Teachers Archives • Page 4 of 5 • FreshEd

2019, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Social Movements, Teachers, Unions

Eric Blanc
Red State Revolt

Teachers are striking across America. From Arizona to Oklahoma to West Virginia, teachers are not simply demanding higher pay. They are also demanding better learning conditions for students and better working conditions for all state employees. And they are succeeding.

Many of these industrial workplace actions are taking place in states that have passed right-to-work laws, meaning workers cannot be compelled to join a union or pay union dues as a condition of employment. The strikes are also happening in the states that Trump won in 2016. So what does this mean for public education generally and the 2020 US presidential election?

My guest today is Eric Blanc, the author of the new book Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics (Verso 2019). Eric is a journalist and a former high school teacher and has followed the on-the-ground developments of the Los Angeles, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Denver, and Oakland public education strikes.

Citation: Blanc, Eric, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 161, podcast audio, July 1, 2019. https://www.freshedpodcast.com/blanc/

Transcript, Translation, and Resources:

July 1, 2019/by Will Brehm

2018, Children, Law, Race, Teachers

Justin Driver
Constitutional Law and Public Schools, Part 2

OverviewTranscriptTranslationResources

Today I continue my two-part conversation with Justin Driver, the author of the new book, The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind.

In today’s episode, Justin recounts his biography from growing up in Washington DC to clerking for two Supreme Court justices.

Justin takes us through some of the Supreme Court cases involving public schools he thinks are most important but that receive little attention today.

He also looks to the future given the recent confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Justin Driver is the Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School. His book, The Schoolhouse Gate (2018 Pantheon), is receiving rave reviews. The New York Times called it “indispensable” while the Washington Post called it “masterful.”

Citation: Driver, Justin, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 135, podcast audio, November 19, 2018. https://freshedpodcast.com/driver-p2/

Will Brehm 2:11
Justin Driver, welcome to FreshEd.

Justin Driver 2:13
Glad to be with you, Will. Thanks.

Will Brehm 2:15
Another tactic that you talk about in the sort of post-Brown era is this idea of color blindness. Can you explain how that has been used to sort of advance a particular agenda that might be counter to what Brown ruled?

Justin Driver 2:31
Yeah, so the colorblind notion of the 14th Amendment says that governmental entities are almost always prohibited from taking account of race no matter the purpose. And so Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion in Parents Involved can be seen as being about a colorblind vision of constitutional law. And of course, that vision of constitutional law has important implications for our higher education in thinking about the realm of affirmative action. And this is, you know, of course, the subject of a lawsuit that involves Harvard College right now. Interestingly, in the Parents Involved case, Justice Kennedy sort of disavowed the notion that the Equal Protection clause requires colorblindness. He voted to invalidate the programs in Louisville and Seattle because they classify individual students according to race. But he did insist that schools could take account of race, therefore not be colorblind, when they are drawing district boundaries in an effort to bring about racial integration or when they are citing schools, when they were building a new school, they can be aware of the racial demographics of the city as a whole and try to foster racial integration in that way. So, this is one area where we may see his replacement, Justice Kavanaugh, take a more conservative line in this area.

Will Brehm 4:14
So, it is quite interesting that you know, what you said at the beginning of our conversation where schools are typically the first encounter of the government for people, for young adults, for children, for citizens. But yet we see this struggle constantly of constitutional rights stopping at “the schoolhouse gate” to use the title of your book. So, what have you found to be sort of the common arguments in favor of limiting the Supreme Court’s reach into schools?

Justin Driver 4:47
Yeah, there are a host of arguments that recur in this area. Perhaps the foremost is that people say, well, Supreme Court Justices are not teachers, and they do not know what is happening in public schools. They also say that the schools are quintessentially local endeavors, and therefore the federal government should play no role whatsoever in this area. And then perhaps the other final reason would be that the Constitution of the United States does not mention education. I don’t find any of those arguments persuasive, and when one notes that all three of these arguments were advanced by the proponents of Jim Crow during the era of Brown v. Board of Education, it seems to me that we should all be less accepting of the power of those arguments. This isn’t to say that every dispute in the schoolhouse should make its way into a federal courthouse. But it does suggest that we should not just reflexively accept those arguments.

Will Brehm 6:09
So, I want to ask how you first got involved in studying education law. Where did you end up going to school in America? Like public school or private school? What is your background in schooling and legal issues in America?

Justin Driver 6:27
Yeah, so I grew up in Washington, DC. I grew up in South East Washington, DC, east of the Anacostia River. Starting from a very young age, I traveled way to upper Northwest Washington, the most privileged segment of Washington, DC, and in order to do that, I caught a bus to two different subway lines, and then had a long walk, and as I would undergo this daily trek round trip, I would think, what am I gaining as a result of this journey? Conversely, what are my neighbors not gaining? I can remember learning about Brown v. Board of Education right around 1985 and thinking that in the nation’s capital within shouting distance of the Supreme Court’s marble palace, there are still some schools that are all black, and that suggested to me that there’s often a large gap between law on the books and life on the streets. And then, when I graduated from college, I very much thought I was going to be a public-school teacher for the rest of my life. I got certified to teach public school and taught AP US history and civics to ninth graders. And when I was doing that, I had some vague sense that there were constitutional decisions that shaped the schoolhouse, but I would have been hard pressed to identify, say, Tinker v. Des Moines. And so, one of the goals that I have for this book is to render, in an accessible way, the origins of students’ constitutional rights, and the contours of students’ constitutional rights in a way that, not just lawyers but ordinary folks, including, you know, educators and principals and even enterprising high school students can understand. And so that’s sort of one of the major audiences for this book.

Will Brehm 8:28
And eventually, you end up being a clerk for two Supreme Court Justices. I think it was Justice Breyer and also Sandra Day O’Connor. Did you end up talking to them a lot about education and, you know, constitutional issues inside public schools?

Justin Driver 8:46
I did, yes. Both Justice Breyer and Justice O’Connor played no small role in motivating me to undertake this project. Not by directly encouraging me but through my interactions with them. You know, Justice O’Connor, when I was with her, was a retired Justice, and she had begun to shift her attention to thinking about the importance of civics. She was very disheartened to think about the way in which many young people don’t understand even foundational concepts of our government. And so, she was interested in trying to promote civic awareness about the separation of powers. My goal here is to do a similar sort of thing. That is to say, I believe that if students can think about their own rights, that as they exist within the schools, that it may make studying the constitution a more accessible, you know, sort of document. And so, I do hope that this will make people have greater amounts of awareness of constitutional rights generally, but if you can reach students at an impressionable age in a way that they will have a great ability to apprehend what’s going on, I think that that will lay an important foundation. Justice Breyer was also important. When I was with him, two of the cases that I write about in the book were decided, the ‘Bong Hits 4 Jesus’ case and also the ‘Parents Involved’ case. And he dedicated enormous amounts of time to thinking about both of these cases. And in doing so underscored to me the importance of constitutional decisions in schools for our nation’s larger constitutional order. You know, his father was an attorney for the school board in San Francisco, and he would often talk about how important that work was. And so, both Justice Breyer and Justice O’Connor did play, as I say, a significant role in motivating me to think about this work.

Will Brehm 10:54
Was there ever a time where you disagreed with them on some educational issue?

Justin Driver 10:59
I hold both of the Supreme Court Justices in very high esteem. I felt very lucky to be a law clerk there, and I viewed it as my job to help them with their jobs. You know, I now view the ‘Bong Hits 4 Jesus’ case in a way that is different from how Justice Breyer would have resolved it. Justice Breyer would have resolved the case along grounds of something called “qualified immunity”, and therefore not reached the underlying first amendment question. He did not go so far as to say that Joseph Frederick did not have a First Amendment right here, but he just wouldn’t have reached the question. I would have, you know, now today certainly have joined the opinion that Justice Stevens wrote, saying that punishing Joseph Frederick for this sort of speech violated his freedom of speech rights.

Will Brehm 12:00
So, returning to some of these cases and topics that your book very carefully details -both the public opinion, the Justice opinions, even the legal opinions in a lot of these journals that are published at the time- one of the topics that really stuck out to me was corporal punishment. I had absolutely no idea that this was still legal in America, let alone practiced -well, quite a lot in a few states- and more importantly that there was a clear racial difference between which students were receiving corporal punishment and which were not. And in this case, it was more African American students receiving corporal punishment. So, has the court ruled on corporal punishment, and what was some of their logic behind these rulings?

Justin Driver 12:52
Yeah, this is the issue that I care the most about that I cover in the entire book. The, in my view, scandalous persistence of corporal punishment. The Supreme Court in the 1970s had an opportunity to rein in corporal punishment in a case called Ingraham v. Wright. The case arose from truly egregious facts. James Ingraham was a middle school student in Florida, and he was on stage with some of his friends during an assembly, and he was instructed to depart the stage and did so with an insufficient sense of alacrity. For that pretty classic Middle School behavior, he was summoned to the principal’s office to receive five licks in the parlance, and that is to say, he was going to be struck with a two-foot-long wooden paddle. When his turn arose, he protested his innocence, and two assistant principals grabbed him, bent him over the principle’s desk, held down his arms and his legs, and he received not five licks but 20 licks. And this beating was so savage that even three days later he had a bruise that was six inches in diameter, that was tender, swollen, and purplish in color, and also oozing fluid. So, you would be hard-pressed to imagine a more, sort of, shocking set of facts than those that existed at Charles R. Drew Junior High School, James Ingraham’s school. It was an all-black school. And James Ingraham’s treatment was part of a larger reign of terror that existed where students were beaten for sitting in the wrong seat, for wearing the wrong socks to gym class, you know, for just incredibly minor infractions. And the school district, when they defended this policy, ended up making matters worse. There was a principal from a school in Miami Beach who said, “Oh, no, we don’t use corporal punishment in this school. We have a predominantly Jewish population, and they understand oral persuasion”. The implication there, of course, is that the black students at Charles R. Drew Junior High School understand only brute force. And so, the Supreme Court of the United States, it was a very odd opinion of five to four decision, Justice Powell said this does not qualify as punishment for constitutional purposes. The Eighth Amendment, of course, prohibits cruel and unusual punishment, but Justice Powell said, that, in effect means cruel and unusual punishment that stems from a criminal conviction. And so it was a very surprising decision because only a few years earlier, the federal courts got rid of what was called “the strap” in prison, meaning hitting inmates, and people thought, well, if you can’t hit people who have been convicted of crimes for not following orders, there’s no way in the world that you’re going to be able to hit public school students. But the Supreme Court did not see it that way and exactly as you suggest, Will, this is not just a historical artifact. Corporal punishment still exists. There are 19 states that have it, but in some ways that overstates its prevalence because there are five states that account for more than 70% of the instances of corporal punishment. And if there’s any, as I say, single goal that I have for this book, that it elevates the salience of corporal punishment and invites the Supreme Court to revisit this issue because I don’t think that the jurisdictions that retain this practice at this late date are going to abandon it on their own.

Will Brehm 16:38
And what is the constitutional issue at play for corporal punishment in your eyes?

Justin Driver 16:43
Yeah, so the strongest claim would be the Eighth Amendment claim, and I think that this is an argument that would appeal to liberals, but also the libertarian inflected vision of constitutional law that is ascendant in some right-leaning circles. If you are a libertarian, you have a skepticism of state authority. And in what instance could it be starker where the state is exercising dominion over an individual than physically hitting someone with a foreign object? I should say that public school students are the sole remaining group in American society that governmental figures can strike with impunity.

Will Brehm 17:33
Wow. I mean, that leaves me speechless. Another issue today is, and we hear it more and more from politicians, is that we need to start arming teachers to prevent lone shooters with the rise of mass shootings in American schools. What are some of the constitutional issues that you see when it comes to arming teachers, when it comes to police officers inside schools, as we see more and more of that happening. You know, what sort of issues arise constitutionally?

Justin Driver 18:08
Yeah, so the Supreme Court’s case involving the Second Amendment is a case called Heller v. District of Columbia. It’s written by Justice Scalia and did confer some limited individual’s right to bear arms, but the opinion was quite careful to say that nothing in the opinion should be understood to disturb regulations involving firearms in sensitive government buildings, and it particularly mentions public schools. So, I have seen some claims that the Second Amendment should make it so that laws prohibiting guns in public schools are impermissible. That is a very difficult argument to square with Heller itself. It is of course true that there have been a number of truly upsetting and deeply disturbing incidents involving firearms. Indeed, massacres is not too strong a word in thinking about Columbine and Newtown, and Parkland. And so, there is no doubt that many judicial opinions refer to our post-Columbine era. I am sensitive to the needs for school safety. I take that very seriously. And I do not think that if a school wishes to have metal detectors that the constitution should be understood to prohibit those efforts. I do also think at the same time that we need to have a realistic approach to the likelihood of a school shooting that’s going to happen at any particular school. I came across a statistic that suggested that any given school in America can expect a school shooting roughly once every 6000 years. And so again, it is to say that these are rare events. They are highly salient events, but we should not believe that a school shooting is a likely event where our children, say, attend schools.

Will Brehm 20:16
Another issue that seems to be on the minds of many Americans today is illegal immigration. We have Donald Trump constantly talking about this caravan of basically migrants from South America, Latin America, moving their way up through Mexico to the Mexican-American border, hoping to seek asylum from all sorts of various troubles from where they came from. In terms of immigration and unauthorized immigration, has the court ruled on anything related to immigration and education?

Justin Driver 20:54
Yeah, so there is a really important case that too few people know about called Plyler v. Doe, which was decided in the early 1980s. That case involved a Texas statute that sought to exclude unauthorized immigrants from Texas public schools. The Supreme Court of the United States invalidated that measure and said that it is unconstitutional to bar, in fact, the children of unauthorized immigrants from the nation’s public schools. Some constitutional law professors have tried to minimize the importance of that case. They say, well, Texas was the only state in the nation that had such a law at that time, and so we should not view the Supreme Court’s intervention as momentous. They say, in effect, that only those cowboys down in Texas would be drawn to this sort of a measure. But we know very well today -as your question suggests, Will- that anxieties about unauthorized immigration are far from confined to the nation’s border. And so, I view Plyler v. Doe as so significant because had the Supreme Court not in effect interred the Texas measure, there is no doubt that other states would have passed similar legislation. And so, as a result of the Plyler v. Doe decision, millions of children have been able to receive an education who otherwise would have been denied one. And so rather than viewing that as some insignificant decision of marginal import, I think that Plyler v. Doe is among the most significant decisions that Supreme Court has ever issued.

Will Brehm 22:40
I mean, obviously, it had a huge impact on access to education, which is seen as an idea that so many people in the world of education want to advance.

Justin Driver 22:51
Yeah, I should say one more thing about Plyler v. Doe, by the way, that I fear that the current court could revisit that issue. John Roberts, when he was a young attorney working in the Reagan Department of Justice, co-authored a memorandum suggesting that Plyler v. Doe was incorrectly decided. You know, Justice Kennedy, who is now no longer on the court, never weighed in expressly on Plyler v. Doe, but I strongly believe that he would have found it to be correctly decided. I could quite easily imagine his successor thinking that it was wrongly decided, and so I fear that states are going to enact legislation that is designed to invite the Supreme Court to revisit that issue, and if the court were to reverse course, that would have calamitous consequences for our constitution order.

Will Brehm 23:45
That brings up a very interesting point. Throughout your book, you really focus on the courts composition, and you focus in on these different Justices and sort of the different majority opinions that they could form, you know, 9:0 or sometimes 8:1 or sometimes 5:4. We now live with a Supreme Court that is deeply divided ideologically. But Justice Roberts is now seen as sort of the quote unquote, swing vote, which I am not sure if that even is the right way to describe it. But he said sort of in the middle ideologically. So, what do you see if you were to sort of think about the future of the Supreme Court and education? What do you see happening in terms of student constitutional rights?

Justin Driver 24:39
Yeah. So, in addition to the Plyler v. Doe decision, potentially being in flux, I can imagine a couple of other areas that Justice Kennedy’s departure and Justice Kavanaugh’s joining the court could make a difference. So, I think about the establishment clause involving religion. The Supreme Court has, in my view, done a pretty good job of making sure that public schools are not places where students are being proselytized to. When Kavanaugh was in private practice, he co-authored a brief casting doubt on some of this jurisprudence in a case called Santa Fe v. Doe, where a public school had students to deliver prayers over at a high school football game over the school’s loudspeaker. Justice Kennedy thought that did violate the establishment clause, but if Kavanaugh continues to hold the view that he expressed as an attorney, then the area of religion in public schools is a potentially hot button area. Another area that keep an eye on would be the legitimacy of race-conscious actions taken by school boards. We spoke about Parents Involved earlier, and Justice Kennedy departed from the rest of the GOP appointed Justices in finding that some race-conscious measures were permissible. Kavanaugh, when he was in private practice, wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal, where he suggested that race-conscious measures should be almost automatically regarded as unconstitutional. And so, I think that those are two areas where the current court could lurch to the right in the area of students’ rights.

Will Brehm 26:49
So, looking across the history of Supreme Court rulings, what can we learn?

Justin Driver 26:55
One of the most important lessons that I draw from this research is that the Supreme Court has an especially vital duty to protect constitutional rights within the schools. The Court’s decision in Barnette from 1943 makes this very point in a really powerful way. That case involved requiring students to pledge allegiance to the American flag. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance violated their religious faith. Justice Jackson wrote an opinion for the court that invalidated that measure, and he said that the freedom of speech involves a corollary right not to speak. But more important than any single line from that opinion is his insistence that the school is a vital theater for constitutional law, because Justice Jackson said, if we discard constitutional rights within schools, then we teach youth to discount constitutional principles as mere platitudes. And he says, we risk strangling the free mind at its source. And I cannot imagine a more powerful and important lesson than the one that Justice Jackson gave to us in the 1940s.

Will Brehm 28:24
Well, Justin Driver, thank you so much for joining FreshEd, it really was a pleasure of talking today.

Justin Driver 28:29
Thank you, Will. I really enjoyed our time together.

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November 19, 2018/by Will Brehm

2018, Children, Law, Race, Teachers

Justin Driver
Constitutional Law and Public Schools, Part 1

The FreshEd Podcast · FreshEd #134 – Constitutional Law and Public Schools, Part 1 (Justin Driver)

November 12, 2018/by Will Brehm

2018, Chinese Translations, Development, Globalization, Teachers

Jelmer Evers
Teachers and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

OverviewTranscriptTranslationResources

Photo credit: teacherslifeforme.blogspot.com

Today we continue our exploration of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and what it means for education. Last week, we looked at comparative education as a field. Today we look at teachers. What are the prospects and perils of the fourth industrial revolution for teachers?

My guest today is Jelmer Evers. Jelmer is a teacher, blogger, writer, and innovator. He teaches history at UniC in the Netherlands and works with Education International, the global federation of teacher unions. He was nominated for the global teacher prize in 2012 and is known for his book called Flip the System.

Today Jelmer and I discuss his new co-edited volume Teaching in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Standing at the Precipice, which was published by Routledge earlier this year.

Citation: Evers, Jelmer, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 117, podcast audio, January 4, 2018. www.freshedpodcast.com/jelmerevers

Will Brehm: 1:49
Today, Jelmer and I discussed his new co-edited volume “Teaching in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Standing at the Precipice” which was published by Routledge earlier this year. Jelmer Evers, welcome to FreshEd.

Jelmer Evers: 2:04
Thank you. Glad to be here.

Will Brehm: 2:06
Why does it seem like every other news article that I read lately mentions something about the fourth industrial revolution?

Jelmer Evers: 2:15
Yeah, I think you are right. That is also I wrote the book. I think there are several reasons for that. I think there is a general fear of disruption, I think people can see that technology is having a major influence on how we live and work and also in education.

But I don’t think that is just it, not just a fear, which is can be right. I think it’s also to do with sort of, the techno-optimism that is sort of like pervasive in the last 10, 15 years are like a dominance of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship start-up culture.

So technology is cool and happening. If you compare to education, education is sort of still an old school. Sort of this is techno utopianism to it.

I also think, at least from an educational point of view, the idea that technology will make these old progressive dream come true, personalize education, I mean, we have we ever been having these discourses for at least 200 years. If you look back at all these, like, older thinking, and books and articles on education, you can still see the similar languages pop up, and now it has the name Fourth Industrial Revolution, or personalized education to it. I think the idea is and there’s grain of truth in it, that it makes it more easier to allow this to happen, although, with lots of caveats.

Fourthly, and that’s something I only learned, like learn later on at least in my teaching career when you start look outside of the classroom, and schools and system etc. has all these policy networks that are out there that have been out there for a long time, and also have been latching on to sort of like this, this whole techno utopist (view) vision of society and also in education.

So this whole 21st Century Skills debate is predating the idea of the fourth industrial revolution. And that’s already been out there for quite some time, at least in the Netherlands, like early 2000s, we’ve been talking about this, and as a means also for politicians, but also for teachers to push for innovation in education. And now we have this sort of like more profound technological change, which I do think is there embedded into it. So that’s why I think it has become stronger, there’s the sense instead of that there is something going on, and it makes it more easy for these narratives to, from whatever viewpoint to take a look at education in that way. But for me, as well, it’s also part of these bigger, bigger, longer neoliberal discourse that has been going on as well and people have been latching on to it, like I would almost feels like GERM 2.0. like the Global Education Reform Movement, as Pasi Sahlberg points out, and now we’re having sort of like these big tech companies pushing into that space as well. And with this teacher ambassadors, and the Google ambassadors and the Apple ambassadors, and it’s a really powerful narratives are both from an optimistic point of view, but also from a fear point of view. So that’s it. That’s what I think, where I think that’s why it’s there.

Will Brehm: 6:03
So the fourth industrial revolution is about what? What is the revolution?

Jelmer Evers: 6:11
Well, I think you have to also look at who coined the term Klaus Schwab from the World Economic Forum in a yearly gathering in Davos, mostly by CEOs, and sort of like academics who buy into that stuff.

And his book has been quite influential. So he coined this term, what’s going on, and it’s his idea is that there was the first Industrial Revolution, of course, steam engine and the second one, early 20 century, late 19th century, with electricity, oil, like mass production, the whole birth of the Ford era and Taylorism, but in the 60s with these reflect the birth of the digital age that the more simple digital revolution, which of course, is a major impact on communications are productivity. And now he’s saying there’s a fourth industrial revolution. And it’s sort of like an exponential technology, where different kinds of strands of technological innovations are now being combined, and accelerated. And you have to think about like AI and robotics, nanotechnology, biotechnology, and like quantum computing, those kind of things. And they’re all like interacting with one another. And there are new industrial sectors, like data scientists, those kind of things to do that, it’s ubiquitous all over the place because everybody needs to be a data scientists nowadays.

So and like gene therapy and DNA. And I mean if you look at it for the whole list that he goes through, it is quite remarkable, I think, what is going on. So you definitely cannot discount the technological change that is going on, I can, I think we can see that all around this. But I think he coins towards that there’s this whole political economy sphere and context to it, but he stays within a certain frame. And I think that’s sort of like the biggest issue that we it’s not a technology that we need to tackle per say, it’s more like, who profits from it? Who owns the technology? Who owns the data? That kind of stuff.

Will Brehm: 8:29
And how are people talking about the ways in which the fourth industrial revolution will impact education?

Jelmer Evers: 8:40
That’s a very interesting question. And that brings me back I think, to the progressive strands and philosophy that we have in education. So for example, if you’re looking for, from a really practical point of view, people are really pushing sort of actors, adaptive platforms, these tutoring platforms that can help students learn at their own pace, maybe you don’t need a teacher anymore, maybe the platform is good enough with all the learning materials, the videos, and the readings, the interactivity, that’s more easy to produce. So there’s already been there. But now sort of like with these algorithms and a promise of activity, I think that’s the main focus right now.

And also that’s where it has the biggest impact. And I think there are some, like, for example if you look at like math skills, basic math skills, I see with my own children, so they’re practicing on the internet for the whole, like drill part of education and teaching, it actually helps. It can ease the formative feedback cycle, that’s great with children work with them on that. So you can outsource a little bit of sort of formative aspect. I think that’s actually a good thing.

But if you look at what kind of articles are you reading, and if teachers will, we will be replaced with AI, and, you know, that kind of stuff. And that’s quite worrying. And it’s completely besides the truth and reality, I think, there are different things going on. But it’s sort of like the basic things. And if you look at the impact of technology in another level, which I think is more progressive is sort of maker education. And so all those technology associated with that as a service with 3D printing, but also like, it’s easy to program, little little computers, etc, those kind of things are having a major impact. And students can be producers, and they can interact with students all over the world, etc. So, I think there is the problem is, there’s this true promise of progressive education, but it’s also sort of like hijacked by more behind the scene by a more standardized form of education. Because if you look at sort of the oldest platforms, they’re trying to sort make these little data points everywhere like the learning goals and then you are run through this maze as a student without the help of any teacher and that sort of like the old standardized dream. So it has this two-face thing to it.

Will Brehm: 11:25
Have you experienced any of these two different faces of the Industrial Revolution 4.0 or whatever it’s called the fourth industrial revolution inside your own classroom?

Jelmer Evers: 11:38
Well, you know, for example, the whole networking, it connects with people all over the world, I can connect with class, with people and other students from all over the world, they are connecting themselves, I mean, I get it, they’re doing it anyway, and I get them anyway.

So that aspect is there, it makes it more easy for me, for example, to create a learning environment where they do have lots of choice, I’m not just fixed to a textbook, for example, while I do also use textbooks, because the students enjoy them, I think working from papers way more efficient than then digital technology that is good or not all these studies that have come out lately that have warned us about sort of like not to go too deep into the digital world, from a learning aspect, but also from an addictive aspect.

So it’s there. And what we’ve also seen is that these types of technologies are being pushed. So we have a major change, we’ve just changed Microsoft, for example, the Microsoft environments, and I don’t think our school which is quite autonomous, and we, as teachers were on board with that you get bombarded with all these actors, policy actors, networks, research people try to sell you stuff. It’s a huge market, also in the Netherlands and more worryingly, I think what we’ve seen, and it was even, I think people from my own school boards were like, part of this, they’re looking into sort of, like, we have a teacher shortage so we can’t pay for it. So we’re going to look at other scenarios. And that means sort of like, and then we’re actually talking about using AI and all these platforms to invest more in that. It will be more cheaper in the long run. So it is definitely affecting us and me still on the ground and lots of different ways, I think.

Will Brehm: 13:44
Do you literally have people coming into your classroom or your school trying to sell you the latest education technology?

Jelmer Evers: 13:52
Well, they’re trying to and trying to approach you, of course, and through different ways, it’s through school leadership, or the board, etc.

I’m usually approached quite often because I write these books and quite well known in the Netherlands, so that sort of like, also, they want to work with us, and we’ve got this product, etc. So that’s definitely a thing.

Will Brehm: 14:14
How does that work? Like, what’s the economy there? Do they want to give you some sort of monetary kickback? Or, like, how does it work?

Jelmer Evers: 14:23
No, no, that’s never the case. That’s the interesting part. And that’s why I always say, No, I said, I mean, I’m happy to consult in any way, as long as you pay me for it. And then usually the conversation stops.

So it’s also a very interesting now it’s just, we give you your, you can try our product for free, and then with your writing little piece on it, or we want to try it out and give us some feedback. So I sort of like free labor kind of thing. So I would say no to that, whilst I do think there are interesting things out there, that definitely help me in my teaching, but it’s definitely a big thing, you can see the major publishers moving from textbooks towards they’re all trying to create this platform, and sort of like trying to create a monopoly and like the major book distributor. And you can see that there are really changing their course, into a sort of, like, a platform kind of way. And they’re actually so big, that they might have a chance for that in the Netherlands.

Will Brehm: 15:26
What is the platform by the way?

Jelmer Evers: 15:28
It’s sort of like, where content’s almost free, but where you want to be where the interaction is ready, where you can gather data, and sort that data and so that’s, you know, that’s sort of, like, if you look at Uber and Airbnb, etc, so they don’t own anything anymore. They don’t own the books anymore. But he might not even own a company anymore. As long as you have enough people on a platform, and it gathers data so that’s a revenue stream, and huge revenue streams for Facebook and Twitter, etc. So, or also doing. And if you have all these learning interactions, then you’ve got all these data points, you can fill this correlations and then you can sell this as look, we know that this works, they don’t really know what works because just the correlation but that’s the days they’re sending a sort of like this model of learning also still don’t know a lot about learning. So that’s sort of like if you can occupy that space. And a lot of people are trying to do that.

Will Brehm: 16:28
So let me just try and get my head wrapped around this. The idea here is that there are these companies, these education businesses that are creating online platforms that they are trying to get students to use and teachers to use. And then while they’re using these platforms that offer all sorts of content, like you said, maybe that has been developed for free externally, they then are collecting data points on how the students interact, and use that material, and then somehow analyze it, and then sell the analysis back to the school. That is the revenue?

Jelmer Evers: 16:39
Yeah, so those kind of things, and also for other products. So you can build off products on that platform as well. And what I’ve been looking for, for example, so I’ve been using all these different kinds of tools, extra credit, and we’ve got a virtual learning environment and all these other things, but they’re not talking to one another. So for me, it would be really useful to have a single point of view that like people are talking about dashboards, for example, learning dashboards. If you can organize that, and then you become sort of like the Spotify of education because you’re already entry point to everything. So you can ask revenue from the people that are providing apps. So you can you can ask for like, small fee from the schools and the students, you can sell your data to other companies again, so this is sort of like how people learn. So that’s sort of like the whole that’s what a lot of companies are trying to do around the world at the moment even in the developing world.

Will Brehm: 17:01
And these sort of companies are I mean, they’re obviously working inside public schools as well. Is that correct?

Jelmer Evers: 18:08
Yeah. So (we have we haven’t) we have a little bit more of a different system in the Netherlands it’s completely privatized nonprofit but that’s more from a historical point of view so it was that religious education was funded just like public education and you know the whole Neoliberal reforms in the end of the 90s early 2000s every school was privatized but with a really strong accountability system Inspectorate etc. Profit is like a big no go, although we have a lot of scandals here in the Netherlands, increasingly, so.

So it is we still consider it public, but a lot of people don’t know how privatized it actually is. And it also makes it more easy to sell this kind of stuff. So if you look at how the government operates, when they’re talking about ICT and ethic and they’re creating these policies, the only people they’re talking to, are actually like the representatives on our boards, like way high up, and the publishers and the ethic people and technology people. So teachers don’t have any say, or schools themselves don’t have any say in those policy networks. They are huge, are well funded. And they know how to approach the ministry, etc. And so it’s been quite worrying. And I’ve been, as a teacher be quite disgusted by the whole direction that has taken the last like eight years or so.

Will Brehm: 19:24
And what direction has that taken in the last eight years?

Jelmer Evers: 19:28
I think we’ve managed to stop a lot of neoliberal discourse, like the standardized testing and the top down managerial sort of like culture that is sort of completely embedded in our schools. I think we’ve managed to stop that. But the whole privatization aspect of it and the whole more it’s more easy to start schools and then people want to do away with the central exams, it becomes more easy to penetrate sort of like our school system through these networks, where our teachers don’t have any say. So I took the whole public aspect of our system is broken without it being really clear to people. So for me, that’s sort of an example of what you see around going on around the world, not just in the Netherlands, it’s happening in a strong system like the Netherlands where you can imagine and you know what’s going on in the United States, but also in the developing world and in African countries, but also Asian countries. I mean, it’s huge and well organized like I see here in the Netherlands as well. So let’s that’s going against I think, I think we’ve another one a lot of sort of, like discourse battles against sort of like that’s how standardized narrative and now we’re up against a new sort of like narrative. And it’s not on a lot of people’s radars. It’s progressive side to it. And that makes it more difficult to counter I think and even be aware of it.

Will Brehm: 20:58
How would you define that progressive side?

Jelmer Evers: 21:01
What do you mean like?

Will Brehm: 21:04
Well, you were saying that education technology sort of furthers the privatization efforts inside schools, not only in the Netherlands, but around the world, and you’re trying to in a sense mobilize against that movement. But because perhaps education technology has this progressive side to it and makes it a little more difficult to mobilize that resistance, can you talk a little bit about that progressive side?

Jelmer Evers: 21:35
Everybody wants to personalize as you want to bring out the talent of the individual student, that’s a given. That’s sort of like one of the major goals, that’s what we do as teachers. If you want to try to build a good relationship, you want to see what’s in there, what comes out of it and improve on that you want to give him every attention or her every attention that he can. So if somebody says, well, here’s the solution that we can give you a real personalized education. Well, before it was just a standard industrial, Prussian solution which is complete nonsense, of course model well it’s based on a faulty premise, that it’s just sort of like jumping through hoops and running through a small like, standardized maze, that it’s sort of like standardized education in disguise, and in another ways. And it’s also like, at least in the Netherlands, and I think definitely in the West, a formative assessment has really taken off in classrooms, and teachers are really aware of it. And I think more research informed on these kinds of developments. And it also buys into that kind of narrative. And it actually helps I’m not against that, per se. But if people then take it to the next level, and start replacing, and like a narrative replacing teachers, and we don’t need teachers anymore, or they’re even better than teachers then it becomes really, really problematic, because those technologies can do that whatsoever at all. If you look at sort of, like what AI experts are saying, it can do and really specific thing really, really well.

But a job and especially in education is so much more than that. And it also has to do with empathy and ethics and morals and bringing up the child as a society, and I sort of like as a and the school is also a small community where it creates sort of like new communities and prepares him for a wider world, which isn’t just about economics and jobs.

So if you, I mean, artificial intelligence can never do that. At least definitely not for the coming 50 years. If you look at all these what AI experts are saying. But at the same time, if you don’t open up, like the times education supplement, for example, it says, well, we need to be really afraid of AI, because they’re going to replace us in that’s just not true. So where’s this narrative just coming from, and then it becomes more easy to sell this kind of things well. But we’re personalized, and how can you be against personalizing education.

So that’s sort of like the real difficult thing I think people are grappling with. And if you’re also then offered incentives to be part of a global network that you can visit conferences, and it’s being paid for, etc. So like, our teachers are now also sort of like in these corporate networks and big tech networks, and that those are the best-funded teacher networks around the world. And they’re having this corporate there, they’re now having a corporate identity instead of a professional identity. So that’s, you know, those are the dynamics that are going on under the heading of personalized education.

Will Brehm: 24:50
It seems slightly analogous to the way in which medical or pharmaceutical companies sort of engage with the medical profession.

Jelmer Evers: 25:01
Yeah, I think there’s definitely and I hadn’t really thought about that way yet. I will have to pursue that as well, I definitely think that’s, that’s the case, and I’ve got a few of my friends are general practitioners, and they definitely have an issue with it. And I know there’s a whole internal debate, like from a professional point of view, but there are lots of people who are buying into the system that goes, you know, it gives them opportunities, it gives them a platform, and it’s the same kind of dynamics. And the problem is, like, the people who are fighting for public education are always underfunded, less network, we’re not at the vows, so to speak. So yet, so that’s you know, and you want to get your voice out. And actually, a lot of people are doing good work. And some of you know, some of the lesson plans that are that they’re talking about, and, and pushing out and really valuable. But if they’re part of this bigger discourse, and I read a, there was a series of the New York Times about these networks, but this kind of networks how Google and Microsoft and Apple are opening up their schools to sell their products.

I don’t think we, as a profession, we have had a real genuine discussion about this. And it also becomes that we’re because we were quite a weak profession, I think, in another sense that we don’t have standard lots of standards, professional bodies, unions have been focusing on bread and butter issues, and it should be way, way wider than they do now. So there’s so many things that we still need to organize around and do and we need to do it globally, I think. It is a global discussion, because these operators, they all operate on a global level. So you can never do it in on a national level, or just on a national level.

So yeah, that’s sort of like the, there are so many things that you need to be involved in. And if you’re, then as a teacher, for example being educated as just focusing on pedagogy and just focusing on the classroom, and you’re not sort of like, brought into this wider discussion, it makes it really hard for people to resist. And that’s also what happened, I think, in the 90s and the 2000s people were, teachers were really being pushed back into the classroom and just sort of like it, then you’ll be, you have to do it you’re told, so this whole history that we’ve had, at least in the 80s and 70s and 60s and more critical pedagogy, but also, like, a really strong profession that’s also being has been undermined. So it sort of makes it really hard to fight back, I think, on these issues.

Will Brehm: 27:41
And so what can teachers do? I mean, if they had, say, a stronger profession, or more professionalized like you were saying, and these global networks, teachers still need to be very literate in all of this new technology, and have a voice at the table, in a sense on how it can be incorporated. So in a sense, how do teachers in your perspective, sort of resist or engage with this large network of education businesses that are in a sense spearheading this fourth industrial revolution?

Jelmer Evers: 28:22
Well, first thing is, I think there’s the idea of a network teacher is really powerful. So they’re actually tapping into something that is really worthwhile. I think, also, if you look at professional development, and why teachers stay in the classroom, that is networking aspect, and collaborative learning is extremely powerful. It’s probably one of the best ways to retain teachers as well, but also for us to become better as a profession. So I think what we need to do is sort of like, try to find ways to support those networks. But then also when we start talking about pedagogy, and good and what is good pedagogy, educational technology, formative assessment, we also start to sort of like pushing these narratives, what education is for, what are all the actors involved in education, what kind of role are you taking, so the networks are always there. And there’s this really powerful network here in the Netherlands, but globally, and I’m talking to teachers from United States, Australia, Africa, African countries, like Uganda, South Africa. So I mean, we’re already connected. It’s just that it doesn’t have a real organizing bit to it. And that’s what I think we’re old fashioned unions that unionism comes in. And I think they need to take a wider approach from just focusing on salaries, for example, or workloads, it’s about being a profession. And I think a lot of unions have already had that, but they also sort of like, let themselves be pushed into this, no more narrow narrative. But just focusing on grassroots networks is not good enough. If you look at sort of, like the field revolutions in the Middle East, the occupy movement, etc.
So if there’s no powerful, political, organized, well-funded movements, combined with this, sort of, like more grassroots network, social media kind of activism. If you can combine those things, I think you have a really, really good chance of sort of, like changing the narrative and our own sort of like what we’ve learned here, at least in the Netherlands, if you if you have a powerful narrative, and if you’re going to influence the general public, you can turn those things around. So we moved away from standardized testing. And I think there’s, there’s a distant, a new sort of, like, powerful grassroots movement and Facebook group that popped up, and they were sort of like a catalyst for a national strike. And you’ve seen those things pop up in the United States as well. So if they’re even comes from like, the, the core of the resistance, like in the, in the red states, Red for Ed. So I think everything is there already, I think, but we need to be more conscious of this. And I think it also starts with being in teacher education.

I don’t think I was sort of educated enough of being (in English or not being) that I was part of a profession and being proud of being part of the profession, what does it mean to go beyond your classroom, and that’s something that we need to take up as well, start with, you know, the people entering into our profession and taking this more holistic approach. And I think everything so I’m quite optimistic actually, that we can achieve change, like flipping the system, that’s what we call it and putting the teachers at this center of it. And because I’ve already seen so many positive changes within schools themselves in school district, but also even on a national level, like New Zealand started turning back on lots of like, toxic neoliberal reforms just recently, so that’s sort of like gives me a lot of optimism that we can turn this around, but it does need to be a conscious effort. And, and that’s we’re still not at that stage. And that’s what we need to push for.

Will Brehm: 32:21
It seems like you’re also advocating for flipping the narrative of the fourth industrial revolution from either techno pessimism or seeing technology as some utopia to actually saying, Wait a second, humans use technology, and it has to, therefore be a political process as to how we use it to sort of flip the narrative completely.

Jelmer Evers: 32:47
Yeah, exactly. And it’s, you know, I’m not a Luddite. I love work, I actually came into, like, education, innovation. I think, like most teachers, through educational technology, that’s a starting point for new apps and new things that you want to try out and actually see, that’s working. And so their technology in itself is not bad. But if you look at sort also how the fourth industrial revolution is portrayed, and what kind of people are pushing it, and then definitely, we’re on the wrong track, I think. And although they talk about changing institutions, I don’t think I don’t see a lot of that happening at the moment. And you can also see, and that’s where the teacher strikes in the United States are so instructive. If you start to go for like more 20 century 19th century activism, and like, go back to what unions and activists did in the emancipate themselves in the second half of the 19th century. If you combine that with new technology, you have a really, really powerful for us.
So I think most people are not against the web. So we were Skyping at the moment, you’re in Japan, and I am here in Brussels. So it would be foolish to discount it. But people really like that sort of like, if you either in this camp or in that camp. But if you that’ll makes it really easy to discount the criticisms are they just against technology, we’re not, but we want to use it. And so that everybody can profit from it, or maybe profit not the right word, but help us create a better world and help our students create a better world. And that’s what it should be about. And most of the systems that are being created and are being funded and lobbied for at the moment are going in the wrong direction including international organizations and big corporations etc.

So if we state that technology is neutral, we can use either for good or for bad, then we are on the right track. But it also needs to be embedded in sort of re-evaluation of the public goods. So if you’ve looked at sort of like, I think if you look at, for example, in economics, that narrative is gaining momentum in ways which I haven’t seen, like in the 70s or 60s, I think when change was dominant. So with Piketty and Dani Rodrik and all these people like really advocating for reassessing how we look at society and economics and politics, etc. So that’s already happening as well. And we need to tap into that, I think, in education, and what like what we flip the system here in the Netherlands and also international those kind of narratives and Pasi Sahlberg and Carol Campbell in Canada and there’s so many people doing the right thing. And systems are also start doing the right thing.

So it’s not that hard to find good examples. It’s just to make more people aware of it and actually start fighting for them. And that there is an alternative out there and it is already working. And that’s, I think, what we if we can, if we can put that into people’s minds, then you can create a really powerful counter movement and a new alternative.

Will Brehm: 35:58
Well, Jelmer Evers, thank you so much for joining FreshEd, and it really was a pleasure to talk today.

Jelmer Evers: 36:03
Yeah, I’ve really enjoyed it. So I love to think about it again. Thank you!

Want to help translate this show? Please contact info@freshedpodcast.com

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June 4, 2018/by Will Brehm

2018, Catherine Doherty, Comparative Education, Development, Matthew Thomas, Teachers

Maria Teresa Tatto & Ian Menter
Learning to be a teacher

OverviewTranscriptTranslationResources

How do teachers learn to teach? My guests today, Maria Teresa Tatto and Ian Menter, discuss the many paths to become a teacher in England and the USA and the policy environment that is shaping current practice.

Learning to be a teacher, they argue, requires much more than simply having a lot of content knowledge. Just because you may know math really well does not mean that you would be a good math teach. Teaching is a skill that must be systematically learned and practiced.

Together with Katharine Burn, Trevor Mutton, and Ian Thompson, Teresa and Ian have a new co-written book entitled Learning to Teach in England and the United States: The Evolution of Policy and Practice, which was published by Routledge earlier this year.

Maria Teresa Tatto is Professor in the Division of Educational Leadership and Innovation at Arizona State University, and the Southwest Borderlands Professor of Comparative Education at the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. Ian Menter is Emeritus Professor of Teacher Education at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Citation: Tatto, Maria Teresa & Menter, Ian, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 109, podcast audio, March 26, 2018. https://freshedpodcast.com/tatto-menter/

Will Brehm 2:00
Maria Teresa Tatto and Ian Menter, welcome to FreshEd.

Maria Teresa Tatto 2:03
Thank you, Will. I’m very happy to be here talking with you about our book.

Ian Menter 2:09
And so am I. I happen to be in Arizona with Maria Teresa at the moment. So, we’re close together but talking to you quite a long way away.

Will Brehm 2:19
I want to jump into your new book -congratulations, by the way. You know, thinking about the different pathways that one can become a teacher in England and the USA. So, you know, what are the different ways that people become teachers in England?

Ian Menter 2:35
Well, in England, traditionally, during the second half of the 20th century, they would apply to a university or college and seek to enter either a one-year graduate program, or a three or four-year degree program, and qualify as a teacher if they got through that program successfully. But over the last 20 or 30 years, we’ve seen many new pathways opening up, some of which don’t involve universities in the way that the traditional programs did. And some of which are actually employment-based, so that beginning teachers are employed by a school rather than being registered with a university. And so, in fact, a colleague of ours calculated that there are now 38 different ways in which you can become a teacher in England. So, it’s quite a myriad of routes compared with what it was in the last part of the 20th century.

Will Brehm 3:41
And how does that compare to the USA?

Maria Teresa Tatto 3:44
In the US, in contrast with England, close to 80% of those who want to become teachers enroll in traditional routes in colleges of education in higher education institutions. In the mid-1990s, the so-called alternative routes began to emerge. And we now have about 20% of the teachers who become teachers enroll in those routes. For example, the most notable are Teach for America, or the ABCTE program of the program of the American Board for the Certification of Teacher Excellence and also the TNTP Teaching Fellows, for instance, they operate in several states in the US. There are other more local programs, but you know, in general, to answer your question, most still enroll and become teachers through traditional routes.

Will Brehm 4:46
And so, these alternative routes like Teach for America, this is where one would receive a teaching certification outside of teacher colleges?

Maria Teresa Tatto 4:58
Well, some Teach for America students cooperate with colleges so that there is joint collaboration there. However, there are other possibilities in which there is a short period of preparation in comparison to traditional routes. And people can become certified to become a teacher.

Ian Menter 5:23
In England, the situation is quite similar in that, in most routes, although there are a great number of them. Most routes have some involvement of a university or a higher education institution. There are very few teachers still who actually qualify without any engagement with higher education. But the kind of proportional contribution of higher education has been reduced on a number of these new routes.

Will Brehm 5:54
And is there something like Teach for America in England?

Ian Menter 5:59
Yes, indeed. We have our very own Teach First program, which started in 2002 and has expanded steadily since then. It was originally modeled on Teach for America but is quite different in many particular respects. It is taking now, somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 entrants every year. It is moved into the primary school sector as well as the secondary school sector. But it retains its original aim of placing bright, young trainee teachers in schools, which are facing major challenges and seeking not only to produce great teachers, but to have an impact on those schools and improve the quality of education there. So, it’s always been an ambitious program. And there have been some very successful teachers who have emerged from it. But it has quite seriously challenged the role of the university in preparing people for teaching.

Will Brehm 7:08
Overall, are people who are joining the teaching force, is that number increasing or decreasing in the USA and in England?

Maria Teresa Tatto 7:17
In the US, it’s decreasing. I will quote something from a national survey of college freshmen. In 2016, the number of students who say they would major in education has reached its lowest point in 45 years. Just 4.2% intend to major in education, which is a typical first step to becoming a teacher, compared to 11% in the year 2000, 10% in 1990, and 11% in 1971. So, this is a decrease in part due to conditions in schools after number of reforms that have made testing mandatory and have introduced accountability models in schools. Teachers seem to be very stressed about the situation and change actually the working conditions that they have in schools.

Ian Menter 8:24
And in England, we are currently facing a decline in the number of people applying for teaching. Indeed, the government is continuing to spend quite a lot of money on promoting teaching as a profession with national advertising campaigns. I mean, the common view held by many teachers and by the teacher unions is that potential applicants have increasingly been put off the idea of teaching, because of the policy changes that have impacted on the profession, including some of the same things that Teresa was just talking about. I mean, the amount of bureaucracy now in teaching, the amount of testing, the amount of inspection, all these things are creating a workload, which is not only very large, but it’s also fairly stressful. And so, unfortunately, we are seeing a number of people not applying who might otherwise. But then, of course, I expect you’re going to ask us, Will, about the retention as well because that’s become a big issue as well. Gatekeeping people in the profession once they have joined it.

Will Brehm 9:38
So, what are the retention numbers in the profession?

Ian Menter 9:41
Well, in England, we have had some fairly horrendous figures recently about the number of people who are no longer in the profession five years after qualifying. It’s approaching 50% of those who enter a teacher education course will have left, will not be in teaching five years after completing their teacher education program. Which, of course, is a hugely expensive undertaking. It means a lot of money is really being wasted. But it’s a sad reflection of how people are not finding teaching to be the kind of fulfilling occupation that they had hoped for.

Maria Teresa Tatto 10:28
Yeah, this question is similar in the US. About 50% of the people who graduate from programs stay in the teaching profession after 3-5 years of teaching. And this is worse in the areas that we call STEM, where people have opportunities to go and get better and higher-paid positions with the kind of knowledge that they have. If they are good in math and science, they are likely to be able to get into better careers, and they are better remunerated.

Will Brehm 11:07
Is this simply a function of the policy reforms that have happened? You know, focusing on accountability and teaching to the test?

Ian Menter 11:15
Well, in the case of England, I don’t think it’s the only factor. I mean, there’s pay as well. And teachers pay has not kept pace with inflation, for example. And so, there’s been some disenchantment around pay levels. But more generally, I think we have to look at the wider economic situation. And Teresa just mentioned, people who have degrees, for example, in science or mathematics, being able to find more lucrative and probably less stressful occupations outside of teaching. This is similar in England. People are able to make choices. And if there are opportunities that will reduce the stress or pay better, then I am afraid people may go for it. This all sounds very negative; I realize that. But we must balance it partially by saying, in spite of these factors, there are people in the profession who are actually enjoying their work and are doing a very good job. People who have found ways of living with the demands, contemporary demands of the profession, and still find it fulfilling, partly through promoting their subject, I guess, in particularly in secondary or high schools. But also, through the fulfillment of actually feeling they’re making some kind of difference for the young people that they’re teaching. So, let’s not all be doom and gloom. We just have to find ways of making it more possible for more of the people who are entering the profession to get that kind of fulfillment out of their work.

Maria Teresa Tatto 12:59
I think, in the US, while policy had the effect of introducing increased assessment, you know, testing of pupils and heavy demands in teachers work, it also had the unfortunate effect of changing public opinion about the worth and value of teachers to the point in which that public opinion does also have an influence on how teachers themselves perceive their work to be. However, I agree with Ian in terms of the large number of teachers who are in schools doing a good job and enjoying teaching. But when you talk to teachers, and the teachers in our book, there are several trends that you can see. And some of those trends are the workload, and the compliance with the standards, and having to prepare pupils for the test, which seems to waste some of the enjoyment of teaching. You know, the discovery, creativity, and so on, that teachers enjoy doing with their students.

Ian Menter 14:19
Our book is based on work in England and in the USA. But if you do look at some other countries, it is clear that it doesn’t have to be like this. And the example that most people refer to is Finland, where there can be up to 10 people applying for one place on a teacher education program. And that seems to relate very much to the point that Teresa has just made about the public standing of the teaching profession. Teaching is a very highly regarded profession in Finland. It is a profession that can only be entered through a master’s level entry program, which will involve sustained study in university as well as sustained experience in a school setting. So, you know, there are some significant international differences and comparisons to be made. And England and USA probably have more similarities in this respect than they have differences, and we have to look elsewhere to see some other examples of how things could be different.

Maria Teresa Tatto 15:32
Yeah, as an example, and just to say a little bit more, this policy of No Child Left Behind did change the idea about what a qualified teacher means. And basically, by changing that idea, which, you know, the policy defined a qualified teacher as somebody who knows the subject very well, and the assumption is that they can go into schools and teach. People who entered the profession under that model do not need to have long years of experience in the school. For example, the internship that teachers get in universities. Or they don’t need to have large introduction to psychology, to the pedagogical techniques, and to what is called the pedagogical content knowledge. So, by saying that, you know, knowledgeable people can become teachers goes against the value, you know, the teachers who have become teachers through the traditional routes. And also, the teachers who are already in the profession then whose knowledge is not seen as important or as valuable as it could be. It’s kind of deprofessionalizing the notion of a teacher, which is what Ian was saying. The notion that in order to become a teacher, you need years of study and years of practice to learn how to really address the learning needs of diverse students.

Will Brehm 17:04
Right. I mean it’s interesting to think that so long as you say, are good at math, and you are assumed that you will be a good teacher. As if teaching isn’t this skill that takes years of practice, and experience and learning and -it’s quite amazing to think about what is a qualified teacher, and how it’s been so sort of skewed and narrowed to just this content knowledge.

Ian Menter 17:29
I mean, if we could perhaps refer to the research in our book at this point. What that particularly, I think, demonstrates the research we did there is actually just building on the point you just made -how complex the process of learning to be a teacher is. It’s not a simple question of learning a bit of theory, a bit of subject knowledge and developing a bit of skill. It’s about all of those things, but in interaction with each other. And what we found in looking at beginning teachers learning to teach both in England and in the USA is that the relationships that the young or early career teacher, the beginning teacher experiences in the school setting and in the university setting are just as important as the factual knowledge or the skill development that they may experience. So, I think a key message of our book is that teacher education needs to be very, very carefully planned, cooperatively between all of those who have responsibility. So, that is, the staff in the university, the faculty there, but it’s also the teachers in the schools. And it’s also about helping the beginning teacher to understand the challenges that they are going to be facing while they’re going through the process. So, if all of that’s achieved, and we did have examples of very successful practice in our research. If all of that’s achieved, we can actually enable beginning teachers to learn effectively, and in fact, to get fulfillment out of their future teaching.

Maria Teresa Tatto 19:19
In the US, for example, the population here is changing dramatically. We have a population of children who come from different backgrounds, who need special attention sometimes. And, you know, having teachers prepare in a very brief manner doesn’t really equip those teachers with the kinds of knowledge and skills that they need to address the needs of the kids who are underserved, who need teachers the most. So, this is a very specialized type of work which is recognized in other countries such as Finland and receives not much recognition under current trends in US and in England.

Will Brehm 20:03
I mean, it seems like the idea of Teach for America or Teach First in England would be counter to a lot of what you’re saying about this in-depth knowledge that needs to be gained through years of learning and years of practice teaching. So, it almost seems like Teach for America and Teach First are sort of the polar opposite of what you’re talking about.

Maria Teresa Tatto 20:30
I should say that you know, observing the Teach First in England and Teach for America in the US; actually, these two approaches are different in the way that they are implemented. So, in the case that I observed in England, which is the one that we report in our book, the support for teachers in Teach First is very carefully planned. Mentors are very attentive, they have gone through the program themselves, and they know the population of children that are in the schools and the needs that the kids have. In Teach for America, it seems to be a less carefully planned model. Especially what happens in the schools. They have been trying to change things a little by thinking of teachers as leaders. But as Ian was saying, if you don’t plan carefully the experiences that teachers are going to have in the schools, and you don’t have a mentor and a structure model that will support these beginning teachers, they have a really, really hard time to the point that they really just stay for two years, and then they drop out. I did see in England also teachers having a really hard time with Teach First, but the difference that I saw there is the support that that particular school – I cannot talk for Teach First. I think Ian could talk in general in England- but at least in the school that I observed, the whole school model, the whole support was structured and carefully planned to support these beginning teachers. And still, they did have challenges and problems. It was still quite stressful.

Ian Menter 22:22
Yeah. So, I agree with Teresa. I wouldn’t see Teach First as a polar opposite to good practice in teacher education, particularly in England, because it is carefully structured. And it does have involvement of study of education, as well as practice of education. There are two additional points, though, that I would make. One is, Teach First has the advantage, if you like, of actually recruiting very, very talented and enthusiastic people. There is a very rigorous selection process for Teach First, and that’s something -if we had more people applying for teaching on to other programs in England, we would dearly love to be able to pursue. So, you get very strong people coming into the Teach First program, and as I said earlier, there are some very, very successful teachers who’ve come in through Teach First. But as Teresa just mentioned, I mean, there is no obligation on people coming in through Teach First to do more than two years. A training year and then one year of teaching. So, actually, again, 50% of those Teach First entrants leave after their second year of the program when they have finished the formal part of the program. So, again, it makes it a rather expensive and almost indulgent way of entering the teaching profession. Many of them go off to other careers at that point, having done two years of what might be seen as public service in the state school teaching sector. Go off into careers, for example, in banking or other aspects of finance. So, you know, there is very positive features of Teach First, but it still has many problems. And it is interesting to me, who worked in Scotland as well as England, that until this point, at least, Scotland has resisted approaches by Teach First to start up there. They don’t see it as a fully legitimate way of entering the teaching profession because of the kind of fast-track nature of the program.

Will Brehm 24:47
What about in Finland? Is there anything similar to Teach First or Teach for America in Finland?

Maria Teresa Tatto 24:53
I believe there is not.

Ian Menter 24:55
There are similar programs in something like 30 countries now. Teach for India, Teach for Australia, etc. But as far as I am aware, Teresa, you are confirming that Finland has not adopted that approach.

Maria Teresa Tatto 25:13
It does go against the whole idea of what teachers should be. In Finland, there is something that they call the science of education. And within the university, education is recognized as one of the disciplines in the university, which is a status that is different than it has in England, or even here in the US. So, you know education is at par with other disciplines. And so, preparing teachers is seen as an equally important endeavor as preparing doctors or preparing engineers.

Will Brehm 25:52
How do these sort of alternative pathways compare to the university internship model that you’ve explored at, I think it was Michigan State University and Oxford University?

Ian Menter 26:05
The idea of the Oxford internship scheme, which has some similarities with Michigan State, as you will hear from Teresa in a moment. The idea was first implemented way back in the early 1980s when for the first time in England, we had a very sustained, collaborative development of a teacher education program involving not just the university, and not just local schools, but also the local education authority, the local council that at that time had management responsibility for schools. So, the program was developed collaboratively. And for the first time, really, we had a fully sustained partnership between those different partners, which involved systematic and prolonged training and debate and discussion between the partners, so that the whole program was developed as a cooperative activity. And it had a principle of learning through inquiry built into it right from the outset. And it’s very much a kind of research-based and research-informed approach. It became recognized and still is recognized as one of the most successful teacher education programs in England. It’s been rated very highly whenever it has been inspected. And it is recognized throughout the professional community, teachers, and teacher educators, as a very effective program. It has to be said, it’s a relatively small program, taking fewer than 200 new people each year, and only working at the moment with intending secondary school teachers. But it has been very successful. And it was one of the two main programs we looked at in this book. We looked at two programs which we believe did have a track record of success in the sense of trying to explore what happens in a situation where practice is generally recognized to be very successful.

Maria Teresa Tatto 28:23
Yeah, the program at Michigan State University is also a program that is very much research-based. And in the late 80s, there was a big effort to create a partnership. In fact, there was some influence from the Oxford model in the Michigan State University. It said that MSU actually went a little bit further to develop what is called professional development schools. The Horn Group reports this series of three reports that imagine or re-imagine what it would be to have a different model to prepare teachers and a different idea of what a teacher should be. It really inspired a movement to create a teacher education program that was based in strong partnerships in the schools. Where also similar as to what Ian was saying, to have a collaborative role between the people in the school, the faculty in universities where everybody will, you know, benefit in order to support the learning of future teachers. Where faculty and teachers together research their own practice so that they will document how they were attempting to prepare teachers and what was working, what was not working. There was a whole scholarship that came out of the 1980s-1990s documenting, you know, what it was like to prepare future teachers. Where teachers were, like in the mid-90s, conceived as learners. And once that switch happened, thinking of teachers as learners, there was just this explosion of ideas and trying to understand teacher thinking, and what it was like to take on the role of a teacher, you know, or the identity and so on. So, the programs at Michigan State University have maintained for 22 years in a row or more the reputation of being the best program in the nation in preparing elementary and secondary teachers. And the US News and World Report just came out stating, again, that we are at the top of the list as well, this year. So, it is a very strong model in terms of partnership. The internship in the Michigan State University model, to answer your question about the difference between Teach First internship and the Michigan State internship model, is that it’s very carefully designed in terms of the collaboration that exists between the university. The last year, for example, Michigan State is a five-year program. So, in the fifth year, the interns spend a full year in the school except for one day that they go to university. And that day, there is a day of planning, reflection, and thinking about what they are going to do on the subsequent weeks. So, they actually plan what they are going to teach, how they are going to teach it, how they are going to reflect on their teaching, how they are going to evaluate their pupils to see whether they learn what is intended. And many of them actually videotape themselves doing these, and they’re quite critical about their own performance, and they write papers about what they could improve. The mentors in the Michigan State models are carefully selected in most of the cases to be mentors who are aligned with the Michigan State model or who have been teachers themselves prepared by the Michigan State University model. In cases where the mentorship doesn’t work well, sometimes it’s because, you know, pressures in the school or because the mentors themselves have not been prepared through the Michigan State University model.

Will Brehm 32:43
Do you think it is possible to scale the Michigan State University model and the Oxford model to more pre-service teacher training, teacher education in England and in the US? I mean, is that a feasible goal?

Ian Menter 33:02
I think it could. I mean, in a sense, these two programs have had a significant influence in both countries. Certainly, in England, the Oxford Internship Scheme was one of those that inspired if you like the move towards systematic partnership between schools and universities that did sweep across teacher education in the 1990s in England. You know, there were very positive moves about recognizing the contribution of schools to teacher education, which had been seriously undervalued in the conventional models that I talked about right early on in this discussion. So, I do think there’s been a lot of learning. And, of course, we have looked from Oxford to learn from other colleagues, both in England and internationally over the years as well. Things have not stood still. On the question of scaling up. I don’t see any reason why the principles of a scheme like the Oxford one shouldn’t be more widely adopted. They’re not particularly expensive. They’re not, I mean, we run on the same resource as programs elsewhere in the country. What I would say, however, is it does take time to really develop the knowledge and expertise within the professional community in the university and the schools to see the benefits of such an integrated scheme. So, one shouldn’t expect sort of immediate overnight success. On the other hand, if you see something that seems to work very consistently and very well, why not learn from it? And rather than throwing out babies with bath waters, rather than English colloquialism that but rather than to sort of overturn practice that is good in a number of places, why not learn from what is best and build on that. And just one final comment. I mean, we have suffered recently in England from this very short-sighted notion of teaching as simply being about enthusiasm for a subject and being able to convey it. And the idea of learning as simply as an apprenticeship. Well, you know, there is an element of apprenticeship in becoming a teacher. There is no doubt that one learns from experienced teachers. But it is very clear to us, and the research in the book shows this very clearly, that is not enough. There is a very complex and challenging program of learning that has to be carefully structured and planned to be fully effective. And that takes time, care, and consideration. And I think we could learn a great deal from these kinds of schemes. The same, no doubt, Teresa, with your scheme in Michigan.

Maria Teresa Tatto 36:11
Yes, well, the Michigan State University model, actually, I have written about this with my colleague, Janet Stuart, about the model for the teacher education for the 21st century. You know, it was something that, you know, expanding teacher education from four years to five years, to having a more selective criteria for entrance into the program, and then to carefully develop a curriculum that will allow teachers to progress. Seeing becoming a teacher as a developmental process, which actually aligns very closely now with what we call the task standards, as we documented in the book. So, the model has been an inspiration to many programs in the nation. And it has already, you know, … it is something that several programs have tried to develop in their own institutions, including the development of professional schools that exist still in several parts of the country. The idea of having faculty researcher on practice, you’ll see these in several presentations in several places, different faculty reflecting on what it takes to prepare teachers. But I will say that the model of partnership, and the kind of partnership that both Oxford University and Michigan State University aspire to, is very challenging in the current era of standards and accountability because, as Ian said, it takes time, it takes a lot of effort from teacher educators to concentrate on what the important task of preparing teachers is. But now, accountability demands require teacher educators to do other things in addition to teach future teachers. You know, it becomes a more bureaucratic procedure. Collect data about how your program is doing. And it is not that programs have ever avoided accountability. Programs have been very good at keeping track of their successes and their failures, but increasing layers of requirements, increasing accountability, procedures, those take away from the work of teacher educators. In addition, sometimes in universities, the work, the teacher education faculty, those is not as valued. And especially if that is, you know, connected with the schools. So, spending a lot of time in schools is something that takes time away from doing research, from publishing, and for those traditionally valued standards that the university has. So, things have to change in universities in order for these models to flourish in the way in which they were planned. At the moment in which faculty care more about publications and about doing research than spending time in schools with teachers and with mentors and, you know, use observing and nurturing these beginning teachers, at that moment, this idea of the partnership, you know, begins to fail. So, there are a number of things that need to be in place for this type of models to be scalable.

Will Brehm 39:59
Well, Maria Teresa Tatto and Ian Menter, thank you so much for joining FreshEd, it’s a pleasure to talk.

Ian Menter 40:05
Thank you, Will, it’s been good talking to you and very interesting to have this discussion. Many thanks.

Maria Teresa Tatto 40:12
Thank you, Will. I was so much looking forward to this interview, and I’m just very happy that we had this exchange. It’s wonderful work that you do.

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March 26, 2018/by Will Brehm

2018, Chinese Translations, Development, Entrepreneurship, Policy, Teachers

Ted Dintersmith
What School Could Be

OverviewTranscriptTranslationResources

Ted Dintersmith is not your normal Silicon Valley venture capitalist trying to save the world through technology. He’s much more complex.

After producing the film Most Likely to Succeed, which premiered at Sundance in 2015, Ted embarked on a trip across America. For nine months he visited school after school, meeting teachers in ordinary settings doing extraordinary things.

Today Ted joins FreshEd to talk about his new book What School Could Be: Insights and inspiration from teachers across America.

Ted is currently a Partner Emeritus with Charles River Ventures. He was ranked by Business 2.0 as the top-performing venture capitalist in the U.S. for the years 1995-1999. In 2012, he was appointed by President Obama to represent the U.S. at the United Nations General Assembly, where he focused on education.

Citation: Dintersmith, Ted, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 108, podcast audio, March 19, 2018. https://www.freshedpodcast.com/dintersmith/

Will Brehm: 2:03
Ted Dintersmith, welcome to Fresh Ed.

Ted Dintersmith: 2:05
Great to be here.

Will Brehm: 2:06
So in the fall of 2015, you literally went back to school for an entire school year, not just one school that you went to, but hundreds of schools across every state in America, what on earth made you decide to embark on this journey to go back to school?

Ted Dintersmith: 2:26
A lot of people ask me that, particularly my friends and my family members, because it is a little ambitious to go to all 50 states in a nine month period. And the trip really didn’t take entirely the shape I expected. So initially, I felt this, and I still feel I mean, every single day, I feel the urgency of anticipating what the future is going to be like for our young adults, and having schools adapt and modify and transform themselves to keep pace, which I think very few schools actually are doing for good reasons, because the innovation economy’s sprinting ahead. So I sort of said why didn’t I go on this really ambitious trip to make sure people understand there’s urgency here. But as I traveled and I took it very seriously, I heard the, believe it or not, the advance campaign planning team who did all the work for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. So it’s like, every day from morning, you know, breakfast till the end of the day, which would, the end of the day was typically 10, 10:30 at night with a community forum, I’m just meeting all these people, I’m going to all these schools. And yeah, boy, I just learned so much. I talked to so many interesting people, I saw so many interesting things. And so I thought, it’s like the classic thing, I thought I had something to say to America. And instead they had a lot more to say to me. And then that ultimately led to my writing a book about it.

Will Brehm: 3:50
So okay, so you went across the country speaking with thousands of people, what did you hear? What were people telling you about the state of education in America?

Ted Dintersmith: 4:01
Whether there’s just a million different perspectives on this, and you realize how incredibly complicated and intertwined our education system is, with schools, subject to all sorts of external forces, you know, state legislators, school boards, college admissions, parents, real estate agents, on and on, there are million different things that come into play, when it comes to the decisions that get made in schools. I’d say, if there’s one major takeaway is that in education, we largely have a system that is run by non-educators telling educators what to do, it’s sort of a few things in American society where that takes place. And you find that a lot of the people who project their views on the school really are thinking about the school they went to 30, 40, 50 years ago. And they’re not able to step outside of that kind of dated perspective on what’s to be accomplished in schools, or maybe more importantly, how to assess whether schools are doing a great job. And so you realize that, and this is similar, I think, to one of my perspectives from business is I generally learned a lot more about a business when I talked to the people actually kind of in the trenches doing the work than when I talked to senior managers, and I worked with some very good senior managers. But if you really want to understand what’s going on, talk to the people doing the work. And that’s what I was able to do. And I think it’s unusual because you know, I recognize I’m humble about the fact that I’m a person with a business background interested in education. And when I say that, as soon as you say those words, I have a business background now, and you’re interested in education, a lot of people in the classroom, you know, like the blood drains from their face, because they’ve seen that movie before. And it’s not a particularly good movie. But I found what I really put the time into, listen to them to hear about what they were experiencing. And in particular, to see some of the amazing things they were doing. It was really energizing.

Will Brehm: 6:05
So why is there a disconnect between the people running education and the people basically doing education, right? Like, why are the upper level managers so disconnected?

Ted Dintersmith: 6:17
In my book I talked about this, and the common denominator, and it’s not 100%, nothing ever in life is 100%, but a lot of the people that make their way to the top of these bureaucracies, you know, states, federal, you know, two things. One is they generally have very strong academic credentials. So school work for them, they expect it should work for everybody, they have no beef for the fact that they, you know, got into an elite undergraduate school and then went on to get their PhD from Harvard in the Graduate School of Education. So they are fundamentally aligned with the process of school. And they are also people that were able to work their way through and up to the top of large bureaucracies. So they know how to work a system, they have a mindset around policies and procedures and metrics, and they do what I think they’re inclined to do, what they’ve succeeded within their own personal life. And then they take that and apply it to schools across America. The problem is, a lot of kids have incredible gifts that go beyond the realm of the academic. And when you start to standardize education, so you can measure the progress of kids, I think you largely destroy the learning.

Will Brehm: 7:33
So on this trip of yours, was there anything in particular that you changed your mind about after meeting all of the educators and students and parents and principals? Like, what was the biggest thing that you came away saying, Wow, I really think differently about that now?

Ted Dintersmith: 7:50
Well, I clearly shifted not dramatically, but whatever respect I had for teachers going into the trip, which was a reasonably high level of respect only got higher. I mean, the number of teachers that would share with me, you know, in tears, you know, a variant along these lines, which is, every morning, I have to decide, do I do what’s best for my students, or what the state tells me to do? There are a lot of teachers in that category. You know, an incredibly moving day for me, is going to the national teachers Hall of Fame in Emporia, Kansas, and you see this knoll where they have these plaques and monuments and, you know, not massive monuments, but commemorating the teachers who gave their lives in classrooms for their students. And it just hit me, you know, like, we trust these teachers with the lives of our kids, but we don’t trust them with their own lesson plans. I mean there’s something really wrong there. And so that was one of my biggest things was just sort of an increase in respect and appreciation. As well, you hear all the time people say, you know, well, our teaching forces are innovative or one that really troubles me is why our public schools can’t innovate. And, you know, you realize, you put public schools and No Child Left Behind straight jackets for 20 decade, in 20 years. You tell them what they can’t do day in and day out, and then you criticize them for not being innovative. I mean, that is not fair. Despite it all I met a lot of teachers doing incredible things in public schools that I write about that just blew me away when they were able to think differently about how they want to engage and inspire their kids.

Will Brehm: 9:32
I want to ask you a list of terms basically that are sort of these I don’t know popular faddish policy terms in education today that we hear a lot in the media and a lot of politicians and big education reformers, quote unquote, reformers talk about and I want to hear your perspective of these terms, but from the perspective of all the people you’ve met. And so the first one is 21st century skills. We hear this a lot these days, what is your opinion on 21st century skills?

Ted Dintersmith: 10:05
Would people listen to me? I don’t hear a lot that’s different from what happened back in the days of Plato. And so I think in some ways, thinking that you have to be a creative problem solver, a communicator, whatever. And putting that in the context of the 21st century is a bit of a misnomer.

Will Brehm: 10:23
What about college ready?

Ted Dintersmith: 10:25
You know, this one to me is, and I pointed this in my book as one of the biggest factors impeding innovation in our K through 12 schools, and disengaging so many students. And honestly, lots of the college ready content is not of intrinsic interest to kids, is not terribly relevant to adults, and is largely baked into a system because it’s easy to test. And so I feel like we need to step back and say, we have gone dramatically overboard and pushing college ready onto the agendas of our particular middle school and high school kids.

Will Brehm: 11:03
Stem, STEM education?

Ted Dintersmith: 11:06
Another trendy thing you’ll read all the time, every kid you know, you are not going to do well in the 21st century without a STEM background, which is I think pure baloney. I actually think liberal arts is really important, you know, because they do teach these fundamental things that are important. You know that just as Plato and Socrates took on very challenging issues, kids are immersed in some of these complex ideas you find in literature, or history or philosophy, or any one of a long set of disciplines can be great vehicles for developing skills that are really important. STEM, first of all, and this is in my book as well, as I talked about the fact that, you know, for instance, MIT students on graduation day, somebody had the great idea which I think it actually is a really great idea to videotape these students on graduation day taking on this incredibly difficult challenge, which is they give the students a light bulb, a wire and a battery and say, can you light up the light bulb and kid after kid after kid, you know, cap and gown, you know, degree from the most prestigious Engineering Institute in the world, five on AP Calculus BC, five on AP Physics, 800 on the SAT and MIT blah blah blah, I mean, like, these are the best of the best, they can’t light up a light bulb. What you know, with a wire and a battery, they can’t do it. And, you know, right up the river, I talked about Eric, Missouri at Harvard in what he learned in his physics courses at Harvard. And so I’m actually deeply skeptical that when we say kids are really getting great at STEM, that in a lot of cases, I don’t know that it really goes much beyond memorizing formulas, memorizing definitions would be facile with being able to spend them back on an exam and slightly varied forms. And so, you know, like, I feel like if a kid’s passion is STEM, it can be a great path forward. But I think we need to start blending the academic with a lot more the applied, you know, that kids that are interested in physics need to be shadowing a master electrician and wiring things up and actually making circuits work instead of just memorizing Coulomb’s law and Kirchoff’s law, because I think we’re fooling ourselves when we think we’re producing great scientists and engineers in our colleges, the employers often tell me, they get here, they don’t really understand much of anything, we got to teach it to them as if they’ve never taken these courses.

Will Brehm: 13:29
It reminds me of that one part in your book, where you talk about this presidential summit that you attended when Obama was president. And there was all sorts of discussion all the way up to the Secretary of Education about calculus. You know, calculus is the thing we need to put back into the curriculum and get more kids taking calculus. And, you know, so why is that sort of this narrative that reaches all the way up to the highest levels of policymakers?

Ted Dintersmith: 13:58
Well, I put it back on the policymakers, the people that say things like that, and don’t know what they’re talking about. And they really don’t. I mean, you know, if you can google my background, I mean, I published papers written back before computational resources were really much of anything. When I had to do clothes for medicals by hand, you know, so I’m not without a fair amount of perspective on when calculus actually was useful, and how it’s a lot less used today. I mean, you know, and kids will get done with AP calculus, and you ask them when would you ever use this? Their answer is, I have no idea, you know, but they might be able to, if they’re particularly good at it to a hyperbolic cosine transformation. But Photomath or WolframAlpha does that instantly on your smartphone so we have these kids spend nine months replicating what a smartphone can readily do without ever making a mistake and they never quite get to how to apply it and actually calculus is something that has very limited applicability. You know but if you’re one of these bureaucrats, it just sounds good. You know, oh, well, kids, you know, isn’t it a tragedy that half the kids in America in high schools they don’t offer calculus. And college admissions officers, oh, we really look for kids that have taken on the rigor of calculus. You know, it’s just mind numbing, because most of the kids that take calculus are not taking statistics. You can get great jobs with statistics, it’s important for career, it’s important for citizenship, it comes into a lot of your personal decisions that are consequential and yet, we’re telling kids take something that almost no adult in America uses and don’t take something that’s indispensable across the three most important things in your life, work, citizenship and personal decisions. You know, it’s like and we just owe our kids better than that, we owe our kids a more informed perspective on the things we advocate as being important.

Will Brehm: 15:55
Okay, so going back to this list of buzzwords and ideas and policies. What about charter schools? What did you find about charter schools as you were crossing America?

Ted Dintersmith: 16:05
Well, I think that charter schools, public schools, private schools, take the category, I don’t care which one it is, you can find some great examples of schools, some okay examples and some bad examples. And I actually don’t think those percentages across the type of school that is are all that different. Yet, you know, you read in the newspapers, you look at where a lot of philanthropists direct their money. And so charter schools are dramatically superior to public schools, despite the data that says there’s really not an appreciable difference in performance. And those are performances measured by standardized tests. And there’s a lot of evidence that charter schools are doing, you know, two things. One is they’re trying to somehow dot the kids that are going to test as well, I think you see some of that. And also they are relentless about test prep. And so I think there’s nuance to these things. But we often just try to simplify it. And so there are charter schools out there, my film Most Likely to Succeed is about High Tech High in San Diego, a really spectacular school. It’s a charter school, it was started back in the days when there was a small number of charter schools formed to really prove out bold in different types of innovations. And I think most people would say there’s a role for that. That’s an important thing to have in our education system. Today, though, most charter schools are co-opted by people who are just going to try to grind out better test scores from their students and hold that up as a measure of success. And I think it’s such a shallow view of things that, you know, we just, again, we need to think harder when millions of kids lives around the lines with the policies and decisions and the massive amounts of funding we direct to schools, you know, are tied to things that just don’t reflect careful plot.

Will Brehm: 17:54
So on your trip, when I read your book, it is very, it’s much more optimistic than I actually imagine that would be before I started reading, and I want to get into some of that optimism about you know, there are many schools and systems in America that are basically doing everything different than what you’re just talking about before, you know, I mean, they’re not trapped in this old way of thinking. And there are many educators trying their hardest to innovate within the constraints of the system that exists. So can you tell me a little bit about, you know, the inspirational features of some of these schooling systems? And, you know, what do these really innovative schools look like that you visited and met the teachers and students who attended?

Ted Dintersmith: 18:43
Yeah, it’s so interesting because one of the challenges I faced in writing the book and I hope I met it is that the specifics of the things that blew me away, you know, when you looked at exactly what these kids were doing, there was no rhyme reason they were really quite different. But there were general principles that undergirded them that really made the difference between, you know, a kind of same old same old classroom where kids, you know, just kind of go through the motions and the occasional question is, will this be on the test, versus these classrooms, these schools, these even out of school settings, where kids are just racing ahead, you know, the learning is deep and retained and joyful, and you just sort of say, man, they have got this and which is why I found the whole trip so inspiring, and why I think and remain deeply hopeful that we’re going to make enormous progress in, you know, a relatively short period of time, because we don’t need to invent what works, I mean, it’s being done, you can find something really great in any school in the country, certainly, any community has its great proof points. And so we don’t need to travel to Finland to see better education, you know, we don’t need to travel to Shanghai, you know, I mean, it’s like it’s being done in the US, it is being done in lots and lots of places. And I think one of the things we need to do a better job of celebrating those successes, which is a goal of my book, and encouraging other people not to copy it, but to in their own way, embrace things that help their kids, you know, have better learning outcomes and be better prepared for a world that’s going to be full of opportunity for the people that are creative and bold and, you know, think outside of the box and curious and a bunch of other things that often get left behind in the process of school. But that world for somebody that’s just conditioned to jump through hoops for somebody that’s just good at memorizing content, replicating low level procedures that kid’s going to be in a world of hurt point forward. And so I think it’s that pattern. And that’s why intentionally wrote the book picking things from every state in the country to really reinforce the point that it’s not just in, you know, actually I found Palo Alto I found California to be not that innovative you know, but you can find these great things in places that many people don’t think of its innovative you know, that North Dakota is, you know, the country that Kentucky’s, you know, these there these really great people fighting in every single day to advance learning for their kids.

Will Brehm: 21:22
And do you think all of the different models and systems that you’ve seen that were inspiring? Are they scalable? I mean, you said don’t copy it, right. But how then can it be scaled even a whole school district or a whole state, you know, maybe not think about the national level?

Ted Dintersmith: 21:40
Yeah, and I write about districts. So, you know, I’ve got a great chapter, a great profile of what’s going on in Charlottesville, Virginia, great district level innovation, the state level New Hampshire, so not only can it I mean, it is being scaled but it’s being scaled at a meta level instead of at a prescriptive level. And so what the people that are really thinking carefully about this are doing is scaling a set of conditions instead of scaling, you know, a cookie cutter model of a particular classroom or school. And I think that’s really the difference between, you know, two decades or more of US education policy, which is decided on behalf of everybody across the country, you need to do X and so now we’re going to make you do it. And we will hold, you know, Title One funding out to sort of bribe you to make sure you, you know, march to the right tune on this versus the really informative, thoughtful leaders like, you know, Jenny Barry in New Hampshire who are looking at how do you put in place the conditions that led superintendents and principals and classroom teachers do the things they entered the profession to do? And how do you trust the teachers to lead the way in far more informed assessments. And so to me, that’s really incredibly encouraging, you know, where you look at a model that is not being scaled, as I say with you, Will, on October 17, study x in class y, which, I mean, who the heck wants to live in a world like that students don’t want to, teachers don’t want to, I mean, when we micromanage a curriculum, and say that all kids need to study the exact same thing for the exact same high stakes test, we really are undercutting any real chance of learning and proficiency development among kids, as opposed to putting in place a condition. So let people run with things, set their goals, really just knock it out of the park in terms of accomplishment.

Will Brehm: 23:44
So what are some of these conditions, right? Like, there must be some sort of, I don’t know, more abstract conditions that that might be able to be scaled to the middle level, like you said?

Ted Dintersmith: 23:55
I put it at the top of the list where it works. There’s a high degree of trust, you know, and if you, you know, it’s one of the things that happens, the bigger the bureaucracy, the more the machine moves away from trusting people to implementing policies and procedures to keep something bad from happening. Once you take trust out of the system, once you, you know, look at what we did our brilliance of holding teachers accountable to standardized test they didn’t believe in and I think, shouldn’t have believed in. You know, we’ve really, you know, cut the legs out from under, you know, what our schools are capable of doing, you know, so that’s the first thing I’d say trust. Second thing is having clarity about where you want to get with kids. And, you know, I talked about, you know, schools, districts, even states that are thinking very carefully about what are the, what are the competencies, what are the skill sets and mindsets you want your students to be developing and be clear at that level. And then working back from that, to understand what school experiences will lead to that. And for sure, the competencies that are going to matter going forward are not memorizing content, replicating low level procedures, following instructions. Machine intelligence is already far better at that than any person could ever be. But it is things like, you know, creative problem solving or aspects of citizenship or aspects of character like never giving up. And so the question is, then how do you embed those in the school experience but not fall prey to this cockamamie thing, like, we’re going to have standardized test of grid, you know, like, you know, like we would someday be here, we’re going to have standardized test of creativity, which honestly, kind of falls in the category of a profoundly bad idea. But, you know, and then really tying the student work to authentic accountability, are they producing things they’re proud of that beat some level of some standard, you know, if a kid is really going to be held accountable to their ability to do great work in language arts? How do you test that? Well, you know, it turns out, you know, and this is another thing that I think is so interesting is that, that if you don’t feel the need to roll all these things up into a particular number, it turns out there are easy ways to, you know, make sure the kids are held accountable. I mean, I often share the story that in 25 years in venture capital, I never want to ask somebody what their SAT scores were, what their grade point average was, but I always ask them to send me three or four writing samples of work that they’re proud of. I’ve learned so much, it didn’t take me five hours to read three or four writing samples. And I actually think that that approach said a lot about my successes as a venture guy is I can read their best examples in, you know, a few minutes, 5, 6, 7 minutes, I can read them. And if they were interesting, I could pick up the phone and talk to them and say, you know, of the things you sent me the third one really struck by interest. Tell me more about it, ask him some questions. If it was really their work. If they really mastered it, they had great answers. And so you think about something like the SAT essay question, right? I think this is so telling is that for 12 years, the College Board gave essay questions on the SAT, it’s actually something really useful to do, you know, kid has no prep, you know, no help from any adult, they can’t anticipate the topic, there’s a proctor you really get to see the kids on writing.

If they had just said for all applications, admissions officers, if you want to see an authentic example of the kids work without coaches, without parents, without tutors, click on this and you’ll see their essay. They didn’t do that. No, they said, we got to put a number on it. And so they ran these essays through these, you know, out of work people they’d hire off of Craigslist, who in interviews will say, I didn’t even read the work I just scan it, people have debunked it by taking great writers and having right sheer nonsense and getting a 750 to 800. If they just were, you know, five paragraphs, four to five sentences per paragraph, invert the sentence structure, introduce some vocabulary words that you know, that are unusual or challenging. Bingo 750 to 800.

And you realize like we obsess about rolling it up and do a few numbers when we’re really letting the easy measurement tail wag the learning dog. And so like New Hampshire, there are digital portfolios with these students, teachers lead the way in authentic assessments but they can be audited. So if your school board and your school is saying most of our kids are doing anywhere from well to outstanding in these areas, you can say I want to look at 10 at random portfolios, see for yourself, teachers cross check each other. To me, that’s far better in terms of getting kids to work on authentic, you know, projects and essays and you know, they value creativity, they really do align with developing skills that matter with a thoughtful assessment system or assessment framework as opposed to boom, high stakes test. They’re generating multiple choice or formulaic essays, somebody somehow turns them into a number. And then when they go up 0.7%, everybody says, great, when they go down 0.3%, everybody says the bottom is falling out. I mean, it really makes no sense.

Will Brehm: 29:26
America is sort of known maybe in a more negative way for having very different funding levels between schools based on these property taxes, and then also deeply segregated schools even after Brown versus the Board of Education. How do you think America is going to be? Or do you think America is going to be able to overcome some of these race and class divisions that we find in schooling?

Ted Dintersmith: 29:56
Yeah, it’s a huge issue. And I talked about being, you know, two different schools 10 miles apart, in Mississippi and, you know, it’s just night and day. One is in a building that anybody would probably say should be condemned. And the other one had, you know, just football fields, fields, plural, you know, practice fields, the main stadium I mean, it’s just most beautiful place in the world you can imagine and you find that all over America. I’m not picking on Mississippi is that it’s almost anywhere you go, you can, in 10, 15 miles you can find two school particular here, urban, suburban area, you can find two schools in close proximity with dramatically different amounts of budget, you know, funding is really this, you know, Rodriguez versus the San Antonio decision more than Brown versus the board that drove all that because local property taxes tell the story. And that’s a very difficult gap to get people to face up to, because the ones with the cloud, the ones with the power, you know, are the ones that you know, have their kids going to the better resource schools. And so it’s a huge issue. But then we take something that’s an enormous challenge. And we make it that much worse. Because if you look at the data on how much time kids in the under resourced schools spend doing worksheets. I mean that’s their day, they’re doing worksheets around the clock. They’re giving material that they have no interest in, material that we can’t really explain how it will ever matter them in life, you know, we block them from getting a high school degree because they can’t pass Algebra Two. I mean, you know, like, I got a PhD in math modeling from Stanford. And I’m not sure in my career I ever used anything from Algebra Two. I mean, you know, like, it’s just really astounding the things we pile up block kids from getting a high school degree, because nobody ever steps back and thinks about it. And so what I found, which gave me encouragement, actually, quite a bit of encouragement is when the heart and soul of school was far more aligned with challenges that were messy and ambiguous and connected with the real world where it wasn’t clear what you needed to do to get an A where you knew you were going to fail multiple times and had to just keep coming at it where you know, where it required real out of the box, you know, out of the box thinking that you know, again and again, people would tell me oh my gosh, you know, these underperforming kids, the at risk kids, the kids that we’ve sort of viewed as being not on the right side of the bell curve, they actually blow us away when they’re doing something they care about. And oftentimes a really rich, you know, micromanaged kids fall apart when they’re given that kind of ambiguity. I mean, they paralyzed, they’re paralyzed when they think they might fail. And so it suggests this view that we could better prepare all kids by connecting more of their school experience with taking on, you know, creating and carrying out initiatives that one way, shape or form make the world better that do have lots of ambiguity and lots of messiness, and lots of challenge with them, that’s actually better preparation for them later in life, and starts to make real progress and reversing that achievement gap.

Will Brehm: 33:14
So when I was finished reading your book, I kind of I was left feeling to be honest, that a lot of what you’re saying is about education is really for getting children prepared to enter a workforce that is going to look radically different in the future than it does now. And I just wanted to ask on your journey, did you experience or witness in a sense civics or citizenship, or the ability to learn how to be in the world? Right, like, so how does citizenship education fit within public schooling? I mean, is education only about jobs? Or is there more?

Ted Dintersmith: 33:52
Yeah, and you know, I do write a lot about school experiences, where kids are connected to the world and in different ways, making their world better. And in some of those ways, it’s directly aligned with the career path. And that’s important to me, I mean, I feel like we have given a kid an enormous gift if they come out of high school with the skill set to directly get a job that pays well above the minimum wage. And by the way, I think that’s doable for most kids in school in America today, and their K through 12 years.

And you know, so as opposed to spending the entirety of K through 12 on college ready, which means that the kid leaving high school really has to choose between a crap, a lousy minimum wage job or college, they pick college. You know, the math on that is pretty dreadful with, you know, only half finishing in six years or less. And then of those that finish, only half of those get any kind of a job we normally associate with a college degree. So it’s sort of like you start down the four year path, four-year degree path. And it’s one chance in four in a reasonable time frame, at least the kind of job everybody thinks a guarantees, and of those kids, no matter who they are, you know, 70% are taking on substantial amounts of student loan debt. And trying to pay off student loan debt, if you don’t have a very good job is a nightmare. And so, you know, I look at that. And so I feel like in a ruthless economy, and people need to try, I mean, if they google me, you know, like, I know a lot about innovation. People need to really recognize the fact that machine intelligence is just advancing at a blistering pace. And you know, I tell this story about the team that got funding at Google for the driverless car, which is now I want to say, maybe eight years ago and so they put their careers on hold, they made this big bet on driverless cars, you would think that they would be by and large really optimistic about being able to pull it off and the most optimistic person in the founding groups said that it would take at least 20 years before we’d have driverless cars. So you know, three years ago, driverless cars were three times safer than human driven cars. So if it’s been talked about today, it will be real in 10 years. I mean, it’s just will be real.

So that’s why I push so hard for making sure kids have an ability to plug in to the economy and make their way forward. I don’t think by the way, it’s either or, I don’t think it’s just and actually really celebrate and focus on schools that blend the academics with the career that learn about electricity by shadowing a master electrician instead of studying Coulomb’s law that captured documentaries, you know, the right docu.., produced documentaries to capture aspects of their local history. I think there’s a way to blend.

Experiences are really give kids a career lift with experiences that get them thinking about intellectual ideas. And that’s one of the great roles these teachers play is to say, oh, you’re interested in this, What about this, is sort of move that initial interest to something broader and to really get at the core thing of citizenship you know, I mean, what is it mean to be a citizen i mean, is it you know, AP US history, right? But everybody says that the gold standard for history classes in high school in America is AP US history. You know, it’s like less than a class period on the Constitution. I mean, the number of adults that can explain to you anything about the Constitution is, you know, like you’re lucky if it’s one in 50. And so we give lip service to preparing kids for citizenship, but I don’t think it’s happening. And yet if kids suddenly start proactively identifying opportunities, challenge problems in their community and learn that they can take their own talents and their ability to learn and their ability to just keep going at it with support from their community and they can make a positive difference in their world. That to me is the most important citizenship lesson we can deliver to our kids.

Will Brehm: 37:54
Well, Ted Dintersmith, thank you so much for joining Fresh Ed and best of luck promoting the book.

Ted Dintersmith: 37:58
Well, thank you, thanks for having me and I really love what you’re doing so I hope we get a chance to meet in Tokyo and I’m just cheering you on from afar.

Will Brehm: 38:06
Thank you so much

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March 19, 2018/by Will Brehm

2018, Economics, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Higher Education, Human Capital, Policy, Social Movements, Sociology, Teachers, Unions

Ioannis Costas Batlle & Aurelien Mondon
University Strikes in the UK: Re-Imagining Higher Education

The FreshEd Podcast · FreshEd #107 - University Strikes in the UK (Ioannis Costas Batlle and Aurelien Mondon)

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2018, Comparative Education, Matthew Thomas, Teachers, Unions

Linda Darling-Hammond
Empowered educators

To kick off the new year, we have a special show for you. Today, Linda Darling-Hammond joins me to talk about her new co-authored book Empowered Educators: How high-performing systems shape teaching quality around the world.

The book explores how several countries and jurisdictions have developed comprehensive teaching and learning systems that produce a range of positive outcomes, from student achievement to equity and from a professionalized teaching workforce to the integration of research and practice.

Linda Darling-Hammond is the president of the Learning Policy Institute and a Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University.

Citation: Darling-Hammond, Linda, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 102, podcast audio, February 5, 2018. https://www.freshedpodcast.com/lindadarlinghammond/

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February 5, 2018/by Will Brehm

2017, Comparative Education, Daniel Friedrich, Decolonization, Development, Matthew Thomas, Teachers

Shenila Khoja-Moolji
Decolonizing Teacher Training in Pakistan

This is the last episode in our four-part series leading up to the CIES 2017 Symposium. In the past three episodes, we have talked about decolonizing knowledge and innovating comparative and international education primarily from within the USA. But what does decolonization look like in other countries?

Today we focus on Pakistan. My guest is Shenila Khoja-Moolji. She researches and writes about the interplay of gender, race, religion, and power in transnational contexts. In the May 2017 supplement of the Comparative Education Review, she wrote an article on teacher professional development in Pakistan.

Shenila has also learned to navigate the difficult and at times imperial terrain of international education development.

Shenila Khoja-Moolji is currently a visiting scholar at the Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality and Women at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Forging the Ideal Educated Girl, which will be published by the University of California Press in June 2018.

Citation: Khoja-Moolji, Shenila, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 92, podcast audio, October 23, 2017. https://www.freshedpodcast.com/shenila-khoja-moolji/

Transcript, translation, resources:

October 23, 2017/by Will Brehm

2017, Comparative Education, Development, Globalization, PISA, Policy, Privatization, Teachers, Unions

Pasi Sahlberg
Hard questions on global educational change

What are the hard questions in education today?

My guest is Pasi Sahlberg. When he was teaching at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, he edited a book with his students on some of the biggest and hardest questions facing education today.

In our conversation, Pasi speaks about the class, the book, and the importance of writing op-eds. He even offers some advice for US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Many listeners have probably heard of Pasi Sahlberg. Some might even consider him an educational change maker. I ask Pasi if he sees himself as a change maker. Stay tuned to hear his answer!

Pasi Sahlberg is a global educational advisor. His latest co-edited book is entitled Hard Questions on Global Educational Change: Policies, practices, and the future of education which was published by Teachers College Press earlier this year.

Citation: Sahlberg, Pasi, interview with Will Brehm, FreshEd, 82, podcast audio, June 17, 2017. https://www.freshedpodcast.com/pasisahlberg-2/

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July 17, 2017/by Will Brehm

Justin Driver
Constitutional Law and Public Schools, Part 2

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Jelmer Evers
Teachers and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Maria Teresa Tatto & Ian Menter
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What School Could Be

Linda Darling-Hammond
Empowered educators

Shenila Khoja-Moolji
Decolonizing Teacher Training in Pakistan

Pasi Sahlberg
Hard questions on global educational change

A weekly podcast that makes complex ideas in educational research easily understood.

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