Differentiating by Assessment

Bless me Father for I have sinned. It’s been four and a half years since my last curriculum article.

My entire teaching career has been spent navigating a student ability gap that got noticeably wider sometime before the pandemic. The strongest kids are getting better, the weaker ones spent middle school not learning a thing because they’d pass anyway. (Thank you, Common Core.)

I am constitutionally incapable of giving an F to kids who show  up and work. Call it a failing if you must. So yes, the gap grew, but I adjusted and got back to moving the unengaged kids forward, building the confidence of the kids willing to play along, and pushing the top kids as far possible, given the ability ranges.

But tests were increasingly a problem. My long-standing approach was to allow all students extra time to finish tests or ask questions. But this was premised on a much smaller gap and by this time the gap is a  canyon. Add to that the fact that cheating is just an enormous issue post-pandemic, so giving kids access to the tests after school and at lunch increases the chance of them getting a camera on the questions, posting it on Discord, using photomath, memorizing the question to ask a classmate, whatever. Once upon a time, kids were just grateful to have the chance for extra time, but lo, those were the days of yore. So I want more kids finishing all or most of the test within a single class, and if they need extra time I want it wrapped up quickly.

To understand the nature of my dilemma: If I build a quiz that my weakest kids (10-20% of the class) can get a high F, D, or C after the entire class period and an hour of additional supported work, the top kids (30-40% of the class) will  finish it in 10 minutes. I’ve given quizzes that the top kids are handing in before I’ve finished handing them out.

That’s just straightforward quizzes. How do you build a cumulative unit test that challenges your best kids that your weakest kids won’t flunk by giving up  20 points? Or takes them eight hours to work through and then flunk with 40 points? How do you make something manageable for your strugglers that isn’t a five minute exercise for your strongest students? 

The idea hit me in November when I was building the unit two test. I’d pulled up last year’s version. It was a good test, but the strongest kids had finished it in 40 minutes, and the weakest students from that class were far better than my 30 weakest students (out of 150) from this year. So I’d be giving a test that the best kids would blitz through, the middle kids would struggle with, and the weakest kids would give up and start randomly bubbling.

As mentioned, I’ve got just the one prep. So instead of this two or three weak students, 10-12 strong students, it’s 40 weak students, 60 strong ones, and 40 midrange.

Never mind the aggravation, it’s just crap, pedagogically speaking. My weaker students need math they can do, build up their confidence. My strong kids need…doubt. Challenge. Something more than the straightforward questions that strugglers need.

Suddenly a familiar thought snuck in: I could create two tests. Not two different versions of the same test. Two tests of entirely different questions on the same topics, one much less challenging than the other.

Familiar because I’ve wanted to do this …well, since before the pandemic, at least five years ago, when I first accepted that the gap wasn’t getting any better. But every other time I dismissed the notion. I usually teach from five to seven different classes a year, so that would be 10 to 14 tests, some of which would only be taken by five or six students. Not worth it.

But hey. I’ve got just the one prep.

Maybe I could make a little lemonade.

Requirements:

1. The tests had to have the same number of questions, the same answer choices, tests the same topics. I build my own scan sheets and I wanted to be able to make each test a different version on the same scantron.
2. Questions had to be on the same topic. I organize my tests by section, with each section having from 4 to 6 questions. The situations presented in each test had to be on the same general topic, and the questions asked had to explore the same knowledge base.
3. My weak students couldn’t get As or Bs on their tests. I couldn’t say “an A on this test is really a C”. The easy test had to be hard enough for my weak students to get a C or B- at best. I wouldn’t have even considered taking this on without confidence in my test development skills, but admitting failure had to be on the table
4. I had to be accurately categorizing students. The “easy test” scores had to be overwhelmingly C or lower with only a few outliers doing well, and no As. The “hard test” could have more variance, as I already suspected some degree of cheating at the high end of my class, but well north of half the students needed to come out of the first test with an 85% of higher. If I met this objective, then I’d decide what to do with the kids who scored too high or too low. But if I had too many students flunking the hard test or acing the easy test, then my whole theory of action was flawed and I had to give up on the idea.

So I made two tests–well, technically, two tests with three versions. Two versions of a challenging test, one I thought would really push the median B student in my class.  One version of a test that I thought would be manageable but tough for the strugglers.

About a hundred students got the hard tests; forty something got the easy test.

Results of the first scan:

• Half of the “hard test” students got an A. Another 10% got a high B, which I counted as an A (this was a tough test). Another 10% got between 75 and 85%, indicating they knew what they were doing and just had a few fixes. The rest tanked badly, scores of 30-60%. More false positives than I expected, but enlightening. These students clearly knew more than my strugglers but there was a clear ability line separating them from the top students. I had a bigger middle than I knew.
• All but two of the weak kids got above 50% on the easy test (two didn’t finish), but only three got 80%, and about 10 got above 70.

I was accurately categorizing students. Well enough at least to continue. And I have, since then, on both tests and quizzes.

The “middle” students needed a mama bear test, and I built a new one that did the job. From that point on I always created three tests, which allows me more flexibility in moving students around. I only build two quizzes (again, I’m talking about difficulty levels; I still build multiple versions of each quiz to cut down on cheating). About 60 kids take the hard test, 40 taking the middle and 40 taking the easy version.

I’m extremely pleased with the results. First, my top kids love the harder tests. A number of students who just thought they were top kids got a dose of humility and started paying more attention. I’ve made math harder for them in, I think, a positive way. They can’t complain that I’m being unreasonable when a fourth of the students are acing the harder tests.

But the real impact has been on my strugglers, who range in motivation from absolutely none to never stops plugging away. They work harder on the tests and quizzes instead of just giving up. They work more in class, finally seeing a link between their effort and achievement. While they all still have difficulty on unit tests and integrating their knowledge, their quiz scores have seen considerable boosts. I’ve actually been able to make the “easy” quizzes more difficult and still see high passage rates.

Regular readers will note a recurring theme of mine: My weaker students are learning more not because I raised standards, but because I lowered them.

Allow me to quote the degenerate wise man, Joe Gideon, once more: Listen. I can’t make you a great dancer. I don’t even know if I can make you a good dancer. But, if you keep trying and don’t quit, I know I can make you a better dancer.

Rigor and high expectations are, forgive me, not the way to make kids better students.

Anyway. It’s working. My weak kids are doing better and my top kids are getting stretched. Score a single lonely point for giving me just one prep.

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Some notes:

Back in 2015, I wrote a lot about my “multiple answer math tests“, as I called them–inaccurately. I still use them, updated them to a scan sheet. Given how essential and permanent these tests are in my work,it’s odd I haven’t written about the format since. To understand this post, you may want to read about the test structure, which is somewhat unusual, I think. I’ve changed the format somewhat since then, with less T/F, but the organization of multiple broad topics with many questions per topic is the same.

While students get the same points for questions, I weight some free response questions with more points on the harder tests. Not always, but sometimes the questions are in entirely different orbits of difficulty. Still, I keep an eye out for students who are getting all the questions right on the easier tests, as it’s a sign they need to move up.

Students have moved up and down. Three or four strong students were coasting off of the easier tests and like their phones way too much. Some figured this out and got serious, others didn’t. Some students have moved permanently from the low test to the mid-range test.

Ever since I found my test on Discord last year I’ve quit returning tests, which makes all this much easier. The top students have realized there are different tests beyond just versions, but after a few questions early on they quit mentioning it. They all seem to like it.

I almost gave up on this post twice because I couldn’t figure out how to display images of the different difficulty levels on the page. Here are some examples:

• Segment Addition with Algebra
• Area and Perimeter
• Angle Pairs and Algebra
• Triangle Centers and Coordinate Geometry

“Marked” with Fear

The reactions to Charlotte Cowles’ decision to give scammers $50,000 in the belief she was protecting her income with a CIA agent range from object lesson that could happen to anyone to roiling contempt. More than one pundit has declared Charlotte Cowles ineligible to ever work as a financial journalist again, as if capturing and syntheizing financial advice in readable fashion is an important professional responsibility akin to passing the Series 7.

Several article comments revealed that others have clearly been in the same situation or knew someone who was.(1, 2, 3,4,5,6,7,8, 9, 10,11,12,13), so I don’t understand why everyone is so completely and roundly dismissive of her intelligence, as if only an unsalvageable idiot (or maybe a MAGA voter) would fall for such a ruse. New York magazine readership is, like Charlotte Cowles herself, highly educated and reasonably intelligent, capable of writing in complete sentences without emojis. Thirteen thoughtful responses of “this happened to me or someone I know” just in the comments section suggests that scammers aren’t wasting their time with an unprofitable clientele.

 Some people, like Charlie Cooke above, declare that Cowles’ story is so outrageously implausible that she’s either a complete fool unworthy of her position or simply lying about her experience.   But a simple Google search reveals hundreds of reports of scams just as outrageous, capturing people of all income levels and ages.

Many more cases aren’t reported. Mine, for example. Almost everything in Cowles’ story happened to me four and a half years ago, in late July 2019. I was caught in nearly uninterrupted phone calls for around five hours, pulled out $8000 from my savings and credit cards, and spent it all on Target gift cards in order to read the codes to scammers waiting to spend my money. Even as I gathered funds, I refused to comply with many of the demands the scammers made during those hours, despite dire threats about my imminent arrest. And ultimately I stopped. I refused to hand over the money. I wasn’t saved by a friend or family member (although a timely email did reinforce my resolve).

For that reason, unlike Cooke and the hordes mocking Cowles, I feel qualified to point out that some aspects of her story shocked me. I don’t understand why, if she had $50,000 handy, she wouldn’t just stick it in a safe deposit box to protect it.¹.And what educated person thinks a CIA agent is involved in domestic affairs? 

But distractions aside, her story has many features in common with my own–disturbingly so. I deliberately quit thinking about it (no small task for me) six weeks or so afterwards, so reading her article gave me some unpleasant jolts as those details came zooming back.

Swindling 101: marks are hooked by greed or fear. Cowles and I were both hooked by fear of identity theft.

Cowles:

If I had nothing to do with any of these allegations, how much could they truly affect me? I thought of an old This American Life episode about a woman whose Social Security card was stolen. ..I remembered another story about a man who got stuck on a no-fly list after his personal information was used by a terrorist group. It dawned on me that being connected to major federal offenses, even falsely, could really fuck up my life.

From my  tweet responding to the article on Twitter before I’d read the story:

…but the total fear of all my financial resources being locked down for years, as they threatened, was horrifying and since this was *exactly* what has happened to people whose identity was stolen, it was believable!

In the several weeks I spent obsessing endlessly about my near-miss, I analyzed the event in terms of how my personality affected my vulnerability, as well as my ability to step away. 

An essential attribute for both better and worse is best explained with an example. When my son was about three years old, I suddenly realized he’d been quiet for too long and rushed outside to find him at the top of an 8 foot pile of rotting planks with rusting nails protruding on every side that used to be our back fence. His cousin would have charged up and probably pulled the whole magilla down on his head, but I knew instantly that my boy climbed that dangerous mountain carefully and cautiously. An innate propensity to thoroughly analyze all the pros and cons before, during, and after engaging in insanely ill-advised activities? That, he got from me.

Other vulnerabilities are easier to describe. I was alone when the call came. My housemate and brother knows nothing about the online world but a lot about scams and would have physically taken the phone from me if he’d been nearby.  I was in a car, making it was much easier to convince me to go to the bank than it would if I’d had to get up and find my keys, etc. It had been a bad year, financially. I’d had about $13K in savings in January; it was down to about $3K.².  

On the other hand, I was temperamentally suited for resistance. I have a very low score on the Big Five Agreeable scale. I’m much nicer than I seem on Twitter, but very comfortable making people unhappy. My orneriness is philosophical as well. I can rant for forty five minutes on the enraging mechanics of identity theft. There are companies that make money reporting on my creditworthiness to lenders and when they get fooled it’s my fault?  Tell me my 401K will be locked up for a decade so I should get the money out now? Fuck that. Finally, it turned out to be very helpful that I have extensive experience living and working among a wide variety of recent Asian immigrants.

Specifics of the actual conversations are fuzzy, but I have extremely clear memories of my state of mind, as that’s what I endlessly revisited for a few weeks until putting the incident away and rarely moving it up to conscious memory since.  I know I wrote it all up in an email and I keep everything, but I’m not searching the archives.

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The call came right as I was leaving summer school, which means a little after 1:30.  My father was visiting for the summer and I was using his car while mine was getting fixed. I’d just started the engine when the phone rang. 

How many people have declared Cowles a simpleton simply for answering the call of an unrecognized number? I get the same nuisance calls that T-Mobile now labels  “Scam Likely”. But even today if I get a call from a local area code, my tendency is to flip a mental coin, think about my mood and current activity, and if nothing better is going on, I answer. A good chunk of the time–maybe 30-40%?–it’s a business or individual who has a legitimate reason for calling or that I was actually hoping to hear from. Those are good odds, so I’ve maintained the procedure.

As bad luck would have it,  that day I mentally flipped that coin to “answer”.

Nothing seemed odd at first with one exception: the caller, who I think identified himself as a case manager with the Social Security identity theft department, had a strong south Asian accent. But his name was something like Dave or Sam or Pete.

I spent the 90s working with Indian H1bs, the early aughts tutoring hundreds of south and east Asian kids and talking to their parents, and since 2009 have been teaching hundreds if not thousands of south and east Asian kids and co-working with dozens more adults–almost all of them immigrants. 

East Asians Anglicize their names. South Asians do not. ³

This instantly caught my attention, registering as such an oddity that, before realizing the call’s intent, I’d made a mental note to ask around to see if this was a new thing. Then “Case Manager Pete”  got into the meat of the tale and I was freaked out and on the hook. At some point he transferred me to someone else in SSA with “special projects”, I think but am not sure.

“Special Projects”  dude was ALSO talking with a strong south Asian accent and a name like Dave or Pete or Sam or Charlie. 

One’s an interesting oddity. Two was a warning. I should have hung up, except (and I’d forgotten about this until Cowles’ account reminded me) “Special Projects Sam”‘ told me I was in danger of being arrested because items involved in a massive arrest involving drug and sex trafficking had been purchased with a card using my SSID. The district attorney had issued a subpoena and the police were going to deliver it to me tomorrow but right now they were were following me now to be sure I didn’t try to alert my gang of drug dealers and pimps that the jig was up. 

The only way to convince the cops that I’m not the targeted criminal, “Special Projects Sam” informed me firmly but politely, was to convert all my accounts and credit to cash. This would not only convince the police who are following me RIGHT NOW but also protect my assets against the accounts being frozen the next day. My bank account, all my credit cards. No, don’t give me their numbers, he warned me,  I have them, I know what bank you should be driving to clean out your bank account, you should never give these numbers out over the phone. Sell your mutual fund. Cash out your IRA. 

I said absolutely not. I’m not going to ruin my finances because some dumbfucks in Social Security allowed someone else to use my number. I wasn’t cleaning out the cash advance limits on all my credit cards–I wasn’t even sure how on a couple of them, although I didn’t tell them that. (Had I tried to cash out my 401K and remaining mutual funds my financial adviser for the past 32 years would have told me to hang up on them.)

“Special Projects Sam” said fine, the police will be calling. And immediately, my phone began ringing with the caller id of my local police station–which was not, mind you, the town I was in at that moment. I picked up the phone and for the third time, I heard a clear and heavy south Asian accent identify himself as Officer Dave or Joe or Charles from my town’s police force and explain that fellow officers were tailing me to ensure I didn’t reach out to confederates and warn them to dump the drugs and the women.

If two was a warning, three was an impossibility. The odds against three consecutive recent probably Indian immigrants haveing Anglicized names were ridiculously high. Furthermore, I’ve lived in my hometown for most of the last forty years and never once seen a south Asian cop. The local police force is just 3-4% Asian, most of them Vietnamese or Filipino. As “Officer Dave” (no last name) was assuring me that only actual sex trafficking drug dealers would refuse to cash out retirement and mutual funds, I put the phone on speaker and brought up a Chrome window to find the number of my local police station and if that confirmed, I was going to ask for his full name. 

I had no web service. Just like they told me.

Total brain overload. I was in my employment town, a huge suburb, and I’d never run into a dead zone before but what the hell, they happen. Or did the police have some form of signal blocker and were following me that closely? I said look, I have to go and “Officer Dave”  warned me I was at risk of arrest if I didn’t comply. I’d assumed he hung up, but suddenly over speaker came  “case manager Pete” whose call I thought had ended  (it had, of course, but “Officer Dave” had just transferred me over). As “Pete” kept stressing the importance of collecting all my money, I put the phone on mute, pulled into a strip mall with a Subway, told the girl behind the counter that my phone wasn’t working, could I use her phone for a quick search? 

Call someone for advice? If only. I wanted google. I looked up the local police station phone number. Match. Looked up the number of the original call: a county SSA office. 

I genuinely didn’t think it was possible to alter caller id, so I was stuck  My phone had no signal for the remainder of the incident. I don’t know why. I checked over and over throughout the hours.

I informed “case manager  Pete” I’d clear out my savings and bank credit cards to hold me over while my accounts were frozen, but they could all go fuck themselves, I wasn’t going any further to confirm my innocence. That ended the push for more money. Don’t think I could tell the bank teller what I was doing, “Pete” warned. The cops would question her later to determine if I was trying to warn my team. So I went to a nearby branch of my bank, maxed out the cash advances on my two bank-issued credit cards and pulled out my savings. The bank teller showed no emotion. She probably suspected (and shouldn’t they maybe say something?) but of course, was she suspecting a scam or had she already been warned that I was a suspect? 

Even while complying, as my internet wasn’t working as they promised, as a call came in from my local police station, whole segments of my brain screamed scam. And I got the money anyway. Checked my phone, still no web service. It was now about 4:00. U was to take my money to Target and convert the cash to gift cards.  I can’t remember the details of why, exactly, law enforcement was forcing me to buy Target gift cards to protect my assets; I think Target had an agreement with the federal government to act as a repository for these sorts of funds. I do remember telling them several times this explanation was complete bullshit. I obediently bought $8000 of gift cards anyway. 

Walking into the Target, my situation seemed binary and horrible: Was I spending over four hours making a jackass of myself as a scammer mark or was this really happening despite my doubts and I was protecting some assets from bullshit government interference but was going to have to deal with months if not years of credit hassle and asset freeze? If I walked away, would the entire incident just vanish or would it end with my getting arrested or at the very least suspected of refusing to comply with federal and local government agencies because they were all Indians named Dave or Sam?

And then, in the familiar red decor, a realization dawned: the store had free wifi. One of my best friends is a lawyer. My phone connected to Target’s wifi, which seemed miraculous at this point.  My email, which is around somewhere, said something like “I’m being told I could be arrested under really weird circumstances and that I’m being followed. This can’t be right, right?” Then I spent close to an hour feeding cash into a self-checkout machine⁴. I noticed various people wandering by more than once, almost certainly Target management or security, but because of that ridiculous agreement the scammers described or because who the hell buys $8000 in gift cards? 

Gift cards in hand, I went back to the car.  By now it was probably “Pete” on the phone, but whoever it was asked for the numbers. I said no, the gift cards are fine. My money is safe now.  No, you must give us the numbers. I refused and was transferred to the other guy, probably  “Special Projects Sam” again. Only as I’m writing this out did I recall how brutal the next few minutes were. “Sam” was threatening and cold. Maybe they were wrong to help me. Maybe I was actually a sex trafficker. Maybe he should call the police officers watching me and tell them to arrest me right on the spot. Or I could give them the numbers and security codes for those gift cards.

I scratched off  the covering of a security code. I may have even given them one outside number. But my phone was still on Target’s wifi and  my lawyer friend had responded in an email that, like all the others, I have but don’t want to look at, saying something like “I’m not sure what’s going on, but don’t do anything if a cop’s not in front of you.” 

And in that moment I realized my choices were binary indeed, but much simpler than the ones that had been dancing around in my head: I could agree to give them that money, or I could refuse.

I said, “I can’t do this” and hung up. Went to my recents, selected the “Local Police Station” number of “Officer Dave” and hit call. A woman answered, and she was a cop, not a receptionist. American. Sounded tough. 

“Hi. I’ve been told that the police are following me and that my Social Security id is being used…” 

I got that far and she exploded. “IT’S A SCAM. We would be at your door if we had a subpoena”. Shades of Michael Clayton, a scene I often quote: “The police don’t call.” I thanked her profusely and hung up, sick with relief.

But my phone rang with Sam or Pete and hard as it is to admit I picked up again,  suddenly terrified that all that assurance was false, that one office wasn’t talking to the other. Which is, of course, exactly what the continually loud, angry, threatening “Special Projects Sam” told me, demanding I turn over those security codes. Did he need to have the police call me again? I just spoke to the police, I told him. They told me it was all a scam. Do you think everyone is aware of every case? I could just wait for a call from an informed officer.

Somehow that broke the spell.

“Ah. From ‘Officer Dave’. That reminds me: how come you all have these distinct Indian or Pakistani accents but go by these American names? Since when do Indians call themselves Sam?

Long pause.

“That’s…..incredibly racist.”

I laughed. “Now I know you’re lying.” And hung up,  permanently, blocking the number the next time it rang.

 A cop’s outrage only mostly convinced me, but when a fake Indian fraudster chastised me for racism I was like yeah, fuck no.

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The coda that made me kick the whole memory out of my brain:

Returning to the Target, I asked to speak to the manager, a thirtyish woman who, sure enough, was one of those I’d seen hovering around while buying gift cards. She was remarkably uninterested. Not sympathetic in the slightest. Took the cards, came back with cash.

I didn’t count it. I was stupid.

Back home, I related my escapade to my brother, who predictably told me all the ways I’d fucked up. My father listened in, confused, but told me I better get the money back into the bank. I was eager to do so, and we drove to the nearest ATM.

I didn’t count the money before putting it in. I was stupid.

When I’d stuffed in all the money, the total was…something less. More than $6000, not $8000. I have the specific missing amount written down somewhere. I don’t want to remember.  Over a thousand dollars was missing.

I think I punched a wall. Definitely kicked my car tire, then realized I was worrying my dad. Returning home, I called the bank 800 number, asked them look at recent deposits. The service rep, a friendly southern woman whose name is still written down in my notes somewhere, gave me all the sympathy the Target manager had not. 

“I see two deposits. One for [some number in the $6000 range], the other for [some number in the 1000+] range.” They added up to $8000.

“But it was only one deposit.”

“Yes but sometimes this happens and there’s a correction.” I’d been standing against a door frame tensely telling her all the details and just slid down to the floor. I’d escaped.

I called the lawyer friend thanking him for the backbone, rehashed the story with dad and brother, spent all night reminding myself that everything was back in place.

Until the next morning, when my account online only registeredthe $6000 plus. The branch told me in person that the accounts aligned, no possibility of error. 

More even than the lack of an internet during those four hours, the disappearance of that thousand plus plagues me. The loss itself wasn’t negligible, but manageable. But how and when in the process had it a disappeared? I’d definitely purchased $8000 in gift cards, so the bank teller hadn’t shorted me. 

I was originally certain the bank had mislaid my money, that it’d been lost in the ATM. But honestly, the bank was pretty great.  When my deposit cleared I called to repay the cash advances but upon learning the story they cancelled the advances and didn’t charge any fees. They gave me the missing funds while reviewing the case and warned me when I’d lost the dispute and gave me notice the money would be removed. Besides, I spent twenty years in tech and worked primarily for financial institutions. What’s the likelihood of the ATM getting the totals wrong? 

Then…it was during the pandemic shutdown, I’m sure…I was waiting for that same ATM to spit out some cash when with no warning, that Target manager flashed in my memory. I don’t remember her face, but I have a clear image of our conversation, where we were standing, the fact that she never looked at me.  I suddenly realized she’d taken all my gift cards and disappeared into the office without counting them first, and then returned with cash that she also didn’t count out. No receipt. 

I’m pretty sure she took it. Don’t get upset, Target people,  if you’re reading this.  I have no proof.  It’s just the bitter ending. I didn’t get away clean.

At the time, though, the service rep telling me about the two deposits a minute apart seemed like the obvious culprit–and mind you, I still have no explanation for why or how the service rep would have invented the story. I reported it as a dispute, mentioning  the time and name of the customer service rep I’d spoken to. A month or six weeks later, the bank rejected my dispute.  I called and asked an agent–begged, really–please, please, review the recording and explain why the service rep saw the two deposits.

“We only record for training purpos…”

“Oh, you asshole prick sons of bitches rot in hell.” I distinctly remember sitting on a bench right outside my classroom, looking out at the garden after disconnecting and reviewing the state of affairs. My house was rented. Car was fixed. My son’s financial emergency was over. Money was coming in.

 I’d told my family, my summer school class the day after it happened, an education reporter I occasionally meet for coffee, my lawyer friend, a couple other pals. I obsessed about the event endlessly when alone driving, before falling asleep. After that last call with the bank, accepting  that a small chunk of the $8000 was gone, I never spoke of that day again and never deliberately pulled it up from the memory bank again until the Cowles story came out and I responded to Megan McArdle’s tweet.

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The next day, I told my students the short version, and one kid said “Oh, that happened to my mom!”

“I sure hope she didn’t get caught up in it like me.”

“Well, she’s undocumented so she knew she didn’t have a Social Security number.”

Fear or greed, it’s how cons hook marks.  It doesn’t seem scary if it’s not your fear.

Other people have told of scams involving the IRS, which wouldn’t yanked my chain. I’d completely forgotten all about the threats about my SSID being linked to drug dealing and sex trafficking, because false accusations didn’t concern me at all. The only threat that registered was their claim that my Social Security number would be frozen the next day and I wouldn’t have access to any money. And before you declare that complete bullshit, what’s up with that Civil Assets Forfeiture Act?

Maybe *this* scam might not trigger your fear. Fine. Maybe you’re completely immune. Good for you. Just…don’t be too sure.

And for those people who read it with a frisson of terror, willing to question their certainty that it couldn’t happen to them? Wise move. Instead of being alert to one specific fraud, focus on behaviors.  This article is an excellent offering of ideas that aren’t specific to any one scam. Print it out, give it to mom and dad, read it yourself. It can’t hurt.

One upside of yanking this out of the memory closet:  I can give myself some credit for killing four to five hours of those bastards’ day with no satisfaction.  Ultimately, I withstood the onslaught and stuck the landing in the phone call, at least.

In the end, the choice is binary: you either give them the money or you don’t.

Don’t.

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¹I did wonder at first how she got the $50K without triggering financial requirements but her reticence to name the bank, coupled with her family wealth makes me wonder if it was a private bank–or perhaps it was in a safe deposit box and she just doesn’t want to admit it.

²My son, then 31 and out on his own since his mid-20s,  had a genuine financial emergency. My  beloved Accord was betrayed by an exploding radiator and was getting its engine rebuilt for a couple thousand (probably would have chosen otherwise if I’d known a bus driver would murder the car five months later). I’d been covering the mortgage on my rental property since February when my renters had abandoned the house when their involvement in a nationwide story (one you’d recognize) left them without jobs and resources.  I’d had an impossible time refinancing for reasons the bank loan officer simply didn’t understand and had just sold $20K of stock to finance the work needed on the house.

³Nikki Haley and Bobby Jindal are native Indian American (as opposed to a Native American Indian, which is Not Said) and born in southern states that held perhaps a couple thousand south Asians at the time of their birth. Haley is using her real name; Jindal is using an “American” one, both of them are consciously downplaying their Indian heritage. I have probably met and significantly interacted with as many if not more Indians and Pakistanis as were in Louisiana in the 70s, literally none of whom are natives, all of whom live in communities that are 30-50% south Asian and 80% Asian. This topic is often discussed in Reddit and Quora, but mainstream opeds about “Asian Americans” abandoning their heritage are always about east or southeast Asians. Here’s an article about Asian students picking American names; note that the south Asians aren’t in fact picking American names.

⁴Reading Cowles’ story got me thinking of the logistics of money delivery. She couldn’t have converted $50K to gift cards The scammers have to execute in a day. So they have to have boots on the ground ready to pick up the cash. Until now I’ve always theought the operations were remote but if they get a big whale (or if they’d convinced me to cash in my 401K) they need local conspirators.  They’ve got a team in place. How would the scammers otherwise keep the “CIA agent” from absconding with all the money?

All Geometry, All the Time

Here’s the thing: I only have one prep this year. The whole year.

I have a lot of credentials. I can teach any subject except science.

(OK, language and PE as well, but they’re not real subjects, just things we make kids do because no one wants to acknowledge that school has no impact on physical activity decisions later in life and colleges aren’t even making students know math and grammar anymore, much less a foreign language.)

Put me in a classroom teaching damn near anything and I won’t complain, provided  you don’t put me in a classroom teaching the same damn thing. This is a topic I have opined on at great length ere now (erenow?) so if you want the whys and wherefores, check the links. For now, know that the tremendous depression I’ve been working with this school year has been exacerbated by teaching the same thing over and over and over and over and over again.

If you really want to turn the screws on my agony, make the one class geometry. We can discuss the merits of any math branch in the abstract, but in the world of high school there isn’t a single topic in geometry that’s more important than linear equations and factoring are in algebra 1, algebra 2, and precalc. You could argue, and I often do, that an entire year of math is wasted on geometry when we could just roll Pythagorean theorem into algebra one, go straight into algebra 2, and then devote a whole year to trigonometry (which by definition brings in similar triangles and special rights, the other two essential geometry topics) to give more advanced students more relevant algebraic proofs and a year of applied algebra.

So the year begins with all geometry all the time. Except my prep. Oh, yes, the year started with a prep period.*  It’s really a banner year.  Huge pay cut and that’s not even the worst, which is the gap in the day with nothing to do but walk to Starbucks to kill time and get some cardio.

The grading. Grading 30 tests is fine. Grading 60 tests is manageable. Grading 150 tests all the same is….well, up to now my definition of hell is a noisy, crowded bar with a ska band playing at deafening volume with flashing lights in otherwise total darkness where I can’t move, can’t hear, and can’t talk. I don’t even know what ska is, but it’s for damn sure I wouldn’t like it. Right now, though, noisy ska bar hell has been upgraded to purgatory.

I am nonetheless grateful for this job this year, and every complaint I make is privately cocooned in gratitude. But that doesn’t make it less difficult. I’ll survive. Probably. That said, I was just at a department meeting listening to the others discuss next year’s schedule and someone said well, Ed can cover Lucy’s classes next year when she retires. It’s only the one. And I said one what? And some other person said Lucy only teaches one course. And I said HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA no. I will shoot myself. Or retire before Lucy does.

I have scheduled a meeting with the principal to request written confirmation of no fewer than three preps next year.  If for no other reason than it has taken me FIVE MONTHS to finally link every student correctly to their name. Apparently, I mentally organize my students first by topic. Like, this is how the kids in my algebra class sit, this is how the kids in my trig class sit, and then I can start to put the names together. But all the classes are geometry and the names all run together.

You might think I’m being punished for poor performance but no, it’s just part of what happened.

Things are improving. The principal came to my room in December and asked me if I’m available to work my prep and I said yes, please, even if it’s geometry but a merciful boss wouldn’t make it geometry. And it wasn’t. It’s a really sweet algebra support class of strugglers who actually want to pass algebra, ask questions, work hard, and are learning. I learned their names in just a few days. Extra courses don’t come your way unless you’re a really good teacher, so the minute that extra course was available, I didn’t have that horrible hole in my day. Evidence I still got it, performance-wise, and none of this hell is punishment.

I try to look for the positives.

Example: I keep coming across insights and patterns that a teacher with four preps doesn’t stumble on because 35 kids aren’t enough for the information to sink in, whereas teaching 150 students day after day after day after day or grading 150 tests hour after hour after hour after hour is the mental equivalent of a sledgehammer banging the information into your head. When two or three kids of the thirty five make the same mistake you notice but think it’s random. When 15 of the 150 show the same error in thinking, the sledgehammer registers as an action item.

Example: There’s a difference between kids who genuinely have cognitive issues with math (as opposed to general cognitive issues) and kids who’ve been cheating for four years to get a passing grade and have no plan B once they can’t lift someone else’s work or turn in late homework or get extra credit in a class that has neither.

Example: A non-trivial chunk of A students just use multiple choice answers (even when I don’t include the correct result) to backsolve their way into a right answer. Most common case: they can’t solve a system, but just backsolve. Boyo, they can just bugger that for a lark. I’ll squish that dead.

The insights are valuable. But it’s a high price.

One thing I haven’t been doing is leaving work earlier. The last two years, I haven’t left before 6 most nights and usually was working until 7 or later. Given my ridiculously easy schedule, I should be leaving right after school most days, but I’m not, even though I often have nothing to do or just some copies to make.  I should leave. But I sit at my desk, checking twitter, thinking through curriculum, listening to podcasts, rather than just go home. I set that as a New Year’s Resolution: at lunch, ask myself if I know what I’m doing the next day. No? OK, make the worksheet or plan the lesson and be out by 5. Yes? Pack up and leave with the kids. Managed it two days in a row so far. Let’s see how that goes.

Another change, a big one, is something I’ve wanted to do for years: entirely different tests based on ability. This was originally my objective in this article, but I decided to postpone that because in putting all this pain down, I came to a new realization.

My schedule this year is as lousy as I’ve ever had. I am deeply unhappy with it. And yet.

Before this happened, I would not have thought I could tolerate an entire year teaching only one course several times a day. Now it’s clear I’ll not only make the year but also–reluctantly–have to acknowledge some positives that my preferred schedule of endless variety….well, may not provide.

Better yet, I’m realizing that certain elements of teaching are immune to prep concerns. No matter the degree to which my psyche is screaming please god not this same lesson again, I still love my job. I still love my geometry students, even the ones whose names I only mastered three days ago. They all still laugh at my jokes and quite a few of them thank me for emphasizing algebra instead of proofs.  Building curriculum is still a beloved challenge. Explaining is still my go to strength.

It’s still teaching. A job formed in no small part by personality. Some actors probably avoid the theater–do the same thing night after night? No, thanks. Others thrive on the familiarity. There’s a reason some doctors are anesthesiologists and others are work the emergency ward. One of the best teachers I knew taught algebra all day, every day, and literally had a lesson plan for day 117 because she had a lesson plan for every day that never varied.

Me, I need variety in my work day something ferocious. And I don’t have it right now.

But I’m not just slogging through day by day but by golly finding the essence of the job I love and keeping it aflame  despite the wildly infelicitous prep allocation. And just over halfway through the year, it’s clear I’ll survive and even learn some things.

Yay, me.

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*If you’re confused by the difference between one prep and a prep period, you aren’t a teacher and skipped by one of my links. Tsk, task. Read the first couple paragraphs of  Handling Teacher Preps.

2023 Thankfulness.

To explain my state of mind this November, I offer this analogy:

I wake up to the sound and smoke of my house in flames, choking off my air as the TVs explode, the curtains fall across my bed and carry the fire closer. I barely escape with my life as everything I’ve ever owned is consumed in the conflagration.

My insurance company puts me in a house that night. It’s…fine. It’s not the home I loved and cared for with all my heart and soul, but basically the same value, same town, same functional description, a better neighborhood really. When people learn I’ve moved, they’re like hey, how do you like the new house? It’s really near that great sushi bar, right? plus the neighborhood has a fantastic homeowners association with  pool and a spa! and it’s all I can do not to turn on them in fury and say what the FUCK are you talking about, bitch? I lost my fucking house! Everything I owned is gone! and instead say yeah, everything’s ok and I’m lucky because, frankly, being alive with a roof over my head is pretty amazing, given the risk I faced.

That’s my life right now. Every minute of every day I grieve what I count as a terrible loss while putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward, acting normal, not rending clothes and tearing hair and looking for sympathy, conscious that the outcome could have been catastrophic and wasn’t. Plus, there’s the lawsuit.

While I lost my father completely and lost my mother to dementia since the last time I gave thanks, any honest description of the last three years up to and including the analogous event mentioned above would have to be that they’ve been wonderful and productive. The family is doing well. I have friends that care about me and let me care about them. My students continue to be terrific.

The years were great even though the world was going needlessly bonkers over covid. I said the country was overreacting in March 2020 when most of everyone else was screaming to close the schools. I spent eighteen months living an easy life simply furious at the predictable consequences of a bunch of media jackasses reading the same book about Philadelphia and Saint Louis in the Spanish Flu (and oh, hey, following that policy didn’t work out), but while the lockdowns and optional remote education hurt kids, I can’t say my life was awful. And unlike a lot of other teachers, I see much to celebrate in the nation’s high schools post-pandemic. Not so much to celebrate in the colleges and workplaces that await them, but hey, that’ll change.

A decade ago, I wrote “”I’ve gotten [jobs so far] because I look young for my age, but around the time I’m fifty-five I’m going to look forty-five and then it’s game over.” Well, turns out that clean living and a fortuitous genetic profile has kept me looking pretty close to 45 at 61. Recently, it occurred to me I shouldn’t take this for granted and so let me just say again that looking younger than you are and weighing more than you look is considerably better than looking older and weighing more so I’m thankful.

Speaking of weight, I’m thankful for Mounjaro and the 42 pounds I’ve shed in sixteen months (62 pounds in two years, but the first 20 pounds were pre-drug). I’m paying out of my own pocket–I can afford it, another reason to be thankful–so let’s hope the insurance companies start covering it soon. And anyone who benefited from Pondimin knows to give thanks for continued FDA approval.

I’m thankful for the many options I have looking forward to the next decade. I’m hoping to retire, change states, and still teach some time soon. I could do it as early as next June, or wait a couple years. I have choices and oddly enough the tremendous loss made it easier to decide to move on. Even better, I could decide not to work at all if I wanted to, but I’m thankful I don’t find that option appealing.

I’m thankful that despite the craziness of my “lost home”, I finished my revisionist take on the pandemic school closures. I kept my focus on that and then put off writing or research that wasn’t arson-related. In prior writing gaps, I’ve been researching and writing, just not publishing. Not this time. I haven’t started or updated a single piece in three months. I hope I haven’t lost the habit.

Most of all, I’m thankful for teaching. I’m thankful to be one of those teachers who never gets disillusioned despite all the nonsense, who never stops loving the complex series of performance tasks involved in convincing a bunch of adolescents to knock some brain cells together, gain a sense of achievement and competence and who knows? maybe learn some shit. The job, it’s a joy.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The Pandemic Counterfactual

If only.

If only the governors had just waited it out. Hung on for six more weeks.

Once Mike DeWine stepped up and declared Ohio’s children an acceptable sacrifice to media demands, most of the other dominoes fell. One by one the other governors joined in.

Ohio had just reported three cases on March 9th, three days before DeWine held that press conference. Montana had just one case when Bullock closed the schools, same as West Virginia. For all the talk today about California’s lockdowns, it had nearly 500 cases when Newsom closed the schools nearly a week after DeWine did.

Governors didn’t shut the schools because of perceived risk in their particular state. They closed the schools because the media demands were becoming deafening and it was the only way to placate opinionmakers.

But it’s one thing to send out some sort of vapid public statement to get the press off your back, quite another to shut down a massive government operation with enormous legally mandated responsibilities.

They didn’t really think it was a big deal. Shut things down for a few weeks, everyone realizes that shit’s going to happen, and will demand their lives back, creating an offsetting pressure to the media.

Their real error was assuming a uniform public response to the risk. Who could have predicted that race would be such a factor in fearing the virus?

(Answer: Me. Race is a factor in almost everything in America.)

If only.

What if governors had ignored the media and kept schools open? Fearful parents could have pulled their students. Teachers unions might have made noise, but it wouldn’t have gotten much traction: nationwide, just 450 active teachers have died of covid. Closing the schools might have prevented some deaths, but everything we know suggests that transmission just got delayed, not prevented.

If the schools had remained open for the rest of the 2020 school year, no one could have pointed to the increasing case and death tolls as a reason to keep them closed because hey, presto! They hadn’t closed. Add to that the nearly non-existent death count among children for those months. Six months of data with no clear answers would have made it considerably more difficult for special ed and 504 parents to threaten lawsuits that would tempt schools to close.

The schools were closed quickly, without any thought. Had they stayed open for months, powers that be would have had time to think about what a stupid idea it was.

But instead, well. This happened.

Here’s the question that long haunted me during my remote education purgatory:

Was I wrong about the pandemic’s original sin? Could catastrophe had been rerouted? Was there a path we could have taken that returned the schools to normal operating conditions in fall 2021 instead of a year later?

All the angry people demanding accountability think it was just a matter of teachers agreeing to go back to work, and that mean ol’ CDC setting unnecessary restrictions.

But this is due to their fundamental fuzziness on the real cause of remote education. Very few kids were forced into remote. Most kids were in remote by parent demand.

White parents in high-diversity urban and suburban areas have a lot of trouble grasping this fact, for understandable reasons. But like it or not, the non-white parents in their district felt differently. In large numbers.

Even in Florida.

Recall the Karol Marcowicz psychodrama? Regular readers experienced her shifting demands live, from “MR MAYOR, CLOSE THE SCHOOLS” to “STOP ABUSING CHILDREN OPEN THE SCHOOLS” to “THE FUTURE IS FLORIDA“. While New York City’s schools were open relatively early (December? Mother of god, woman, quit whining), she hated hybrid and wanted full-time. Finally, in desperation, she moved her kids to an 70% white elementary school in the Sunshine State, returning temporarily only to flee back permanently. Governor DeSantis, she proclaimed, “put children first.” Her children were finally back in school full-time. Not for Florida all that zoom time, the kids locked up at home, the horrible academic results, right?

Wrong.

Karol’s school, Marsh Pointe Elementary, is in the Palm Beach district. 60% of Palm Beach students chose remote in September 2020. By the time Karol transferred her kids, just 60% of students opted for in-person. So just a third of the students who chose remote in September had returned to school by the end of the year.

Thus it was that Palm Beach County test scores plummeted that year, particularly in math. And that, readers, is why it’s unsurprising that California outpaced Florida in the NAEP scores that year. Not predictable. Just not surprising.

Karol never mentioned that, did she? I’m not even sure she knew, given how thoroughly her opinions are derived from that little white cocoon she wraps her life in.

–>

Florida was great for Karol and family. But DeSantis didn’t “put kids first”. DeSantis gave parents equal rights, rather than privileging parents’ preference for remote, as most other states did.

That’s no small thing! Had all governors followed DeSantis’s lead, the 15% of parents living in majority non-white districts trapped in endless remote would have had much less to bitch about. We all would have been spared a few thousand op-ed pieces by pissed off urban white moms clueless as to their minority status.

But the academic damage was caused not by parents forced into remote, but by parents choosingremote. Preventing that damage required ending remote. Take away the choice entirely. That is, ultimately, what got everything back to normal. It wasn’t parent protests or union settlements, but wise blue states taking away choice, as I wrote in my very first piece on this topic two years ago.

So going back to the question I posed, the only way to undo the original sin of closing the schools in March 2020 would have been to eliminate the option of remote instruction in fall 2020 instead of fall 2021.

Was that an option? Is there some way we could have pushed out remote instruction a year early?

>

I want to say yes. I can’t shake the longing for the counterfactual. Like maybe if Trump hadn’t tweeted “SCHOOLS MUST OPEN IN THE FALL!!” in July 2020, well, schools might have ended optional remote education at local schools.

Certainly, the response to Trump’s tweet doesn’t leave much room for hope. Trump was ;widely accused of politicizing issue with his “open the schools!” tweet by the left and the media, if that’s not the same thing, but with the conservative media not far behind. National Review criticized him for not getting covid19 under control and demanded more testing. Some conservatives wondered why Trump was closing schools–wouldn’t it be better for school choice and home schooling if all the schools stayed closed? The Bulwark was aghast at his very suggestion that schools should be open–how could little kids follow safety protocols?

But Trump was a lightning rod. By demanding that schools be open, Trump put everyone’s hackles up on both sides of the political wisdom aisle.

What if Trump hadn’t said anything? If white Democrat parents hadn’t seen open schools as a victory for the Orange One, they might have used their political power effectively at a time when it might have done some good. If public schools have learned one essential lesson from fifty years of policy errors, it’s that you don’t piss off white parents. Had white parents in majority non-white districts had understood that accepting remote education in September meant remote education for several more months, might they have made their displeasure clearer when it would have mattered?

I want to believe we had a shot at business as usual until July 2020 not because Trump was wrong–in fact, he was right, even if no one but me will say so–but because if he hadn’t raised the issue maybe…maybe. Maybe it would have been safer for someone else to suggest the possibility. Maybe more Democrat white parents would have realized the risk from failing to open immediately.  Maybe support would have been enough that schools would have told fearful parents that their opposition wasn’t sufficient rationale to service their remote education needs and give them a list of online charters.

I want to be like everyone else, in short, arguing that the One True Path was there, if only. But I can’t. For two big reasons. First, opening the schools had already become political, and I just don’t think white Democrat parents would have sided with MAGA folk demanding schools open at that time. Like the governors in March, they probably assumed everyone sane wanted schools open and once Biden was elected, schools would open. They could wait. But even that wouldn’t matter, because like Karol Marcowicz, those parents would only give a shit about their own schools. Like Karol, they don’t realize the mores of Marshmallowland aren’t universal.

But the larger reason I can’t convince myself that 2020-21 could be saved is best characterized by the actions of Deborah Birx, Coronavirus coordinator, aka Scarf Lady. She made the roundsto everystate, meeting with every governor, pushing masks, warning of contagion risks, pushing distance learning, strengthening the case for parents to oppose in-person education. She openly opposed Trump’s push to open schools. In short, Birx was ;a walking amicus brief for a class action lawsuit by furious parents demanding the right for their kids to view their teachers on a computer screen.

No governor was going to risk forcing in-person instruction on parents. No governor was going to tell parents they couldn’t have their own local school on zoom. No governor was going to force parents to sign up for a virtual option or find a virtual charter. No, not even DeSantis. Not in 2020. Not with Congress and the states having waived attendance laws. It just wasn’t worth the bother.

I’ve reluctantly abandoned all belief in a counterfactual. There was no chance, ever, that schools would return to business as usual in the 2020-21 school year. Parents would be guaranteed remote instruction in their local school. No one was going to force them back to in-person instruction or make them enroll in a virtual academy. Not that year.

So alas. Closing the schools was the original sin from which there was no redemption. The penalty must be paid.

If you’re looking for bright spots, consider the bullet we dodged. What if legislatures hadn’t acted to remove the remote option?

In spring 2021, plenty of evidence showed that at least 30% of students were remote education, and of that group, 90% chose it. By fall 2021, polls showed 20-25% of parents still wanted remote education. That winter, when omicron took hold, a Pew poll showed only 1 in 4 non-white parents wanted full-time inperson instruction. 61% wanted “a mix”. Reams of anecdotal evidencesuggests that non-white parents were more likely to be freaked out about returning to in-person instruction, both in the fall and during the rise of omicron.

Given the demographic skew of schools….it could have happened again. Polls and revealed preferences strongly suggest that non-white parents in many districts would have had sufficient majorities to demand remote instruction. White parents in those urban districts, including all those Republican moms with op-ed columns, would be deeply pissed off. More importantly, low-income non-white children would continue getting half as much education, if that, on zoom.

None of that happened.

By the grace of God, the Fates, karma, or simple happy circumstance, we got a window.

From November 2020 to June 2021, everyone believed the vaccines would end covid. For a few months in early summer, that seemed to be the case. And during that brief window, a miracle happened: blue state legislatures took action.

No, really.

Even better, those legislatures took the right action. They wisely passed laws taking away a parent’s right to choose remote education at their public school. That’s not what the laws said, of course. They said that schools couldn’t offer remote instruction. Ultimately, it’s the same thing.

I realize that to anyone who didn’t actually look at the data–or to those intent on ignoring the data because they want their audience to blame unions–this seems absurd.

Am I really saying that once the schools closed there was no way out of the damages followed?

That giving parents a choice guaranteed that millions of kids would learn much less and never be able to recover?

That rather than look for people to blame we should simply thank the summer 2021 pause that the damage didn’t go on for longer?

And most ridiculous of all, that we actually have politicians’ quick action to thank for it ending as soon as it did?

>

Yes, that’s what I’m saying.

Just one more thing to drop onto the “crazy shit” pile.

It’s hard to face, given the damage caused by keeping kids at home, but it could have been much worse had legislatures not acted swiftly and correctly.

Go figure. Government worked.

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I really don’t know why I’ve kept up this series. Lord knows, the prevailing winds of discourse have hurricaned against me. But hey, what else is new. I think it’s finally out of my system.

On the Cause and Fix for School Closures and Remote Education

• Tradeoffs in the Era of Covid-19: I’d forgotten I’d written this! Not really about policy, but proves I said closing schools was a bad idea from the very beginning.
• The Real Reason for School Closures: The data showing how strongly parental race determined parental preference for remote and that race, not unions or politics, drove school decisions about remote education.
• Principal Responsibilities in the Pandemic: A look at the way adminstrator responsibility changed during the pandemic, and the role these changes played in school decisions on whose needs to prioritize.
• The Pandemic School Policy Power Differential: A key difference in parental rights during the pandemic went entirely unreported, but explains so much of the difference between perception and reality. Parents who wanted remote were primarily non-white and were guaranteed this choice in 2020-21. Parents who wanted in-person were primarily white and were not guaranteed their choice. White parents tend to be loud when they don’t get their way. But rather than argue for equal rights, they just assumed that they were speaking for a majority. Bad call.
• Paying Teachers To Do Nothing?: The pandemic narrative insists that teachers were paid to do nothing. In fact, teachers were the school district employees with the most to do, the jobs that were least unchanged in terms of time, and most changed in terms of delivery.
• The Pandemic’s Original Sin: Closing the schools in March 2020 pretty much guaranteed all the disasters that followed.
• Wise Blue States Take Away Choice: Chronologically, this was my first pandemic piece. I’m kind of proud of that, because late 2021 was pretty early to realize how essential it was that legislatures removed the means of committing further educational damage.

Teaching Life in the Pandemic:

• Life During Lockdown
• Five Things I Learned Remote Teaching Summer School
• Post-Pandemic Update

The Pandemic’s Original Sin

I was loudly and vehemently opposed to conventional wisdom on school closure and really all pandemic restrictions, from March 2020 to today. But that’s me. I’m a little weird, plus I don’t get sick much. My standard for closing down schools is Contagion. Or The Last Ship.

I’m nobody, of course,  but a nobody pretty clued in to media coverage, and I’m well aware that  arguing against school closure back in March 2020 was a fool’s errand. Then, ironically, I was likewise mostly alone on the right in refusing to blame teachers or blue state governance for remote education that persisted well beyond what those on the right thought was necessary. So for the better part of forty months I have been a lonely voice in the wilderness, which has given me a lot of time to argue fruitlessly with the fact-ignorant, but also a lot of time to wonder productively what could have been done differently

If the remote education push was bottom-up rather than top down, what could have been done differently from March 2020 to June 2021 that so devastated the public school system? I have mulled for many months, using this factbase:

1. Parents were guaranteed remote education at their local school for the entire 20-21 school year, even Florida and Texas. This guarantee was not extended to parents wanting in-person education, with the notable exceptions of Florida and Texas.
2. Student disability law is ferocious and unrelenting and while it wasn’t much reported, had a considerable impact on district constraints in remote education decisions.
3. Race played a huge role in parental preference for remote education, with white parents being the only group with majority support for in-person instruction.
4. Politics played a significant role in CDC compliance, with Democrat majority states adhering and Republican majority states generally ignoring.  Schools required to follow CDC mandates could not realistically offer full-time in-person instruction. (Example: both Florida and Vermont offered in-person instruction for most of the 2020-21 school year, but Vermont was in hybrid while Florida was full-time)
5. Individual American schools do not represent national demographics. About a third of all schools are majority non-white. A third of whites attend schools that are majority non-white. On average, a third of non-whites attend majority white schools, but fewer than 20% of blacks and Hispanics do. (Cite)

Understand this fact base and nothing else about the year is relevant.

Points 1 and 3  combine to explain why NAEP scores aren’t explained by more than 10% of a state’s use of remote instruction.  Florida and Texas may have guaranteed parents in-person instruction, but only if they wanted it. Blacks and Hispanics, regardless of state, were far more likely to select remote, so those students would see a decline in scores regardless of policy. And so Florida and Texas actually lost more total NAEP points than California.

Points 1, 3, and 5 explain why most parents were content with their school instruction policies but a small vocal minority of whites was not. Non-whites, regardless of school demographic, were able to choose remote instruction. Most white students attend majority white schools, so got what they wanted as well. But that 33% of whites in majority non-white districts, which tend to be wealthy whites in high immigration urban or sububan areas, are a small but highly influential group with access and ability to make a lot of noise.

Points 2 and 4 explain much of the hesitance that schools had about rolling back restrictions.  Lawsuits are the form of accountability schools fear most. States and districts were crushed between disabled students with polar opposite needs–kids with mental disabilities needed in-person instruction, kids with physical disabilities had airtight claims for the wildest and most extreme protections. The CDC guidelines supported any lawsuit by the kids with physical disabilities. Blue states in general give much more support to these laws. Blue states with large non-white populations (pretty much all of them except Vermont, Washington, and Oregon) were under tremendous pressure to heed CDC guidelines with the progressives adding vocal pressure to then non-white existing preference. And the minute a state vows to follow CDC guidelines, their decision to *not* follow those guidelines becomes a material fact that gives weight to parental demands for adherence to the education disability laws.

So there’s the fact base. Very little to do with teachers unions, a little to do with blue state politics, but not as much as the day of reckoning demanders claim. The facts aren’t really in dispute. Randi Weingarten’s nonsense: irrelevant. CDC guidelines: a bit relevant, but in the context of governors could and did ignore them. Blaming the rhetoric for scaring parents: well, explain how whites weren’t fooled but non-whites were without getting hinky. What, non-whites are just more gullible?

Accept that the public discourse on this is completely off-base with no connection to the underlying problems, and look at the history of the pandemic with the only facts that matter, and it becomes clear that one key decision set everything in motion, from which I can see no certain path to undoing.

The schools should never have been closed in the first place.

And that’s sadly hilarious. In the entire history of the pandemic, with all the political and racial schisms that developed around remote vs in-person education, masks, lockdowns, vaccines, vaccine mandates, social distancing, the only milestone about which seemingly everyone acted and argued in lockstep was shutting down the schools in March 2020.

So hey, good news! No accountability needed. The decision that caused all the damage had everyone’s approval. Well, except mine.

The decision to close the schools was bipartisan. Omni-partisan, really. Everyone with a voice in the public sphere supported school closure, lockdowns, masks, and censure for the non-compliant. Even the voters apparently supported closed schools in March 2020.

The media pressure was unrelenting and likewise bipartisan. The negative blowback on politicians who balked at shutting down was tremendous.  Bill DeBlasio took an extra two days to close NYC schools and was excoriated. I have yet to see anyone acknowledge that his stated concerns for poor kids being robbed of education were well-founded. Florida governor Ron DeSantis was willing to ignore the media and set fewer restrictions and was likewise subjected to waves of criticism.

So. Close the schools, all the shit rolls right downhill to parent majorities determining method of instruction, zoom school, social isolation, the whole Mission burrito.

If everyone had continued to agree on the dangers of covid19, well, we’d all be just looking at the test scores as a regrettable but necessary expense of saving America.

Instead, in less than three months, the unity had fractured.. The progressive left remained firmly and loudly in support of remote education, masking, and if anything held that the country was moving beyond covid too quickly. Most non-white parents agreed,  from all available evidence, but didn’t chime in.

Meanwhile, conservative media and politicians, originally and loudly in favor of closure, switched effortlessly in the summer of 2020. (Republican voters, of course, had never particularly favored shutdown–as early as June, GOP support for opening schools approached 60%.)

Since it was largely conservative media that flipped on school closure, it’s worth expending a paragraph to demonstrate just how thorough, unrelenting, and total the 180 was amongst the people who are have been howling for accountability for a couple years now.

Timothy Carney originally praised the “reasonable and responsible” school closure and  chastised President Trump for demanding the schools open in ALL CAPS. But his kids were depressed and unhappy without school, so soon he was a vocal activist demanding that his private Catholic schools stay open. Recently Carney acknowledged that the lockdown he demanded may have done more harm than good.  Michael Brendan Dougherty emailed his district superintendent begging him to close schools, then a few months later said gosh,  I’m not sure how long I can keep doing this remote education thing, and finally began pressuring the school board to end its mask mandate. Karol Markowicz screamed loudly for then-mayor DiBlasio to close the schools; a year later she howled just as furiously for him to re-open the schools, finally moving down to Florida and a much whiter school district to get in-person education for her kids. Jim Geraghty did a ticktock on what he saw as DiBlasio’s terrible failure to close the schools in  timely fashion and called for an end to clickbait opinion journalism when an op-ed predicted catastrophic damage caused by school closure. Our “improvised solution, keeping kids out of school, is going to have some bad effects”  doesn’t get the clicks of “setting back a generation” he wrote, dismissing the very notion that closed schools could do any serious damage.Two years later, Geraghty wrote an article talking about the toll the pandemic took on America’s kids and it sure sounds now like he thinks it’s a generational setback as opposed to “some bad effects”.  And let’s never forget “don’t touch my baby’s hands” “for god’s sake people social distancing! Stop going!”  Bethany Mandel, who was hysterically against killing Grandma before she was for it. For equal time, Damon Linker was chastising people who wanted to open the schools and submit his kids to the trauma of guilt at being the cause of their parents’ death until he saw the trauma of his kids’ remote education. But by and large the flippers making the most noise were on the right.

In each of the above cases, the writers are now sublimely oblivious to their original support for closure. All they remember now is their rage at not getting the open schools they wanted exactly when they demanded them.

But sorry, folks. Did you call for closing the schools in March 2020? You own the results.

This might strike some as unfair.  Of course, the argument goes, *everyone*–or at least everyone who mattered–supported school closure in March 2020. People were scared.  Uncertain. Worried. Best to close the schools, keep people home. But once “the science” made it clear that schools were safe, it was incumbent on everyone to change their minds and do what was best. And Democrats didn’t do what was best. They didn’t follow the science.  It’s those stupid woke educators and the Democrats in thrall to the unions that caused the damage.

Ah, yes.  “I supported closing for two weeks, but…” or “Look, we didn’t know. It made sense at the time to shut down. But times changed.”

There is no “but”. It didn’t make sense at the time. Why close the schools? The goal was never to save the children because as early as February 2020, everyone knew children weren’t at risk. Mike DeWine and most governors closing schools expressly said the objective was to “slow the spread” or “flatten the curve”.

To restate: attendance requirements enabled and overwhelming opinion mandated that no parent be required to choose in-person instruction for their student, while parents were not given a similar guarantee out of remote.

Another fact rarely acknowledged: March school closure set a standard for unacceptable risk.

That standard set the stage for lawsuit threats over the following year. As can be seen from the Washington Post’s covid statistics, deaths and infections were far above the March 2020 levels for all of the next 18 months. This data made it very hard for schools even in the states that had no “mandatory remote option” requirement to deny parents the right to an in-home education.

See, here’s the thing: People are just stupid. In all ways, all the time. We all get to define stupid for ourselves. I personally think anyone under the age of 70 who *ever* felt unsafe about covid is pretty damn dumb. I also think the flippers who couldn’t accept that not everyone agreed with their change of perspective were idiots. I think the columnists endlessly yammering about infection rates and deaths in the apparent conviction that covid19 could be somehow controlled were foolish obsessives wasting print space.

Stupid is multi-directional.  Matt Ygelesias’s comment section is filled with self-styled thoughtful progressives who soberly discuss methods to educate MAGA folk out of their moronic devotion to Trump. Commentary podcast regulars smirk at the woke mentality and the MAGA morons. Pick your population, they’ll find a whole new stupid.

I’ve always known fixing stupid is hard, particularly in our polarized society with little agreement on what, exactly, stupid is. This explains my opposition to school closure. I knew people would react in idiotic ways. Not who, when,  or how.  But I was sure we could bank on stupid. And that meant closing the schools, which was a horrifically drastic action, would be impossible to undo as easily as the jackasses yapping about two weeks to slow the spread assumed.

People supported closing the schools because they felt afraid. When they stopped feeling afraid and felt safer, they wanted schools open. It’s just….everyone didn’t feel safer at the same time. As I’ve been writing for a while, now, the race factor was the unanticipated gotcha.

I realize that to anyone who didn’t actually look at the data–or to those intent on ignoring the data because they want their audience to blame unions–this seems absurd. Am I really saying that giving parents a choice guaranteed the damages done by 2021? That we were simply lucky the damage didn’t go on for longer?

Yes.

I am also saying that the media’s agitation for school closure caused this.

I doubt opinionmakers will ever understand how much damage they did.

If you ever called for school closure, if you have any sort of public voice and you added it to the demands for lockdowns and school closures, then nothing you said or did after that point mitigates your joint responsibility for the following eighteen months.  You didn’t understand how school works. You didn’t understand the massive legal restrictions and mandates that schools face. You didn’t understand that other people weren’t going to recover their sense of security as quickly as you did. You didn’t understand, period.

So yeah, Tim, Jim, Bethany, Karol, Michael, and all the other media golems who demanded closure then complained about remote education, with your only guiding principals being MAKE ME FEEL SAFE: you caused this. You want accountability? Look in the mirror.  Publish your own mea culpas.

Closing the schools was an act only fixable by ending remote education as a choice in local schools. And forcing kids back to in-person wasn’t going to fly that first year.

There aren’t always do-overs. There are mistakes that can’t be walked back. You can’t ctrl-z out of original sin.

Larry Cuban: Understanding the Stability of American Schools

(Disclosure: Larry Cuban is a friend, but my opinions on his value originated long before I met him.)

Over 20 years ago, Franklin Foer extolled conventional wisdom (CW) and its avatar,  David Gergen, arguing that Gergen’s relentlessly conventional wisdom was based on his deep expertise, which led him to unflashy but unerringly correct conclusions.

Until starting this piece I’d forgotten the author, the date, and the publication. My memory said the CW exemplar was David Broder, which made finding the article nearly impossible. 

What stayed with me was the plainly correct observation that flashy, controversial and ultimately flawed “takes” are given more public attention than accurate analyses yielding  prosaic outcomes reflecting the status quo.

Larry Cuban is a writer, historian, teacher, and educator who built a career pointing out that no Big Idea, whether it be driven by technology, “science”, money, standards, leadership, or organizational mandates, is likely to change the implacable stability of American education. And he gets it right. A lot.

Just as David Gergen has been banking on his “boring” takes for decades, Larry has been successful in education policy despite his avoidance of bold, controversial policies and predictions. Popular Stanford professor and co-author of a  famous text on education reform, he has made Rick Hess’s list of prominent edu-scholars every year since it came out in 2012.  

In ed school, we were assigned a chapter Larry wrote on problems versus dilemmas, a frequent topic on his long-running blog.  I initially dismissed his observations because I confused his insights with the teachers’ values. One wanted to support her students by advocating rent control but she might lose her job, for example. But we reread the piece after seven months of student teaching and I realized that the dichotomy was essential regardless of the examples. Today it’s hard to avoid the reality that most if not all education policy debates are dilemmas  wrongly pegged as  problems.* Accept this reality and it’s a short step to understanding that little will change.

Larry recently wrote a memoir, one I strongly recommend, although my  book reviews usually run to multi-part articles filled with examples and arguments on the author’s many misconceptions. (No David Gergen, I.) 

Larry structures his life story around America’s three eras of education reform, which correspond with his own education and career. His childhood took place in the fading days of the  Progressive Era, characterized by rapid secondary school expansion and increased focus on education administration and methods. His immigrant parents worked in New York City until they could buy n their own grocery store in Passaic, New Jersey, where Larry was born. Forced into bankruptcy by  anti-Semitic boycotts of all Jewish-owned stores, they relocated to Pittsburgh to be with family. An average student who preferred history and science, Larry’s memories of school are quite fuzzy, although he clearly recalls lessons of both traditional  and progressive approaches. More vivid memories involve sports and friends, a core group of whom he has stayed in touch with for seventy years.

The next section, my favorite, focuses on the Civil Rights era in education reform, from the late 50s to the early 70s. Larry majored in biology and history education. His first job was as a science teacher, but his strong desire to teach US history led to employment in a 99% “Negro” school in Cleveland, Ohio, a job that set the trajectory of his career. Lecturing to bored students five classes a day enervated and depressed him, so he started typing up primary sources of black history in an attempt to create classes more like his graduate seminars.  In a few years he became a notable teacher expert at engaging black students, qualifying for a year seminar in Yale. 

From there, Larry’s career becomes a roadmap of major 60s initiatives. He was invited to Washington, DC to head the Cardozo Project in Urban Teaching initiative, training returning Peace Corps volunteers to teach and build curriculum, originally a one-year project that his successful leadership converted into continued extensions. Ultimately the model was adopted first as DC’s Urban Teacher Corp and then as a model for the National Teacher Corps. He tried federal employment as a director of race and education at the Commission on Civil Rights, but he wasn’t a happy administrator. The horror of Martin Luther King’s assassination created racial tensions in the diverse office staff, so he left and enjoyed a few months of unemployment as a stay at home dad. He then went back to the DC district and worked in staff development until office politics drove him out. 

 Larry’s blazing early success in teaching drove his initial belief that curriculum and engagement could close the achievement gap and drive societal change. Witnessing the politics and obstruction of his ideas at the federal and state level changed his opinion: the  “best unit of reform” was a leadership position. But the ability to influence and reform as an administrator would require either  experience or more education.  Although Larry had kept teaching all through this period, covering one or two periods of history a day at a local school, he hadn’t stayed anywhere long enough to start an administrative career–and doing so would take a number of years. So off he went to Stanford to get a doctorate as a shorter path to a leadership position.  

The Civil Rights era of Larry’s career offers wonderful insights into teaching and education politics of an earlier era**. Larry’s brief recollections of ed school as well as his efforts to teach in a manner consistent with his training also sounds really familiar. I’m reminded again that many aspects of the education debate have a much longer timeline, one that most ed schol  critics ignore.

In person and writing, Larry is calm and laid back, making it easy to miss the ambition drove many of his career decisions (although his deep love for wife and daughters as well as his long-running friendships come through).  His decision to pursue a doctorate for professional advancement led to his superintendency at Arlington Schools superintendent, which begins the book’s third section on the Standards Based Reform Movement, from the 70s until today. He was hired by a politically liberal school board (including Ann Broder, David’s wife–how plate o’ shrimp it would have been had Broder been the CW maven!). The internet still yields a  number of stories that support Larry’s recollections, including an epic revenge reversal that’s hard not to enjoy as sheer story-telling despite the outcome, which ultimately led to his ouster when a more conservative electorate flipped the school board.  

Larry’s account details the national shift from focusing solely on black  achievement to managing the needs and challenges of an economically, racially, and academically diverse student body. While he never neglected the practical aspects of superintendency–keeping the lights on, parental communication, board relationships, learning and test scores–both his memoir and contemporaneous reporting reveal his emphasis on instruction and instructors.  He visited classrooms weekly for all seven years of his superintendency and had a standing offer to join teachers for lunch and discussion. He offered workshops on observations and  inquiry-based questioning skills. He’d sub from time to time. 

Biiennial surveys during his seven year reign showed increasing parental satisfaction. Test scores in elementary school improved, while secondary school scores stagnated. (Twas ever thus.) Significantly, Larry’s successor lasted only one term and was fired when the school board flipped back to the left. By then, Larry had returned to Stanford where he’s been ever since, publishing over 20 books since retiring in 2001.

Larry’s memoir does much to explain his scholarly focus and philosophy. His sketchy memories of his own school experiences renewed his perspective on the relative importance of education: Or, as he says in the memoir, “Life educates.”

His success in improving engagement led to his conviction that meaningful curriculum and trained teachers would lead the way to greater learning. When he found constraints, he sought to broaden that “best unit of reform” –first trying policy, then in district management. Ultimately, Larry realized that his initial belief that “better schools could make a better society” had the “causal direction wrong: societal changes alter schools far more than schools remake society”.

His scholarship continually reflects this theme. Larry’s seminal work Tinkering Towards Utopia, written with his friend and colleague David Tyack, informed and warned passionate choice and accountability advocates about the cycles of earlier reform eras.  In 1995, the modern education reform movement was gathering steam, the federal government was enabling charters to “compete” with public schools so they could “end the achievement gap”. National curriculum reform was being attempted in every academic subject. Triumphalism was the tone of the day. Meanwhile Cuban and Tyack were pointing out how often this had been tried–and failed–before. ESA and voucher advocates would be wise to take note.

In As Good As It Gets, he explored a decade of Austin’s school reform under the same superintendent.  Larry observes that relatively little changed in the classroom and to the extent it did no link to management policy implementation could be ascertained. The title is double edged, praise with a shrug: hey, you want reform? This is about as good as it gets. 

As reform movements sought to use technology as the new tool to transform the classroom,  Larry reported the actual impact. Oversold and Underused, captures his thesis: computers in the classroom haven’t changed much about instruction or curriculum.

Larry’s books continually remind us of the strength of the conventional education models: for all we argue, nothing in education changes much. He views American schools’ implacable resistance to change with cheerful equanimity.  It is what it is, something to be accepted and even cherished, despite the inequities. I suspect Larry wouldn’t object much to Arnold Kling’s Null Hypothesis of Education Intervention. 

Although Larry supports charter schools, his message often runs contrary to reform rhetoric. Once he participated as a panelist in a 2015 AEI round table on classroom changes wrought by “billionaire philanthropy” for education reform. His presentation included this deeply Cubanesque slide predicting that most reforms will disappear, and the ones that don’t will actually strengthen the conventional form of public education. 

Howard Fuller, up next, responded with doleful humor: “It’s always difficult to read Larry’s stuff because then you want to go back in your house. It’s like ‘why did I leave my house today?’ you know, given how little leaving my house means to anybody…but after having fought through that, I decided to get on the plane anyway.” 

Acceptance doesn’t mean indifference. As I first observed over a decade ago,  Larry is one of just two well-known education policy experts who has significant experience as a teacher, a job he dearly loved and that clearly influences his research and findings. Above all, he seeks to inform his readers on the act of teaching and its disconnection from the far more visible policy debates. He loves to visit working classrooms. His books carry multiple, careful and detailed lesson observations, either those he witnesses himself or those he culled from archives and news reports. Anyone who simply wants to know what happens when teachers shut the doors in  America’s classrooms would be well-advised to read his work.

In years, decades, and even centuries to come, when historians are snorfling loudly at publishers who promoted nonsense like Richard Reeves’  treatise arguing we should keep boys back a year, they will still be reading Larry’s books for insight into America’s teaching force throughout history.

*****************************************************

*Examples in my own work: Algebra 2, the Gateway Course, The Day Of Three Miracles, The Push for Black Teachers, Minneapolis Style. Another ed school author who made much more sense on the second reread was Grant Wiggins. 

**Teaching History Then and Now has more such stories for those interested.

Christmas in July

In 1994, I bought a really nice grill. Much bigger than I needed–with a lurking question being did I need one at all, since keeping coals on fire until they ember wasn’t (and isn’t) in my skillset. I was in another state at the time; upon returning back home I moved to an apartment and had no room for it so I gave it to my mom. My stepdad has his own forty-year old Weber, and needed nothing else. So my lovely grill sat neglected for two decades until my brother and I moved back into the family house (not my mom’s). Fortunately, my father was in town that summer. We lugged it home to spend a good week scraping and painting and fixing to restore it to beautiful condition.  We–and by we, I mean my brother, father, nephew, and stepdad–used it for countless family dinners over the past eight years and it has enjoyed a happy, useful life.  Eventually the neglect caught up with it and the bottom fell out.

On the Fourth, my brother and I go out to buy a new grill at Home Depot.

“So here’s the thing,” I said. “I have serious moral qualms about a gas grill.”
“Yes,” Bro nodded.
“I mean, if it’s not charcoal, it’s just….cooking.”
“Exactly.”

I expected more of a diatribe. Look, our family takes food and cooking seriously. I make pumpkin pie with no cans. My brother gets annoyed at the very idea of Chipotle and buys street tacos from little truck stands.  One time we were flying to my dad’s and I was stripping my garden of all the corn to take with us and he objected. The corn won’t be fresh, he said. I observed that dad was unlikely to get corn fresher than six hours and he reluctantly agreed that more than a 30 second delay between picking and steaming wouldn’t be ruinous.  We sneer politely at people who buy Earth Balance. No, Smart Balance. Whatever that fake butter is called. Bro should have launched into a lecture about the need for the carbon in the grill marks or whatever. But he was just wandering around the displays, hesitantly.

“Oh, my god. You want a gas grill.” Guilt was written upon him. “But I’m not wrong, right?”

“No. Gas grills are just…cooking. Well. It’s an open flame, so I suppose that has some value.  But….it’d be nice to get the grill going with less than an hour lead time.”

My failure to master charcoal lighting left me at a serious disadvantage here.

“Well. Maybe if we think of it as just another oven? With Nephew taking cooking seriously, our utility bills are taking a hit.”

Bro cheered up instantly. “Hey, that’s a good idea. I’ll tell him to start cooking outside. Propane is cheap.”

Guilt resolved, we look upon the gas grills purposefully. I suggest that we (I) consider this a throwaway purchase. Who knows how this whole gas thing will work out. So we rule out buying the Cadillac Webers and start looking at the sales. Two five-burner grills, one normally $449, one $529,  are on sale for $299.

“Do these things come in boxes?”
“Yes. They have to be put together.”
“Is it easy?”
“Oh, shit. We need to do this today.”
“It’s almost 1.”
“That’ll be tight.”

Time management being as absent from our genes from as organization, planning and a desire for Chipotle menus, I suggest we buy classic Weber grill as well.

“Both?”
“Well, we need the one for today and then…. hell. Buying two seems crazy.”
“We don’t have to barbecue today.”
“But then what are we here for? Besides, we can give one to Nephew in the unlikely event he ever moves out. I was budgeting $500 for this grill, and we can get these two for under that.”

We decided on the $529 for $299 grill and then look for the boxes, asking an orange apron.

“You do know that the ones inside have to be assembled, right?”

“Yes, we…wait. There are grills here that don’t have to be assembled?”

Home Depot had put a whole bunch of grills for sale outside, purchase assembled. Out the first door, the one marked Entrance but is also an exit, we found multiple instances of two different models.  Miraculously,  the $449 for $299 was one of them. The $529 one wasn’t, but there was a cheaper version in the same brand.

Just then, Bro noticed a taco stand at the far end of Home Depot. Never one to endure indecision for more than 15 minutes, he told me to go figure out what the differences were while he had lunch. I did some research and found him back at the taco stand, past the big sheds for $5000, past the confusingly marked Exit sign that actually works as an entrance.

As I ate the last of Bro’s barbacoa tacos, we agreed that the $449 for $299 was the optimal deal, along with the Weber for today.  Neither of us was particularly happy. This felt more like a duty than a purchase. Still, as I pointed out, a lot of times I make slog buys that turn out great.

We started back the front of Home Depot, past the confusingly marked Exit sign, past the big sheds for $5000, and what do we come upon but more grills!! There were more than two models after all.

So before you think we’re idiots, consider a typical Home Depot storefront.

We came in the entrance just out of picture on the left. The first set of grills were right where they are in this picture. Still going left, there was a huge block of shopping carts–normally right by the entrance. So we thought that was the end of the grills for sale.

But in fact, after the shopping carts, where this picture has tractors, there were more grills. We both walked by them obliviously on our way to the taco stand, which is past the other entrance (the one marked Exit) to the right of this picture. So yeah, we’re idiots.

Seconds after we noticed the grills:

“HOLY SHIT! Look at this!” I looked over at Bro pointing to a grill with a different shape:

typical gas grill

new strange grill

“Why does it have two….holy shit. You’re kidding.”
“It’s BOTH!!!”
“We can have gas AND charcoal! And it’s ASSEMBLED!”

(If you can’t tell, I’m avoiding all brand names. I don’t want your judgment. I do not care if this is the best model. It was fucking Christmas in July.)

And that, readers, is how Bro and I learned about dual fuel grills.

Bro guarded our find while I paid and returned with two guys, both Hispanic long-time first gen, to help load our fabulous find. The grill didn’t entirely fit into the trunk, so Bro secured the trunk with knots and a ratchet strap. Just then a young dude with a huge man-bun parked his Prius, hopped out and came straight to the grills, checking them out with an expert’s eye right by me and the helper guys.

I said “these you can buy assembled–and there’s more on the other side of the shopping carts. And they have plenty unassembled inside.”

He said, “Thanks. But I can’t use gas. I’m opposed.”
“Exactly! It’s cheating! Like, why not just cook?”
” Gas grills really aren’t that different from a gas stove. I don’t want anyone bitching about carcinogenics, either. That’s what makes the flavor.”
“But we just bought this one and it does BOTH!”
“Get the fuck out, really?” (Are dual fuel grills new? I felt better for not knowing about them.) “Damn. I can’t check them out today. I need a long flat grill.”
“Oh, I saw one inside. It was a Weber, too. But I think it was gas. Good luck!”

Man-bun strode off to judge the gas grills and find them wanting just as Bro called me over to show him how to release the ratchet strap and retighten. As we finished, I heard the two Hispanic guys cracking up.

“It’s CHEATING!” “Man, it’s too easy to just turn on, you gotta work for it!”

It wasn’t mockery, but discovery.

The gas vs charcoal preference is a long-running American debate. Gas grillers might think charcoal lovers masochistic Luddites, but they understand the rationale. Not until this moment did I realize there were people in the world genuinely wondering why the fuck anyone would get a charcoal grill if they could afford gas. Like, why the hell did Traegers exist?

And I’d just pierced their cultural bubble. Ten years from now, these two are going to be grilling on their gas barbecues for family dinners and catch each other’s eye and say, in unison, “It’s CHEATING!” and laugh at the memory.

The new grill works great. Dinner was steaks, garlic bread (from scratch, of course) and salad with lettuce and cukes from my garden (tomatoes aren’t in yet). I had finished the pie crusts (from scratch, of course) for the lemon meringue pie but my mom, who has dementia, broke off the crusts and ate them before I could put the filling in. So I bought ice cream.

Happy Fourth.

PS–Can I restore the bottom of my old grill? I’d love to use it as a planter.

Paying Teachers To Do Nothing?

I argued constantly during the pandemic that remote elementary education was a waste of time, and all parents wanting to reopen schools should have just pulled their kids and threatened their district’s funding, but that doesn’t mean an elementary school teacher’s job was easy.  But I don’t know enough about the day to day work to comment on it.

I taught mostly high school math during the pandemic, for eighteen months: March to June 2020, summer school in 2020 and 2021, and the entire 20-21 school year.  I did a good job at it, too.  I can attest that for middle and high school, teaching is much harder in remote and required far more time.

Check for Understanding: In person, math teachers give kids a practice problem and walk around the room to determine who gets it, who needs help, what common misconceptions exist. We make sure the kids are all working, check for common misunderstandings to address, give the kids who finish in 30 seconds an additional challenge, and do this all in five-ten minutes.

To say that this task can’t be done in remote understates the difficulty added by remote. In-person, student response and teacher checking  are done simultaneously. In remote, these tasks are sequential. To determine kids understanding on Zoom, teachers had a few options, from unstructured to highly structured, all of which took far more time in an online class of anywhere from 25 to 36 kids.

Easiest method for ad-hoc questions: ask students to put the answer in private chat. For example, put a liner equation graph up and ask for the equation in slope intercept. The question had to be something that doesn’t require math notation, which Zoom chat can’t handle.  In general, getting 90% of students to answer takes on average 10 minutes AFTER the time needed to work the problem. Teachers need a list of names handy to check off each answer. Some kids won’t answer until nagged by name–which assumes, of course, the kids are actually online as opposed to logging in from work or bed or Disneyworld, which you can’t figure out until you’ve called them out by name several times. (I would always mark those kids absent then, despite their Zoom login. Revenge, and it did improve actual attendance.) Despite the problems, I used this method often. My student participation rate was generally over 80%, focus and obsess as I might over the remaining fifth.  So I could ask a question and get close to half of the kids answering quicky, chat them back a followup question while I harassed the rest into responding. It wasn’t perfect but it worked well enough and besides (as I reminded myself frequently) in the in-person version, there were always kids who didn’t work until I nagged them. And inevitably, there were kids who forgot to put it in private, meaning everyone could see their answer, meaning those who just wanted to avoid work could copy the response just to get me off their backs.

Next up for adhoc questions: create a poll, Classroom question (in Google) or a Google quiz. These made it far easier to track who had answered and who hadn’t and teachers didn’t have to go into Zoom logs to figure out who said what. This method also allowed for more than one question, so teachers could get more granularity on misunderstandings.  Still the same math notation limitation and the same nagging issues, delay in response. Moreover, it was really hard to make these genuinely ad hoc. Zoom poll takes a minute, but they’re hard to track outside of Zoom. Google Classroom questions take maybe two minutes, Google forms longer than that. From a practical standpoint, they can’t be really adhoc. So you have to plan ahead, which some teachers do automatically and others (raises hand) find a difficult task. Google forms were great for actual quizzes (see below) but they’re a bit too much work for a simple check for understanding. I never used Zoom polls, used Google forms for quizzes. I used Classroom questions occasionally.

Creating a poll, classroom question or google form quiz can’t be done easily on an ad hoc basis, especially if the question involved formulas that need special font, which most polls don’t allow. So teachers had to either plan and create their questions ahead of time (more hours of work) or create something simple in the moment–again, with response time for each taking ten minutes or so, for the same reason.

Classwork: Both of these methods give no clue as to what errors are being made and in fact, there’s no way online to check for understanding and get a real insight into student thinking. Checking for understanding by its nature has to be quick. Classwork, the bread and butter of math teachers is the other key way to see student thinking, what happens after the “release to work“, whether it be a book assignment, a worksheet, or an activity. For the first year of Zoom–from March to December 2020–I created Google Classroom assignments and students took pictures of their work to turn in.  Teachers using this method have to flip through multiple pages of student work online. This is brutal. I still have nightmares from the time spent reviewing classwork online until, thank the great math gods, a fellow teacher told me about Desmos activity builder and its integration with Google Classroom. As a former programmer, I was able to build my own custom lessons quickly, but for teachers without that skill, Desmos offers a lot of blessed options and googling finds a bunch of others. Desmos and Google Classroom combined were wonderful.  I could build my own activities, assign them to a class, and then see students work as they completed it, catching mistakes in action. If a student never logged in, I could see it. If a student logged in but did nothing, I could see it. I marked a lot of students absent on that basis,  which got them back into paying attention. Huge win.

But there’s that time factor again: either teachers could use their existing curriculum (worksheets or books) and spend hours reviewing work online (in my case, I don’t do homework normally, so this was a big chunk of added time) or they could rework all of their existing curriculum into Desmos assignments, which also took endless hours but at least had something of a payoff.

Assessment: Monitoring test integrity is relatively easy to do in person. (Relatively. And methods got much more sophisticated post-pandemic).  Rampant cheating was a huge issue during remote.  How to reduce cheating? Rewrite tests entirely.

For example, in a paper-based test you could ask a student to graph “y=2x+7” or “y=(x-3)(x+5)”. But Photomath–or, for that matter, Desmos–provides that answer in a heartbeat. Instead, I’d use a Desmos activity and ask students to graph a line with a slope of 2 and a y-intercept of 7, or a quadratic with zeros at 3 and -5. This wasn’t in any way a perfect substitute. Students wouldn’t have to know how to graph a slope of 2 or find a vertex. But at least I could ascertain a level of understanding. There were entire topics that were pointless to teach during the pandemic (exponents, factoring) because there was no way to see if the kids were doing it themselves or photomathing the work. Rewriting the tests still took hours.

Grading: Most non-teachers–hell, even teachers themselves–can’t really conceive of how hard it is to grade online. Automation takes care of the multiple choice scenarios, but Google forms allow short answers, and they don’t always exactly match. And never mind the exact matches, how about partial credit? Math teachers routinely give credit for setting up the problem correctly, deducting fewer points for minor math errors, and so on. I bought the least expensive Veikk tablet (love it, and still use it) but I could never find an easy way to mark up student work and save it for return without a lot of extra work. Leave aside that, it is still difficult to keep track of what you’re adding up. You can’t write directly on a google form or desmos, so you have to snip it and make your notes, which you then have to tally up and keep on a separate sheet….and so on. it’s a bitch.

These are essential tasks that went from 2 minutes per instance to an hour or more–each instance, with dozens of instances a week. For teachers (or me, at least), life outside of work was great. But work itself?  This article focuses on life during the early months of the shutdown, but I was able to institute more structure during summer school and by  fall 2021 my school had instituted a formal “bell schedule” with something approximating a normal school day online. It was a lot of work. Teachers coped with this in different ways. The more organized teachers who believe that coverage is the most important thing taught less time online and added far more to the students’ “asynch” hours, believing this would allow the motivated students  to learn more effectively. I did the opposite. But regardless of method, work was much longer and harder.

The only good thing about teaching during the pandemic is that I could do my bit to make life better for students after a government action I vehemently opposed from day one. Meanwhile, moving so much of school online added permanently not only to my pandemic school day, but to my day post-pandemic.

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I remember the day our school closed, asking the head custodian what he’d be doing during the shutdown. “Taking care of mom,” he said. She had cancer. Oh,  so he wouldn’t have to be on campus. He laughed. “Maybe a bit. Not much.”

Bus drivers were definitely furloughed. But in the main,  public education layoffs actually decreased during the pandemic.

Shutting down the schools in March 2020 left hundreds of thousands of people paid a full time salary to do almost nothing. Most non-teaching school lower level staff (attendance, custodial, teacher’s aides) had very little to do. We didn’t even take attendance in most schools from March to June 2020, so those clerks had nothing to do. Custodial staff had to clean if anyone came on campus, but otherwise were onsite doing nothing. Secretaries and clerks had half or less of their usual job. The more highly educated district staff, who are nice, supportive, but ultimately unnecessary staff anyway but ignore that for another time, had pandemic-related assignments, like finding online curriculum to purchase at great expense that we teachers generally ignored. I don’t blame any district or school staff for their long vacation. But they were on light duty at best.

Half of all school employees don’t teach. With the exception of school administrators, most of them had next to nothing to do during the school closures. So closing the schools meant that just under half of all public school employees had their jobs cut in half at least. Schools could have laid off millions of personnel to combine jobs. 

Just one of the many misconceptions deluding all those complaining about paying teachers to “do nothing” during remote education is the fact that teachers were one of only two employment categories whose jobs got much harder and longer during the pandemic. I’ve pointed out endlessly that school closures were primarily a function of parental preference, that teachers’ unions, no matter their pro-closure rhetoric, couldn’t do anything to affect those decisions. There’s mountains of evidence establishing this pattern. But even those who foolishly believe in the evil teachers closed the schools story should remember that if teachers closed the schools, they created more work for themselves, not less.

Meanwhile, does anyone remember the various folks howling about closed schools and lazy teachers demanding that district and support staff personnel get furloughed? Any complaints about the thousands of state government employees getting a long-term vacation at taxpayer expense? Demands that schools collapse jobs to eliminate expensive, unnecessary personnel?

Me neither.

The Problems with Accountability

For years, I’ve rolled my eyes at all the earnest people talking about student learning, particularly in high school. Like the occasional think pieces on credit recovery, questioning them as an effective tool for student learning. I mean, my lord.

In fact, it was one of those think pieces on credit recovery by Nat Malkus that actually led to this article, which I started years ago and just found in my draft folder. I’d been trying to figure out a way to express my admittedly cynical hilarity at these, but had a hard time figuring out how to start until this sentence caught my eye:

“Education reform in recent decades has focused on raising standards, pushing more students to reach them…”

Wait, what?

Education reform in recent decades insisted that ALL students MUST reach them, and they must meet them by the same levels in all SES, racial, and educational categories.  NCLB went so far as to demand that all students must be above average.

But leave that aside for the moment. Malkus is still wrong. The standards movement wasn’t about pushing students. Standards are about pushing schools.

Federal and state governments don’t hold students responsible for failing to meet goals. It’s the school that lose control and funding.

Education policies don’t hold students accountable for their own low  test scores.

This seems obvious, trite even. Naturally the students can’t be blamed for the schools’ many  failures!

But that’s not why we don’t hold students accountable.

Consider the only time in recent education history that students faced actual accountability for their own failure to meet the mandated levels of achievement.

I speak, of course, of the high school graduation test.

Refusing to grant high school diplomas to those who failed the test was a reform that at its height was implemented by 27 states.

Keep in mind that these high school graduation tests didn’t actually assess what we’d like to call high school knowledge. My own state required middle school math and some basic grammar, and since all states had upwards of 90% pass rates, it’s a safe bet that all states set competency at roughly the 8th grade level. These tests nonetheless posed a tremendous challenge for small chunks of the population with the usual suspects of race playing their usual part, and thousands of students never passed. As Matt Barnum’s brief history of the exit exam fad discusses, the research on exit exams revealed reduced graduation rates and no increase in proficiency or college attendance. It’s all bad news.

Results: Most states eliminated their efforts in the mid-teens after barely a decade of traying. A few created  several workarounds to allow graduation for those who fail the tests.

That’s it. That’s the only time America has in any way held individual k-12 student advancement hostage to their tested proficiency. And boyoboy when states backed away, they really backed away. California and Georgia went back and handed out retroactive diplomas to anyone who hadn’t been able to pass the test.

When Malkus says that education reform pushed “more students” to meet “raised standards”….well, he misspoke. Education reform created higher standards and demanded that schools provide evidence that students met those standards, but at no point penalized students for failing to meet the standards by general assessment.

Here, in fact, is what happened during the education reform heyday: students were given no choice but to take demanding courses. They couldn’t opt out of Algebra 2. They couldn’t take composition instead of writing critical essays on Shakespearean plays. Schools couldn’t place students who counted on their fingers into a basic math course, or give reading instruction to kids reading at third grade level. They had to put freshmen in “college prep” courses.

Despite this ruthless curriculum restriction, the only attempt at enforcing student accountability gave passing scores for knowing middle school math and the proper use of capitalization. Meanwhile, schools were criticized and often penalized for not graduating enough students who the states required to take increasingly advanced courses to get those diplomas.

What did they think would happen?

Transcripts and grades have been fraudulent for decades, even without reaching the depths of the Maspeth scandal.

I’ve often discussed this reality, of course. Teachers ignore universal standards and set their grading policies to the average ability of their students.  In cases where teacher rigor is too much for their students, these teachers either adjust or don’t last long at that particular job.

But consider how this reality plays out in the context of the aforementioned credit recovery system. If schools give passing grades based on the average student ability, credit recovery shouldn’t be necessary.

It’s not as if teachers are out there holding all their students to the expected standards. Go seek out the million stories bewailing the low student test scores accompanying grade inflation going back decades. Failing a single class doesn’t lead to credit recovery. Students can take a class two or even three times and still be on track to graduate, as happens quite a bit in math. Or they can take the expensive version of credit recovery known as summer school, where students exchange seat time for a certain pass.

And yet with all the lowered standards, all the multiple opportunities, all the efforts, there are kids who still can’t get their ass to school each day, or get to school and treat it as social hour, or cut classes so often they can’t get a passing grade even if the teacher wants to give it because they’ve missed the minimum number of instructional hours (look for states to end this requirement).

These are the students for whom online credit recovery is designed. Can schools get them into a classroom to sit still long enough to click through courses? And, as any principal will tell you, there are students who can’t even manage this much. But many can, and so yet one more selection criteria emerges–students who fuck around endlessly but straighten up enough to click through credit recovery and students who continue to fuck around endlessly.

Low ability students in schools with lots of low ability students generally pass if they want to. Most will pass the first time, but some will either screw up or get stuck with a teacher whose standards are higher than they  can deliver. Then they’ll take the course again, or go to summer school. Learning has little to do with it. Maybe 1 in 100 kids who retake a course says “Yeah, I learned a lot.” The vast majority jumped through the hoops they needed. A depressing number of students miss, jump, pass, miss, jump, pass all the way through high school.

Credit recovery isn’t for kids who didn’t learn. Credit recovery is for the kids who dodge all of the schools’ expert techniques at convincing students to do enough work to get a passing grade.

Credit recovery is just one part of a massive, expensive endeavor to shepherd unwilling students through school long enough to give them a diploma. Worrying about whether or not they are learning really misses the point. Worrying about what students learn in a world determined to pretend all students can learn the same subjects is likewise missing the point.

Any effort to improve education has to hold students accountable. But in order to hold them accountable they have to be given choices.

Schools do need to teach their students. But in order to hold schools accountable, they need to be able to accurately place students based on their ability and interest to help them progress.

All sides of the education debate refuse to acknowledge this.  They refuse to acknowledge ability and motivation. They refuse to acknowledge that low student ability isn’t a moral failing: not the student’s, the teacher’s, or the school’s. That’s why all their efforts will fail–including the ridiculous parent choice initiatives libertarians and choice folks are currently celebrating. That’s why the problem is now getting worse, with colleges abandoning their previous metrics of student accountability (test score admissions and remediation).

I don’t know what the answer is. The 80s is the last time our country gave students choice and schools the right to place. It was roundly rejected in the 90s by lawsuits against tracking and education reform’s demand that “all students succeed”.

I’ve been depressed by educational changes made post-pandemic. The left is pretending all kids are traumatized, the right is convinced that all parents share the rage of the roughly 15% who wanted in-person education but didn’t get it. The left is eradicating standards for college, the right is busy giving illegal immigrants $7K to homeschool their kids, and celebrating grifters who open voucher schools. Things start to feel grim.

Then I look at my kids and remind myself that the real miracle is how many kids do learn. How schools still do the best job imaginable at finding smart kids and helping them out. How despite all the insane rhetoric coming from all sides, most of us in school–students, teachers, and administrators–get the job done of helping kids navigate their way through childhood to meaningful adulthood.

And I feel better.