Grumpy Old Teacher

Instant gratification is all we know in these fraught, technological-driven times.

Post on social media? Give it 10 seconds and then stare at the device wondering where all the reads, likes, and reposts are.

Order from Amazon? Fume when you realize the delivery time is only a guess, not a guarantee (those days of Prime guaranteed delivery within 48 hours are over) and the product is not thrown over your fence and onto your porch when the website said it would be.

Door Dash? Uber Eats? Where’s my <ahemed> food?!

We live in an age of instant gratification. We want what we want now and we’re not willing to wait.

Then there are the K-12 state tests, the ones that take weeks and weeks for the results to arrive even though the tests are taken on computers and can be scored instantaneously. You have to wait.

In this year of 2023, Florida’s been waiting nine weeks for the release of testing scores from mid-March. Why so long? Forensic analysis is done on the tests. While there is no need to scan answer sheets for excessive erasures (yes, that was really a thing), student responses for each testing group are compared to see if there are any tests that have similar answer choices that violate some statistical parameter that the test mavens have set.

If so, the results for those tests are embargoed. Schools that want to pursue a release of scores have to file an appeal, which is why the proctors have to create a seating chart so the school can demonstrate where the children were sitting. If they were far enough apart, the appeal will be successful as there is no physical way two students sitting across the room from each other can be sharing answers.

It’s a long wait. In the spring, it’s particularly egregious as some of those students waiting for retake scores are seniors. They have completed all of their requirements, jumped through all of the hoops except one. They have paid all their fees and are waiting to pick up their cap and gown so they can march proudly across the stage as their name is read. They wait and wait and wait as the big day draws closer. Will they walk?

But this post is not about the long wait. That’s the set-up for the new reality and the new tests whereby test results are reported almost instantaneously.

Friday, Grumpy Old Teacher’s (GOT) school administered Florida’s End of Course exam in Geometry. It is a 160-minute test. If students aren’t finished, they are allowed to continue working until the end of the school day. Thus it was that at the end of the 160 minutes, students who had finished were dismissed to lunch and their remaining classes even as some students remained in the testing rooms.

GOT was amazed that within an hour students were walking up to him and telling him how they did. “I’m Level 2. I missed Level 3 by one question.” (Level 3 is passing; Level 2 is not.)

Before the end of the day, a parent had called GOT to talk about the test result and what her options were for her child.

Instant gratification. All of us crave it, but how does the state do their cheating check? Is Florida really going to let parents see that their kid passed, identify suspicious answer patterns, and pull the score back?

Good luck with that, Florida. The genie is out of its bottle and there’s no putting it back.

This also means that the state cannot review the results and adjust the passing score upward if the overall results have the students scoring too highly. That’s one of the dirty secrets about these state tests. If too many students pass what the state has determined ahead of time, the state moves the cut scores upward. Even worse and this is not even whispered, but if you pay attention to the raw score (percent of questions answered correctly) and the reported scores (known as a scale score, which the state determines according to some secret sauce much like Coke never reveals its formula,) you see where the passing score has dropped across the years.

For the old Florida Standards Assessment, a raw score of 28% was a pass when the test first rolled out. In its final years, that had dropped to around 26%.

What’s up with that?! you ask.

It’s simple. The Department of Education has a narrative to maintain about the success of Florida’s education reforms despite their crappy teachers. They have to support their prewritten media release and that requires manipulation of the results. It’s not an easy act to pull off. How do you credibly take credit for what other people have done while you condemn them for not doing it?

Florida.

But that’s all over now. Florida is reporting results the same day. Read that again, Florida is reporting results the same day. GOT will need a tailor to let out his clothing sizes lest he burst out of them from laughing if Florida tries to adjust its cut scores after the fact and tells parents that the passing score was not, in fact, a passing score.

The genie ain’t going back in.

Who’s old enough to remember the Blue Screen of Death? That agonizing moment when the computer froze and whatever work one was doing was lost. That agonizing moment when a reboot was the only solution at hand. That agonizing moment when one cursed whatever impulse caused them to buy a Windows machine instead of a Mac.

GOT is old enough and he is reminded of those bad, old days as he rushes from testing room to testing room to solve the Black Screen of Agony, when students taking a high-stakes test assessment that will comprise 30% of their course grade, cannot move from one question to the next because their screen fades into the Black Screen of Agony.

It’s time for standardized testing, but the testing experience is anything but standardized for the children undergoing this rite of Spring. For some unknown reason, the testing app for Microsoft computers that is called unironically “Take-A-Test,” malfunctions for a few students every test. Not everyone, only a few that the gods of testing decided to pick on, and they will struggle with technological problems throughout.

It’s not standardized testing when every student does not have the same testing experience. Getting kicked out of the test every 10 minutes does not qualify. The Black Screen of Agony appearing each time a child tries to move to a new question does not qualify when the test works fine for most. The affected children are at a disadvantage in relation to their peers who are also taking the test.

We are told to stop the testing for affected children until we can resolve the technological issues. Often, the real issue is too many computers trying to test in the same location at the same time. For some strange reason, the random student who is having connectivity issues will continue to have issues even after restarting the computer and making a fresh connection to the wireless hub.

If we resume the test the next day, almost always the issue has disappeared. For Florida’s new tests, Cambium Assessment and the Department of Education have decided that students may finish testing within 48 hours of starting if they have technological problems. The problem is that when they say 48 hours, they literally mean 48 hours. If a student begins the test at 9 AM on Monday, they must finish by 9 AM on Wednesday.

When we hear 48 hours, we think two days. But when you work out the actual count of hours and think about when children are in their school building, you realize that there is only one day to resume the test and complete it. GOT supposes that is better than saying the child must finish before they leave school the same day.

Plus, you might think the 48 hours applies to school days, like when you are told a bank will take 10 business days to release a hold of funds on a deposit, That’s 10 business days, which means two calendar weeks. But no, 48 hours is 48 hours. So a child who started their test at 8:30 AM on Friday means they must finish by 8:30 AM on Sunday.

Of course, the testing platform is shut down around 4 PM on Friday. Even if adults are willing to open the building and work on Saturday, the test platform would be inoperable. This was hilariously obvious back in 2021 when the Florida Department of Education allowed Saturday testing for parents who were keeping their children home. They could go to their school on Saturday and be isolated as they took their tests apart from the population who had returned to in-person learning.

The first Saturday, all you-know-what broke loose as nobody could get their test running. It turns out the state employee who was supposed to go in on Saturday and turn on the testing platform overslept. Once that was rectified, the testing commenced.

Thus, given we have to test on a Friday, despite the tech problems and the Black Screen of Agony, we have to keep the children in the test no matter what because they cannot finish on Monday.

It literally is a black screen. There is no writing, no error message. The only way out is a Control-Alt-Delete and an exit from the test.

What’s the upshot? Except for one student, the others all finished even though one girl had to test the entire day because she had to restart her test each time she moved to a new question. For context, that’s 55 test questions. FIFTY-FIVE times encountering the Black Screen of Agony, FIFTY-FIVE times restarting a computer, FIFTY-FIVE times.

There has to be a better way. All of us know what it is.

In GOT’s town, you put your trash bin on the curb for pick-up on Mondays and Thursdays.

Down in the Bold New City of the South (actual city motto), we received this treat in our mailboxes a few days ago. It’s a little blurry, but the postcard informs each recipient, “When we follow up after the election, we hope you have voted and we can update your grade.”

Teachers, stop laughing.

Also, this: “DID YOU KNOW? Whom you vote for is private, but whether or not you voted is public record. Don’t let your community down by forgetting to vote again.”

That is correct. Voting participation is available to anyone who wants to request the records, but no one knows how the actual votes anyone makes because the ballots have no identifying information about who cast it nor is that information captured by the Supervisor of Elections office.

Nevertheless, people were concerned. A local reporter also received one of these. Like GOT, he has voted in every election so the C+ grade is a puzzlement.

We can discern the answer by examining the postcard more closely. Unlike the name and address of the recipient viewed on the right, printed onto the card by machine with standard black ink, the grading portion on the left is in dark blue. The font also shows that the C+ and B+ grades were part of the stock design. It is not personalized.

EVERYONE RECEIVED THE SAME GRADE.

The purpose is clear: An emotional manipulation to guilt people into going to the polls in order to keep up with the neighbors, an attempt to put social pressure on people to vote. In GOT’s opinion, this is a clumsy attempt.

Nevertheless, people were concerned. The Supervisor of Elections, Mike Hogan, had this to say, “This disarms the voter. When someone sends him information about how they’ve been voting, they think, in their minds, do they know who I voted for? But of course, in Florida, I don’t even know, the supervisors don’t even know how a particular voter voted.”

Maybe this is a cunning attempt to keep people from voting? In these DeFascist days of Florida’s governor, where giving a child a book that contains LGBTQ+ characters could be deemed a third-degree felony, people trying to live their lives without undue interference may decide to forego voting entirely as they don’t want to be known as not having the approved opinion or not making the only approved choice.

And that is why GOT, tired as he is from showrunning the first week of AP testing, is working (pro bono, as always) on a Saturday morning. Who are the people behind the postcard? The Florida Watch PC.

They’ve been around since 2020, raising about $3.2 million dollars and spending about the same. But their registered agent is in Homestead, a Dade County (Miami) city. The former agent was in Tallahassee. Are they really a local PAC? Their address is a PO Box, which is fishy.

Looking at more documents, this is not a Jacksonville group. Why does a PAC that is actually located in Dade County care whether Jacksonville voters go to the polls in their local elections that includes the mayoral race?

According to their website, they are a progressive group that “Florida Watch is a communications and research organization with a digital first lens. Launched in the spring of 2020, we serve as the progressive community’s in-state hub for message development, digital communications, and research.”

From Transparency USA, here are the top contributors and payees:

Off-year elections are notorious for low voter participation. In the Jacksonville mayor’s race, Democrat Donna Deegan is outpolling Republican Daniel Davis. However, the only poll that matters is the one that takes place at the precincts when voters cast ballots. To win, Deegan has to get voters to the precincts and it would seem that the mailer is an attempt to aid that process, which is not to say that there is any connection between Florida Watch and the Deegan campaign.

Was it an attempt to guilt progressive or Democrat voters to cast a ballot or an attempt to get conservative or Republican voters too paranoid to cast? Who knows?

Republican politicians have moaned for years about the lack of civics education in the schools as they connect that to … GOT doesn’t know what. But they have mandated courses and standardized testing across the years. The latest is the Florida Civic Literacy Exam, which all college students must take and pass along with enrolling in a mandatory college course about Civics if they are going to graduate with a bachelor’s degree.

What Civics lessons should we get from the mailer?

First, an ability to recognize an attempt at emotional manipulation to produce the desired response. The mailer was stupid. Long ago, in his junior high school years, GOT took Civics in 9th grade. The very first lesson was about advertising and how to recognize the techniques used to trick people into the desired response. The Florida Watch PC mailer was bad, but is a useful lesson in how to keep a skeptical mind about information that arrives unsolicited.

Second, the internet is a purveyor of misinformation and political interference. Russian bots, anyone? But it is also a useful tool in seeking out truth. GOT is done today. He will leave it to professional journalists to track down the people behind Florida Watch and report more about who this group is, what they do, and why.

An informed citizenry is a powerful citizenry in keeping politicians and the power-hungry in check.

Let’s keep at it!

Time for my annual message for students in K-12.

You, yes you, even those of you in the back ducking down in your seats, you are not a test score.

You are so much more than that.

You are living lives full of human potential with all of your dreams before you and yet to come.

You love and receive love, you engage your curiosity about the world, the larger world around you, not only the world you find in lessons and school, but in families and friends as you are finding your place in the world.

What does a test tell you about that?

Not very much. Yes, tests are important and it’s important to try your very best when you take one, but the information they give adults are limited. Sometimes, the only thing adults learn from the tests you take is how good you are at taking that particular test.

You are not a test score. You will find that when you are 25 or 29 or 44 years old, no one will care what your state reading and math scores were when you were 9 or 12 or even 16 years old. They won’t ask. It’s not important because what will really matter is what you have done with your life and accomplished up to that point.

So don’t stress about these tests, the ones you are about to undergo. Just do your best, not because the score is important, but so that you can relax knowing that you worked throughout the year to master the knowledge and skills needed, you brought your A game to the testing room, and that if you had to do it again, you couldn’t do anything better.

However the scores turn out, you will always know that you did your best and that is all a human being can do.

And you know what? Even if you didn’t, the world is not going to end. The sun will rise tomorrow and your life will go on.

In time, you will find someone to fall passionately in love with. You will have children of your own and, in time, grandchildren to spoil. I know it seems far away now, but the point is that you have a great life ahead of you. Your parents, your grandparents, and all those who came before lived wonderful lives with meaning, satisfaction, and success.

Remember this as you grind #2 pencils in a sharpener or bang away at your laptop keys, as you read incomprehensible questions and try to figure out what response to make, as you talk to your friends in the hallway about question #27 forgetting the threats made about never, ever talking about the test, including “texts and posting on social media sites,” because the one thing humans do when they have shared an intense experience is talk about it afterward …

Remember that you are a human being and that means you have infinite worth, one that a test will never measure and will never limit.

You are not a test score. Do your best, but then go and have a wonderful life. Because you are so very much more than how you might do on a test.

So the blight of my Boomer generation, the self-appointed expert on everything because he watches The Learning Channel videos as he jogs on his treadmill in his 66,000 square foot mansion in Seattle, you know who I’m talking about, has now proclaimed that AI (Artificial Intelligence, the tech concept that drives chatbots across the internet) will replace human tutors and teach children more effectively how to read and write.

He gives it 18 months. (Hope you have a Plan B, teachers.)

Grumpy Old Teacher (GOT) gives it never. It ain’t gonna happen.

GOT is not sneering at Moore’s Law, which stated that the number of microcircuits on a chip would double every 18 months. That’s historically accurate and has driven the pace of innovation that saw computing power, memory storage, and cost improving over the last five decades.

If you’re old enough, you remember the early days of PCs (when they were still carried that acronym for personal computer) when file names were limited to 8 characters and clever schemes had to be devised to remember what each one was. The days when a 20-megabyte hard drive was cutting edge, but users still needed to use a compression utility to avoid running out of room. If you’re too young to remember that, those were the days of dial-up modems to get on the internet. It was expensive as users were charged by the minute. We worked offline to get everything ready before activating the modem to upload files, email responses, etc.

Those of us old enough to remember are grateful that Moore’s Law delivered to us cloud storage, terabyte hard drives, computers in our pockets (you might call them smartphones), and more. Technology improves and finds ways over its hardware and software challenges.

Thus, GOT does not doubt that eventually chatbots will be able to deliver the tutoring that the non-genius of our time foresees.

Do we have time for a tangent? Several years ago, GOT had a gifted child in his Algebra 2 classroom. As he observed the child interacting with his peers, GOT saw that he was indeed bright and had many capacities beyond the typical child of his age. He tried to help the other students with the algebra, but he often steered them wrong. Why? Gifted children are not necessarily gifted in everything. The day GOT talked to him about this, he was relieved. The pressure was off in his math class. He could settle back and be himself, learning at his own pace without feeling a responsibility for others.

The point? Bill Gates was brilliant at writing an operating system for personal computers, built a company whose product would work on multiple manufacturers’ versions of the personal computer, and dealt with the technological problems and consumer frustrations to the point where he became a billionaire, at one point the richest man in the world. But that accomplishment does not mean he is an expert in anything else.

He has made education a pet project of his philanthrocapitalism. Yet every initiative he has tried has failed. He may be a genius in computer technology and a successful businessman, but he is terrible at education at every level.

We must understand, then, that his prediction is sawdust if he is trying to talk as an education expert that he is not, but it may happen that AI becomes effective at providing tutoring, and if we are being honest, he has remedial tutoring in mind, for reading and writing.

GOT will not argue that because AI and chatbots are ineffective now means they will never be effective.

Already, the chatbots that struggled to pass standardized tests are now able to make a credible effort and achieve satisfactory scores. This is not evidence of the superiority of AI, but a scathing condemnation of the quality of standardized testing.

The prowess of AI-powered chatbots to scour the entire internet and soak up all that the web has to offer is not in question. Already, the businesses involved are refining the AI so the chatbots recognize and reject inappropriate or offensive language and ideas.

Bill Gates argues the power of technology, a supply-side argument not heard since the 1980s.

That is not why it will fail.

Teachers scrambled very hard during the pandemic to provide instruction over the internet. Microsoft Teams, Google Classroom, Zoom, whatever, they used technological tools to reach their students during those days of isolation. All of us suffered.

What was missing was human interaction. We are gregarious animals, craving contact with one another. In-person contact, not a substitute provided by machines and a phone line. We need people. It is essential to learning.

Children are human beings and crave human contact even more than adults.

Long ago, GOT read a book about theology and the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. The book quoted a child as saying I need a God with skin on him.

And so it is with learning. Human children need teachers or tutors who are human, someone with skin on them that they can relate to and with. Anything less won’t do.

Sorry, Bill, but your assertions deny the fundamental humanity of children. AI tutoring will fail for those who try it.

Disclaimer: What follows are the individual and personal views of Grumpy Old Teacher (GOT) and should NOT be mistaken as the position or statement of Duval County Public Schools, the School Board, or anyone else employed by the school system.

Yesterday, led by local reporter A.G. Gancarski and picked up by other media journalists, reports began circulating that Jacksonville’s (Duval County) school board may be considering an early end to Dr. Greene’s run as the Superintendent of Duval County Public Schools (DCPS).

The boiling issue is the erupting scandal over misconduct at the magnet high school dedicated to the arts, theater, music, visual, dance, and literature, which GOT wrote about two days ago.

It is more than that, however. Most serious is the underreporting of crimes committed in the schools that featured prominently in a grand jury report that named DCPS as one of the worst offenders. After the report, DCPS overhauled their reporting procedures and hired an independent firm to audit their results. Although DCPS claimed that all needed corrections had been made, some believe that the problems had lingered as highlighted by a letter from the Department of Education about a failure to report a 2021 incident involving the DA teacher arrested in March.

The School Board has filed notices of a meeting that Chair Kelly Coker has called for Wednesday. Reports and social media speculation about the statement ‘Everything is on the table’ has it that pressure is being put upon the Superintendent to resign or face termination. Reasons abound from the above to the book review process to racism. (Ah, the delights of Twitter! [sarcasm alert])

But that is not the focus of this piece. GOT was saving this for June when his #daystoretirement, now standing at 31, were over and he was a former employee, not a current one, of the school district. However, as the superintendent has repeatedly found out, events have a way of moving ahead of carefully crafted plans.

The termination issue is one GOT has avoided with every superintendent. As an employee, it is well above his pay grade to opine about that and he is not beginning now. The first amendment rights of government employees (a school board is a governmental authority) are complicated, but generally, employees may speak on any issue as long as it is clear they are speaking in an individual capacity as a citizen and taxpayer. Thus, the disclaimer that heads this piece.

GOT has another reason for not talking about termination. It is pointless. The issues teachers have with district leadership are fundamental and involve overtesting, lack of autonomy over curriculum and instruction, accountability for same through test score evaluations, and a lack of respect that GOT has called ‘the DCPS imperial attitude.’ If you are school-based personnel, you are a minion not worthy of notice or conversation, no matter what issue you are trying to communicate.

When one superintendent leaves, the school board hires another one just like him/her and the spirit of Delores Umbridge lives on: things are bad, new edicts to fix them, and ongoing inspections because teachers are not to be trusted. Diana Greene didn’t begin this in Duval County, but she has carried on in the same vein.

The overarching problem is an obsession with data as the sole means of understanding and measuring student achievement and learning. Not only has the district duplicated state testing with their own tests, they often mistime when their tests should be given. This year was an exception, but the district usually forces teachers to give students a progress monitoring assessment in February, an assessment that measures learning for the entire school year.

Teachers are judged by the results. Thus, they routinely face the question of why they did not teach 40 weeks of jam-packed curriculum (Florida has never met a benchmark for learning that they didn’t immediately add to their standards if it wasn’t already there and they never, ever remove anything) in 27 weeks.

Why are we giving such a test halfway through the third quarter? Because the superintendent wants her data before Spring Break. Like a 1960s junkie addicted to smack, she needs her data and she cannot wait.

The solution for the district is to write detailed curriculum that every teacher must follow. Lessons aren’t scripted, but they might as well be. Teachers are told what to teach, when to teach it, and what platform to assign student work on. Even those assignments are often precreated.

We’ve gone paperless and a plus is that these online programs can be paid for with the money we are not spending on textbooks. Thus it is that when GOT walks around the school, glancing through door windows as he goes to his destination, he sees students working on their laptops in every classroom. Children spend most of their instructional time online.

Every online program gathers data including the time spent on the programs. More data to monitor, more data with which to punish if the minutes do not meet requirements.

Teachers cannot make the decisions they need to make in order to meet the needs in their classrooms, but they are measured by the results nonetheless. Although Florida law allows school systems to reduce the data component of the annual evaluation to 33%, DCPS maintains 50%.

And how that 50% is determined! It needs a separate post to explain how teachers are graded on a curve. Each year, students take district end-of-course tests. The district averages the results. Every student who scores above average is counted as meeting the teacher’s data requirement. Those below do not. So it’s not about how good a teacher is, it’s about how well their students test versus all the other students in the district.

If 25% or more of a teacher’s students are not above average, they automatically go into ‘needs improvement’ status. They receive no pay raise. The pressure upon them along with the inspections increase.

It boggles the mind that school district personnel don’t understand why teachers are leaving. Look, they cry, at the annual surveys about employee morale. But those surveys only ask teachers how they feel about their principal’s leadership. Most are okay with that. What the district never dares to do is to ask teachers how they feel about district leadership and policies. It’s as if they already know, but if they don’t ask, they don’t have to respond.

Much of what we know about pedagogical practice, how children learn, the importance of relationships and social connections, the importance of play, is cast aside. It is important to realize that the superintendent did not start this, but she embraces it. If she disclaims that, she is unaware of what takes place daily in the classrooms.

It goes back to the day she arrived in the district. She did a whirlwind tour, meeting with community leaders and power brokers as she also did media interviews. She got around. Meetings were held with administrators and others. Know who was left out? Teachers. She had nothing to say to us. As the weeks went on, it became increasingly embarrassing and obvious that she held teachers in little regard.

Finally, she sent an email, one of three teachers received in her first year. Each one contained an ask, something she wanted teachers to do for her. The only time we were worthy of notice was when she wanted something.

It’s no wonder that in subsequent years her supportive emails were met with skepticism.

All in all, if next Wednesday is the end of her time leading DCPS, teachers will sit back and watch the process. They’ve been through it so many times already. The school board will hire someone like her. Like United Methodist church members dissatisfied with their minister, teachers will sit back and wait. If they don’t like the new one, it won’t be too many years until that one is moved out as well.

The policies, the emphasis on data and testing, will continue. Students will continue to hate what school has become. Nothing changes.

That is why Duval County Public Schools is locked in grinding mediocrity and cannot break out.

A few months ago, this blog, other blogs, and numerous Jacksonville news sources reported or commented upon the cancellation of the play Indecent at the nationally-renowned high school for the arts, Douglas Anderson, informally called DA.

Something was INDECENT at the school and that’s an understatement! What began as just another story about a predatory teacher has ripped the cover off what is now described as a toxic culture going back decades. At this point, the accused teacher has been arrested, two others are being investigated (to be fair, we don’t know for what, but they have been removed from contact with students), and the school system is in full damage control.

Suffice it to say that the investigations are ongoing, but the district is bringing in outsiders. The school board does not want an internal investigation (cue the bomp bomp doom music.) They have asked for recommendations of independent attorney firms to hire from their first stop for legal advice, the Office of General Counsel, an agency of the city government. (It’s a feature of Jacksonville’s consolidated government and it is complicated.)

The Superintendent is busy trying to address the ongoing issues. She wants to bring in a South Florida consultant firm with expertise in establishing an appropriate culture at specialized arts schools like DA. She has communicated to families that changes are coming amidst internal investigations and encouraged anyone with information to come forward.

At last count, law enforcement agencies have identified 140 current and former students they would like to talk to.

Too late. People are already beginning to lawyer up and their attorneys are telling their clients not to talk to anyone who is not from a law enforcement agency.

This is huge. How long before this becomes national news? The revelations are only beginning and, of course, the state has started to poke their nose into the controversy.

Some observations:

1. If you read all the reports carefully, the school board is staking out an independent position from the superintendent. They don’t want an internal investigation; they want to hire outside counsel. They don’t trust the superintendent or district staff to do the job.
2. The superintendent cannot claim lack of knowledge. If she didn’t know, she should have known. In 2021, the district reported the arrested teacher to Florida’s Department of Children and Families (the agency charged with the responsibility of protecting children) and the Department of Education’s Professional Practices Office. It begs belief to think that even in the nation’s 20th largest school district that the superintendent would not have been informed of allegations of indecent conduct by an employee. It’s not that common.
3. This has legs–as the expression goes. How much money will the district have to pay in compensation to the victims by the time all is known? Poor teachers, that property tax referendum for operational expenses, the one that was going mostly to raise your salaries, will now be needed to pay the many settlements that will come over the next few years.
4. Truly, to use an expression from the late Queen of England, this has been Diana Greene’s annus horribilis*. She cannot run from this scandal like she did in 2018 when she left her subordinate, Cynthia Saunders, to deal with the allegations that they had pushed 12th grade students into home school or other options in their last semester to avoid taking a hit to their graduation rate. Both scandals started before her but continued under her leadership.
5. But that’s what comes with a leader obsessed with data and test performance. Other things that ought not to be ignored go unnoticed.

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*Cancellation of the JASMYN contract, cancellation of the Indecent production, removal of books from libraries and classrooms, cancellation of the risky behavior survey, removal of Safe Space stickers, the choice office publishing the lottery results for magnet schools too early … the list goes on. The superintendent would do better to be the featured bovine in a game of cow pie bingo.

By now, everyone who reads or follows the internet has learned of the Tallahassee principal who was dismissed from her position because the teacher of a 6th grade class showed the students a picture of Michelangelo’s David statue, a famous piece of Renaissance sculpture in Florence, Italy. Because early news reports got some of the details wrong, let’s review the essential facts.

The school in question is Tallahassee Classical School (TCS), a charter school that is a part of the Barney Charter School Initiative, which is a project of Hillsdale College (Michigan.) You can always spot one of these by the appearance of the word Classical in the school’s name. This particular school has existed since 2019.

The Board terminated the principal, but it was the governing board of the charter school, not the Leon County School Board as previously reported. The constitutional officers of the elected school board for the district have no power to intervene in charter school operations under Florida law. Barney Bishop III is the chair for the school’s governing body.

While the instigating event for the termination was the lesson that included the statue, it was the culminating event for the school as Bishop revealed that it was only one of several issues they had with the principal’s leadership. Although we may be inclined to disregard the whole matter as a tempest in a teapot, most likely, the issue revolved around parent complaints.

There are two issues at play: one, that parents were not informed about the controversial and perhaps disturbing (for the students) nature of the lesson; two, that the statue itself is pornographic. The number of parents making the complaint in this incident were two for the first issue and one for the second, not large numbers at all even for a school that has a low enrollment of 403 students in all its K-12 grades.

There’s not much more to say about this particular instance. A minority of parents do opt for charter school education, including the Classical model that is promoted by Hillsdale College. A minority of parents are angry, whether innately or stirred-up by others, about public school curriculum and teacher discretion over creating lessons. A Venn diagram would show that these two sets of parents overlap to some degree.

We could sum up by viewing this as an instance where the principal and teacher failed to understand the clientele or to use what is rapidly becoming a cliche, read the room. While the principal was dismissed, we have yet to learn what discipline was given to the 6th grade teacher.

TCS has a faculty and staff of 48 persons, of whom 15 are deemed in-field teachers (they hold valid certification in their subject areas from the Florida Department of Education), 1 is transferring credentials, and the rest are out-of-field for various reasons like their certification has expired or they need to add their current subject area to their certificate. It is a plus for them that they require state certification for their teachers, but a minus that the percentage deemed in-field is low, only 33%.

Most interestingly, no one on staff teaches science although the school lists it as part of its curriculum. That leads into what the Barney Initiative means by prescribing a Classical education for children ages 5 to 18. So as not to tax your patience reading the descriptions of Classical education on various websites, it may be understood as a learning curriculum structured by what used to be described as the learning of DWM (dead white men) or traditional curriculums in vogue during the early years of the Enlightenment in Western civilization.

Proponents of Classical education make sure to explain that the foundation of their model is Greco-Roman philosophical thought, such as that expressed by Plato, Aristotle, and other famous thinkers of the ancient world. For instance, “If a student were asked to read Plato, Virgil, Augustine, Aquinas or Locke because there will be a test on their content, the student would likely find them uninteresting. Our scholars read with a purpose. Like a treasure hunt, they are looking for the connections and development of ideas that span all great literature. When reason and belief are integrated, students are unlikely to be persuaded by college dogma.”

For what purpose would students be reading Plato? Like the Symposium, in which the men get drunk as they discuss the nature and pleasures of Eros, the god of love, and make reference to love between men. In these Don’t-Be-Gay days in Florida (remember to read the charter school room,) this cannot be in the curriculum. It must be a selective use of Plato in the curriculum.

Because, yes, Classical education comes with a purpose. It values everything that was valued in late medieval Europe (circa 17th and 18th centuries) “through a content-rich classical education in the liberal arts and sciences, with instruction in the principles of moral character and civic virtue.“

It emphasizes the use of traditional texts (those DWMs again!) and the practice of logic, rhetoric, and debate. It seeks to produce an informed citizenry of the virtues (an old-fashioned word) of art, science, and literature. Students learn Latin and mathematics and receive intentional instruction in moral principles and encouragement to practice them.

The challenge, for them and for others, is that we don’t live in the 18th century and social media savvy is more important for today’s students than the careful construction of an hours-long argument complete with the rhetoric needed to sustain it.

It also leaves out an acknowledgment that we live in a very different world from that of George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. It glosses over the existence of LGBTQ people and that they too are endowed with unalienable rights. It ignores the experiences of Black people and others in the world who are not European in origin, and western European at that!

Does it even investigate the tensions in Renaissance art between those like Michelangelo, who painted male nudes on the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel and a subsequent pope who ordered that modesty drapes or fig leaves be painted over what the Brits would call the naughty bits?

It would seem, given the recent flare-up over the statue of David, that more critical thought may need to go into how the curriculum is developed and what resources are used, the kind of critical thought that Classical schools pride themselves on.

Perhaps Classical education advocates should even examine their belief in the superiority of Western civilization and American exceptionalism, both features of the learning these schools seek to impart to their students. While great advances have taken place under these auspices, there were also great evils of colonial exploitation and wealth extraction that continue to shape the world today.

Ah, poor David and his overly large-sized hands! What was the artist’s intent in fashioning his masterpiece so? It is a debate worthy of having, although many of us would agree that the typical 6th-grade student is too young for it. But it is not a debate the typical Classical education advocate is interested in having. It is a great piece of art, they acknowledge, admire it and move on.

And by no means ask why Michelangelo painted and sculpted the many nudes he and other Renaissance artists are famous for or why Leonardo da Vinci fled Florence.

Transliterated from Chinese, the word is a verb and it is used for the moment when students report a teacher to authorities for inappropriate teaching that diverges in the slightest way from the government curriculum.

Jubao. Given all the parental rights bills that have been rushed into law and the many more now moving through Spring state legislative sessions, it is fair to ask the question about how many K-12 teachers will be jubaoed this year.

Grumpy Old Teacher (GOT) ran into this term over the summer of 2022 when reading an article in the New Yorker about an American teaching in China who was blindsided when a student reported him to authorities. In this case, the teacher had made some editing comments on a student paper, which made their way to Chinese social media but no one knows how. The comments were reported, the teacher investigated with the Communist Party interviewing students, the university withdrew its support of him and non-renewed his contract.

Jubao! His teaching career was over, a moment every teacher can relate to.

From Florida’s Don’t-Be-Gay bill, which muzzled teachers from kindergarten to third grade from mentioning sexual orientation or gender identity that is now being extended to grades 4 – 8 in proposed legislation, or through grade 12 according to a proposed rule by the State Board of Education, to Florida’s Stop WOKE act, which stifled honest discussions of race in all classrooms, anyone including students can now report a teacher for anything that was said in a classroom if it is thought to violate these strictures.

Other states are passing similar laws. Then there are the attempts at setting up parental hotlines, dedicated phone numbers or email addresses where any parent can report a teacher for saying something they don’t like.

We are crossing familiar ground here. Many excellent writers have covered these attempts to censor public education classrooms including the increasing effort to ban books in the classroom.

There are no protections for teachers. Depending upon the state and the strength of one’s particular union, if one is a member at all, there may be very little recourse once a teacher is jubaoed.

The motivation of those who would jubao a teacher are seldom discussed. Is it a sincere belief that the instruction was age-inappropriate? Is it the imposition of moral values upon others, including the cramped moral values of those who are threatened by people who are seen as other? Is it a desire for revenge because a teacher gave a low grade for work, intervened in an act of misbehavior, or attempted to keep a student’s attention upon the learning?

Perhaps a student will decide to jubao a teacher because they did not make the cheerleading squad or a sports team. Any reason will do in these days of cartoonish reasoning by legislators currying favor to advance their careers or garner campaign donations.

Maybe it would be innate racism, a distinctive feature of the American character. In an example filled with irony, Grumpy Old Teacher (GOT) knows of a school where there is a Chinese teacher who many of the students don’t like. Students have complained about her. The complaints have no validity. She demands that they work, she demands they achieve competency in mathematics, and she speaks with an accent, which is often the real reason students take a disliking. In other words, she is an excellent teacher, one who does not seek popularity but strives to impart learning every day in her classroom.

Would she be jubaoed? She already has been although the students complained to the wrong person, in this case, GOT who sees the complaints for what they are: immature griping by teenagers.

It is doubtful, though, in these days of hyper-charged partisan politics that the politicians would react the same way. Attacking teachers has become second nature in states like Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Tennessee.

Teachers now live in fear of being reported for doing their job, that is, teaching. GOT hears the horror stories that are disseminated in political speeches and across social media about teachers not teaching their subject but indoctrinating students. However, he has yet to come across an actual example in any school in which he has taught, his many teacher acquaintances and colleagues, and even in teacher posts in social media and blog essays. The indoctrination claim is false.

Jubao! No individual can stop politicians from imitating China in their attempts to set up reporting networks and proscribe speech, especially those ideologically driven politicians who genuflect before their god of Christian nationalism.

But now, teachers, at least we have a word for it. Jubao!

May it never happen to you.