Advice for Teachers, Policymakers, and Donors

Well over a decade ago, Larry Ferlazzo, a Sacramento (CA) high school English/social studies teacher and avid blogger, interviewed me asking what advice I have for teachers, policymakers, and philanthropists. The advice I offered then came largely from my 14 years as a high school history teacher in Cleveland (OH) and Washington, D.C. public schools, seven years I spent as a district superintendent in Arlington (VA), 20 years of teaching, research, and writing at Stanford University. Since 2001, I have been an emeritus professor teaching occasional university seminars (until 2013) while becoming a full-time writer and blogger.

I have updated and expanded that earlier post. The advice I gave then to Larry Ferlazzo is, in my opinion, still apt for teachers, policymakers, and donors in 2024.

Larry Ferlazzo: If you were going to offer teachers three key pieces of advice that you think might help them to stay in the profession longer and be more effective educators, what would they be?

1. Re-pot yourself every few years.

Teaching is both energizing and exhausting work. When teaching you spend the rich intellectual, physical, and emotional capital that you have accumulated over the years on your students. And because teaching over time is also draining, you need to re-invest in yourself and your future students by doing what expert gardeners do with favorite potted plants.

Because plants can become pot bound, that is, the roots of the plant become cramped and form a tightly packed mass that inhibits growth they need to be re-potted into different soil and larger pots so they can flourish. Yes, re-potting entails risks and often causes stress but staying potted in the same place means little growth, even death.

For teachers, re-potting may mean shifting to another grade, tossing out old lessons, introducing new ones, taking a short break from the classroom or doing something else that engages one’s passions. For educational policymakers, re-potting may mean a return to teaching for a school year or seeking a similar post in another district, or even taking a short paid or unpaid leave of absence.

Effectiveness in every helping profession requires developing relationships with those served, be they clients, patients, parishioners, or students. In teaching, the building and sustaining of relationships with children and youth prepare the soil for learning. Such work, over time, exhausts one’s energies and commitment. Renewal—re-potting—is essential.

2. Take intellectual risks.

Because teaching is repetitive work—as is doctoring, lawyering, and engineering—a certain monotony creeps in over time. Sure, each year students differ and they add the spice of unpredictability to what occurs in classrooms but inevitably, daily routines become, well, routine. Altering predictable classroom practices, introducing new subject matter, experimenting with different time schedules for activities, trying out new technologies to enhance student learning—all are instances of taking risks and avoiding getting buried intellectually in a deep rut that you have created.

Yes, failures do occur–after all, taking risks means facing possible failure but teaching effectively means accepting that from time to time falling on one’s face is not a tragedy but—you guessed it—an opportunity to learn how to do the task better next time around. Losing the courage to take intellectual risks is a telltale sign that teaching fatigue has set in and that the routines of teaching have triumphed.

3. Speak out.

There are so many reasons why teachers and policymakers do not speak out about teaching, student learning, school procedures and district policies. From fear of retaliation to sheer exhaustion at the end of the day to working at another job or taking graduate courses to caring for family and friends to inexperience in writing or speaking publicly—all are reasons teachers and district administrators give for letting others speak for them.

What many teachers forget or underestimate is the credibility that they have with parents, voters, and students when they do speak out about teaching, learning, district policies, and school leadership. I read many teacher blogs and applaud them for taking this avenue to express themselves. More teachers and policymakers need to speak out on the issues and the life that they experience daily. Even if they are members of a union. Being a union member is, of course, important but no teacher or policymaker can depend upon a union or professional association to speak for each and every teacher on every issue that arises.

So voicing publicly one’s thoughts about teaching, learning, school routines, policy struggles, and, yes, even school politics is a way of re-potting one’s self and taking intellectual risks.

Larry Ferlazzo: What advice would you offer philanthropic foundations seeking improved schooling?

*Before recommending any reform policy or making a grant aimed at altering teacher behavior in classrooms or district policies, include an historical impact statement (no longer than two single-spaced pages) of earlier similar reforms similar to what is being proposed (e.g., what conditions were in place or missing? What happened to those reforms? Why did they succeed? Fail?).

*Funders publicly describe the theory of change (or action) embedded in any policy for which they are willing to give dollars to schools. Both donors and school staffs must be clear on how school and classroom changes that they propose to put into practice will lead directly or indirectly to improved instruction and student learning.

*Recommend funding only those policies and programs aimed at changing teacher behavior and classroom practices that you, as reformers, would want for those teachers of your own children and grand-children.

*Dial back hyped policy talk about what a new policy will achieve for teachers, students, and the larger society (e.g., online instruction for K-12, new curriculum standards, authentic assessment, charter schools). Over-promising results while under-estimating tough actions superintendents, principals, and teachers must take to put proposed changes into practice is the dominant pattern that reformers have followed for over a century. Speaking honestly, directly, and publicly about what a new policy aimed at teachers and district policymakers can and cannot do would not only be refreshing but give credibility, if not respect, for proposed changes.

More Cartoons on Tests in School

I scour the web for new cartoons about teaching, curriculum, administrators, teachers, and, yes, the inescapable practice of students taking tests. Here is this month’s collection of cartoons on what many students (and teachers) dread–taking tests. Enjoy!

Teaching Is a Grind Peppered with Joyful Moments (Bill Ferriter)

This post appeared in Bill Ferriter’s blog, “The Tempered Radical.” In his blog, he describes himself as follows: “Bill Ferriter has about a dozen titles—Solution Tree author and professional development associate, noted edublogger, senior fellow of the Teacher Leaders Network—but he checks them all at the door each morning when he walks into his sixth- grade classroom in Raleigh, North Carolina.”

After 29 years in North Carolina public school classrooms, Ferriter retired and now consults with schools and districts.

Teaching is a Grind.

I’m sitting in a dirty McDonald’s restaurant right now.  It’s the same dirty McDonald’s restaurant that I’ve spent the better part of the past 15 years sitting in.  Stop by and you are almost guaranteed to find me in a booth near the back — next to the filthy bathrooms and just inside the door where the sketchy teens are chain-smoking Marlboro Reds.

I come here after school and on the weekends to crank out writing for part time projects.  Sometimes I’m blogging.  Sometimes I’m putting together #edtech or #ccss lessons that I’ll use in my classroom AND in professional development workshops that I deliver during  those legendary “vacations” that teachers get.  Sometimes I’m answering emails sent by school leaders who need a bit of advice on how to move their buildings forward.

Always I’m tired.  Finding energy AFTER a full day at school ain’t easy.  

I walk into my classroom at 6 AM every morning and spend the first two hours planning, grading and answering email.  From 8:00-1:30, I work with 140 of the most engaging eleven year olds you’ve ever met.  They are simultaneously beautiful and demanding, though.  Meeting needs, answering questions, calming worries, celebrating successes and soothing hurt feelings are all wrapped around delivering the content in my curriculum.

The whirlwind

I spend the last two hours of my day in meetings — with parents, with peers, with special educators, with principals, and with professional developers.  On good days, I might even get a few more minutes of planning before picking my daughter up from school.

As soon as my wife gets home at 4:30, however, I head to McDonald’s to start my second job.  Most nights, I work until 7:30.  Most Saturdays and Sundays, I work from 6:30 until noon.

Always, I’m worried about making ends meet because my family literally relies on my part time income to pay our bills.

Living in a state that ranks 46th in the nation for teacher pay — a full $10,000 behind the national average — means I’ve GOT to generate part time revenue in order to financially survive.  If the content that I create on nights and weekends doesn’t resonate — if I can’t convince SOMEONE to buy my ideas or my time — we’d be flat broke.

The hacks that harp on the horrors of the public education system would probably revel in this reality, wouldn’t they?  They’d argue that the stress of my poor salary has pushed me to be a better teacher. “Competition blah-blah-blah.  Pay for performance blah-blah-blah.  Cushy teaching jobs blah-blah.  Wasting our tax dollars blah-blah.”

And in a way, they’d be right:  While a part of me is constantly improving my practice because I know that improving my practice means improving the lives of my students, I’m ashamed to admit that I’m also constantly improving my practice because I’m hoping that someone will see me as an expert and hire me as a consultant so that I can cover next month’s day care bill for my four-year old daughter.

Long story short:  Teaching is a grind.  

On a good day, the grind feels like a noble sacrifice because I know that my work has made a difference for the kids in my class and the families in my community.  On a bad day, the grind feels like professional masochism.  I guess that’s the uncomfortable truth for those of us who have chosen a career that has always been undervalued and — more recently — been unappreciated.

The question is how long can I keep on grinding?

Six weeks later, Ferriter posted the following on his blog: It’s no secret to regular Radical readers that I often get worn down by the grind of teaching.  Wrap the public criticism piled on teachers at every turn up with the crappy policies that have stripped the joy out of the public school classroom and you have a profession that leaves me wondering more and more every year.But there IS joy in teaching — and this week, it came in the form of a pile of birthday cards from my students:

Such a small thing, right?  But to me, it meant everything.  

The kids thanked me and teased me and joked about my hairline and the fact that I’m apparently older than dirt.  Some snuck the cards into my room and left them for me to discover on my desk.  Others came in groups of two or three to share creations that they had worked on together.

They worked on their cards during homeroom, during our school wide enrichment block and during their classes.  My guess is that they missed a ton of content, distracted by the simple act of celebrating one of their teachers.

I missed a ton of content, too:  At the end of the day, I ignored the four thousand email messages sitting in my inbox and smiled my way through a pile of special memories from a group of kids that I care about.

How Blame for Low Student Achievement Shifted from Family to School

The shame that many teachers and principals feel at being blamed for a school’s low academic performance is a recent phenomenon.

For over a century and a half, policymakers, citizens, and educators explained students’ poor academic performance by pointing to their lack of effort and family deficits. By the 1970s, however, other explanations had come into vogue such as ethnic and racial discrimination, poverty, and immigrants lack of schooling. Policymakers would say that they could hardly be blamed for reversing conditions over which they had little control. Not until the 1970s, however, did demography as destiny fade as an explanation and, instead, the school and its teachers became an explanation for unequal student outcomes.

A half-century ago, then, other explanations for low academic performance among different groups of students gained traction: The school and its teachers—not racism, poverty, family, culture, or even language differences–caused students’ low academic performance. Blame shifted from home to school (and its teachers ) when research studies of largely minority urban elementary schools scoring well on national tests appeared.

These high-achieving ghetto and barrio schools had common features: staff’s belief that all urban children could learn; the principal of the school was an instructional leader; staff’s establishing high academic standards with tough classroom lessons, frequent testing, and an orderly school (PDF el_197910_edmonds-2).  Such “effective schools” proved to many skeptics that high poverty urban schools didn’t automatically fail; they could produce high scores on standardized tests.

Therefore, students’ race, ethnicity, and social class did not doom a school to failure. And most important, when committed and experienced staff worked closely together, they could make a decided academic difference in the lives of impoverished children of color. No longer could teachers and administrators blame students and their families for failing. Now, it was the responsibility of school staff to insure student success.

By the early 2000s, this fundamental swift in blaming the school rather than race, ethnicity, or family income for the causes of low academic achievement turned up in the words of national leaders who admonished teachers and administrators to avoid the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” This reversal of responsibility for inequitable outcomes has shifted the burden for academic success from students’ and families’ shoulders to those of their teachers, principals, and superintendents.

While most of us cherish the egalitarian thought—enshrined in the federal law of No Child Left Behind (2001) that all students will achieve and subsequent legislation, Every Students Succeeds Act (2016)–research studies and the facts of daily experience should give us pause before nodding in agreement. Perhaps total equality in results may occur in heaven but with wide variability in families’ income, students’ motivation, per-pupil spending across states, and teachers’ skills–such an outcome won’t happen on earth.

Nonetheless, within a few decades, a 180-degree shift in responsibility for chronic academic failure has occurred. Neither extreme of blame-and-shame of children and families or no professional responsibility for schools’ academic outcomes, however, squares with the facts. Responsibility rests with both community and district, both school and family, and, of course, both teachers and students.

Blaming others may be momentarily satisfying but ultimately unhelpful in either improving schools or motivating teachers and students to do their best. On the one hand, expecting a school staff to have the full responsibility for students’ academic achievement neglects the long history of research and daily experience of those students who come to school unready to learn. Family income, parental education, individual health, immediate neighborhood, and other factors surely influence (but not determine) what happens to growing children even before they enter kindergarten, much less as they go from grade-to-grade. If there is one fact researchers have established repeatedly it is that family income and education play a large role in children’s behavioral and academic performance in schools (see here and here).

Striking a balance between documented facts of inequities among students when they appear at the schoolhouse door and a large body of evidence that other educators have turned failing, largely minority schools into high-fliers is essential. But it is hard to strike this balance in the current unforgiving climate of state and federal accountability rules that name, blame, and shame districts, schools, and teachers for gaps in achievement, high drop out rates, and low graduation numbers. Consider that in 2019, 34 states used test scores to judge teacher performance.

Currently, state and federal penalties for low performance and concern for what students bring to school including both their strengths and weaknesses are seldom mentioned publicly because of policymakers’ and educators’ fears of being called racist, excuse-makers, or having low expectations of their students (or all three). The dominant one-liner repeated again and again is that efficient, well-managed schools and districts must be held accountable for students’ academic success.

This back-and-forth rhetoric and policies over the past half-century sharply limits those policymakers and reformers who want to address larger socioeconomic structures in the U.S. that contribute to economic inequalities and students’ disadvantages. After all, it is no secret that tax policies favor the wealthy, that residential segregation reigns in most cities, and discriminatory employment practices persist. But reform-minded policymakers find addressing larger political and social structures in the nation very difficult to do in a climate where well-intentioned but misguided school reformers censure teachers and schools while continuing policies that link district test scores to academic performance.

Blame and shame do work.

Get Tech Out of Classrooms–Some Parents Say (Jessica Grose)

Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The New York Times. She covers family, religion, education, and culture.

Jaime Lewis noticed that her eighth-grade son’s grades were slipping several months ago. She suspected it was because he was watching YouTube during class on his school-issued laptop, and her suspicions were validated. “I heard this from two of his teachers and confirmed with my son: Yes, he watches YouTube during class, and no, he doesn’t think he can stop. In fact, he opted out of retaking a math test he’d failed, just so he could watch YouTube,” she said.

She decided to do something about it. Lewis told me that she got together with other parents who were concerned about the unfettered use of school-sanctioned technology in San Luis Coastal Unified School District, their district in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Because they knew that it wasn’t realistic to ask for the removal of the laptops entirely, they went for what they saw as an achievable win: blocking YouTube from students’ devices. A few weeks ago, they had a meeting with the district superintendent and several other administrators, including the tech director.

To bolster their case, Lewis and her allies put together a video compilation of clips that elementary and middle school children had gotten past the district’s content filters.

Their video opens on images of nooses being fitted around the necks of the terrified women in the TV adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It ends with the notoriously violent “Singin’ in the Rain” sequence from “A Clockwork Orange.” (Several versions of this scene are available on YouTube. The one she pointed me to included “rape scene” in the title.) Their video was part of a PowerPoint presentation filled with statements from other parents and school staff members, including one from a middle school assistant principal, who said, “I don’t know how often teachers are using YouTube in their curriculum.”

That acknowledgment gets to the heart of the problem with screens in schools. I heard from many parents who said that even when they asked district leaders how much time kids were spending on their screens, they couldn’t get straight answers; no one seemed to know, and no one seemed to be keeping track.

Eric Prater, the superintendent of the San Luis Coastal Unified School District, told me that he didn’t realize how much was getting through the schools’ content filters until Lewis and her fellow parents raised concerns. “Our tech department, as I found out from the meeting, spends quite a lot of time blocking certain websites,” he said. “It’s a quite time-consuming situation that I personally was not aware of.” He added that he’s grateful this was brought to his attention.

I don’t think educators are the bad guys here. Neither does Lewis. In general, educators want the best for students. The bad guys, as I see it, are tech companies.

One way or another, we’ve allowed Big Tech’s tentacles into absolutely every aspect of our children’s education, with very little oversight and no real proof that their devices or programs improve educational outcomes. Last year Collin Binkley at The Associated Press analyzed public records and found that “many of the largest school systems spent tens of millions of dollars in pandemic money on software and services from tech companies, including licenses for apps, games and tutoring websites.” However, he continued, schools “have little or no evidence the programs helped students.”

It’s not just waste, very likely, of taxpayer money that’s at issue. After reading many of the over 900 responses from parents and educators to my questionnaire about tech in schools and from the many conversations I had over the past few weeks with readers, I’m convinced that the downsides of tech in schools far outweigh the benefits.

Though tech’s incursion into America’s public schools — particularly our overreliance on devices — hyperaccelerated in 2020, it started well before the Covid-19 pandemic. Google, which provides the operating system for lower-cost Chromebooks and is owned by the same parent company as YouTube, is a big player in the school laptop space, though I also heard from many parents and teachers whose schools supply students with other types and brands of devices.

As my newsroom colleague Natasha Singer reported in 2017 (by which point “half the nation’s primary- and secondary-school students” were, according to Google, using its education apps), “Google makes $30 per device by selling management services for the millions of Chromebooks that ship to schools. But by habituating students to its offerings at a young age, Google obtains something much more valuable”: potential lifetime customers.

The issue goes beyond access to age-inappropriate clips or general distraction during school hours. Several parents related stories of even kindergartners reading almost exclusively on iPads because their school districts had phased out hard-copy books and writing materials after shifting to digital-only curriculums. There’s evidence that this is harmful: A 2019 analysis of the literature concluded that “readers may be more efficient and aware of their performance when reading from paper compared to screens.”

“It seems to be a constant battle between fighting for the students’ active attention (because their brains are now hard-wired for the instant gratification of TikTok and YouTube videos) and making sure they aren’t going to sites outside of the dozens they should be,” Nicole Post, who teaches at a public elementary school in Missouri, wrote to me. “It took months for students to listen to me tell a story or engage in a read-aloud. I’m distressed at the level of technology we’ve socialized them to believe is normal. I would give anything for a math or social studies textbook.”

I’ve heard about kids disregarding teachers who tried to limit tech use, fine motor skills atrophying because students rarely used pencils and children whose learning was ultimately stymied by the tech that initially helped them — for example, students learning English as a second language becoming too reliant on translation apps rather than becoming fluent.

Some teachers said they have programs that block certain sites and games, but those programs can be cumbersome. Some said they have software, like GoGuardian, that allows them to see the screens of all the students in their classes at once. But classroom time is zero sum: Teachers are either teaching or acting like prison wardens; they can’t do both at the same time.

Resources are finite. Software costs money. Replacing defunct or outdated laptops costs money. When it comes to I.T., many schools are understaffed. More of the money being spent on tech and the maintenance and training around the use of that tech could be spent on other things, like actual books. And badly monitored and used tech has the most potential for harm.

I’ve considered the counterarguments: Kids who’d be distracted by tech would find something else to distract them; K-12 students need to gain familiarity with tech to instill some vague work force readiness.

But on the first point, I think other forms of distraction — like talking to friends, doodling and daydreaming — are better than playing video games or watching YouTube because they at least involve children engaging with other children or their own minds. And there’s research that suggests laptops are uniquely distracting. One 2013 study found that even being next to a student who is multitasking on a computer can hurt a student’s test scores.

On the second point, you can have designated classes to teach children how to keyboard, code or use software that don’t require them to have laptops in their hands throughout the school day. And considering that various tech companies are developing artificial intelligence that, we’re meant to understand, will upend work as we know it, whatever tech skills we’re currently teaching will probably be obsolete by the time students enter the work force anyway. By then, it’ll be too late to claw back the brain space of our nation’s children that we’ve already ceded. And for what? So today’s grade schoolers can be really, really good at making PowerPoint presentations like the ones they might one day make as white-collar adults?

That’s the part that I can’t shake: We’ve let tech companies and their products set the terms of the argument about what education should be, and too many people, myself included, didn’t initially realize it. Companies never had to prove that devices or software, broadly speaking, helped students learn before those devices had wormed their way into America’s public schools. And now the onus is on parents to marshal arguments about the detriments of tech in schools.

Holly Coleman, a parent of two who lives in Kansas and is a substitute teacher in her district, describes what students are losing:

They can type quickly but struggle to write legibly. They can find info about any topic on the internet but can’t discuss that topic using recall, creativity or critical thinking. They can make a beautiful PowerPoint or Keynote in 20 minutes but can’t write a three-page paper or hand-make a poster board. Their textbooks are all online, which is great for the seams on their backpack, but tangible pages under your fingers literally connect you to the material you’re reading and learning. These kids do not know how to move through their day without a device in their hand and under their fingertips. They never even get the chance to disconnect from their tech and reconnect with one another through eye contact and conversation.

Jonathan Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” prescribes phone-free schools as a way to remedy some of the challenges facing America’s children. I agree that there’s no place for smartphones on a K-12 campus. But if you take away the phones and the kids still have near-constant internet connectivity on devices they have with them in every class, the problem won’t go away.

When Covid hit and screens became the only way for millions of kids to “attend” school, not having a personal device became an equity issue. But we’re getting to a point where the opposite may be true. According to the responses to my questionnaire, during the remote-school era, private schools seemed to rely far less on screens than public schools, and many educators said that they deliberately chose lower-tech school environments for their own children — much the same way that some tech workers intentionally send their kids to screen-free schools.

We need to reframe the entire conversation around tech in schools because it’s far from clear that we’re getting the results we want as a society and because parents are in a defensive crouch, afraid to appear anti-progress or unwilling to prepare the next generation for the future. “I feel like a baby boomer attacking like this,” said Lewis.

But the drawbacks of constant screen time in schools go beyond data privacy, job security and whether a specific app increases math performance by a standard deviation. As Lewis put it, using tech in the classroom makes students “so passive, and it requires so little agency and initiative.” She added, “I’m very concerned about the species’ ability to survive and the ability to think critically and the importance of critical thinking outside of getting a job.”

If we don’t hit pause now and try to roll back some of the excesses, we’ll be doing our children — and society — a profound disservice.

The good news is that sometimes when the stakes become clear, educators respond: In May, Dr. Prater said, “we’re going to remove access to YouTube from our district devices for students.” He added that teachers will still be able to get access to YouTube if they want to show instructional videos. The district is also rethinking its phone policy to cut down on personal device use in the classroom. “For me,” he said, “it’s all about how do you find the common-sense approach, going forward, and match that up with good old-fashioned hands-on learning?” He knows technology can cause “a great deal of harm if we’re not careful.”

How Ads for Tech Devices Have Changed

Autos replace horse and buggies. Home washers and dryers replace clotheslines and laundry stores. Television replaces radio. The list goes on but the point is clear. In America, newer technologies replace older ones.

Most Americans generally use three criteria in adopting a new technology: cost–dollars saved; increased efficiency—time saved; and convenience–added ease and comfort. Ads for new technologies appeal to one or more of these criteria.

Here are some ads for “new” technologies in the 1980s and 1990s.

And here are a few ads for “new” technologies in the 2020s.

Teacher Absenteeism: Managing the Dilemma

That both student and teacher absenteeism has increased since Covid-19 closed America’s schools is accepted as a fact (see here, here, and here). When students and teachers repeatedly miss school, experts say, learning losses occur. And of equal importance, the all-important teacher-student relationship, fundamental to academic performance, erodes.*

The question is what to do about such losses that occur from increased absenteeism. For this post, I will focus on teachers missing school.

One approach is to make a fuss about increased teacher absenteeism, blame teachers, and penalize them in various ways. And that is what the Heritage Foundation has proposed for solving the problem.

Their “solutions?”

1. “Only agree to teacher contracts that reduce the number of teachers’ sick and personal days, and move teacher training and meeting times to days when school is not in session.”
2. “Expand education choice.“

A politically conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation has historically favored dismantling public schools. Expanding school choice by giving vouchers to parents that they can use in private schools, offering tax credits, and creating charter schools (see here) have been policies they have pursued.

There are other ways, of course, to deal with teacher absenteeism. It is a dilemma that does not have a single policy solution. I offer a few organizational policies that are less often discussed by policymakers, practitioners, and parents as ways of dealing with teacher absenteeism.

1. Discuss publicly the issue of teachers missing school and non-punitive ways of managing teacher absences.

2. Raise salaries for teachers in districts and individual schools that largely serve disadvantaged students where rates of teacher absenteeism tend to be highest (see here).

3. Reduce teaching loads in those district elementary and secondary schools.

Yes, I know, that teacher unions will oppose raising salaries for teachers in some districts or particular schools but not others. Also political opposition from anti-teacher groups and those citizen associations opposed to higher taxes will occur as surely as the sun rises every morning.

Yet the fact remains that teacher absenteeism is far higher in districts serving large percentages of disadvantaged children (see here). Furthermore, few taxpayers and informed observers of schooling deny that teachers are the single most important factor in increasing student achievement.

So what to do about teacher absenteeism?

As with so many other issues involving public schools, the dilemma of higher than usual teacher absenteeism in districts where both teachers and students have to be in classrooms cannot be solved by any one policy or organizational change.

What can be done is negotiate trade-offs between prized values: reduce teacher absenteeism in particular districts by paying higher salaries and hiring teacher aides without raising school taxes is, at best, tricky maneuvering. There are no easy solutions, however, to these conflicting values but the situation can surely be better managed now than it has been.

There will be future pandemics and school closures. Little can be done about such events. But the problem of teacher absenteeism can surely be better managed to bring down numbers of absentee teachers in urban districts than it is now. Open recognition of the dilemma and public discussions of these facts and tradeoffs are the first steps toward managing this long-present issue that seldom gets discussed publicly by mayors, school boards, teacher unions, and citizen groups.

___________________________________

*Even though districts hire substitutes and have raised their daily wages in replacing absent teachers, anyone who has ever attended public schools remembers well what happens when the word spreads among students that the regular teacher is absent and there will be substitutes. Students cutting classes and raucous lessons often occur. Not a pleasant experience for either students or temporary teachers.

Classroom Technologies: Clickers

Like laptops and desktop computers, clickers have entered many classrooms over the past thirty years. Called “student response systems,” clickers are hand-held devices that students use to answer teacher questions.

I have seen teachers in San Francisco Bay area schools pass out clickers to high school students as they enter the classroom since the lesson the teacher prepared required students to respond by “clicking” the remote device rather than raising hands. In one math class I observed, for example, students worked on a problem in pairs or individually. Then the teacher passed out “clickers” so students could answer a multiple choice question appearing on an Interactive White Board (IWB) by voting whether A, B, C, or D answer was correct for the problem they were working on. And students did use their clickers:

The teacher then tapped a button and the results of the entire class were displayed in charts so that the teacher and students saw what percentage of the class got or missed the concept embedded in the multiple-choice question.

Then, the teacher moved on (although she could have re-taught the concept if too many students erred).

Clickers are also used in university classrooms. Over a decade ago, Northwestern University Professor Bill White who taught “Organizational Behavior” to undergraduates used them. Reactions from students to these instant voting devices vary, of course, but those responding to a journalist’s questions were positive. As one said: “I actually kind of like it. [Having clickers to register your opinion] make[s] you read. It makes you pay attention. It reinforces what you’re supposed to be doing as a student.”

One of the arguments used by boosters of clickers echoes the above student. Students participate more in class and attendance, particularly in lecture classes. Active not passive classroom learning occurs, cheerleaders for clickers claim. However, I have yet to see any studies that causally connect clickers to increased student participation.

The companies that sell “clickers” as a class set of 30-plus devices charge schools nearly $700 dollars per student. Individual students will pay around $50 for one. Here is how the student newspaper of the University of Arizona described the cost of clickers in March 2024:

If you’re one of the lucky few students who is blissfully unaware of clickers, allow me to fill you in: Clickers are very expensive pieces of technology that some professors use in large classes in order to take attendance and give quizzes on lectures. The concept is pretty straightforward, and it’s a handy tool for professors who have anywhere from 70-400 students in their classes. But the price is somewhat of a hefty one: Clickers are $80 from the UA BookStores, including a subscription. You can find a way to purchase a clicker for cheaper than this, which typically is found with ease online. However, if you do end up finding a clicker for, say, $50, you still have to purchase a subscription in order to use it, which costs at least $17.99.

Freshmen Katy Johnston, speech pathology, Fernando Diaz, pre-business, Caitlin Beall, retail and consumer sciences and Kelly Alston use traditional clickers that can be purchased at the (University) bookstore for their [Natural Sciences] 101 class taught by Harold Larson. This was the first class that Larson required students to purchase and use clickers for tracking class participation.

The entry of electronic technologies into public school and university classrooms over the past quarter-century has been accompanied by the familiar rhetoric and claims that professors and students using the “new” technologies will increase student participation thereby making learning faster and better.

Yet the evidence ain’t there. And the costly devices continue to be bought.

Do Screens Help Kids Learn? (Jessica Grose)

“Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The New York Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.” This piece appeared March, 31, 2024

A few weeks ago, a parent who lives in Texas asked me how much my kids were using screens to do schoolwork in their classrooms. She wasn’t talking about personal devices. (Smartwatches and smartphones are banned in my children’s schools during the school day, which I’m very happy about; I find any argument for allowing these devices in the classroom to be risible.) No, this parent was talking about screens that are school sanctioned, like iPads and Chromebooks issued to children individually for educational activities.

I’m embarrassed to say that I couldn’t answer her question because I had never asked or even thought about asking. Partly because the Covid-19 era made screens imperative in an instant — as one ed-tech executive told my colleague Natasha Singer in 2021, the pandemic “sped the adoption of technology in education by easily five to 10 years.” In the early Covid years, when my older daughter started using a Chromebook to do assignments for second and third grade, I was mostly just relieved that she had great teachers and seemed to be learning what she needed to know. By the time she was in fifth grade and the world was mostly back to normal, I knew she took her laptop to school for in-class assignments, but I never asked for specifics about how devices were being used. I trusted her teachers and her school implicitly.

In New York State, ed tech is often discussed as an equity problem — with good reason: At home, less privileged children might not have access to personal devices and high-speed internet that would allow them to complete digital assignments. But in our learn-to-code society, in which computer skills are seen as a meal ticket and the humanities as a ticket to the unemployment line, there seems to be less chatter about whether there are toomany screens in our kids’ day-to-day educational environment beyond the classes that are specifically tech focused. I rarely heard details about what these screens are adding to our children’s literacy, math, science or history skills.

And screens truly are everywhere. For example, according to 2022 data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only about 8 percent of eighth graders in public schools said their math teachers “never or hardly ever” used computers or digital devices to teach math, 37 percent said their math teachers used this technology half or more than half the time, and 44 percent said their math teachers used this technology all or most of the time.As is often the case with rapid change, “the speed at which new technologies and intervention models are reaching the market has far outpaced the ability of policy researchers to keep up with evaluating them,” according to a dazzlingly thorough review of the research on education technology by Maya Escueta, Andre Joshua Nickow, Philip Oreopoulos and Vincent Quan published in The Journal of Economic Literature in 2020.

Despite the relative paucity of research, particularly on in-class use of tech, Escueta and her co-authors put together “a comprehensive list of all publicly available studies on technology-based education interventions that report findings from studies following either of two research designs, randomized controlled trials or regression discontinuity designs.”

They found that increasing access to devices didn’t always lead to positive academic outcomes. In a couple of cases, it just increased the amount of time kids were spending on devices playing games. They wrote, “We found that simply providing students with access to technology yields largely mixed results. At the K-12 level, much of the experimental evidence suggests that giving a child a computer may have limited impacts on learning outcomes but generally improves computer proficiency and other cognitive outcomes.”

Some of the most promising research is around computer-assisted learning, which the researchers defined as “computer programs and other software applications designed to improve academic skills.” They cited a 2016 randomized study of 2,850 seventh-grade math students in Maine who used an online homework tool. The authors of that study “found that the program improved math scores for treatment students by 0.18 standard deviations. This impact is particularly noteworthy, given that treatment students used the program, on average, for less than 10 minutes per night, three to four nights per week,” according to Escueta and her co-authors.

They also explained that in the classroom, computer programs may help teachers meet the needs of students who are at different levels, since “when confronted with a wide range of student ability, teachers often end up teaching the core curriculum and tailoring instruction to the middle of the class.” A good program, they found, could help provide individual attention and skill building for kids at the bottom and the top, as well. There are computer programs for reading comprehension that have shown similar positive results in the research. Anecdotally: My older daughter practices her Spanish language skills using an app, and she hand-writes Spanish vocabulary words on index cards. The combination seems to be working well for her.

Though their review was published in 2020, before the data was out on our grand remote-learning experiment, Escueta and her co-authors found that fully online remote learning did not work as well as hybrid or in-person school. I called Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, who said that in light of earlier studies “and what we’re coming to understand about the long-lived effects of the pandemic on learning, it underscores for me that there’s a social dimension to learning that we ignore at our peril. And I think technology can often strip that away.”

Still, Dee summarized the entire topic of ed tech to me this way: “I don’t want to be black and white about this. I think there are really positive things coming from technology.” But he said that they are “meaningful supports on the margins, not fundamental changes in the modality of how people learn.”

I’d add that the implementation of any technology also matters a great deal; any educational tool can be great or awful, depending on how it’s used.

I’m neither a tech evangelist nor a Luddite. (Though I haven’t even touched on the potential implications of classroom teaching with artificial intelligence, a technology that, in other contexts, has so much destructive potential.) What I do want is the most effective educational experience for all kids

A Few Thoughts about Teaching as a Career

In 2001, I retired from full-time teaching and research at Stanford University. In June of that year, the Dean invited me to give a talk to the graduates and their families. Here is an abridged version of what I said about teaching and being a teacher.

I have thought a lot about the past 46 years I have spent in education. I have taught in urban high schools and Stanford for many years [in addition to being an administrator]. Teaching–not administration or scholarship [however]–has defined me as an adult….

Teaching has permitted me to be a lover of ideas, a performer, a lifelong learner, a historian, a writer, and a friend to former students and colleagues. For these reasons and because at this moment in our nation’s history teachers have moved to the top of the nation’s school reform agenda, I want to comment today on both the exhilarating and troubling aspects of teaching….

Two basic reasons are behind this strong push for higher quality in teachers: Policy makers and teacher educators believe that when teachers understand deeply their subjects and possess a full repertoire of teaching skills–students will learn more, do better on tests, and eventually get good jobs. And, second, higher teacher standards will move the occupation much closer to professional status.

And, of course, who could argue against teachers acquiring more expertise in the subject and displaying polished skills to help children learn more? Who would argue against teaching becoming a full-fledged profession? Certainly, I don’t. Yet, in all honesty, what troubles me is the cramped image of teaching that has emerged from these reforms [over the past few decades]. The constricted picture is one where the teacher is a technically competent supplier of information and skills. It is an incomplete image of teaching.

Missing in all of the talk and mandates aimed at improving teacher quality are the traditional moral obligations of teaching the young be they preschoolers or graduate students….

I need to be clear on this point. Not for one second do I minimize the importance of raising the low status of teachers and getting students to do better on tests, go to college, acquire credentials, and secure good jobs. Nonetheless, I must point out that these reasons for improving the quality of teaching are far different than the moral purposes that have guided the practice of teaching for centuries.

Let me be more specific about what I mean by traditions of teaching imposing moral obligations upon the teacher. Teaching obliges those who teach kindergartners, sixth graders, molecular biology, auto mechanics, or art to give sustained intellectual and moral attention to students’ learning and growth. Intellectual attentiveness means concentrating on what students know and think about the content and skills to be learned–-the technical side of teaching–-but then go on to deepen their understanding of the world and their capacity to continue learning.

Moral attentiveness means to concentrate on helping students grow as persons in grace and sensitivity, becoming more rather than less thoughtful about ideas, becoming more rather than less respectful of others’ views, and becoming more rather than less responsible for reducing social injustice. Questions of what is fair, right, and just arise constantly in classrooms; students learn moral sensibilities from how their teachers answer those questions….

Teacher and author, Frank McCourt realized the moral implications of teaching. As a first-time New York City teacher in the mid-1950s, he was uncertain about what kind of teacher he should be. He recalled his thoughts after his first day of teaching.

“Should I be Robert Donat in Good-bye, Mr. Chips or Glenn Ford in The Blackboard Jungle? Should I swagger into the classroom like James Cagney or march in like an Irish schoolmaster with a stick, a strap, and a roar? If a student sends a paper airplane zooming at me should I shove my face into his and tell him try that one more time, kid, and you’re in trouble? What am I to do with the ones looking out the window calling to friends across the yard? If they’re like some of the students in The Blackboard Jungle they’ll be tough and they’ll ignore me and the rest of the class will despise me.”

Teaching is a way of defining yourself as a person, a moral actor, and McCourt’s struggle goes well beyond how much of his subject [he knew] and what skills he displayed. He [understood], as we do today, that important as technical expertise is, our character as human beings and how we teach become what we teach.

Just like Frank McCourt, professors also display their character and moral virtues when they teach. In universities, as in public schools, the act of teaching, too often defined as knowing one’s discipline, has been divorced from who one is as a human being. To teach is to convey unveiled enthusiasm for ideas as it is about the details of a lecture. Too often, teaching has been stripped of its moral dimensions and made into a series of technical moves that can be swiftly learned and put into practice. If a professor, for example, only calls upon the brightest, most verbal students in the class, snipes at students’ answers that call into question the professor’s statements, and provides few comments on students’ written work, students learn about fairness, independent inquiry, and the moral character of their professor.

Teaching, then, whether in graduate schools or kindergartens–in elite universities or slum schools–binds all of us together. In teaching we display our views of knowledge and learning, we advertise our ideas, how we reason, and how we struggle with moral choices whether we intend to or not. To teach is to enlist in a technical, morally based vocation, not an occupation and certainly not just a job. Technical competence, as important as it is in teaching, is insufficient to make a whole teacher or a complete student. It fails to capture the fundamental moral obligations of teaching the young. Teaching young and old in all of its splendid moral and technical triumphs and disappointments has taught me and many other teachers to approach life and the classroom with humility….

After retiring from Stanford University in 2001, Deans of the Graduate School of Education encouraged me to continue teaching classes to masters and doctoral students. I did so until 2013 when I taught my final seminar. Since then I have continued my teaching through writing books and my twice-weekly blog (https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/).