicker stolen from the XQ Superschools program, a philanthrocapitalist scheme to rebrand school privatization funded by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs.

This shouldn’t be surprising coming from  Castro. In 2013, the mayor went on a tour of cities sponsored by Education Reform Now – an arm of Democrats for Education Reform, a school privatization lobbying network. In the same year, he was also a featured guest at a ribbon cutting ceremony for IDEA charter schools. In 2010, he admitted he had no problem taking money with strings attached – a reference to the Obama administration’s chief education initiative of offering education grants if states increased reliance on high stakes testing and charter schools. In particular, Castro said: “I would have taken the Race to the Top money if I was mayor, dogcatcher, or whatever.”

And speaking of standardized testing and edtech, there are other telling hints that he’s on the neoliberal bandwagon in his current education plan:

“Provide educators and public schools flexibility in defining success, including competency-based assessments and support for transitions away from seat-time requirements. Provide maximum flexibility for school leaders, teachers, and students to work together to develop rigorous, competency-based pathways to a diploma and industry recognized credentials,” [Emphasis mine].

These terms “competency-based” and “rigorous” have strong associations with the privatization industry. “Competency-based” education programs usually mean making kids do daily mini-standardized tests on iPads or other devices and other untested cyber education programs. “Rigorous” has been associated with topdown academic standards like the Common Core that provide students with few resources or even taking them away and then blaming kids for not being able to meet arbitrary and developmentally inappropriate benchmarks.

Castro has some good ideas, but his troubling associations and language give any person familiar with these issues reason to pause.

Of course, Castro has not yet made a real mark among those Democrats seeking their party’s nomination.

Perhaps more important is the relative silence of a more popular candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

She hasn’t spoken much about integration efforts on the campaign trail. Along with Sanders, she is a co-sponsor of the Strength in Diversity Act, the leading congressional vehicle for school integration. However, that legislation is deeply flawed because it not only increases grant money for desegregation but also gives a big chunk of change away to charter schools.

In the past, Warren has supported a kind of school voucher program to separate where a student is enrolled in school from where they live entirely, but you can add it to the list of education issues she has not seen the need to clarify as yet.

It’s no surprise that so few Democratic hopefuls want to address the issue of desegregation – especially doing so through busing.

White middle class and wealthy people generally don’t support it.

They simply don’t want their kids going to schools with large numbers of black and brown students.

And this is a real moral weakness in white culture.

I went to an integrated school from Kindergarten to high school. My daughter goes to the same district. I teach at another integrated school.

The benefits of attending such a school far outweigh any negatives.

If students have to spend more time getting to and from school via buses to reach this goal, it wouldn’t matter if we valued the outcome.

In fact, many white parents don’t mind putting their kids on buses or driving them to get away from minority children.

Certainly we should try to minimize the time it takes to get to and from school but that shouldn’t be the only consideration.

They say we get the leaders we deserve.

If white people really want to defeat Trump, they may have to start by defeating the bigot inside themselves first.

Classroom Teachers are the Real Scholastic Experts – Not Education Journalists

May 7, 2019May 7, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, bloggers, Censorship, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Competency Based Education, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", edtech, Education, Journalism, Labor, Learning, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, School Funding, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, Unions education, experiance, experts, Journalism, knowledge, media, Media Matters, Politics, public schools, teachers, teaching, transparency

When you want an expert on health, you go to a doctor.

When you want an expert on law, you go to a lawyer.

So why is it that when the news media wants an expert on education they go to… themselves!?

That’s right. Education journalists are talking up a storm about schools and learning.

You’ll find them writing policy briefs, editorials and news articles. You’ll find them being interviewed about topics like class size, funding and standardized tests.

But they aren’t primary sources. They are distinctly secondary.

So why don’t we go right to the source and ask those most in the know – classroom teachers!?

According to a Media Matters analysis of education coverage on weeknight cable news programs in 2014, only 9 percent of guests on MSNBC, CNN and Fox News were educators.

This data is a bit out of date, but I couldn’t find a more recent analysis. Moreover, it seems pretty much consistent with what I, myself, have seen in the media.

Take Wyatt Cenac’s “Problem Areas,” a comedy journalism program on HBO. The second season focuses entirely on education issues. Though Cynac interviews numerous people in the first episode (the only one I saw), he put together a panel of experts to talk about the issues that he would presumably return to throughout the season. Unfortunately, only two of these experts were classroom teachers.

There were more students (3), policy writers (3) and education journalists (3). There were just as many college professors (2), civil rights leaders (2), and politicians (2). Plus there was one historian (Diane Ravitch).

I’m not saying Cynac shouldn’t have talked to these other people. From what I’ve seen, his show is a pretty good faith attempt to talk about the issues, but in under representing classroom teachers, we’re left with a false consensus. It’s like having one climate denier debate one scientist. They aren’t equal and should not be equally represented.

And that’s as good as it gets!

Turn to most discussions of education or scholastic policy in the news and the discourse is bound to be dominated by people who are not now and have never been responsible for a class full of K-12 students.

Allowing journalists who cover education to rebrand themselves as “experts” is just not good enough.

Take it from me. Before I became a classroom teacher, I was a newspaperman, myself. Yet it’s only now that I know all that I didn’t know then.

If anyone values good, fact-based reporting, it’s me. But let’s not confuse an investigator with a practitioner. They both have important jobs. We just need to be clear about which job is being practiced when.

Reporters are not experts on the issues they cover. Certainly they know more than the average person or some political flunkey simply towing the party line. But someone who merely observes the work is not as knowledgeable as someone who does it and has done it for decades, someone with an advanced degree, dedication and a vocation in it.

Moreover, there is a chasm between education reporting and the schools, themselves, that is not present between journalists and most fields of endeavor. In the halls of academia, even the most fair-minded outsiders often are barred from direct observation of the very thing they’re trying to describe. We rarely let reporters in to our nation’s classrooms to see what’s happening for themselves. All they can do most of the time is uncritically report back what they’ve been told.

It’s almost as if sportswriters never got to see athletes play or political reporters never got to attended campaign rallies. How could their ideas about these subjects be of the same value as the practitioners in these fields!?

It couldn’t.

Think about it. Journalists are rarely permitted inside our schools to see the day-to-day classroom experience. Legal issues about which students may be photographed, filmed or interviewed, the difficulty of getting parental permissions and the possibility of embarrassment to principals and administrators usually keeps the school doors closed to them.

In many districts, teachers aren’t even allowed to speak on the record to the media or doing so can make them a political target. So reporters often have great difficulty just disclosing the opinions of those most knowledgeable about what is going on.

At best, our nation’s education reporters are like aliens from another galaxy trying to write about human behavior without actually having seen it. It’s like a bad science fiction movie where some alien with plastic ears asks, “What is this thing you call love?”

Sorry. These are not experts. And if we pretend that they are, we are being incredibly dishonest.

Some of this obfuscation is by design.

Education reporting is incredibly biased in favor of market-based solutions to academic problems.

Why? The corporations that own the shrinking number of newspapers, news stations and media outlets are increasingly the same huge conglomerates making money off of these same policies. The line between news and advertising has faded into invisibility in too many places.

Huge corporations make hundreds of millions of dollars off of the failing schools narrative. They sell new standardized tests, new test prep materials, new Common Core books, trainings for teachers, materials, etc. If they can’t demonstrate that our schools are failing, their market shrinks.

Even when they don’t put editorial pressure on journalists to write what the company wants, they hire like-minded people from the get go.

Too many education journalists aren’t out for the truth. They’re out to promote the corporate line.

This is why it’s so important to center any education discussion on classroom teachers. They are the only people with the knowledge and experience to tell us what’s really going on.

And – surprise! – it’s not the same narrative you’re getting from corporate news.

Schools are being defunded and dismantled by the testing and privatization industry. Corporate special interests are allowed to feed off our schools like vultures off road kill. And all the while, it is our children who suffer the results.

High stakes standardized testing must end. Charter and voucher schools must end. Parasitic education technologies must be controlled, made accountable and in many cases barred from our schools altogether.

But that’s a truth you can only find by talking to the real experts – classroom teachers.

Until we prize their voices above all others, we will never know the whole truth.

gadflyonthewallblog

"To sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth."

Competency Based Education

Gadfly’s Top 10 Articles of 2021 – Shouts in the Dark

10) Top 6 Administrative Failures of the Pandemic Classroom

9) Why Does Your Right to Unmask Usurp My Child’s Right to a Safe School?

8) Stop Normalizing the Exploitation of Teachers

7) Top Five Actions to Stop the Teacher Exodus During COVID and Beyond

6) I Love Teaching, But…

4) You’re Going to Miss Us When We’re Gone – What School May Look Like Once All the Teachers Quit

3) The Teacher Trauma of Repeatedly Justifying Your Right To Life During Covid

2) Teachers Are Not Okay

1) Teachers Absorb Student Trauma But Don’t Know How to Get Rid of the Pain

Why High Stakes Testing Was Cancelled This Year (and Probably Will Be Next Year, Too)

WHY TESTS WERE CANCELLED

CORPORATIONS FIRST

TESTING SECRECY

THE PSSAS

CORPORATE VULNERABILITY

THE DYSTOPIAN TESTING FUTURE

CONCLUSIONS

The First Taste is Free: Ed Tech Follows Drug Dealer Sales Techniques with Schools During Coronavirus Crisis

How Did America’s Schools Cope with Spanish Flu vs. Coronavirus?

PITTSBURGH

NEW YORK CITY

CHICAGO

SMALLER TOWNS

LAKELAND, FLORIDA

IMPLICATIONS

The Coronavirus Could Be A Big Moneymaker for EdTech Companies

Top 7 Ways Technology Stifles Student Learning in My Classroom

1) It Stops Kids from Reading

2) It’s a Distraction

3) It’s Unhealthy

4) It Costs Too Much

5) It Has Never Been Proven to Help Kids Learn

6) It Perpetuates Bad Pedagogy and Assessment

7) It Undermines Public Schools and Teachers

Classroom Teachers are the Real Scholastic Experts – Not Education Journalists

10) Top 6 Administrative Failures of the Pandemic Classroom

9) Why Does Your Right to Unmask Usurp My Child’s Right to a Safe School?

8) Stop Normalizing the Exploitation of Teachers

7) Top Five Actions to Stop the Teacher Exodus During COVID and Beyond

6) I Love Teaching, But…

5) My Students Haven’t Lost Learning. They’ve Lost Social and Emotional Development

4) You’re Going to Miss Us When We’re Gone – What School May Look Like Once All the Teachers Quit

3) The Teacher Trauma of Repeatedly Justifying Your Right To Life During Covid

2) Teachers Are Not Okay

1) Teachers Absorb Student Trauma But Don’t Know How to Get Rid of the Pain

WHY TESTS WERE CANCELLED

CORPORATIONS FIRST

TESTING SECRECY

THE PSSAS

CORPORATE VULNERABILITY

THE DYSTOPIAN TESTING FUTURE

CONCLUSIONS

PITTSBURGH

NEW YORK CITY

CHICAGO

SMALLER TOWNS

LAKELAND, FLORIDA

IMPLICATIONS

1) It Stops Kids from Reading

2) It’s a Distraction

3) It’s Unhealthy

4) It Costs Too Much

5) It Has Never Been Proven to Help Kids Learn

6) It Perpetuates Bad Pedagogy and Assessment

7) It Undermines Public Schools and Teachers