Recommend me a book that _________.

If you're wanting a high-level policy view of things, Diane Ravitch has two books that might interest you: The Death and Life of the Great American School System and Reign of Error. She's a bit of a polemicist, but I appreciate the candor she brings to the conversation.

As for a more on-the-ground view of things, I don't have a good book that captures the current experience of modern teaching, but I also tend not to read them. My Kindle is loaded up with education-related books that I've bought with the best of intentions but that I can't bring myself to actually sit down with. The demands of the career already consume large parts of time that should rightfully be considered my own. Thus, I find it hard to further immerse myself in the world of education as an act of leisure.

That said, I was a teacher in low-income schools for the first decade of my career, and one of the things I wished I could help the world see was just how different the world of poverty is from the expectations of those who've never lived through it. There's a lot of ignorance on this topic, and some of it is by design, but I genuinely believe that most people who have never experienced or interfaced with poverty first-hand do not have an adequate frame of reference for it, and that textures their beliefs, usually against compassion.

Wanting to change hearts and minds, and lacking the wherewithal to write something of substance myself, I found three books that, when read together, capture what I believe to be an honest snapshot of the grounds where poverty and education meet. Curiously enough, only one of them is directly related to education.

The first is Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities. It was published in 1991, but I can assure you it is still relevant today. In fact, that's one of its most chilling qualities: that it has maintained its relevance so far beyond its initial publication. The issues it lists with low-income schools still persist, and he wrote the book long before the accountability culture that I decried in my other post took hold. The question I've gotten most from people who've read this book are "is it really that bad?" The answer is, unconditionally, yes.

The second book is There Are No Children Here by Alex Kotlowitz. Also published in 1991, it too is sadly applicable to today. This one follows the story of two brothers as they grow up in poverty in Chicago. It covers their day-to-day lives, and while some stories of education are presented in the book, the main focus isn't on their schooling but on their life experiences. Where the first book captures the issues with schools, this captures the issues of communities and how they impact children. Your heart will break for the boys in this book, and it's important to remember that though their experiences are individual, the arcs and textures of their stories can be found in impoverished communities all across the country.

With everything so terrible, why do people do it? Why do people teach in those schools? Why do they stay? Well, the answer is included in the third book: Tattoos on the Heart by Gregory Boyle. It is about a pastor who works with gang members to rebuild their lives. You do not need to be religious to appreciate the book, and I recommend it because it captures the interpersonal humanity that can make teaching worth it in spite of everything that's wrong with it. It's also a beautiful reminder of the power of healing and compassion. Teachers do what they do because it's for the students, just as this pastor does what he does for his community. It's an enriching read, and I'm just realizing now, an answer to my own original question in this topic: it is a book that will help you, and maybe me right now, feel hopeful.

(Pinging @ainar-g for this, as they asked a similar question)

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has put a lot of money into the idea that we need to assess "teacher effectiveness." Whether this comes from a benign but misguided altruism or whether it's instead a lever by which they are helping to implement "corporate reform" is still debated, but the outcome is the same regardless of the intent: they have systematically supported the idea that American education is in crisis because of teachers' skill levels.

I won't be able to do full justice to how much of a misdirection this is, but I'll do my best to give at least a peek at why it's a transparently incorrect--quite possibly deliberately ignorant--way to address the needs of the nation. To do so, I'll have to ask you to first trust me, which is a tall order for teachers these days, as the first and foremost effect of the "teacher quality" argument is that erodes the public's faith in our ability to do our jobs. Rather than trusting us to be professionals, everyone, including students, is told that we must be closely monitored, year after year, to prove that we are effective.

Of course, "effective" has nothing to do with what any average person would consider "good teaching." Think back to your own educational experience and the teachers you loved, and you are most likely to identify the ones who inspired you, believed in you, or helped you become a better version of yourself. Furthermore, there are plenty of teachers you don't remember who had a significant impact on you, but those teachers' investments don't pay dividends until later. A teacher who teaches a small child to read has no idea what that child will go on to do with that skill. They don't know if it will unlock a life-long love of reading, or whether it'll supplement their interest in writing. Nevertheless, they lay the foundation so that the student can later flourish and have a full life, but this often isn't seen until much, much later--past graduation and beyond.

Measures of effectiveness take none of this into account. First off, they are narrowly based off of standardized test scores, which capture next to nothing about good teaching. Second, they refuse to accommodate a longitudinal and hierarchical view of education in which the impact of an individual teacher is not able to be isolated to their individual practice. Our effectiveness cannot be measured in isolation because our entire educational system is structured around being a pipeline of professionals, all working together to help students, year after year, as they progress towards graduation. We do our best teaching when we work together to help kids.

On the same note, we do our best work when we're institutionally supported to help kids. Is it fair to compare a teacher who has to spend her own money to buy paper and pencils with a teacher who has thousands of dollars of lab equipment at her disposal? Certainly not, but teacher quality arguments rarely address the systemic inequities that pervade education and instead assume a level playing field based on skill alone.

Furthermore, it's no secret that there are myriad factors outside of teacher's abilities that will affect the quality of a student's education. Poverty, parental involvement, health-care, nutrition. All of these have significant impacts on children and therefore on their education as well. Unfortunately, these often get waved away as "excuses" or, even worse, "controlled for" in the data--as if te negative effects of poverty on child development is something that can simply be smoothed over if you simply look at the data the right way.

I could continue, but I think it's worth derailing here to point out the real splinter under the skin of teacher accountability arguments. More than anything I've just said, they fundamentally put us on the defensive and make it look like we have something to hide. They are an accusation, and instead of putting the burden of proof on the accusers to prove that their implementation of data and findings are accurate, the country reverses that obligation and instead put the squeeze directly on teachers instead.

This is particularly relevant to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which uses educational funding as a petri dish for reforms. Do they know if what they are doing is effective? No! But do they move forward with it as if it is a solution rather than an experiment? Yes!

Take a look at the key findings from this report, which covers an initiative that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation not only funded, but designed.

Overall, however, the initiative did not achieve its goals for student achievement or graduation, particularly for LIM [low-income minority] students.

With minor exceptions, by 2014–2015, student achievement, access to effective teaching, and dropout rates were not dramatically better than they were for similar sites that did not participate in the Intensive Partnerships initiative.

And my absolute favorite point:

There are several possible reasons that the initiative failed to produce the desired dramatic improvement in outcomes across all years: incomplete implementation of the key policies and practices; the influence of external factors, such as state-level policy changes during the Intensive Partnerships initiative; insufficient time for effects to appear; a flawed theory of action; or a combination of these factors.

They discovered, in a study published in 2018, what teachers have been saying since accountability measures have been put in practice by No Child Left Behind in 2001--that teacher effectiveness is often hindered by "the influence of external factors" and that yearly measurements are "insufficient time for effects to appear."

The last one, "a flawed theory of action", is particularly telling, and would make a great book title for what's wrong with education in America today. The truth of the matter is that the policies that have now been implemented for decades exist in fundamental misalignent with the diagnosed issues in education. In fact, it's at an "Emperor's New Clothes" level of absurdity.

The past twenty years we've felt the squeeze of accountability culture based on the idea that schools and teachers are underperforming and that we need harsh penalties in order to get us in line. Without continued surveillance of our jobs and a fundamental mistrust in us to perform them in the absence of that surveillance, teachers would be the scourge of society--harming our kids' futures by not teaching them effectively!

This is a patently absurd diagnosis (not to mention patronizing), and to demonstrate, let's run with a line of thinking for a moment. Let's assume the very worst and believe that America really is a nation rife with very shitty teachers doing a very shitty job at teaching our very important kids. Furthermore, let's run with the assumptions implicit in teacher quality arguments and assume that if we could gather data on bad teachers and fire all of them, we'd substantially improve the quality of education nationwide.

The reason we're running in this direction is that it leads straight into a wall--one known as Teacher Shortage Areas. Turns out, we've known since 1990 that we cannot fill teaching positions adequately. In decrying a lack of qualified teachers in front of our nation's students we have buried the lede and failed to identify that it's not that we have shitty teachers in classrooms but that we lack teachers in the first place! Here's a PDF of the rundown by year and state. It's devastating. Too much to digest, really, and horrifying in its implications.

Let's zoom in on Texas for a moment, not for any other reason than the "Texas Miracle" was one of the driving rhetorical forces for implementing accountability culture in the first place. From 1993 to 2017, the state reported a shortage of math teachers. That is a span of twenty four years during which they could not find adequate teachers to fill positions. I am not choosing Texas as a cherry-picked data point. I encourage you to pick a state at random and look through its data. This problem is nationwide, and we're about to celebrate its 30th anniversary.

Jumping back to where we were, if we believe the worst in American education, and we believe that firing bad teachers is the method of action we should take, we have shot ourselves in the foot because it's not like we have this rich surplus of qualified candidates just waiting to enter the field. Furthermore, for advocates of that to ignore this reality means that they are either ignorant of it, or deliberately dismissive of it. Either one is a bad look. If you are going to speak authoritatively on education, then you have an obligation to have at least a somewhat complete picture. Or, if you have that picture but you selectively ignore pieces of it, your policy position is one that isn't operating impartially and in the best interests of our students.

I know I have been speaking mostly in the abstract, and that his has kind of turned into a rant, but the reality is that it is very hard for me to adequately capture what has gone wrong with my career in a single snapshot. I've barely scratched the surface here, and there is so much more I could go into, but I would argue that accountability culture is the largest driving force of my own personal burnout. If I had the data for it, I'd argue that it's a driving force for burnout at large. My social circles are filled with ex-teachers. My husband is an ex-teacher. My sister is an ex-teacher. Both of them left the field and took significant pay cuts to do so, identifying that the quality of life of a sustainable job superseded the higher income offered by teaching. And it's not like they were even raking it in with a teacher's salary in the first place!

My aunt just retired from teaching, and when I last met up with her, her first question to me wasn't "how's the job going?" but "do you think you'll make it?", as in "make it to retirement." I have coworkers in their 50s who have less than 10 years until they're out, wondering whether they'll be able to last that long.

The current culture of education is toxic. It is hostile to both teachers and students. It is not only eroding my faith in a profession I once loved but it is eroding my students' belief in education as an institution. It erodes parents' faith in our ability to do what's best for their children. Schools are no longer driven by passion, discovery, and richness but by an ill-advised, illogical, and patently destructive chase of data for purposes either orthogonal or antithetical to good teaching practices.

If I ran my classroom the way our national education platform is run today, I would punish my lowest performing students. I would kick them out of my classroom. I would hound the other students with threats to get Bs on my tests, or else. I wouldn't praise their creativity, kindness, or any other positive human quality we want in kids. I wouldn't support them when they are hurting, or find ways to help them out with issues outside the school. I wouldn't direct them to pursue their passions. In fact, I'd argue that their passions were detrimental to the goals that I've imposed on them--goals in which they have no say and which have no benefit to them.

Instead, I would have a rigid, militaristic and holistically negative focus on "achievement," and I would treat anything other than this solitary focus as a distraction or excuse.

You can imagine how terrible the kids would feel in my class.

And that's how we feel as teachers.