Chris Osmond PhD

I am horrified by the Wisconsin legislature’s end-run on teachers’ collective bargaining rights last week, but thrilled by the national conversation on teacher quality and compensation that it’s triggered. Today we see heavyweight Nicholas Kristof weighing in with a great summary of the issue and the stakes, and I am right with him through most of it.

But things break down for me when he echoes pervasive, common-sense calls for greater accountability re: teacher quality –

The teachers’ unions have a point when they complain that existing measurement and evaluation systems are haphazard, but they can be improved — and it’s absurd to say that just because something is difficult to quantify, everybody should be paid the same. It’s difficult to measure or quantify who is a better journalist, or a better lawyer, or a better doctor, but no one thinks that their compensation should be lockstep.

Okay – but actually, doctor quality is quite readily quantified these days as number of patients seen and, sometimes number of tests run and procedures performed. Whether or not it SHOULD be is another question altogether, as the doctors themselves know. In my four years on faculty at a major academic medical center, I saw doctors’ compensation increasingly linked to “thruput,” with bonuses and possible pay docking held over their head to keep the numbers high. It’s a perfect example of “seeing like a state:” counting what can be counted, even if it doesn’t measure what’s most worth measuring. Quantifying doctor quality to link it to compensation, Mr. Kristof, is equally troubling, though no less pervasive.

But then he notes research linking long-term earning potential to early-grades teacher quality, and the comparison really goes off the rails. Imagine for a moment attempting to draw a similar line in medicine – linking, for example, a patient’s cardiovascular health at 65 to the accuracy of an annual physical he received at 40 and using that to determine how good the doctor was who did the exam. Hear the cry: “Absurd! So many other factors came into play – I couldn’t control whether he came back for follow-up, let alone whether or not he quit smoking.” And yet we are comfortable making such long-range assessments of teachers absent meaningful control for social factors (let alone political will to fund measures to address them). In education, we yearn for a pin with a head big enough to fit all the angels that impact student success, the better to count them. But value-added models ain’t it.

Also, reputation accrues to successful physicians, and behind it comes greater compensation as they enter private practice, raise their fees, and generally surf the meritocratic wave that medicine is first among the professions in rewarding. In contrast, how is a teacher recognized for a career-long record of excellence in the almost wholly-unmeasurable register of positive impact on kids’s lives? Reputation, yes, and sometimes pay increase through promotion to one of the more prestigious administrative jobs, which usually takes them away from kids. And tenure, that troubling sop whose history I have not totally grokked yet. (Here’s a California perspective, and a New York one. Anyone else got a link to share?)

And yes, teachers who don’t want to go into administration pursue graduate study for a pay bump (one that can charitably be viewed as getting them to a comfortable standard-of-living, remember – forget supporting a family on it alone, at least in my state). I wonder if grad school for teachers isn’t also a gambit for the respect that might accrue to the letters, some token to mark achievement in a field that barely knows how to. For Arnie Duncan (and Bill Gates), linking advanced degrees to pay raises is on the block now too, as Kristof notes – though he elides the accompanying assertion that advanced study in the field itself (biology for a science teacher, say) SHOULD be unproblematically rewarded. This assertion, whoever makes it, seems woefully ignorant of well-established understanding that knowing a subject well is NOT the same as knowing how to teach it well, pace Lee Shulman and the reams of understanding he opened.

So I think I’m on Kristof’s team today, and certainly applaud his outrage at the recent swipes at the teaching profession. As long as we can bear in mind just how hard it is to measure a great teacher. And if we note just how comfortable we seem as a culture allowing other professions their complexity (and self-governance) while de-skilling and disrespecting teaching as a matter of public policy. Maybe one of the reasons why we’re so comfortable doing so is that we spend most of our formative years watching teacher work: familiarity breeds contempt, a point better made elsewhere. I am happy to see others decry that contempt today. What do you think?

 

 

 

 

The world does not need another fanboy post about Radiohead. I get it.

But my recent experience with 1997’s OK Computer has me thinking about some pretty trenchant education topics, so here I go. (Plus, many of my students were six years old – six! – when it dropped, so I wonder if some might find this heads-up as useful as I found Greil Marcus‘ stuff on Elvis’ “Sun Sessions,” Gang of Four, and The Band. Trying to raise all the boats here).

When OK Computer came out, much was made of its icy technicality. Many reviewers, up against deadline, called it “Punk Floyd” or something in that vein, reaching for the last record that drew heavily on “spacey sound” veranacular and spacious tempos to try to evoke what they were hearing. Fair enough, on first pass: there’s a lot of tech in this record for sure, a lot of crafted sounds that use obscure technologies, digital and analog.

But other aspects of the record are obscured by this characterization: namely, its raging humanness, under all of the bleeps and bloops. Revisiting it (as a drummer, granted), I can’t get over how much rattling and jangling goes on in the background. Claves, tambourines, jingle bells, cowbells: there is always an ancient, percussive technology clanging alongside the electric stuff, giving the tracks aural space and presence and reminding us that there are hands attached to these voices and instruments.

There’s also the fact that 80% of the record was recorded live – if Wikipedia is to be believed – partly in a converted shed, and partly in Jane Seymour’s famous mansion where so much sonic shenanigan has gone down. I have played on enough recordings to know how easy it is for a record to get made at the mixing table; how the way a lick gets played once in a take can be copied and pasted throughout the track, resulting in a carefully crafted exquisite corpse of a song that is, alas, still a corpse. This record wasn’t like that: it went for the energy of people playing together, finding the technical and mystical synergies that always come from sharing time and space, attentively, with people who also share your goals.

Maybe that’s the humanness I hear in the most powerful moments of the record. When the bottom drops out three minutes into Climbing Up The Walls, for example, our vertigo is due as much to the chord changes as to the sonic devastation of guitars and drums. That’s a simple, simple progression – my seven year-old son, with a working musical vocabulary of ten pop songs, has worked out as much on the piano – but it sucker-punches us for the same reason that Amazing Grace does. Ones, Fours, and Fives are the language we all speak emotionally in this culture, regardless of the technologies used to articulate them. This record gets that.

So , where’s the education in all this? I guess it’s in how the record helps me understand what Roland Tharp would call “intersubjectivity,” and its related concept “propinquity.” The first I take to mean the unique pedagogical power evoked by being joined with others in a shared pursuit. The second, the actual energy created by physical and temporal proximity: sharing time and space with people, right here, right now. Technology in education is often decried as a force that will separate us from our students and each other, or heralded as the silver bullet that well help us draw closer. In fact, I think “technologies” have always been a powerful part of learning; books are technologies too, after all, and chalkboards, as surely as tambourines and Humbuckers are.

What seems more important to me is attending to how we use those technologies. As long as we sit in a circle, joining our energies around common goals, it doesn’t much matter whether we are banging on rocks with sticks or reading off our iPads or hobnobbing in SecondLife. We need a purpose, and a text in common, and we need each other to help find our way through what happens next.

That’s all I got right now. I have discovered that blogging is seductive – it FEELS like actual work, when there is so much else to do! So going forward I am trying to limit my posts to 30 minutes. Seeking the liberating power of constraint, as my beloved poetry professor Tony Connor once called it.

What do you think?

My head’s buzzing after last night’s Grammys. To wit:

1 – I do not dig The Arcade Fire. I respect them, I get them, and I am thrilled to see Merge Records get this big boost, but the band itself leaves me cold. The thing is, they seem so serious about NOT leaving me cold. Their every muscle onstage is deadly earnest, overwrought. No drum is hit without echoing Agincourt and every hope and dream ever hatched and crushed. All four-by-four driving rhythms and major chords, serious as Suzuki piano lessons. It’s frankly a bit exhausting; it’s one note to me, a note that was compelling when I first hear it in “Wake Up,” but now just seems like way too much. The strobe light assault didn’t help. It seemed to embody everything wrong about them.

It is not that I do not love the music of uplift, of getting sanctified. AF clearly explores territory opened by U2, the band that Sasha Frere-Jones notes traffics almost exclusively in “uplift.” But Bono’s diva act is always shot through (at least since Achtung Baby) with a wicked sense of humor, with the possibility that he is messing with us. That note of humor both lets us enjoy U2’s beautiful surfaces and respond emotionally when they bring the emotional punch they so frequently do. In other words: by NOT being earnest all the time, they are able to KILL with earnestness when they want to.

See? If all you are is earnest, you can never really make an impression on anybody. You need to be able to relax into your earnestness, to allow the humor in, to let the audience find what you bring rather than battering them with what you want them to get.

2 – While thinking on the diva-ness of Win Butler (the guy out front in Arcade Fire), I got to thinking about the diva who was honored at the outset last night: Aretha Franklin, not in attendance but lauded by a devastating five-gun tribute medley. What did Aretha have, I wondered, that Arcade Fire does not? Putting aside genre, passage of time, etc – why do I respond so to her songs, still, when AF leaves me cold?

So this morning I listened to “Respect” five times – really listened, for the first time in years if ever. And what was most amazing was how confident Aretha is in what she is doing. To listen to her lead is to understand why the rest of the performance comes together so magically: she is so assured that the famous Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section can play with her, not at her. How else to account for the drummer’s stutter-swing on the hi-hat, the loose crush rolls and the funky little flam he slaps down on the way into “sock it to me”? He’s not “hammering it down,” and nor is the bass player whose thumping around all that funky junk – instead they are showing up to have fun with Aretha, not behind her. The magic, slippy-slidely feel of the track is borne of the looseness and ease that her confident lead affords. I am not saying the band in and of themselves were not legendary, but they didn’t sound like this with everyone (Wikipedia tells me they also backed the Osmonds’ first hit, which does not have the same ineffable quality to say the least IMHO). And I wonder at whether her confidence is somehow connected to her gospel roots – the fact that since she is consecrated to Sunday morning, she can relax like this on Saturday night. In any case, she can show up and do what she does, making space for others to explore alongside her rather than battering down the door toward her objective. Or something like that.

This seems to have deep importance for the work of teaching (huh? Stay with me). The contrast invites reflection on what is lost by overwhelming, laser-like focus on one outcome – how so many peripheral results of our actions as teachers (or artists) get lost when the only thing we care about is the outcome we have our eye on. Lacan says something like this when he theorizes jouissance as the pleasure of unpredictability and danger, vs plaisir as the pleasure of meeting predicted goals, attaining anticipated satisfactions. So does Dewey when he described “flexible purposing” in Art as Experience. More vivid, maybe,  is Princess Leia’s rejoinder to Governor Tarkin when he insists the Empire is about to crush the Rebellion: “the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.” It’s a pretty big issue, and a tough argument to make in the world of “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” But strobe-light, battering-ram curriculum can only accomplish one thing, if that, and leaves out so much that an approach valuing obliqueness, space, possibility, can bring.

3 – My last diva must be Christina Aguilera, who made my night with her stunning read of Aretha’s “Ain’t No Way” and more than redeemed her Super Bowl National Anthem flub. But consider: I am sure she’s sung “Ain’t No Way” a hundred times to herself, in the car and the shower, in thrall to its gorgeousness. So have I. Who has done as much with the National Anthem? How could she drop a word or a note last night? She was in that magical place where what she desperately wanted to do aligned perfectly with the task at hand: the pedagogical moment, if you will, I think Marshall MacLuhan had in mind when he noted that “anyone who makes a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know a thing about either.” Or so I was reminded, witnessing her valentine to Ms. Franklin last night.

No more time to work this through today. What do you think?

c

Thanks to Rob Helfenbein at IUPUI for sharing this via Facebook.

http://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/why-i-am-not-a-defender-of-the-status-quo-in-education-because-the-status-quo-is-failed-ed-reforms/

I am grateful for the bright line it draws between competition and privatization, which so many students don’t see initially. And why would they? We are easily dazzled by the idea that “competition encourages innovation” when it is divorced from its free-market roots. Ditto the links Peters makes between “rock-star” reformers and the appeal of Teach for America, which hurts the “professionalism” our field ostensibly seeks by reducing what it requires to a good heart and a degree – in anything – from a fancy school.

Which rolls me back to the question I can’t stop thinking about: is teaching a profession at all? Yes – if by profession we mean an endeavor that is hard, requires specialized skills, and is worthy of respect, which is what my students take the word to mean initially. But no, if by profession we mean a body of knowledge that only we own, and that we control access to. That’s part of how medicine became our culture’s profession ne plus ultra: by systematically trashing everything else as quackery, and therefore limiting access to who got to be called a “doctor” to those who agreed with them.

It seems to me TFA is bad for education on the first count, because part of how it works is by bringing the reflected light of the attractive and well-educated to shine on the poor and unsexy teaching job (while burnishing resumes with extremely desirable evidence of altruistic concern in a tough job market – sorry, that’s probably too cynical to say without documentation). In other words: your main qualification for being a teacher in TFA is being demonstrably smart already, not the five-week training you have to do (which is presumably all you need to get what my students take four years for).You don’t really need anything else, it says, and thus perpetuates a culturally-desirable but harmful untruth.

But then my criticism is vulnerable on the second count – because isn’t Ed school a place where the specialized skill of teaching is imparted to only those we see fit to have it? And am I not pulling a medical move by calling TFA “not really teaching”?

A little bit, and I think we can benefit from the critique: if we in the Ed school are making the simple complicated, only to ensure we are needed to help figure out the thorny problems we pose, then sure. (See this very funny Slate piece on architecture last week – I think we can all stand to have the air let out of us a bit). And definitely if social foundations classes like the ones I teach only bemoan how insoluble the world’s social ills are without affording future teachers a way through. But generally, I do not think that’s what Ed schools do. They try to provide exactly the sort of close attention to the challenges of the classroom that’s needed, and if they do their job they also provide time and space for students to settle into the contours of a life that is, after all, at least as much avocation as employment. Ed schools can’t really be tarred with the Med school brush, I don’t think.

Maybe the difference is in where the lines that are drawn around a profession lead. After all, when allopathic medicine closed down all the other healers’ shops, it got rich on the market it created. Ed schools aren’t getting rich – though of course they do need funding. Some might say they have been supported till now without accountability for their results, and that NCATE’s data-driven clampdown on measurable results is therefore required in order to justify their continued support. I personally see that phenomenon as far better explained by Peter Taubman’s perspective (in Teaching by Numbers, 2009): the ways Ed schools are being asked to prove their success are incommensurate with the stated goals of such oversight, and better explained as a “death of a thousand cuts”. There’s a lot more going on in that particular common-sense assault than I can gloss over here. (Get the book!)

Maybe it’s important to note that education, unlike medicine, is BOTH something everyone can do (every parent teaches, and every older brother or sister) AND something that it takes more focused attention and well-developed skills to do (when the goal isn’t teaching one child to ride a bike with unlimited time, but rather to teach thirty to read by Christmas). TFA conflates the two definitions into one, which ends up treating the goal like it’s riding a bike because that behooves the larger, control / privatization goals of those who characterize it as such. And maybe the greater concern, as is well-noted in the piece, is that most of these teachers all leave when two years is up, decimating any stable culture or longitudinal focus on kids. To strain the metaphor: it’s great to teach bike-riding on a sunny afternoon, but who lives in the home, and is there when the sun goes down?

That’s as far as I can get it this morning. What do you think?

Check out this broadcast of WFAE’s “Charlotte Talks,” which discusses upcoming funding challenges in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools but along the way gives some insight into the “audit culture” as it looks in school right now. I only heard the first 15 min live but imagine the rest of the hour is also time well-spent.

http://wfae.org/wfae/19_100_0.cfm?id=6878&action=display

What most got my attention was the amount of data being gathered as part of teacher performance review – the form so long the reporter thought she was being handed a whole stack of them.

Chris

CMS Reporters Roundtable
Education in Mecklenburg County is in the news once again. As budget concerns and cuts loom for next year, parents, teachers, administrators and students alike are anxious about what the cuts will be and how they’ll affect our schools. Today we’re joined by a panel of journalists who cover education in our county. We’ll discuss the proposed cuts, what the next steps are and how Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools plans to continue offering a quality public education when faced by significant cuts several years in a row.

Guests
Lisa Miller – Reporter, WFAE, covers education
Eric Frazier – Reporter, The Charlotte Observer, covers social media and education
Ann Doss Helms – Education Reporter, The Charlotte Observer