Close up of smartphone in hand flickr photo by Japanexperterna.se shared under
a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

The new year for a high school teacher always means the sprint to the end of the first semester has begun. This week marks the final week of classes for me and many others with exams looming in the near future. Consequently, that means a lot of grades will need to be reported. So I offer support and solidarity to all the teacher readers of this as they make their way through the mountain of material to wrap the end of term.

This week’s “If you read only one article…” is a toss-up between the first and last one. The last one usually gets that honor but anyone unfamiliar with what goes on regarding state demands and textbook production should give the first one a look too. The final selection focuses on issues related to data which gets a fair amount of attention in this newsletter. It will come as no surprise that part of the point is students are more than data.

I have certainly mentioned Anand Giridharadas and his book Winner’s Take All previously here, including a video of him in issue 113. For anyone that has not read the book or not seen a lot of him in the media, this video RSA Minimate: Winners Take All | Anand Giridharadas (4:54) is a really good 5 minute summary of the ideas he is advancing. The visuals are great and help enhance his points. I wish he would have called the Silicon Valley education scheme he mentions what it really is – little more than a digital indentured servitude.

Here are three+ curated articles about education, technology, and evolutions in teaching.

Two States. Eight Textbooks. Two American Stories. – The New York Times – Dana Goldstein (10-minute read)

First, I included this story because it is an under-reported issue in education, but even more, it should be understood that this is not news. This textbook editorial wrangling and shaping has been going on for decades. It is not new nor does it look like it is going away anytime soon. Moreover, Texas and California with some nod to New York have always been the states that play an outsized role in this kind of ad hoc, revisionist historiography because of their market size.

Also, make no mistake, one of the factors in the Common Core movement was a profit motive. Textbook publishers were looking for ways to cut costs by avoiding having to produce the kind of multiple versions the main state markets were demanding. No matter what kind of spin there was about all American students learning the same standards, which might seem like an appealing idea, publishers wanted to pad their profits with one-size-fits-all solutions that are cheaper and more efficient to produce, not to mention all the gravy available from the new testing schemes.

Of course, the real problem is that history is never a single, iron-clad narrative. Someone decides what is included and what is not in any story, real or imagined. This what historians spend their lives exploring, interrogating, and producing multiple histories that reveal a grander narrative. Of course, there can be wild disagreement in assembling history, as we have seen recently (The Fight Over the 1619 Project Is Not About the Facts). What should be more unsettling about what is included in this article is the degree to which politically appointed boards of non-historians are shaping the narrative available to millions of students who are only beginning to understand that the very discipline of history is a contentious one, especially considering the different versions are not only sold in the states that shape them alone. Again, multiple versions are expensive to produce.

Why Are Grades Important? Some Teachers Say They Do More Harm Than Good – Teen Vogue – Zach Schermele (6-minute read)

It is not every day the publication Teen Vogue makes an appearance in this newsletter. In fact, they have been having some journalistic growing pains of late. Still, this was an unexpected and well-sourced piece written in a magazine whose target audience includes secondary students. The breadth of the sources Scermele uses is deep and wide, including practitioners and experts in the education field and mostly avoids a lot of the traps many mainstream education articles find themselves.

First, it is an interesting choice to use an AP teacher as the hook for a going gradeless story. The College Board and Advanced Placement program certainly contributes to a competitive academic culture. So to see an anecdotal lede that demonstrates that the teacher’s experience going gradeless has had no impact on the AP test scores helps strengthen the reporting that aims at revealing more about this alternative approach to grades at the K12 level. Add more classroom teachers to the mix and the story deepens.

Then, adding higher education academics and experts to the story helps add some weight and validity to the topic. Plus, any article that asks Alfie Kohn for comment probably will get my attention. Yet, his research and work is not the only one that the reporter taps. There are other quality sources with links that make this pretty strong piece of reporting on the subject for anyone unfamiliar or new to the topic and looking for some good places to investigate more. I will admit that I was a bit disappointed to see the ever-present John Hattie mentioned, given that he remains the current soup de jour of the education world, despite his meta-analyses being more suspect than is often acknowledged. Still, this article is a great primer for the whole idea for a K12 teacher interested in learning more about going gradeless.

A Teacher’s New Year’s Resolution: Stop Fixating on the Data – The Chronicle of Higher Education – David Gooblar (6-minute read)

While this piece may be in a publication for higher education, there is plenty to consider at the secondary level too. For one, anyone that has not read John Warner’s Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities yet, I cannot recommend that book highly enough. It is not just for English teachers by any stretch. Another reason that bears directly on secondary education is the fixation on data, what can be easily measured versus what cannot, and what implications are communicated to students as a result.

I recently had a couple of conversations with different colleagues about the challenges presented with data availability, use, and challenges. The common thread in both involved how any kind of data might be used and what do we even believe it is telling us, which for me is definitely never above interrogation. Also, one fo the great things about the conversations was a baseline understanding that no one metric was particularly useful, something that is not always a given. Yet, as those conversations marinated in my mind, I keep essentially returning to the eye test, what do my direct observations reveal. Any data that I might consider when assessing a student usually must be coupled with my eye test.

As an educator, I am constantly looking for ways that I can afford students and teachers for that matter choices. It has been one of the steadfast principles of my teaching career. What I like most about what Gooblar writes is how he addresses the challenge of understanding how much help to provide and how much to let them struggle. Chasing the answer to that question in a perpetually changing context for each individual is one the enduring and most satisfying endeavors of the whole enterprise of teaching, at least for me. That has a lot less to do with cold, collected data, although it can at times help inform, and a whole lot more to do with connecting to warm real human beings. It also has a lot to do with my thoughts on grades too, which may be just another data point.

Close up of smartphone in hand flickr photo by Japanexperterna.se shared under
a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

Happy New Year to all readers that find their way to this little collection of articles and thoughts. After a short break for the holidays, I was excited to gather up a few items to share. There rarely is much of a shortage. Usually, it takes me longer to cull through and try to decide which ones to include than it does for just about any other part of the process. Still, it is an effort to connect with a small community and beyond around work that we can all read and have a good think about. For me, writing a little about them has its benefits too. In fact, I encourage anyone to do it.

I hope everyone had a nice respite over the festive period no matter what holidays are observed. I will say that vacations, especially ones that might bring gifts, always means more reading for me. I got a whole bunch of great books that I have been nose deep into already, as well as the regular periodical reading that I happen to do that renders this newsletter. I am firmly in the too much to read and never enough time to get to it all camp.

This week’s “If you read only one article…” is the last one. I am a big fan of Douglass Rushkoff. He is an exceptionally smart social, technology, and media thinker and critic. He has written no shortage of books that have shaped some of my thinking. If you are not familiar with his work you should be. He has been a regular at times on NPR and PBS. Still, if he is new to you, this piece published in The Guardian is a good introduction. A usual, he points out some things that sometimes slip past the mainstream media but also finds a way to promote a thread of optimism, the genuine kind.

Additionally, I am adding a link to an extra item that I know will not entice everyone because of its length. Nevertheless, a writer often featured in this newsletter, Audrey Watters, has put together an impressive piece of writing The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade (103-minute read). Even if you do not read every word, just scanning it is worth it. Yet, when you have some time and inclination reading the whole thing is well worth the endeavor.

Since the first time I saw a trailer for the forthcoming film 1917, I was hooked on seeing it.  Continuing to see commercials for it in the run-up to its release kept reminding me of this excellent video on World War I, Cause and Effect: the unexpected origins of terrible things, which is five years old already. Adam Westbrook made a number of these video essays before joining the team at The New York Times. They are really good. Rewatching this one put me on another binge of sorts. I suspect I will share more.

Here are three+ curated articles about education, technology, and evolutions in teaching.

How First-Year Comp Can Save the World – Inside Higher Ed – Deborah L. Williams (6-minute read)

While this article may be aimed at a higher education audience, I could not help but include it because it certainly can apply to secondary education, if not all levels. Of course, being a high school English teacher probably makes me predisposed to the kind of thinking in this opinion piece. Plus, I regularly admit that I teach young writers if I teach anything. Still, nearly every teacher of any subject would claim that they want to teach their young charges how to think better and yet writing is thinking. Not every teacher wants to reconcile that simple fact.

What I love about Willimas’ piece is how she deconstructs just some of the key pedagogical elements of a first-year composition class at university and then proceeds to expose how those elements would work pretty well in any course. It is a clever trick but it is far more than just a logical conceit. The truth is that she is right. Any class would benefit from “conferences, drafting and revision, [or] thoughtfully structured workshops.” I am not sure a reasonable argument could be made to the contrary.

Yet the real meat of Williams’ work is at the end, in the final section entitled “Principles of Consilience.” Not only does she provide some instruction about a work that I reckon a fair number of people are unfamiliar but she does so in delivering a poignant message about the need for more consilience, which another point pretty difficult to contradict. There is not a class at any level of education that would not benefit from “the ability to draw upon multiple intellectual disciplines to inform one’s perspective.” I also think Williams is right about another thing. The ability to teach and practice learning with greater consilience would make the world a much better place.

Smartphones Are Spies.
Here’s Whom They Report To. – The New York Times – Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel (8-minute read)

The New York Times recently began The Privacy Project which is chock full of plenty of articles being generated at an impressive piece. I could probably pull a piece from that effort almost every week. This one is specifically about mobile devices which are now nearly ubiquitous. I often wonder how much people actually pay attention to just how much the mobile phone in their pocket is a tracking device. It seems strange to me that people would not be aware of it, which may explain why pieces like this seem necessary to be published in major newspapers, or maybe people don’t care all that much. I can never be all that sure.

What might be more eye-opening for people is exposing the ways that companies pretty much get around any agreement that you believe that you might be entering with them through software development kits (SDKs). While a select few people may actually look at the terms and service agreements, the SDKs provide a kind of loophole that isn’t even covered by that clause that explains how the company can change the terms of the agreement without consent pretty much anytime they like.

Of course, not everything about this is all bad. The main problem is that you, as an end-user, are not given much choice about anything. More problematic is how companies deliberately obfuscate the amount of data that may be collected, how it will be used, who will get access to it, to name just a few possibilities. Plus, it can be sold almost anytime to third parties all because of that original consent. Of course, companies like Google and so many others will try to make the case that their services simply cannot function as well without this kind of tracking. However, there is a completely unregulated market predicated entirely on surveillance data. It truly is the oil of the age and we are so far from being able to get our heads around it let alone do anything about it. See the Rushkoff piece below.

We’ve spent the decade letting our tech define us. It’s out of control – The Guardian – Douglas Rushkoff (8-minute read)

I have been following Douglas Rushkoff’s for 25 years. It stings a little to write those words. Still, I remember listening to an interview with him promoting his excellent book Media Virus back in 1995 and thinking this guy was really on to something. Since then I have followed his career and writing, which began like so many of us with an excited, positive, and hopeful view of how technology was going to change the world for the better only to recognize his own naivety and offer a far more nuanced and sharply critical view of how technology is changing the world not necessarily for the better. It is all a little more complicated than that.

In this piece, Rushkoff shows how we all have come to the realization that digital technologies may not have lived up to the hopeful promise it so successfully marketed. As he explains, so much of the current protest and criticism focuses on the box while the forces unleashed are well gone from the scene. Another possible way to put it, we no longer live our lives mediated by technology as much as technology mediates our lives, which I find increasingly uneasy. How can anyone read the following and not be made to feel a little uneasy?

We’ve spent the last 10 years as participants in a feedback loop between surveillance technology, predictive algorithms, behavioral manipulation and human activity. And it has spun out of anyone’s control.

He then posits a pretty compelling notion that we are all sleepwalking into an array of virtually-engineered realities that cater to some of our most base impulses because they are, of course, some of the easiest to access and manipulate via our digital technologies. However, he then offers a potential antidote by continued use of technology to resist atomization in favor of connection to the local and using the network’s best asset, memory, to harness real facts, real metrics, and real commonalities that we have as humans in favor of a mutually agreed-upon reality. The kind that passes the eye-test and requires attention to what is immediately around us rather than the dislocated, distant connections dangled in front of us through digital technologies. Some of these ideas are rooted in his excellent book Program or Be Programmed, mentioned in the article and bridge to his current work in Team Human (both book and podcast). His work is highly recommended. As I said, I have been following him for a quarter of a century, even though it smarts a little to repeat that fact.

Close up of smartphone in hand flickr photo by Japanexperterna.se shared under
a Creative Commons (BY-SA) license

Apologies to all as last week was one of those rare instances where I failed to get an issue of this newsletter out. Occasionally, Sunday slips away from me and I send something out late. Yet, last week I completely spaced sitting down and putting things together. I think the season just got me a bit busier than normal. I think that has only happened one other time in the 118 efforts. Sorry about that.

All that being said, this will be the last issue of this year. I will resume in a couple of weeks after the holidays.

This week’s “If you read only one article…” is the last one. The Internet has a long memory, changing the way we live and creating a host of new challenges for young and old. This story is a look into another evolution in the kind of propagandizing efforts that can be unleashed across the web if you have enough money that is. How tech companies can continually be allowed to remain unaccountable on these fronts boggles the mind.

Continuing the effort to add some videos to this newsletter, here is one from EdWeek’s series on student motivation. This specific one is Why Autonomy Matters. Allowing students autonomy to make decisions is an excellent way to exercise their agency, which is always good to me.

Here’s hoping everyone enjoys the holidays and festive season.

Here are three+ curated articles about education, technology, and evolutions in teaching.

Is Writing to Text the Only “High Quality” Curriculum? – Inside Higher Ed – John Warner (5-minute read)

First, full disclosure, I like John Warner a lot. The writing instructor and author wrote the recent titles Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities and The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing, both of which are practically must-reads for anyone charged with teaching writing. Of course, I would require that English and language arts teachers from grades 6-12 read them but everyone would benefit immensely from those two books. Additionally, Warner was gracious and willing to interact with one of my students last year, before the student swerved and went in a different direction.

In this piece, Warner shares his frustration with the results from a recent report by the Fordham Institute. The fact that anyone takes any evaluation from the Fordham Institute’s edreformy agenda seriously at this point is an issue that Warner politely avoids, instead using the report as a platform to comment on the profoundly flawed consequences of the Common Core debacle regarding writing instruction. He squarely focuses on writing to text as an indicator of “high quality” curriculum. Since every standardized test makes almost exclusive use of writing to text, it has now nearly become the exclusive writing occasion in English and language arts classes.

If ever there were a perfect way to distort and destroy any chance a student might enjoy writing as an activity, let alone truly understand writing as thinking, David Coleman seems to have found it in developing the Common Core, as Warner cleverly suggests. Read this article for no other reason for the shortlist at the end, where Warner proposes his own criteria for a piece of high-quality writing curriculum. His criteria is considered, caring, and ultimately consequential for students and teachers alike. For anyone that thinks, “Right, I don’t have time to read a book about teaching writing,” read this article and spend some time rereading the list. Not doing so and continuing to focus almost exclusively on writing to text at the expense of any other occasion simply to serve standardized testing is tantamount to malpractice.

Tech companies monitor schoolkids across America. These parents are making them delete the data – The Guardian – Lois Beckett (8-minute read)

Student data privacy is an enormously under-reported and undervalued element in education today. While there are organizations and systems that are taking things seriously, I remain stunned at just how unaware schools, parents, and students remain about these issues. Worse still is when schools are complicit or actively seeking student surveillance. Yet given the range and depth of surveillance that is conducted on adults, it should not surprise anyone that that would pervade schools. On some level, education technology means surveillance, which is why a story like this needs wider availability.

I am fortunate enough to work with people that are taking student data privacy seriously and part of a growing effort to address this issue. However, the wider efforts are not large enough or growing fast enough in my estimation. There really is a need for legislation on this front, which seems unlikely at the moment. This is the first major effort I have seen primarily driven by a group of parents. It is inspiring. Still, I find it fascinating that I found this story about an American educational issue in a foreign newspaper. Perhaps I missed local coverage but I do not see a whole lot of mainstream media outlets focusing on these kinds of issues with any real focus. As far as I am concerned, all schools should demand that all student surveillance data be deleted every year.

How the 1% Scrubs Its Image Online – The Wall Street Journal – Rachael Levy (10-minute read)

This is a fascinating journey into a side of the web few likely knew even existed. Stories about gaming Facebook and other social media sites have been surfacing for a while now, especially in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal thanks to the like of investigative reporter Carole Cadwalladr, but I don’t know how many people were aware of how to game Google beyond the basics of search engine optimization. However, this article highlights just how it can be done by those willing and able to pay for it.

Essentially, there are firms that are able to engage in a blunt force, denial-of-service-style tactic by flooding the Internet with a favorable news blitz to overwhelmingly mute negative stories. What is exposed is a whole new flavor of “fake news” that puts the notion of public relations spin into hyperdrive. It is both enlightening and frightening. Furthermore, it exposes the make-believe notion that a company like Google can control, let alone prevent this kind of manipulation. The pretense that tech companies claiming to be platforms and not publishers can prevent bad actors on anything but the most superficial level is essentially myth.

Unless some major changes are enacted, this is another harrowing glimpse into the future of a world where artificial intelligence and algorithms distort reality, especially if you can pay for it. The fact that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos makes an appearance in the article as a client for these kinds of services is peak irony. Here is the pubic figure charged with stewarding the nation’s public education system actively trying to rub facts from public view as if they never existed, including who her own brother is. It is just another reason her appointment casts such a long and continually expanding shadow. It is some kind of intersection between technology and education.