Educational Mansplaining

As an American male, I’m an experienced mansplainer. My former teacher colleagues (mostly female) would surely be able to give you an example or two of my tendency to “help them understand” something that they probably understood as well or better than I did. I remember once, at a meeting discussing psychometric testing of a student, I started explaining percentiles to another teacher. With a look of pity and loathing, she said to me, “I understand what percentiles are.” What she likely left unsaid was, “I have an education degree, too, you obnoxious, insulting POS!” Out loud she added, “It’s ok. I’m used to you.”

Now that I have established my mansplaining credentials, I’d like to comment on a thread I read on Twitter this morning. The thread consisted of women giving examples of someone like me mansplaining something that they already knew.

I must admit…while reading the thread I felt the urge to add my own tweet explaining how Twitter threads work…

…but I digress.

A FLASH OF INSIGHT

The thread that I read included a tweet from Dr. Jessica McCarty, whose Miami University (Ohio) bio reads,

Dr. McCarty has a PhD in Geography from University of Maryland at College Park. Expertise in remote sensing, GIS, data mining, natural resources, agricultural & food security, land-use/land-cover change, fire, air quality, GHG emissions, black carbon, climate, app development, and UAVs. She is a PI and/or Co-I on NASA, EPA, NSF, USDA, and UN projects that focus on using remote sensing of food security, fire, emissions, & air quality. She has presented at NASA, AGU, IIASA , WMO & UN meetings.

I have no idea what most of that bio means, so I’ll assume that Dr. McCarty is a fully qualified professional. Her tweet about mansplaining…

Dr. Jessica McCarty (‪@jmccarty_geo‬)

At a NASA Earth meeting 10 years ago, a white male post doc interrupted me to tell me that I didn’t understand human drivers of fire, that I def needed to read McCarty et al.

Looked him in the eye, pulled my long hair back so he could read my name tag. “I’m McCarty et al.”

At that point, I had a blinding flash of insight…

For the last few decades, politicians in the U.S. (mostly male) have been mansplaining education to American teachers (mostly female).

Think of politicians as the “white male post doc” and think of teachers as Dr. McCarty. For years they’ve been telling us “what’s wrong with education” and “how to fix education” but the teachers are the real experts.

MANSPLAINING EDUCATION

Let’s see some examples…first, George W. Bush’s “signature” education policy, No Child Left Behind.

Were there any teachers, anywhere in the country, who believed that it was possible to have all students score “proficient” on standardized tests within a dozen years?

Of course not. The politicians who wrote NCLB had absolutely no clue what proficient actually means. Nor did they realize that standardized testing was an excellent method of determining a student’s family income, but not much else.

And then we had Race to the Top. Not to be outdone, the Democratic designed education plan begun eight years later included evaluating teachers using student test scores. Were there teachers anywhere in the country who didn’t understand that those teachers who taught in wealthy schools would get better “evaluations” than teachers who taught in high-poverty schools?

Once again, the answer is no. Politicians didn’t notice that “good” teachers (by their definition) seemed to congregate at schools with children from wealthy families while poor kids always seemed to have the “bad” teachers. They didn’t understand that correlation is not causation. They didn’t understand that there are out-of-school factors that have an impact on a child’s school achievement and that test scores do not define quality schools or quality teachers. David Berliner explained this well in Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. American schools are set up to reward students who come from wealthy families.

THE STATUS OF TEACHERS

By now it should be no secret why teachers are “mansplained” about education — aka treated with less respect than other professionals. Teaching is still seen as “women’s work” and those who hold control of the funding in education are mostly men.

In a field so dominated by women, it’s not surprising that, in our patriarchal society, teachers are devalued and disrespected. Women still earn less than men. Women still have trouble reaching the highest levels of societal status (outliers notwithstanding). And women are still objectified in popular culture.

Money and status are still the most reliable paths to respect in our culture. The relatively low pay of the teaching profession and the fact that women make up the majority of educators, tends to lower the status of other teaching when compared to other professions.

In societies where education is more successful teachers are paid more and afforded higher status.

Now, the next time you hear a politician talk to a teacher or a group of teachers (or the general public) about “…what’s wrong with education in this country” you’ll know what’s really going on.

And to my former colleagues (mostly female)…Thanks for reading. I really needed to explain this.

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It’s not enough!

“OPEN THIS SCHOOL!”

MASKS WORK…

I feel like we’re living in an Idiocracy.

Wisconsin’s Republican legislature is fighting the mask mandate ordered by the Democratic governor…because, of course they are.

Wisconsin’s Legislature repealed Gov. Tony Evers’ mask mandate. He issued a new one.

Fearing more deaths statewide, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers reissued a mask mandate Thursday, standing up to a Republican Legislature that had repealed his previous mask order earlier in the day.

“We know that wearing face coverings can save lives and prevent death. We know it’s supported by science,” Evers, a Democrat, said in a two-minute video.

He said repealing his previous mandate to wear face coverings in public places put at risk about $50 million a month in federal funds to help hundreds of thousands of vulnerable residents.

Experts, i.e. those who are educated and actually know things, understand that masks, along with other mitigation measures, help prevent the spread of COVID-19 (See here, here, and here. The idiocrats in the Wisconsin legislature aren’t experts.

…BUT MASKS ARE NOT ENOUGH FOR SCHOOLS TO OPEN

So what do experts say about opening schools during a pandemic? Teachers are worried about their own safety, as well as the safety of their students, co-workers, and families. Some teachers are refusing to return to school until they can get vaccinated. In Indiana, the governor has decided to forego vaccinations for teachers even though the CDC recommended that teachers be vaccinated at the same time as other “essential” workers. Our governor is not alone. Others are saying that teachers should just go back to work and quit whining.

So, do teachers need to be vaccinated before schools can open?

If you have seen or read any news recently, you might think that the new director of the CDC believes they don’t.

CDC director says schools can safely reopen without vaccinating teachers

Teachers do not need to get vaccinated against Covid-19 before schools can safely reopen, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday.

“There is increasing data to suggest that schools can safely reopen and that safe reopening does not suggest that teachers need to be vaccinated,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told reporters during a White House news briefing on Covid-19.

“Vaccinations of teachers is not a prerequisite for safely reopening schools,” she added.

This is the extent of the reporting that most folks see on Facebook, cable news stations, or the headline in the newspaper. The article above even has “Key Points” of the article bulleted at the top which further discourage readers from reading any further…

That’s it. Case closed. The science has spoken. Right?

Wrong!

Notice what’s left out of the “Key Points.” There isn’t anything about what needs to be done before schools can open other than teachers have been worried, and they don’t need to be vaccinated.

If you keep reading, however, you get to this paragraph…

A study from the CDC published late last month found little evidence of the virus spreading at schools in the U.S. and abroad when precautions were taken, such as wearing masks, social distancing and ventilating rooms.

Did you see that?

…when precautions were taken, such as wearing masks, social distancing and ventilating rooms.

In Indiana, our idiocratic governor, aside from postponing teachers vaccinations, now says that students and staff only need to keep a “social” distance of three feet instead of six. And now that there are more contagious variants of the disease, the governor, in his (lack of) wisdom has decided that schools are…

…no longer required to quarantine if someone is exposed in the classroom, if they kept three feet socially distant and wore a mask.

According to the CDC, social distancing is still six feet. Even if it wasn’t, how am I going to fit 25 (or 30 or 35) kids in my classroom and keep them even three feet apart?

PROVIDE AND EMPHASIZE MORE INFORMATION

Since many citizens in our idiocracy (including some legislators and, apparently, our governor) don’t necessarily read entire articles, or only get their news in small bites from the TV, more information about what schools need to open must be emphasized! The director of the CDC should emphasize that teachers don’t need to get a vaccine before schools open if and only if…

1. all staff members and students have masks
2. strict social distancing (of six feet) is followed and
3. school buildings and classrooms are properly ventilated

If a school can’t do those things, and if the state or federal governments can’t provide funds to allow them to do those things, then it’s not safe for schools to open.

Think about the special education teacher or special education paraprofessional who can’t social distance from their high-need students, whose students have trouble keeping masks on, and are working in an old school building with poor ventilation. It’s February. Opening windows is not an option in some parts of the country.

Think about the preschool teacher who has a room full of two, three, or four year olds. Can she keep a social distance between them? Can she make sure that they all keep their masks on? How about snack or lunch time? How about diaper changes? What if the classroom is in an old building with poor ventilation?

Not every educational group or age group of students are able to follow the guidelines from the CDC. Not all school buildings are equiped to keep students socially distanced or to provide adequate ventilation.

When someone makes a blanket statement that “it’s ok to open school buildings even if teachers aren’t vaccinated”…

…it sounds like an idiocracy to me.

You might also like this post by Nancy Flanagan.
The 12 Point Covid-19 DISCONNECT Between Teachers and Those Who Want Schools Open Now!

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2021 Medley #1: Bye, Bye Betsy and other stories

DeVos Resigns, End wasteful testing,

COVID and education, Choice for schools,

Blaming teachers, The “Science of Reading”

BYE, BYE BETSY

Betsy DeVos Resigns

I was ready to publish the rest of the articles in this post on Wednesday, but I got sidetracked by the horrible events in Washington D.C. Since then I have paused, while I figured out what I wanted to say. Then, last night, Betsy DeVos resigned…

I am against nearly everything DeVos has done during her term as Secretary. She has pushed her agenda of privatization and has rejected pleas to support students overwhelmed by debt. She has ignored racist education policies and neglected the students who need the most help. She hates public education and public educators. I doubt that she cares much for public school students, either. She was never qualified for her job. She never attended a public school. She never worked in a public school. She never sent her children to a public school. She’s an elitist billionaire who cares only about what she can control with her money.

I’m sure she will now return to private life and continue to wreak havoc on public education by buying legislators and using her billions to support private, religious education.

There are a lot of articles discussing DeVos’s resignation — the nation’s worst Secretary of Education appointed by the worst President. Mitchell Robinson verbalizes how I feel about her. After all the terrible things her boss has done over the last four years, she has finally had enough, apparently…

I wish I could find more satisfaction in something I’ve hoped would happen for 4 years.

But as usual, Ms. DeVos did the absolute least she could do (resign), well past the time when it could have made a difference (with 13 days left in her lamest of all duck terms), and is probably only doing it to avoid doing something she doesn’t want to do (invoke the 25th Amendment).

DeVos resigned, allegedly, because her boss’ insurrection attempt was an “inflection point” she simply couldn’t ignore.

TIME FOR TEST WITHDRAWAL

The Tests Are Lousy, So How Could the Scores Be Meaningful?

If anything good can come out of the devastating pandemic still terrorizing the nation, then it’s that there is absolutely no reason to continue our overuse and misuse of standardized tests. Alfie Kohn pens another excellent, thought-provoking piece…

Standardized tests are so poorly constructed that low scores are nothing to be ashamed of — and, just as important, high scores are nothing to be proud of. The fact that an evaluation is numerical and the scoring is done by a computer doesn’t make the result “objective” or scientific. Nor should it privilege those results over a teacher’s first-hand, up-close knowledge of which students are flourishing and which are struggling.

Sadly, though, some educators have indeed come to trust test scores more than their own judgment. One hears about parents who ask a teacher about problems their child is having in school, only to have the teacher reach into a desk and fish out the student’s test results. Somewhere along the way such teachers have come to discount their own impressions of students, formed and reformed through months of observation and interaction. Instead, they defer to the results of a one-shot, high-pressure, machine-scored exam, attributing almost magical properties to the official numbers even when they know those exams are terrible.

SCHOOLS AND COVID-19

COVID and Schools: The Data and Science Then and Now

The conventional wisdom is that it’s safe to send kids back to school. The need for students to be in face-to-face school situations is so important that we should not worry about adults in the building and their susceptibility to COVID, but send the kids so they can get an education (Note: this is often said by the same people who lobby for online charter schools!).

It turns out that the conventional wisdom is wrong. Schools are not always the safest place for kids or adults.

…internationally, they have already figured out in the public consciousness that schools are platforms for superspreading. It is very clear that Covid has taken advantage of some of American’s most challenging traits— denial and hubris— in the debate about reopening schools.

So what does the national data reported in early December by US News tell us about the situation with communities, schools, and Covid?

• 
  Their analysis of their national data shows that the high school student case rate (13 per 1,000 students enrolled for in-person classes) is nearly three times that of elementary school students (4.4 per 1,000).
• 
  They observed that the higher the community case rate, the higher the school district case rate…

THE MYTH THAT TURNS OUT TO BE TRUE

Can charter schools pick the best students? No, but many believe the myth.

Jay Matthews, the reformist Washington Post education writer without any educational training, writes this article about how it’s not true that charters can pick and choose their students…and then proceeds to tell us how charter schools pick and choose their students.

So it’s wrong to say that charters are allowed to pick whatever students they want. But that’s not to say some of them haven’t skirted those rules.

In 2016, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the Public Advocates civil rights law firm found that at least 253 of California’s roughly 1,200 charter schools maintained policies that illegally prevented students from enrolling or remaining at their schools.

A school in Hemet, Calif. said that to apply as a sophomore a student “must be earning an ‘A’ or ‘B’ in both Geometry and Biology.” A school in Redlands said “only students who show steady academic progress . . . will be eligible for enrollment.” Within a few months of the report’s publication, more than 100 charter schools contacted the authors to say they were correcting their policies to get off the bad list…

IT’S ALL THE TEACHERS’ FAULT

The New York Times Adds One Plus One And Gets Three

When the pandemic hit and schools closed, teachers were lauded for their heroism…changing their entire jobs overnight and taking care of their students online. As the public has tired of the pandemic, however, the inconvenience of not having all schools open — despite the danger to those who work in education — has opened teachers up for derision. The very fact of teachers as essential workers has given many the opportunity to blame teachers for inconveniencing their lives.

Peter Greene, in the following two posts, explains some things about education and teaching…

…what the heck do people think teachers do every fall? Seriously. Do they imagine that teachers just assume that all their new students know X, Y and Z because it’s in the curriculum. Do folks imagine that teachers spend the weeks before school poring over BS Test results to learn where their students are? Because, no– mostly the test results aren’t available yet and because teachers are forbidden to see the actual question, all they get is the test manufacturer’s “analysis” of the results, which is mostly hugely broad and unhelpful.

No, in the fall, teachers use a large array of formal and informal assessments to figure out student’s individual weaknesses and strengths. Teachers do this daily, and then they keep doing it all year. This remains one of the great, silly fictions of the BS Test–that the results are useful to teachers who would be lost without them. In reality, the BS Test is like a guy who shows up at the office of a general who is commanding thousands of troops on dozens of fronts and this guy–this guy shows up with a pop gun and announces, “I am here to win this war for you.”

Another Round Of Teacher Bashing

The level of bash, of demeaning insult, in this “selfish teachers close our schools” argument is huge. Because there are only a couple of possible explanations for the picture critics like FEE [Foundation for Economic Education] paint:

Teachers are stupid people who don’t understand the settled science.

Teachers are stupid and also lazy people who went into teaching hoping they would have to never actually work and the pandemic shut-downs are their idea of a gift from God, and they want to stretch out this paid vacation for as long as possible.

Teachers are big fat liars who are pretending not to understand the settled science so they can milk the taxpayers while providing nothing in return.

Teachers should be martyrs who want to give up their entire lives for their students, and if they don’t want to do that (or, incidentally, want to be well-paid for it), they’re lousy teachers and terrible human beings.

Note that all of these include the assumption that distance learning is a big fat vacation. Also, people who chose teaching as their life’s work don’t actually want to teach. Also, as FEE makes explicit, teachers do not have students’ interests at heart. They don’t care about the kids at all (which adds to the assumption of their stupidity, because if you don’t care about children, teaching seems like a pretty dumb career choice, but hey–maybe you became a teacher because you couldn’t manage a real job).

A TAKE ON THE “SCIENCE OF READING”

The Critical Story of the “Science of Reading” and Why Its Narrow Plotline Is Putting Our Children and Schools at Risk

Last one for today, an essential article for teachers of reading and literacy.

#1. Hijacking Terminology
Words have power. The term science connotes credibility, but it also represents evolution and diversity. The “science of reading” has stripped away the dynamic interplay of experiences that grow a child into a reader and a writer and centered the literacy process solely atop phonics. This narrow plotline disregards the impact of writing, comprehension, culture, play, mentor texts, family, and the power of a teacher-researcher to individualize instruction…

#2. Reframing the National Reading Panel…

#3. Attacks on Higher Education and the Problems with NCTQ…

#4. “The Sky Is Falling” atop Declining NAEP Scores…

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Who’s to Blame?

How can a school system evaluate their teachers this year?

No one has been trained to work under our current conditions of either remote learning or learning while maintaining a social distance while wearing face coverings.

Everyone is doing what they can to make things work.

Some of the teachers who have worked hard to be there for their students have gotten sick.

Some have died.

We’ve discovered that COVID can strike anyone…even children. Even in school.

Parents who work outside the home can infect their children, and those children can infect their teachers.

When students or teachers get COVID, school systems, cities, and municipalities are quick to say “it didn’t happen at school.” This keeps the schools open and the kids at school so parents can work even if it’s not true. (And I understand the need for parents to work. I understand the difficulty for some parents of not being able to work from home…and at the same time having to be home with their children).

Sometimes if it gets too bad, schools will “go virtual.”

What happens to the parents, then? Do they quit their jobs? Do they lose their jobs? Do they enlist the aid of grandparents who might be more susceptible to serious illness?

The adults in schools can get sick and die from this disease. When they do, who do we blame? Who is responsible when teachers (or kids) get sick and die from COVID-19? Do we blame the teachers themselves because “it couldn’t have happened in school” so “they must have gotten it from somewhere else?”

Can we stop blaming educators for getting COVID?

Could we please have the decency to admit that, in many of these cases, we have no idea where they got it? While it is possible these educators contracted the virus outside of school, it’s just as likely that they didn’t. We simply don’t know.

What we do know about this virus is that the only way to truly stay safe from it is to avoid crowded public places, perform regular disinfection and ensure proper ventilation and clean air flow when we must share space with others. Those conditions are hard to come by in a public school.

These educators who have lost their lives during the pandemic have been forced to choose between increasing their risk of infection by returning to in-person instruction and not being able to feed their kids or pay their mortgage.

We’re all doing what we can.

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U.S. Neglects Tomorrow

In Aesop’s tale of the ant and the grasshopper, the busy ant made preparations for the coming winter, while the flighty grasshopper played away the summer. When winter came, the ant was prepared with substantial food for the winter while the grasshopper was starving.

The United States seems determined to play the grasshopper when it comes to our future. We use up our energy without a thought of what will happen when it runs out — and fossil fuels, no matter what other arguments one might make about them — are a finite resource. We fill our landfills to bursting…and recycling is failing in its promise. We ignore the changing climate that is drying out the “nation’s breadbasket” and burning up California’s farmland. And, most important, we don’t seem concerned with preparing our future citizens and leaders, our children.

In 1989 Carl Sagan said,

…we have permitted the amount of poverty in children to increase. Before the end of this century, more than half the kids in America may be below the poverty line.

What kind of a future do we build for the country if we raise all these kids as disadvantaged, as unable to cope with the society, as resentful for the injustice served up to them? This is stupid.

In the video above, Sagan claims that the US is 19th in the world in Infant Mortality. We haven’t improved much — if at all — since then. Why? Because we don’t spend as much money on our babies as other countries. We’re a wealthy country yet we aren’t investing in our future by taking care of our most important natural resource — our children.

Without continued investment in our children, will we be able to maintain our lifestyle and standard of living? In 1996, Sagan wrote,

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United states is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

Superstition and darkness — take a look around.

U.S. ranks near bottom of advanced nations in child wellness — new report

If we don’t take care of our children now how will that affect our future? Will we prepare enough doctors? enough teachers? enough people to support our society? Will we have more social unrest? more poverty? more violence? Will our economic gaps increase?

Which will have a greater impact on our daily lives…Jeff Bezos’s $200+ billion net worth, or the more than 38 million Americans living in poverty?

The United States ranks near the bottom of dozens of advanced nations in terms of the well-being of its children, according to a report with data from before the coronavirus epidemic.

The rankings were published by the United Nations Children’s Fund, known as UNICEF, which show that of 38 advanced countries for which data was compiled in a range of wellness markers, the United States was No. 36. (See ranking chart and full report below).

The Netherlands, Denmark and Norway topped the list, which takes into account data on the mental and physical health of children as well as their skills as measured by international exams. Mental well-being includes both life satisfaction as well as suicide rates; physical health includes rates of overweight and obesity as well as child mortality, and skills focuses both on proficiency in reading and mathematics as well as social skills.

But the report noted that in many of the advanced nations on the list, children are not doing well; in fact, in nearly half, more than 1 in 5 children live in poverty. Of 41 nations ranked on child poverty, the United States was fourth from the bottom.

What Does It Mean When Hardly Anybody Stands Up for the Basic Needs of Children and Public Schools?

I do not remember a time when the wellbeing of children has been so totally forgotten by the leaders of the political party in power in the White House and the Congress. This fall, school district leaders have been left on their own as they try to serve and educate children while the COVID-19 pandemic continues raging across the states. School leaders are trying to hold it all together this fall at the same time their state budgets in some places have already been cut.

Teacher pay penalty dips but persists in 2019

To prepare our children for their (and our) future, we’ll need teachers. Are we investing enough in teachers? Are we providing an incentive for the “best and the brightest” to go into education? Are we addressing the nation-wide teacher shortage?

We have been living through a decline in the number of teachers being trained, even before the pandemic. Colleges and universities report fewer students are choosing education. This past week we learned that the University of South Florida will close down its education school. Will more universities follow USF’s lead? Who will train tomorrow’s teachers?

Key findings

• The teacher wage penalty has grown substantially since the mid-1990s. The teacher wage penalty is how much less, in percentage terms, public school teachers are paid in weekly wages relative to other college-educated workers (after accounting for factors known to affect earnings such as education, experience, and state residence). The regression-adjusted teaching wage penalty was 6.0% in 1996. In 2019, the penalty was 19.2%, reflecting a 2.8 percentage-point improvement compared with a penalty of 22.0% a year earlier.

• The teacher wage penalty declined in the wake of recent teacher strikes but only time and more data will reveal whether teachers’ actions led to a decline and a turning point. The lessening of the teaching penalty from 22.0% in 2018 to 19.2% in 2019 may reflect pay raises enacted in the wake of widespread strikes and other actions by teachers in 2018 and 2019, particularly in some of the states where teacher pay lagged the most. Unfortunately, the data we have to date are not sufficient to allow us to identify the geographic locus of the improvements in teacher wages and benefits and any association with the recent wave of teacher protests and strikes. Only time will tell if this single data point marks a turning point in teacher pay…

• The benefits advantage of teachers has not been enough to offset the growing wage penalty. The teacher total compensation penalty was 10.2% in 2019 (composed of a 19.2% wage penalty offset by a 9.0% benefits advantage). The bottom line is that the teacher total compensation penalty grew by 7.5 percentage points from 1993 to 2019.

Isn’t it time that we started to prepare for the future?

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