Steven Singer goes through the long list of failed innovations that “Reformers” have foisted on the schools.
Think how many billions have been wasted on standardized tests, interim assessments, data coaches, test-based evaluations, Common Core, etc.
He has an idea for an innovation that he is certain will make a difference: more people.
Have you walked into a public school lately? Peak your head into the faculty room. It’s like snatching a glance of the flying Dutchman. There are plenty of students, but at the front of the overcrowded classrooms, you’ll find a skeleton crew.
Today’s public schools employ 250,000 fewer people than they did before the recession of 2008–09. Meanwhile enrollment has increased by 800,000 students. So if we want today’s children to have not better but just the same quality of services kids received in this country only a decade ago, we’d need to hire almost 400,000 more teachers!
Instead, our children are packed into classes of 25, 30 even 40 students!
And the solution is really pretty simple – people not apps. Human beings willing and able to get the job done.
If we were fighting a war, we’d find ways to increase the number of soldiers in our military. Well, this is a war on ignorance – so we need real folks to get in the trenches and win the battle.
We need teachers, counselors, aides and administrators promoted from within and not functionaries from some think tank’s management program.
We need more people with masters or even more advanced teaching degrees – not business students with a three-week crash course in education under their belts who are willing to teach for a few years before becoming a self-professed expert and then writing education policy in the halls of government.
We need people from the community taking a leadership role deciding how our schools should be run, not simply appointing corporate lackeys to these positions at charter or voucher schools and narrowing down the only choices parents have to “Take It” or “Leave It.”
We need people. Real live people who can come into our schools and do the actual work with students.
What an idea! Real people to do the work, instead of machines!
Thats innovation!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
For many years I worked in a diverse school district that took its mission to educate all to the best of their ability seriously. Fortunately, I retired before the worst of deform hit the fan. This district deployed many staff members to serve the neediest students. In addition to counselors and nurses, the district hired teaching assistants for K-2 and Title 1 teachers, translators, social workers and family resource center directors. We also had librarians in each school library. This education is not cheap, but it is effective. About 90% of the students went to college or post secondary training, and most of the students went on to have middle class careers. It is an integrated school district. Separate is never equal.
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Innovation is not the latest shiny thing or craze. Finally doing what we’ve known makes sense all along is innovative! Yes, hire more teachers to reduce class size and attend to kids academic, social, and psychological needs. Wow, it’s brilliant. Let’s do it. Demand it.
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The primary fact about teaching is that THERE IS NEVER ENOUGH TIME. People are continually stressed out in middle schools and high schools because they are teaching six or seven classes a day, with three- to five-minutes’ time between each, and then they have coaching and tutoring and car line and lunch room duties on top of that and endless paperwork. The pace is FRANTIC, and as a result, a) teachers are mostly stressed out and b) they don’t have the time in their schedules to do proper planning, reflection, and collaboration. Officially, state limits for class size in Florida, where I taught most recently, were as follows:
But it was common for me to have 35 kids in a class. I taught seven classes, and the average class size was about 28. So, that’s 196 students. As all English teachers know, it’s important for kids to write a LOT. Only by doing it do you get any better at it. But suppose that I assigned a single five-paragraph theme to my 196 students. That’s 980 paragraphs–roughly the size of a couple novels. But these are novel-length works filled, in every line, just about, with errors in grammar, usage, mechanics, style, sense, coherence, unity, formatting, documentation, and so on–so reading them and commenting on them is slow going.
And in such circumstances I would read pieces published by The Thomas B. Fordham Institute and other Gates shill and shell organizations about how “class size doesn’t matter” because Gates had tried smaller schools and smaller classes, and this didn’t affect test scores, which, of course, in Ed Deformers’ minds are all that matters. And I would contemplate the irony of these people who must never have set foot in a classroom as a teacher, these utter morons, billing themselves as pundits and “Thought Leaders” in American education.
Class size is an issue, but so, importantly, is class load. To do their jobs properly, teachers in middle and high schools need HALF the number of classes that they have so that they can devote the rest of their time to a) planning lessons, b) reviewing curriculum, c) learning about new pedagogical strategies, d) tutoring kids who need particular help, and, importantly, e) collaborating with other teachers in quality circles.
And the schedules of the kids are also insane. Here, a piece on that topic: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/17/one-way-to-make-high-school-suck-less/
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But Ed Deformers want to reform education on the cheap. Put 400 kids in a room with a proctor and some depersonalized education software. In other words, they want to take things in precisely the opposite direction from where we need to go.
Class size matters, but, and this is REALLY IMPORTANT, so does class load.
When I was in college years ago, professors would complain if they were given three instead of two classes to teach in a given semester. Four was considered an insane workload. And, in fact, it’s a LOT, more than most people can teach well.
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The class load issue never gets talked about because people have become so inured to our insane way of doing things that they think it sensible. It’s not. Real learning involves estrangement from the familiar, from stepping back from it and rethinking it and seeing it with fresh eyes. The Aztecs must have thought it normal to conduct human sacrifices because this utterly insane thing was FAMILIAR. Well, our class loads are like that. As the late, great novelist David Foster Wallace pointed out, ask a fish how the water is, and the fish will say, “What water?” We don’t see the familiar, even when it’s completely crazy-making.
Let’s talk class size AND CLASS LOAD.
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This pretty much sums up my life as a teacher, Bob. Thanks for writing it.
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Or let’s approach this in another way. In my school, teachers were required to post online 2 grades per student per week. I had 196 students, so that’s 392 grades. Here’s a stack of student writing, tests, and worksheets for you to grade. So, how long will that take? Suppose that each piece takes, to low-ball it, 3 minutes. That’s 1,176 minutes. Divide that by 60, and you get 19.6 hours. Now, when grading, you will occasionally have to look up from it–to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water or whatever. So, let’s say 22 hours. The average school day in the US is about 7 hours. So, that’s 35 hours a week. We’re already up to 57 hours. Add the time spent supervising car line, coaching, fulfilling ongoing certification requirements (English teachers in Florida have to take 300 hours of online ESL courses, for example), tutoring before or after school, putting up bulletin boards and data walls, posting required material on one’s whiteboard, preparing written lesson plans, meeting the incessant demands from admin for other paperwork, filling out IEP and 504 reports. Suddenly, we’re talking a 70-hour week. But not a normal office-type week, in which one can sit back at a meeting or head to the coffee room or go out for a leisurely lunch. No, we’re talking about 35+ of those hours requiring constant vigilance. But, hey, in exchange for this, you get paid about what the person who bags your food at a grocery does.
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Bob,
You might be interested in a piece of software called Grade Scope (www.gradescope.com). It has cut my grading time by at least 75%.
It saves time by eliminating all the data entry, grouping like answers together so you grade them all at the same time, and your grading based on your rubric so you only have to write the feedback once, but it will appear on each student’s work.
I can turn around over 250 single page assignments in less than 2 hours, including recording the grades to the LMS system, notifying the students that the grading has been done, and returning the work to them as a PDF through email.
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I use ZIPGrade. But, of course, it only works with multiple-choice, true/false, and other so-called “objective” format student answers. For reading their writing, I could, I suppose, employ elves.
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But yes, thanks TE. It’s interesting that this software seems capable of doing optical character recognition. So it might work with some short-answer stuff.
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For me, not having to scroll through the class roster and type in a score saves enough time to make it worth using the software even for the long free response questions that I ask in my large classes.
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Career Teaching IS Innovative Disruption.
-My new mantra
The best move I made after I earned my doctorate in 2006 was to remain a classroom teacher in Title I high schools. What joy to be a Latin teacher. Thanks for that invitation to new colleagues, Diane.
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Brilliant, Kelley. You remind me of a comment received here some years ago in a discussion of test-based evaluation (VAM). A teacher of Japanese said she was totally fearless because none of the tests for her subject could be used for VAM and she had no peer evaluators and her administrators had no idea what she was teaching because she was the only person in the building who understood Japanese. Maybe as a Latin teacher, you are in the same protected position!
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Student compositions: filled, in every line, just about, with errors in grammar, usage, mechanics, style, sense, coherence, unity, formatting, documentation, fact, and so on. You know, like a speech by Donald Trump, but with far fewer lies
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Reblogged this on What's Gneiss for Education.
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Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
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It’s a wonderful time to be a public school Latin teacher, Diane et al. In addition to the prescribed curriculum, I get to teach mythology, the Greek alphabet, Roman numerals, Latin phrases & abbreviations, pharmacy terms—-yes, about the same things that Mason Classical Academy teaches (charter school in Collier County whose student demographics do NOT reflect the district demographics. This is the school which Erika Donalds co-founded—her husband is in the FL House).
In a public neighborhood school.
—A Title I high school
—And we’ve competed successfully at the regional, state & national levels
Thanks, students, families & admin. for your support.
Career teaching is Innovative Disruption.
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Kelley, that’s a great line. I may steal it.
Career teaching is Innovative Disruption.
Isn’t it great to do work that you love?
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I am thrilled you are keeping the classics alive.
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