It was National School Choice Week, again, and I totally missed it

Ok, so President Trump proclaimed last week National School Choice week, and like everything he does, it was big. Huge. Tremendous. Elephantine, in fact.

Because, of course, we've already had School Choice Week for years,  brainwashing the public into despising the schools this society so depends upon, so I guess this is a "bigger" proclamation than past presidents'. Or a huge one. Or a Trump-penis-sized one. Or, well, pick your buzzword. Anyway, the president is thinking big, and that's how we get things done in this country, apparently, so long as we ignore all tangible reality in the process.

So I was stymied. How to best celebrate the week, after the fact, in the spirit of our new administration and in the spirit of the America that, apparently, we've had all along? And how to make this celebration stand out amongst all the other big, huge, tremendous, gargantuan executive actions we've been reveling in this past week, everything from deporting Muslims to sparring with news executives?

I thought big. I thought huge. I thought irrationally.

And here's my planned School Choice Week Agenda, to be submitted after the fact but, sadly, all too easy to enact any day of any year for the foreseeable future:

• Hold a bake sale in your school's cafeteria. Make sure all the money to pay for the baked goods comes out of your low-income students' pockets, and make sure it goes straight to your school's Bible Study Group. (If your school has no such group, create one quick before you get deported.) 
• Give students homework vouchers. It's up to them and their parents to decide which assignments deserve their effort and attention (making saddles for dinosaurs in science class; grizzly bear patrol practice in Health; Legs-Crossing 101 in Sex Ed) and which don't (history lessons on Jim Crow laws and their permutations in the 21st century; reading anything with sexual issues in it in English class). 
• Hold an informational meeting about the values of choice in America. And if anyone asks about the growing segregation of students that winds up being a byproduct of such movements, scream "Choice! Choice!" until they give up and leave. Then you win. 
• Find the wealthiest, most competitive soccer mom in your neighborhood and make her PTA head. If she can't discern between federal and state law concerning student aid, praise her love of competition. If she thinks she's doing God's work by privatizing schools or that organizations trying to cure homosexuality need money, write an op ed about how awesome it is she wants to make schools cut each others' throats for students. 
• Set your local public school on fire. Remind them that if they'd done periodic fire drills with an Adequate Exit Progress plan goal of 100 percent of all students out the door by 2020, they would have been fine, but since they didn't, tough titty. 
• Write an op ed defending the role of the public school and its subordination to outside externalities wreaking their havoc on the population, thus making the job of public school teacher tougher and more necessary. Then roll up your op ed and smoke it. Seriously, no one gives a shit anyway. We have unlimited job protection and are "flush with cash," so we might as well start gathering apples to sell on the street. 

By Tuesday, we'll most likely have an Education Secretary looking to make connections with the schools that she's heard of who serve 50 million children in this nation but has never actually worked with. Time for the show of solidarity so many on the right are calling for, particularly when they won and want you to fall in line. So let's get some t-shirts made, and let's make sure our Pledge of Allegiance voices are in top timber. It's the dawn of a brand new, glorious, hideous, unavoidable reckoning. 

How many teachers does it take to interview an Education Secretary? Give up? None!

President Elect Donald Trump's pick for Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, is getting plenty of heat, rightfully so, for her unconvincing and ill-informed answers to Senate grilling in her confirmation hearing Tuesday night. She doesn't seem to understand federal disability law and how it pertains to schools; she was unwilling to commit to equal oversight in all schools, whether private, public, public charters or online; and she seems to think that the only way to stop a bad grizzly with a gun is a good school employee with a gun. Welcome to Trump's America.

This is why our kindergarten teachers need Uzis. 

When Senator Al Franken asked her about her philosophy concerning the proficiency/growth debate, he was asking her whether she was signing on to the philosophy inherent in President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind law, which promoted accountability based on student performance on standardized tests.

This may sound like wonk talk, but it's important. Basically, if enough students in enough subgroups (black students, low-income students, pinko liberal students, etc) weren't getting the scores they were supposed to be getting by test time, the school would be closed, restaffed or restructured. Bush figured that waving this stick threateningly at schools, with an arbitrary deadline of 100 percent proficiency by 2014, would make educators across the country gulp in terror, buckle down, and do the teaching they apparently hadn't been doing all this time.

Of course, when it became apparent that wasn't going to happen, the law was recast as Race to the Top, and later the Every Student Succeeds Act. Essentially, the Obama administration backed away from the "Johnny should be getting this score by age 16 or else" and towards a "Johnny should be getting this score by age sixteen, and he's not because you guys suck at teaching him, but if he shows movement towards that score, you might be ok."

And right now, with a Trump presidency looming, it's anyone's guess what chimera awaits educators in America in the future. Primary and secondary education was largely undiscussed during the 2016 campaign, so all we really have to go on is DeVos's resume, which indicates that, when it comes to our schools, Trump wants to privatize, privatize, privatize.

So here we are, with Senator Franken wanting to know whether DeVos is for proficiency or growth-reflated measurements of student learning. What was really illustrative to me was a simple realization it took about twenty-four hours to come to terms with:

I'd never heard of this debate.

Of course, I'm aware of the issue, but only on a philosophical level. Any teacher worth their salt can talk about student learning and how it informs their instruction. And we can all talk about the hours we've spent reviewing state- and federally-mandated data and trying to craft lesson plans that will result in the scores everyone has decided we should be showing at present.

But we don't talk about the conflict between the two approaches because, well, it's not up to us. I've never seen a discussion of the issue on any of the major shows discussing political issues of the day. I've never seen a worthwhile exploration of the issue in the local press. I've attended mandatory presentations on how to clean up a nosebleed in my classroom six years in a row (hint: don't use your shirt), but I've never attended a conference exploring the difference between setting test-based goals vs charting learning progress independent of benchmarks.

This is like a waiter seeing a Congressman ask the head of the FDA "So where do you stand on the kick them out/apologize to them" debate over dickhead customers?"

Any educator worth an eighth of their salary can tell you which students are learning. If a student is writing less terribly than they were when they started my course, that's cause for celebration. And if they're still committing comma errors that, in a just world would be penalized by a night in the stocks, at least they're a step closer to where they need to be. Sometimes, that's all you can hope for.

Unfortunately, no one is going to take a teacher's input into what students are learning. We're told we need to deliver the bottom line, the raw score. We need to show data. We need to be held accountable. And because it's devilishly impossible to demonstrate any kind of learning as cheaply as you an with a bubble exam (even the PARCC, however much it was lauded, has this problem), you can pretty much guarantee that the yelling and hand-wringing calling for student proficiency measurements in our educational system pretty much guarantees teaching to the test and perpetual disaffection for the finer points of learning, particularly during our children's formative years.

But I don't get to make that case. No educator does, because we don't set the policies. We don't even choose the people who do set the policies. When it comes to this aspect of the profession, we're foot soldiers, beholden to elected officials in thrall with private interests holding wealth and power beyond your wildest dreams. And what tends to happen is several of them get together and say, "Well, based on these scores, we can tell teachers and schools suck. So why don't we cook up some more formulas, tests, pre-tests and penalties to scare them into cutting through the effects of economic status, parenting, community environment and other externalities that truly affect learning?" And we get our marching orders, hunker down and attempt to teach in spite of these mandates.

So in many ways, last night's hearing articulated the real problem in this country: educators are almost completely divorced from pedagogical policy. You can consider me a fan of Senator Franken, but still. Only in America could a former Saturday Night Live comedian be the one charged with grilling a Christian fundamentalist bazillionaire who got rich off marrying into Amway's pyramid schemes on how she could best run our public schools, without anyone in Congress or the media wondering for a split second why no one who's ever stood in front of a class full of children isn't in the room with them to keep it all real.

Count the educators present at this hearing over who will lead your children's school. Go ahead. Count them. Is the number higher than zero?