This entry was written as a guest post for Philly’s 7th Ward.

Talk to anyone who has made education equity their life’s work, and you will find, more often than not, that at the root of their drive and determination is a painful, formative experience in which they were confronted with illiteracy. For some, it was their own personal experience, or an experience of a family member. For others, it was an experience they had while working with students or community members. For D.C. Teacher of the Year Kelly Harper, it was her legal internship at the Southern Center for Human Rights and realizing how many of her clients had underlying struggles with literacy, which led her to shift her career trajectory from the legal field to the education field. For the 1991 Michigan Teacher of the Year, Thomas Fleming, it was his personal experience that fueled his teaching. Having left high school at 16, unable to read, he enlisted in the military. During his service he learned how to read, then he earned his GED and college diploma, and then became a teacher, determined to ensure that each and every one of his students becomes a “person who reads.”

For me, it was my first week of teaching. I had asked my 11th grade chemistry students to write a few sentences about themselves and things they wanted me to know. While many struggled with writing, there was one student in particular that really struck me. Even though it was just the first week of school, I already knew this student was one of the most caring, helpful, and charismatic people I had ever met. And yet, this student struggled to spell basic words correctly. It hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s one thing to know, on a cerebral level, that our education system is rife with injustice; it’s another thing to feel it. I count that experience as the first time that I actually felt it.

If there’s one thing I learned during my first couple of years of teaching, it’s that I was very unprepared to teach high school chemistry to students who struggled with reading, even though my alternative certification program (Teach For America) had placed a heavy emphasis on literacy during our training. TFA made sure that we left our training with the understanding that all teachers are literacy teachers, and we were all responsible for ensuring that our students make significant gains, not just in our subject area, but in literacy as well. We had a literacy specialist come in once a week to give us formal training on how to teach literacy, and the importance of literacy was imbued, in less formal ways, throughout all aspects of our training program.

Despite all of this, I was still unprepared. While I had my students read chapters from John Hersey’s Hiroshima when we learned about nuclear chemistry, and I held a short-lived after school book club for students who wanted to read more, I definitely did not move the needle in my chemistry students’ literacy abilities. There were a few students in our high school who were non-readers, and a significant portion who were reading well below grade level, and none of the adults in the school (me included) seemed to know what to do about that.

So, after my first two years of teaching, I was confident that teaching was going to be my career for life, but I was just as confident that I needed more training. I felt like the 5 weeks of training with TFA enabled me to get by, but I was not opening doors or moving the needle for my students in the ways that I wanted to. I decided that if teaching was to be my career, I should get trained the “right” way, and I should get a masters’ degree, so I enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania’s teacher education program. This was a traditional grad school teaching program, with a combination of coursework and student teaching, and it was “urban-focused,” meaning all student teaching placements were in the city of Philadelphia, and the coursework centered around themes of teaching in urban contexts.

Now, as a chemistry teacher, I had long since given up hope of ever learning anything chemistry-specific in any of my teacher training experiences. I realized through my TFA training and through the training and PD at my first school, that when you teach a subject that’s very specific, any training or professional growth related to your subject matter is something you have to seek out on your own time (and usually pay for with your own money). So I was prepared for the fact that grad school would be somewhat generic (which it was) but since the program was urban-focused, I figured that it would really help fill in some of the general teaching skill gaps that I still had, despite having completed my two years of training and teaching through TFA.

Now, before I rip into my grad school program, I want to highlight what was good about it. Namely, my grad school program did a good job of educating us on issues of race, power, and privilege. I can say with confidence that many of my peers in the program really did have their eyes opened to issues of racial and societal injustice, and truly did see the world differently after completing the program. Now, it must be noted that our “urban-focused” program was comprised of about 50 grad students, none of whom were Black, and a handful of professors, none of whom were Black, so how well they were actually preparing us to teaching in a city in which a majority of students are Black is debatable. However, when compared to other teacher prep programs, my grad school program definitely did a better job than most in ensuring its graduates were knowledgeable about racial and societal injustice, and other teacher prep programs, both traditional and alternative, could really learn something from what my program did.

The first book we read and discussed in our grad program was Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, a powerful, transformative book that every future teacher should read. In fact, it is the only book from my grad school program that I found memorable and relevant enough to keep because it gave me a vocabulary and a framework for how to talk about and work towards societal change in a world rife with inequality and injustice.

However, there is more to pedagogy than Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and that transition from overarching themes of societal change to actual teaching in public school classrooms in Philadelphia, is where my grad school program started to fall short. While our grad school coursework emphasized over and over and over the importance of a student-centered classroom that is co-constructed between the students and teacher, I don’t remember learning anything about teaching that was useful or actionable in the classroom. Our professors generally tried to organize our courses in a student-centered, co-constructed way, which meant I was mostly listening to the thoughts and opinions of of other student teachers with maybe a few weeks or months of experience. To be honest, I felt like I just wasn’t learning anything and my teaching wasn’t really improving.

While I had come in to the program knowing that I wouldn’t learn much about chemistry teaching in particular, I thought that at least we would learn about education topics that affected all subjects, such as literacy. However, I don’t remember ever reading about or discussing anything about literacy at all. There we were, in an “urban-focused” teacher prep program in Philadelphia, a city where only 1/3 of students are reading on grade level, and there was zero focus on how we can help improve our students’ literacy skills.

Well, there was actually one time when reading ability was mentioned, and I think this vignette is very revealing about the type of educational philosophies undergirding our program. The director of our program was involved in the “free school” or “democratic school” movement (famous examples include the Sudbury Valley School in the US and the Summerhill School in the UK). These schools are private schools that charge tuition (not sure how that’s free or democratic?) that follow a philosophy of student governance where students are heavily involved in decision-making and there are no structured courses or curricula. Students are free to do as they please, and when decide that they want to learn something they can ask an older student or an adult to teach it to them.

Our program director’s spouse, also involved in the free school movement, came to our class one evening as a guest speaker to tell us more about these free schools and their philosophy. He showed us a news clip about a free school in Vermont. The news clip discussed how many students were spending their days at school playing video games, and the students met to discuss maybe agreeing to a limit on screen time. I don’t remember much else about the news clip, other than a particular part that highlighted a 12-year-old white boy who was not able to read. They interviewed the boy and his family, and his parents said they were fine with him not reading yet, because they believed that he would know when he was ready to learn.

Now, nothing says “white privilege” like a Vermont family going on a national news program to proclaim that their 12-year-old can’t read, and this is probably why the majority of Philadelphia parents (and parents anywhere, really) would not want this type of education for their children. I can say with confidence that the vast, vast majority of parents would like a school that teaches their child to read before the age of 12.

So, now that you can see some of the philosophical underpinnings of my grad school program, it’s probably not a surprise that topics of “student-directed learning” and “student-centered education” reigned supreme in our coursework, and something like “improving student literacy” was never even mentioned.

Well, actually, there is one additional instance when being able to read was mentioned (besides the free school news clip). It was the spring semester, towards the end of our 12-month masters’ program. It was our Field Seminar course, a course that everyone in our cohort took together. In the spirit of “student-centeredness,” our professor had us get into groups of three, and for each class that semester, a group would be in charge of assigning the readings for that week and leading the class discussion.

So there was one class in particular, I can’t remember what the topic was exactly, but the students who were leading the class that day had us one of those activities where you stand in different parts of the room based on how much you agree or disagree. Now, this was many years ago so some of the details are a bit fuzzy, but one of the students leading the discussion asked us which was more important – teaching students how to read or teaching students to dismantle capitalist structures. I was firmly in the “read” camp, so I headed to that corner of the room. Based on what I knew of my peers in my cohort, I expected a 50-50 mix, but I was shocked to find only one other person (out of the 50 people in our cohort) in the “read” corner with me. Everyone else was in the middle or all the way over in the “dismantle capitalism” corner!

Now I don’t know which is worse – the fact that we were at the end of an urban teacher prep program and this is what our beliefs were, or the fact that the professors would probably think that these were appropriate beliefs for future teachers to have. Now, I’m no champion of free-market capitalism, but I’d say the #1 job of schools and teachers is to teach kids how to read. That should not be up for debate.

Now, I don’t remember much else about that particular class after that activity. I vaguely remember participating in the class discussion afterwards and saying something like “they won’t be able to read your Marxist pamphlets!” or maybe “don’t you know Fidel Castro had a literacy program!” or maybe “stop trying to live out your anarchist fantasies on the backs of black and brown children in Philly!”

The thing was, my peers in my program were not vehemently anti-capitalist by any means. Maybe some were, but not many, which is why I expected a 50-50 mix. I think this example shows just how isolated our grad schools of education are from the schools, students, and communities they purport to serve, and how easy it is for them to perpetuate their own divorced-from-reality educational philosophies. This is what happens when a bunch of white people sit around discussing Pedagogy of the Oppressed in their ivory tower environs, but never actually attempt to bridge that philosophy with the on-the-ground reality of current educational injustices.

Public education in America is painfully and enragingly unjust. Black and brown students do not have the same access to quality education as white students. Unfortunately, a lot of the education professors and education grad school programs who are the most aware of this injustice also seem to be the most hell-bent on making the actual teaching and learning of basic skills so vague, so muddled, and so fake “student-centered” that the students most in need of the best public education possible end up being pawns in a failed, misguided “progressive” education agenda.

I am an educator; I’m not an economist and I’m not a sociologist. I don’t have the expertise to say what the socio-economic structure should exist in my version of utopia. But I do know, and can say with certainty, that in my version of utopia all of Philly’s kids can read.

“Once you learn to read, you are forever free.” -Frederick Douglass

I was recently organizing some of my old electronic files, and I ran across an old quarterly chemistry email blast that I was in charge of writing and sending to the other chemistry teachers in my school network. It was Spring 2013 and I had a blurb about the newly-finalized Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) with some links for more information. Even though our state (Pennsylvania) had not adopted them, I was still so excited! Wow, have my thoughts changed over the last 7 years. But first, some background on why I was initially so enthusiastic…

My first teaching job was in Arkansas back in 2005. I taught 11th grade chemistry, 9th grade physical science, and remedial math. Our schools test scores were low, and a state takeover was looming, so a lot of outside experts were coming in to train us. They repeated over and over and over how important it was to teach the standards, write the standard on the board, copy and paste the standards into our lesson plan, etc, etc. The Arkansas science standards had just been updated that year (2005) and they were pretty clear and understandable. There was a set of standards for chemistry, and set of standards for physical science (which I didn’t appreciate at the time…I didn’t foresee the coming of the dreaded “integrated” science standards). I do remember maybe 1 or 2 grammatical or content errors; I smugly added [sic] after putting these standards in my lesson plans and on my board. But overall I had nothing to complain about. Of course, there were a few things in them I thought should be left out, and there were things left out that I thought should be in, but that’s a natural part of the standardizing process, and I believe in the importance of all students within a subject learning pretty much the same stuff. Plus, the standards were reasonable enough that there was spare time to add extra stuff into my curriculum based on student interest and things that are important to our school community in particular.

Then in 2007 I moved to Pennsylvania, home of some of the most confusing, messy state science standards ever. Ugh. So, their high school science standards were separated by subject (biology, chemistry, physics), but the standards for each subject were separated into 10th grade expectations and 12th grade expectations, which was confusing for me because chemistry (my subject) was taught in 11th grade. Even worse, each subject also listed 10th grade and 12th grade expectations for the other subjects. So, chemistry standards were listed in the 10th grade chemistry and 12th grade chemistry sections, as well as in the 10th and 12th grade biology and physics sections. Yeah. So, I get that this was probably an attempt to get on board with the “integrated science” trend that was (and maybe still is?) all the rage, but my thoughts on “integrated science” are another blog post for another time. In any case, I was really confused and had a really hard time figuring out what on earth I was supposed to teach in my chemistry classes, and I had a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and a couple of years of teaching experience already under my belt. Can you imagine how confused a new teacher would be, especially one without a degree in the subject they are teaching?

Then, in 2010 Pennsylvania released “Keystone Assessment Anchors and Eligible Content” for high school biology and high school chemistry. These were somewhat of an improvement. The document for chemistry has 3 columns: the Anchor Descriptor, the Eligible Content, and the Enhanced Standard. I don’t really know what these things mean, especially “Enhanced Standard” because that column literally only has numbers in it. The definition of “Enhanced Standard” given at the beginning of the document is “a code representing one or more Enhanced Standards that correlate to the Eligible Content statement. Some Eligible Content statements include annotations that indicate certain clarifications about the scope of an eligible content.” Huh?

At least the other 2 columns, Anchor Descriptors and the Eligible Content, contain sentences that are pretty clear, so even though I don’t know the difference between these 2 columns, I can at least get a sense of what I’m supposed to teach. I’m going to call these the “standards” from now on, even though they’re not in the “standards” column. Overall, these Pennsylvania Chemistry Keystone Standards are very reasonable and make sense, but are VERY pared down. Topics that every chemistry teacher teaches, like measurement, density, acids and bases aren’t even mentioned. In talking to my Biology colleagues, the same seems to be true for the Biology Keystone Standards (although they sound like they are even more pared down than the chemistry ones, to the point where they are missing too much content). However, in general I’m all for depth over breadth, and the Chemistry Keystone Standards strike the depth/breadth balance fairly well, and they leave enough space for me to add in extra topics for my students, just like I did in Arkansas.

The problem is, these rather clear Pennsylvania Keystone Standards were only made for biology (generally taught in 9th or 10th grade) and chemistry (generally taught in 10th or 11th grade). There are no physics standards (generally taught after chemistry), but I guess that’s because in a lot of high schools physics is not a required course. The biggest issue for me is that, while I now have clarity on what I should be teaching in chemistry, I still have no clarity on what is being taught in K-8 science in Pennsylvania. While some may say that standards are not important because teachers should instead be focusing on “relevant” topics that are related to the “real world” or students’ everyday lives, I find this to be an insultingly narrow definition of “relevant.” If something is “relevant” to my students, it’s because it builds on something they already know. Sometimes, the things they already know were learned outside of school; sometimes the things they already know were learned in school. As such, it is really important for me to have an easy way of getting a general sense of what science stuff they learned previously. In fact, some of the foundational chemistry topics that are missing from the Chemistry Keystone Standards (like measurement and density), I think are missing because they are supposedly being learned in earlier grades. Knowing if, when, and to what extent these topics were learned is crucial to my success as a teacher.

I figured there had to be some document somewhere that laid out the K-8 PA Science Standards, so I set out to find it. After a lot of googling, clicking around, and scrolling, the closest thing I could find was the “Academic Standards for Science and Technology” and “Academic Standards for Environment and Ecology” which are posted on the PA Standards Aligned System (SAS) website. Why they break science into these two categories, I don’t know. These links will send you old 2002 documents similar to what I described earlier, where every topic is broken in to columns for 4th grade, 7th grade, 10th, grade, and 12th grade, making it impossible to get a clear idea of what was learned and when. And, as a side note, since these documents go all the way to 12th grade, I guess I’m supposed to be teaching some of these things in 11th grade chemistry, in addition to the PA Chemistry Keystone Standards??

One day sometime in 2012, when I was randomly doing some google searches in an attempt to figure out why my state science standards were so bad, I ran across this published review of the science standards in each state . I finally felt some vindication. Arkansas’s state science standards were given a grade of B, and were praised for their “well-organized and generally sound set of science standards, with thorough and excellent treatment of most—though not all—disciplines.” They said the Arkansas chemistry standards are “particularly strong; all of our content criteria—and much more—are thoroughly covered by the Arkansas standards” and “the 2005 chemistry revision committee should be congratulated for producing such a comprehensive document.”

On the other hand, the Pennsylvania State Science Standards, not surprisingly, received a D. It states, in summary:

“The Pennsylvania science standards are generally poor. If a bright spot exists, it’s in the early grades, where the coverage does occasionally earn reasonable marks for rigor. In high school, however, the material generally descends into flabbiness and disorder. By no means could these standards serve as the foundation for a sound science curriculum or students in the Keystone State.”

So, in short, I think it’s pretty clear that the PENNSYLVANIA STATE SCIENCE STANDARDS ARE MESSED UP. Which is why I was so, so, so looking forward to the release of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)…

When the NGSS were being developed, back in 2012 and 2013, I remember seeing a tagline on some NGSS website that said something like “let’s get it right this time.” Considering the mess in Pennsylvania, this really resonated with me and I got really excited. While individual states are in charge of their own K-12 education standards, the NGSS were something designed to be nationwide that states could choose to adopt, similar to the Common Core for math and literacy. I followed the NGSS development process from afar, and I think there were a couple of drafts that were open to public feedback, which I submitted. Pennsylvania wasn’t, back at that time, considering adopting the NGSS (although PA has just recently started taking steps towards it). Nonetheless, I knew these standards would have an effect on science education nationwide, even if every state didn’t adopt them, which is why I was closely following the process.

I think it was maybe sometime during the draft-feedback cycles that I noticed they started adding these awkward “clarification statements” and “assessment boundaries” after the performance standards, probably in response to feedback from people who (understandably, in my opinion) found this section of the standards confusing and vague. When the finalized version was released, I was nonetheless still optimistic and excited about them, because really anything would be an improvement on the Pennsylvania science standards. However, my hopes faded a bit more when I dug into the section that applied to my course (chemistry). Well, there’s not actually a section labeled “chemistry” but there’s a high school section and I can kind of figure out which parts of that should be a part of a chemistry course. Overall, I found the chemistry part of the NGSS to be confusing, vague and just generally disappointing. (The specifics of what I found to be vague, confusing, or just incorrect, are a whole other blogpost for another time – here I’m just trying to keep the focus on NGSS in general.) In any case, despite my reservations about the chemistry part, I held out hope that maybe teachers of other sciences were finding the NGSS more promising and more useful.

I want to emphasize, though, that I did, and still do, definitely agree with the overall aim of what the NGSS are trying to do. I want all students across the country to have access to meaningful, conceptually-rich science curriculum that is more or less the same across states (with some reasonable flexibility), rather than each individual state having to design, develop and execute its own K-12 science standards from scratch. Each state doing it’s “own thing” becomes particularly problematic when states just don’t spend enough resources on the development of their standards, leading to the total mess that we see with the current Pennsylvania state science standards. So signing on with some high-quality national standards was, and still is, a good idea in my view. But are the NGSS really all that high-quality?

Before I get into my criticisms, I also want to say that I totally agree with not only the aims of NGSS, but also what what I would call the “spirit” of the NGSS, which is that we want students to learn scientific reasoning and understand scientific phenomena in a way that leads to meaningful conceptual understanding, rather than memorizing terms and doing mindless mathematical calculations. This is something I think the vast majority science teachers (me included) have always wanted for their students. Math and vocab words (and yes, memorizing some stuff, too) is a part of the process of learning science and becoming a scientist, but it’s not the end goal. However, the reason many students aren’t achieving conceptual understanding in science is not because teachers think that mindless memorization is the goal; it’s because teaching for true conceptual understanding is REALLY DIFFICULT and there are not a lot of concrete resources to help teachers do that. Unfortunately, the NGSS seems to just be 103 pages of telling teachers “teach in a conceptually meaningful way,” without providing any clear pathway towards actually doing it.

Part of this lack of concreteness in the NGSS is (in my opinion) due to an over-emphasis on science skills (like “asking questions” and “planning investigations”) with very little clear outline of what science content knowledge should be learned alongside these skills. It reminds me of a very formative experience I had in my 4th grade “talented and gifted” class – the famous toothpick bridge project. We were divided into groups, given materials, and told to work together and “think like engineers” to make a bridge that was strong and could hold more weight than the other groups’ bridges. However, we were not taught any engineering basics about good bridge design. Even just some basic engineering vocabulary would have been helpful; then we would have known some terms look up in our school library’s card catalog to do our own research. I know students should be learning how to research and solve their own problems, but they need at least a basic understanding of the content first. We had never learned anything about engineering. Now, did this project provide us with an opportunity to work on our communication and cooperation skills? Absolutely. Did working with all those toothpicks improve our hands-on dexterity? Yes. But the “learning experience” still felt really empty to me, and I’m worried that the NGSS will lead to a lot more learning experiences like this going on in a lot more classrooms across the US.

Another reason why the NGSS, in my opinion, are not going to lead to us actually achieving its very laudable aims, is that the standards are just generally confusing. Somehow they manage to be both really wordy and really vague. Just looking at them makes my head hurt. In fact, the 103-page NGSS document is so confusing, they had to also publish an additional 5-page document that teaches you how to read the 103-page document. The fact that something like this is even necessary speaks to what I, over the years, have come to believe is a lack of quality and clarity in the NGSS.

In their defense, I think the authors of the NGSS had expected that, after the standards were released, Pearson, McGraw-Hill, etc., would do their thing and some up with an NGSS-aligned curriculum that they could market and school districts would purchase. That way, teachers would have more than just the confusing 103-page NGSS document telling them the importance of conceptual understanding and scientific inquiry, they would have concrete resources for actually bringing the standards to life in their classroom. After all, the NGSS are standards, which are supposed to be broad, not a curriculum, which is more detailed. I remember reading a few things over the years about publishers slapping the NGSS logo on their curricular products, claiming they were aligned when they actually weren’t, but I never heard about any purchasable curriculum that was actually aligned to the NGSS. So I decided to investigate. I took a look on EdReports, an independent nonprofit that rates how well instructional materials are aligned to standards. (Now, keep in mind, EdReports is not assessing the quality of the standards; they are just assessing curriculum material alignment with the standards.) In the 7 years since the NGSS were released, only 1 curriculum, Amplify Science, achieved the designation “meets expectations” for their 6th-8th grade curriculum. Only 2 other curricula were designated “partially meets expectations.” Everything else was rated “does not meet expectations” (some pretty popular ones, like FOSS Next Generation, are in this category). If the vast majority of publishing corporations with a strong profit motive can’t even come up with a marketable curriculum aligned to the science standards that 40 out of 50 US states are using, then I don’t know how all these individual school districts are supposed to do it without allotting tons of time, money, and resources (that they probably don’t even have) towards the development of an NGSS-aligned science curriculum.

Now, like I said before, I think the spirit of what the NGSS are trying to ultimately achieve is spot-on, but the way they are written is just too confusing, impractical, and does not provide any of the necessary frameworks and structures needed to achieve their goal of deep science understanding for all students. As my own personal reservations about the NGSS were developing, and I started doing some googling, I found a final evaluation of NGSS done by the same organization that had rated and reviewed all the state science standards. According to their analysis, the NGSS earned a grade of C. Here are some excerpts from their analysis that really speak to my frustration with the NGSS:

-“Standards should, as much as possible, clarify and prioritize what content and skills are essential at each grade level. By leaving so much to the whims of publishers, curriculum developers, and teachers…we cannot be confident that all students in the schools and districts governed by the NGSS will learn what they need to be ready for college and careers.” (This analysis really spoke to me, because the NGSS are SO long and wordy – 103 pages – and yet actually reading them leaves you feeling like there’s just not much there. I think the fact that they are very long and appear so detailed and informational really fools some people.)

-There is a “failure to include essential math content that is critical to science learning. As our physics and chemistry reviewers explain: ‘In reality, there is virtually no reference to mathematics, even at the high school level, where it is essential to the learning of physics and chemistry. Rather, the standards seem to assiduously dodge the mathematical demands inherent in the subjects covered.‘”

-“…the content of NGSS itself fails to ensure that that all students will be equipped with sufficient content to make real the option of taking more advanced courses in the core STEM disciplines. This is particularly egregious in physics and chemistry.”

-“…by omitting essential content, yet signaling (via course maps) that NGSS does provide the basis for high school physics and chemistry courses, the authors have offered the country watered-down versions of heretofore more demanding courses in key STEM subjects. There is a real risk, then, that students in states that adopt the NGSS, or those that use the course maps to define learning in high school physics and chemistry courses, will graduate having taken courses that carry an impressive label but don’t supply the requisite scientific content that the country urgently needs today.”

-“Good science consists of doing as well as knowing, of practices as well as content and concept, and well-taught K–12 science has long understood and incorporated this truth. But doing it well requires a careful balance that seems somehow to have eluded the NGSS authors. Instead, they conferred primacy on practices and paid too little attention to the knowledge base that makes those practices both feasible and worthwhile.”

-“Unfortunately, the NGSS suffer from the belief—widespread among educators—that practices are more important than content. Consequently, every standard in NGSS articulates a practice first, even when doing so obscures the content that students should learn. And, while there are stand-alone standards that list practices and skills that students must master, there are no stand-alone expectations that list—in clear, teacher-friendly language—the content that students should learn.” (I’d like to add a side note here to demonstrate just how content-poor these standards are. During these COVID quarantimes, you may be interested to know that the word “virus” does not appear anywhere in all 103 pages of the NGSS.)

Now, a few of these criticisms focus on high school chemistry and physics in particular, which is maybe why I have a more negative view of the NGSS than your average science teacher. However, I think there is enough here to make anyone justifiably wary of the NGSS. And if you want to see what type of national science standards could be possible, just look to our friends across the pond: here are the UK middle school science standards (about 2,000 words) which are so refreshingly clear and crisp. Oh how I long for something like this, so I could easily figure out what science skills and content my students learned in middle school. Compare that to the headache-inducing confusing mess that is the NGSS middle school science standards (about 19,000 words)! And, as a side note, the word “virus” does appear in the UK high school science standards. Oh the clarity!

I would be remiss if I failed to mention Appendix D of the NGSS. This is not part of the main 103-page document, but it’s one of several appendices. This one addresses issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and has the title “All Standards, All Students.” Since this pretty much sums up the whole reason why I became a science teacher, I read through this appendix more closely than the others. While the goals that this appendix is promoting are pretty much the most important thing in the world (to me at least), and the teaching approaches and ideals that it conveys are good things for teachers to know and aim for, it again fails to provide anything actionably clear or concrete. It explains how the inquiry-focused methods of learning outlined in the NGSS are methods work for everyone, but they work particularly well for marginalized groups. It emphasizes that the “cross-cutting concepts” (which are things like “systems and system models”) will help ensure students make connections across science courses, and even across other disciplines, and this will lead to a deeper engagement in science particularly for historically underserved groups. When I read stuff like this, I find myself wondering, is this actually going to create meaning and relevance for students? If students make and analyze a model of the solar system, it will be more meaningful because they also once made and analyzed a model of a cell? If the class then had a discussion about all the systems they have modeled in science, that’s definitely not the worst thing in the world, but how much is it really moving the needle in these students’ science learning? And honestly, is it really that engaging? Yes, models and systems play a role in all science subjects, and yes, that’s an important (albeit somewhat easy and surface-level) connection for students to make. It’s really not the deep, thought-provoking connection that the NGSS authors seem to present it as. I’ve never once looked at my 11th grade chemistry students and thought “wow, I really wish they came to me with a better understanding of how systems and models play a role in all the science disciplines.” (My thoughts are usually along the likes of “wow, I wish they came to me knowing that when I say gas, as in solid, liquid, gas, I don’t mean gasoline.”)

So, in short, Appendix D which focuses on equity, did have some good stuff but overall left me feeling empty. The main crux of this Appendix seemed to be that everything in the NGSS will improve science learning for all students, but it will work especially well for historically underserved groups. Since this is pretty much the goal of my life’s work, I had really had been hoping the NGSS would help me realize this vision, but I have come to believe that it just won’t. Not only will the NGSS not make things better and more equitable; I think there’s a serious risk that they’re going to make things worse. The best way I can think of to illustrate why, is to take you back to the toothpick bridge…

So, there’s more to that story. The part I didn’t tell you is that there was a girl in our group whose uncle was an engineer. She went home and called her uncle to ask for advice about how to build the best toothpick bridge. He said “use lots of triangles and trapezoids in your design.” She shared that information with our group, we did just that, and when it came time to test which group’s bridge could withstand the most weight, WE WON! Now, on the surface, you may think “Wow what a great project; the students really learned how to ask questions and find answers!” or “Wow, those students were really able to connect this project with the shapes they learned about in math – great integration across different subjects!” (Yes unfortunately a lot of “cross-curricular” stuff really is that shallow.) But I want you to think about the kids in the other groups, the ones who didn’t have an engineer in their family. What about them? If they had just tried harder at “thinking like an engineer,” could they have had a chance at winning?

Scientists are able to “think like scientists” and engineers are able to “think like engineers” because they have a ton of content knowledge about science and engineering. The “skills” they have don’t exist in a vacuum; there’s no such thing as “scientific thinking” without science knowledge. Now I get that the goal of the NGSS is to ensure that all students see themselves as practicing scientists, and I 100% agree with that goal, but there really needs to be a parallel focus on building up students’ science content knowledge. When students are assigned science projects and experiments but are not provided with an equal opportunity to learn applicable science content, the students who can learn the content at home (or have someone at home to help them learn the content) will get ahead, do better on their project, and feel more confident in science as a result, and the students who can’t learn the content at home will fall behind and feel discouraged. So I think the reason why my fourth-grade self felt kind of empty after that project wasn’t just because I felt like I didn’t learn much. It was mainly because I was coming to realize that some students had home advantages, and some students had home disadvantages, and the school wasn’t always evening things out and making things more fair; our school was sometimes making the inequities worse. I felt this exact same emptiness after every science fair I ever participated in (and this is coming from someone who went on to major in chemistry in college). If you’re interested in a more in-depth analysis of the types of problems that can arise when kids are tasked with “thinking like a scientist”, read this article by D. T. Willingham.

Now I don’t think the NGSS are a lost cause; I do believe they can be re-written in a more understandable, useful, meaningful way that will actually ensure that teachers and students are able to fully realize the goal of a meaningful, conceptually-rich science education for ALL. The main things that need to be changed are a more clear presentation of the content to be learned (look at the UK standards as an example), and a toning-down of the too-heavy emphasis on generic science skills and concepts like “systems and models” and “patterns” that are presented in the NGSS as if they’re so deep, engaging, and meaningful but really aren’t.

Do we need national K-12 science standards? Yes, absolutely, because there’s simply not enough science education expertise out there for each individual state to come up with their own quality science standards. But are the NGSS going to get us where we need to be? No. The main pushback I hear from NGSS supporters when I share my criticisms is that these standards are just meant to be a foundation or framework for more clear, detailed curricula that individual school districts will write. Umm, who’s going to do all that curriculum writing? My school district has 1 curriculum director in charge of all subjects from 6th grade to 12th grade. Is he supposed write the science curriculum? My former school district did have a “science curriculum specialist” whose credentials included a major in Urban Studies and 2 years of experience teaching middle school math. Is this who we want to be in charge of writing an NGSS-aligned curriculum? Now of course, there are well-resourced school districts with qualified “science curriculum directors” who maybe actually have the extensive content knowledge and resources needed to turn this NGSS mess into a clear, coherent curriculum. (Or, if maybe these wealthy districts don’t have a science curriculum director, at least they have teachers with strong content knowledge, tons of teaching experience, and low-stress working conditions who will be able to make solid, conceptually-meaningful learning happen in their classroom no matter what the standards say.) But what about our under-resourced school districts, the districts with students that NGSS so emphatically purports to be helping? Well, I guess these poor districts could just purchase the curriculum from that one publisher that actually aligned with NGSS. But you’ll have to forgive me for not believing that a for-profit publishing corporation with a monopoly on NGSS-aligned curricula will, in an act of magnanimity, decide to sell their stuff at a reasonable price.

So, now that Pennsylvania is on track to adopt the NGSS, (something I only discovered though the course of doing research for this blog post…no one tells teachers anything!) I started thinking, maybe I should move back to Arkansas and teach there? Remember those clear, helpful Arkansas science standards? Well, I went online to look into it, and….Arkansas adopted the NGSS…sigh…

As I am about to start my 15th year of high school chemistry teaching, I have an increasing interest in helping train and develop future science teachers. I have colleagues who have worked as adjunct teaching methods professors in the evenings, so I started looking into how I could go about getting a job like this. There are SO MANY things I know now that I wish I had learned in my science teaching methods grad school course.

So I’ve been looking at CVs of education grad school professors, particularly those who teach methods courses, so I can figure out what I need to do to become one of them. I’m finding that they have shockingly low amounts of K-12 teaching experience. I’m not sure if this is because they actually have never taught K-12, or if they are just leaving it off their resume (maybe to avoid criticism for only teaching K-12 for a few years, or teaching at a ritzy private school, or something else of that sort). In any case, this apparent lack of K-12 teaching experience definitely explains some of the criticism I have of my own grad school of education experience.

I enrolled in a master’s program at a “top-ten” graduate school of education because I wanted to do things the right way. Having just finished 2 years of teaching through an alternative-certification program, I knew that chemistry teaching was going to be my career. However, I had significant issues with and criticisms of the hasty teacher training I received through my alternative program, and I felt that my relatively smooth first 2 years of teaching were in spite of, not because of, the training I received. So, like I said, I set out to get my teacher training in the way that most people would call “the right way.”

My grad school secondary ed program was a 10-month program that cost about $55,000 at the time. Luckily, I won a full-tuition award; otherwise, loans were the only option. My cohort was about 50 students, a good mix of future English, social studies, science, and math teachers. It was an “urban education” focused program in a major US city; however, there were no Black members of my cohort, and only one Latino student. There were no BIPOC professors either, except for the one elective I got to choose (The Psychoeducational Development of Black Males, taught by 4 Black males – I learned 1000x more in this class than all my other grad school classes combined).

I’d say the program overall (not just my elective class) did a fairly good job of educating us in the realms of race, power, and privilege, considering the demographics of our program (although the one Latino student had to bear an outrageously unfair amount of emotional and educational labor during our class discussions). I can say with confidence that some members of our cohort, myself included, have a more developed understanding of race, power, and privilege than they did before the program. I think they found our readings, discussions, and workshops on the subject both uncomfortable and enlightening (words only white people would use to describe those types of discussions). Considering our “urban focused” program was essentially a white space there were limits to how much everyone actually learned, but I can say that most people at least learned something. The student teaching was also good, because it was year-long, rather than just a semester or just a quarter like many other programs, and I liked the way they had us gradually take on classes–at first zero (just observing our cooperating teacher), then one, then two, then three.

What was painfully missing from my grad school program, however, was any practical, actionable information on how to teach or how students learn. While we learned a ton about justice, race, power, privilege, and identity (which is super-important and something that most teacher-prep programs aren’t doing well enough), we never really learned much about effective teaching, which I’d say is also a pretty important component of preparing future educators for racial justice in a city where the majority of kids don’t have access to quality education.

We did read about and talk about education pedagogy theories, mostly constructivist theories about student-directed learning. Setting up a classroom where this type of learning is actually taking place is EXTREMELY difficult, but I never got any practical information on how to make this work in the classroom. Now, at the time, I figured this was because the professors were practicing the constructivist approach that they were preaching, meaning our grad school classes looked like this: a bunch of grad students with maybe a few weeks or few months of student teaching experience sitting around discussing their thoughts on how to create a “student-centered” classroom. Needless to say, because we barely had any experience, we did not really have any good ideas. It was weird to read all these books and articles about the importance of a “student-centered” classroom, and then actually be a part of a “student-centered” classroom, run by a professor who was an expert on “student-centered” classrooms, and feel like I wasn’t learning or contributing anything useful or meaningful. While I wasn’t getting much out of these grad school classes, I figured that the professors were doing the right thing by trying to be the “guide on the side” instead of the “sage on the stage.” Since this was the type of teaching method that all of our assigned readings were supporting, I figured there was something I was doing wrong as a grad student which led to me not being able to link the constructivist theories that we were reading about with any practical classroom implementation methods.

But now, 15 years into my teaching career, as I peruse these education professor CVs, I’m realizing that maybe the professors were using this “constructivist” approach because they just didn’t have anything practical to share with us due to them having very little, if any, actual K-12 teaching experience. Now, I know this might not be the professors’ fault, and maybe the problem is that things are set up where education professors, in order to get tenure or whatever, need to devote their entire career to “academia” stuff, and can’t spend much time actually teaching in a K-12 classroom. The problem with this, however, is that they are getting their ideas for their future research and publications from existing research and publications. And they are deciding what to have their grad students read and discuss based on the research and publications they themselves are reading and discussing. This has created a self-referential academic realm that seems, to me, to be completely separated from the on-the-ground reality of K-12 education. Even worse, when new, more grounded education research comes out that may call into question some of their educational theories and research findings, some education academics double down with a shocking amount of fury. Now that I’m looking at their CVs, I can see why. They have little to no K-12 teaching experience, but they have pages and pages and pages of publications about K-12 education theory that took years and years and years of work. When your entire career and academic status is based on your publications, it’s much easier to double down than to admit that your research and publishing might need to change direction.

Now I know this problem of academia being divorced from reality (and the related “publish or perish” nature of professorship) is a problem within many fields, not just education academia. I think we could fix this problem, at least in education academia, if the people who were doing the K-12 research, publishing, and teacher training were also practicing K-12 teachers. I know this would take some re-structuring, but look at the medical field as an example. Physicians who publish journal articles are also practicing physicians. This ensures the content they are putting out into the world is not only research-based, but also do-able and practical. My friends who are physicians regularly read medical journal articles to improve their practice. (I have tried to do this with education, but practical, useful articles in education journals are VERY few and far between, and besides, even if a teacher found education research useful, due to paywalls they would probably have to pay out of their own pocket to access it.) Additionally, these practicing physicians who are also publishing are also teaching and training residents and fellows, and allowing their trainees to observe them as they work. Imagine if K-12 education professors also had a K-12 class they were teaching that their grad students could pop in and observe! With this type of transparency and accountability, I think we’d see a drastic re-orientation of ivory tower education research towards theories and practices that are actually effective in the classroom. And, let’s say someone publishes an education journal article that is later disproven or called into question by new research. I think, because the professor who published it is also a practicing teacher and teacher-trainer, they might be more willing to change course (rather than double down) because their past research publications are not the only thing their career and prestige is based on. And because they are practicing educators, they themselves, along with everyone else, reap the benefits of altering course based on improved research. This creates an excellent, healthy cycle of improved research -> improved practice -> improved research -> improved practice, rather than the self-referential research -> research -> research thing we have going on now in education academia that, in my opinion, is sending American education into a downward spiral.

Medicine is so important to our society that it CANNOT afford to be divorced from reality, which is why the medical education system, medical research, and current medical practice are all tightly interwoven. I’d say K-12 public education is just as important as medicine, and looking at the abysmal state of the current K-12 education landscape we desperately need some new solutions. K-12 education academia: get your act together.

*Note: Due to the confidential nature of the topics discussed in this post, I have changed and scrambled a lot of details. I have worked at 5 different schools in 2 different states, and the examples provided here are a general amalgamation of my experiences and are not specific to one school.

I occasionally see a teacher comment on Twitter about IEPs and 504s for special needs students that goes something like this: “Teachers should not complain about accommodations / modifications / SDIs for special needs students being ‘extra work’ because these are all things that every good teacher is already doing anyway. IEPs and 504s don’t create any extra work for me!” First, I definitely agree that teachers shouldn’t complain about this, and secondly, I generally agree that most of the accommodations and modifications I see on IEPs and 504s (such as frequent checks for understanding, preferential seating, study guides, chunking of material, etc.) are things that “good teachers” do anyway–in some cases with all students, and in some cases with particular students I can tell would benefit from it (regardless of whether or not they have an IEP or 504). However, I find statements like “IEPs and 504s aren’t any extra work” to be flippantly dismissive of the significant amount of time, effort, and energy that regular-ed teachers devote to ensuring the growth and success of their students with IEPs and 504s.

First of all, teachers need to read the IEPs and 504s. This is really important, useful, and it takes a significant amount of time. Let’s acknowledge that. Maybe schools could even cut their beginning-of-the-year PDs and meetings a bit shorter to give teachers more time to do this. And keep in mind that the more students on a teacher’s roster with IEPs and 504s, the more time they will need. For me, it’s not just reading the documents that takes time; I also need to consolidate the information in these documents into some type of workable reference sheet for myself. I need a quick way of figuring out which students receive the option of test re-takes vs. which students receive the option of test corrections, and which students require preferential seating near the source of instruction vs. which students require preferential seating away from distractions (no they are not the same thing), and which students need a weekly email home with an overview of their progress vs. the students that need an email home if their grade drops below a certain number. Compiling this info into one reference document is really helpful and prevents me from having to repeatedly log on, open their IEP, and scroll through dozens of pages to find their accommodations and modifications. Now, in my 15-year teaching career there were two years when I didn’t really need to make a reference document. Those years I had five or fewer students with IEPs. I find that when the number is that low, I can pretty much memorize the accommodations and modifications for each student who needs them. In an average year, however, I maybe teach 20 or so students with IEPs and 504s. The amount of time I spend each year doing the useful and important work of reading these documents, compiling my reference document, and then referring back to my reference document throughout the year is significant and should be acknowledged, not dismissed.

Secondly, actually carrying out the modifications and accommodations also takes time. Let me start by saying that I do generally agree with the teachers on Twitter who say that accommodations and modifications are things that “every good teacher does anyway.” I find that this is mostly true, and even though most accommodations and modifications require the teacher to put in more time up front, they end up saving time and energy overall, for both the teacher and the student. For example, “preferential seating” is a common accommodation you see on an IEP or 504, but this is something I do for all of my students. At the beginning of the year I have them fill out a seating survey, where they tell me if they need to sit near the front and why (vision, hearing, to pay attention better, etc.) and they tell me if there are students in the class who help them learn, and also if there are any students who might distract them from learning. I then use the results from this survey any time I assign seats or lab groups. Is it a lot of work up front? Yes, but it’s totally worth it. It gives me a good sense of the class’s social dynamics, and it ensures I group kids in a way that works for them. When group work and chemistry lab work run like well-oiled machines, it reduces stress for the students and teacher and helps to minimize lab mishaps, accidents, group conflicts, and emotional shut-downs due to interpersonal dynamics. Everyone wins with “preferential seating!”

Likewise, there are accommodations / modifications that I don’t use for everyone, but still overall don’t add to much to my workload and would definitely fall under the category of “something all good teachers do anyway.” For example, test corrections is a common accommodation. This is something I use for all students who I think need it, not just students who have it in their IEP. While working 1-on-1 with a student after school to go over a test, re-teach material, and give the student a chance to correct it does take a significant amount of time, it ends up saving time overall. Students who need this accommodation might otherwise have significant emotional reactions to tests, or might lash out from frustration due to not understanding the material. We all know that situations like this don’t just take up a lot of time and energy, but can also take a devastating emotional toll on student and teacher alike. I find that accommodations like 1-on-1 test corrections provide a support that these students need, and the initial time spent up front ends up saving just as much time in the end.

There are, however, accommodations and modifications that DO take extra time. For example, one year I had a student whose parent I had to call when their grade dropped below a 75, and I had a student whose parent I had to email when their grade dropped below a 70, and another student whose parent I had to email when their grade dropped below a 65 (I’m changing some of the details here to protect privacy, but you get the gist). Now, of course it is good practice for all teachers to contact home when a student’s grade drops significantly and/or the student might be at risk of failing, and I do that (along with significant amounts of family contact about positive stuff as well). But keeping track of these specific numerical cutoffs, as well as trying to remember which parents required phone calls and which required emails, was very time consuming. On top of that, our online learning management system at the time did not allow for a teacher to set up an automatic notification when a students grade dropped below a certain number. (It did, however, allow for a parent to set up an automatic notification when their child’s grade dropped below a certain number.) So, I basically had to set up a calendar reminder to go off every other day that reminded me to log on to our learning management system, check these 3 students’ grades, and inform parents as necessary. I had to list the student names, grade cutoffs, and email address/phone number in the calendar reminder itself just to keep everything straight. Overall, I only had to do maybe 5 total emails/phone calls for these 3 students all year, because they all for the most part stayed on top of their learning and maintained high grades, but that doesn’t negate the fact that I devoted significant extra time and brain space to being hyper-vigilant about these 3 students in a way that I would not normally do. I was scared that a parent would log on and see their student’s grade was a 72 before I had a chance to contact them; even though I was checking every 2 days there was still a chance that would happen and I would be out of compliance with their IEP. I think something more reasonable for the teacher to do is take a look at all students’ grades once a week, and contact a student’s family if a grade has dropped significantly or if a student is in danger of failing, and be extra-vigilant about the students whose families don’t have the time to check their child’s progress online (I find these students are usually not the ones who have required parent contact in their IEP.)

Overall, I’d say it’s true that the effective, quality accommodations and modifications that I see in IEPs and 504s are just general effective practices that any good teacher would be doing anyway. While all accommodations and modifications do take some time up-front, if the accommodation is effective, it ends up saving the student and the teacher time and energy in the end, which is why all good teachers do them, IEP or no IEP. It’s the less effective accommodations that are the problem because they don’t end up saving anyone time and are just an overall sunk cost. I’m lucky that ineffective accommodations and modifications have been rare in my career, and I have found that with an effective case manager and a good teacher-family relationship, most of the ineffective, time- and energy-draining accommodations can get changed and improved in the next IEP re-write.

So, are IEPs and 504s “extra work?” Well, reading them and processing the information in them is definitely extra work. Carrying out specific accommodations and modifications in them I would say is generally not “extra work” because, as long as the accommodations are effective, they are usually strategies that any good teacher would use anyway for some or all of their students. The major thing, however, that I have not touched on yet that creates significant “extra work” is the paperwork.

PAPERWORK. I don’t know where to start. I have taught at 4 public high schools all in the same state, and the amount of 504 and IEP paperwork I have had to do has fluctuated significantly for reasons I don’t understand. I have always been a regular-ed teacher so I have little knowledge of the laws and rules that determine the volume of paperwork that appears in my mailbox or email inbox, so I can’t offer any insight beyond just that–the volume of paperwork.

To give you an idea, here’s a list of IEP/504-related paperwork I completed in a one-week period:

• one BASC-3 form (165 questions on a rating scale, plus 2 open-ended questions, related to all types of student behaviors, the majority of which seem unrelated to the classroom setting)
• two “teacher observation/evaluation” forms (10 questions on a rating scale to evaluate a student’s workplace-readiness)
• two “teacher input forms” (6 open-ended questions about student progress, strengths, and needs)
• one Vanderbilt assessment (43 questions on a rating scale related to ADHD behaviors observed in the classroom setting)
• two daily behavior trackers (3 yes or no questions every day about a student’s behaviors)

Now, this was a particularly bad week, but I’d say that on average I am answering 50-100 questions per week about my students with 504s and IEPs. There are two problems with this. First, the overall volume is just too large and it eats up a significant portion of my planning period, meaning that I am sometimes not able to plan lessons, grade student work, or set up chemistry labs due to IEP/504 paperwork. Yes, I have had to cancel labs due to paperwork. The second issue is that it’s also too much for the people on the receiving end of this paperwork. There is such a high volume of information coming back to case managers, school psychologists, counselors, and families, that it is difficult to process and act upon. This means that important information can get lost in the fray, and the 1 or 2 things in the paperwork that were significant sometimes end up not being acted upon.

Now, if there was no 504 or IEP paperwork, would I still be making a note of concerning issues and contacting the necessary people (psychologists, counselors, families, etc.)? Yes, of course. But I would not be spending nearly the amount of time I am currently spending on paperwork.

I’d say the only other IEP/504-related item that might be considered “extra work” is meetings. These do take significant time, and often when I attend the meeting I am just saying aloud all of the things I already wrote in the “teacher input form” that are now written in the IEP, which feels a bit redundant. (Maybe there’s a better way?) But overall I’d say meetings are kind of like good accommodations/modifications–the time invested brings a lot of overall benefits. Getting in-person time with a student’s family is so valuable, and these meetings always give me a strong emotional reminder of why I became a teacher in the first place, and the insights I gain make all my future interactions with that student and family more positive and more effective.

So, in summary, I wish that IEPs and 504s only consisted of “things that all good teachers do anyway,” and in an ideal world, that would be true. In reality, they do take extra time and they do create additional work. Now, I am not here to judge whether that fact is good or bad, but I do think it’s important to acknowledge it and not dismiss it, because it has a consequence that is pretty unfair to students with IEPs and 504s: the more students with IEPs and 504s a teacher has, the less time that teacher is spending on lesson preparation, giving feedback, setting up and cleaning up labs and activities, etc. If a teacher has classes with an unusually high number of IEP/504 students, shouldn’t they have MORE time, not less, to prepare lessons that meet the needs of all learners in the room? Don’t we need our teachers of IEP/504 students to be MORE positive and calm and LESS stressed out and anxious? When a teacher spends significant chunks of their planning period filling out paperwork, it does not make them a better teacher; it makes them a worse teacher. So, let’s acknowledge that, and let’s allow space for some critical thinking and dialogue about how our regular-ed teachers of special-ed students could be spending their preparation time in a way that better benefits students with IEPs and 504s.

No article about teaching has resonated with me more than this article by Jose Vilson, a math teacher in New York City with tons of accolades who is also my favorite teacher-writer. His article really spoke to the realization I had early on in my teaching career that US teachers do not have nearly enough planning and preparation time. At my first high school as a teacher, I taught 5 periods a day (2 chemistry classes, 2 physical science classes, and 1 remedial math class), but only had 1 period a day to plan all those lessons, grade all those papers, set up all those labs, and call all those families. Since then, I have made it a priority to find a school that makes an effort to minimize the number of different subjects each teacher has to teach, and I have managed to find that, but what I have never been able to find a school that gives teachers more than 1 period a day to do all of their planning, preparation, grading, and communication about student progress.

The second high school I worked at made an effort to really help their teachers improve their teaching. Every Wednesday, the students were dismissed 2 hours early so we could have 2 hours of professional development and/or collaboration time. Often, this time was used for the typical staff meeting, or generic science professional development on the basics of teaching the scientific method, or time to meet with other teachers in our grade level to discuss specific students who need extra support. All of these things are good, but on these days each class period was shortened due to the early dismissal, meaning my planning period was shortened. Since Wednesday is right in the middle of the week, far from the weekend, it would be an ideal time to provide teachers with some extra time to re-calibrate and tweak their lessons for the end of the week based on how the beginning of the week went. Unfortunately, this school’s “Wednesday Professional Development” rarely provided time for that, and I left school with a heavier take-home workload, and more stress, than a normal school day with a normal-length planning period.

On a couple of occasions, I had so much work to do that I had to take a personal 1/2 day for the afternoon on Wednesday so I could skip Professional Development and sit in my classroom and set up a lab, grade tests, or plan for the rest of the week. It’s ridiculous that I had to do that, but I think it really demonstrates the reality of teacher workload and the lack of time we are given to tackle that workload.

A common “solution” to the tension between the need to provide Professional Development and teachers’ need for work time is “collaboration.” One year early in my career, during weekly Professional Development, they would have all the teachers take their grading and go to their department head’s room. The idea was that everyone could do their own grading while somehow simultaneously talking to other teachers and get advice about topics their students struggled with on the assessment they were grading. I was able to get a bit of grading done, which is better than none, and we were able to help each other a tiny bit, because we’re all science teachers. But since we all taught different science subjects, and I was the only chemistry teacher, the collaboration aspect of this activity was just not worth it, and I could have gotten 5x as much grading done, and the quality of my feedback to my students would have been better, if I had been allowed to work alone in a quiet room.

Now, I’m all for half-days or full days devoted to professional development or collaboration, but it is NOT a replacement for, or a solution to, the lack of teacher work time. While I have learned great things and gotten amazing teaching tips through PD or collaboration, it has never once reduced my workload. If I learn about a good lab or a better way to teach a topic by collaborating with other science teachers, I need to then go back to my room and do the actual work of setting up and practicing that new lab, re-writing that lesson plan, adjusting that assessment, re-writing that exemplar, etc. It’s good work to be doing, because I am improving my practice and I love becoming a better teacher, but it’s important to keep in mind that collaboration and PD does NOT reduce teacher workload or save teachers time.

Too often, school improvement initiatives emphasize more professional development and more collaboration time for teachers, but they never seem to allow for more time for teachers to get work done. I’m not sure if it’s because there is a general unawareness of how much work teachers need to do, or if it’s coming from a place of distrust (as in, if we allow teachers more time to work alone quietly in their room we can’t trust that they’ll use that time to actually do work). I generally thing it’s the latter, but sometimes I think it’s the former (especially when I’m at a school that is renovated – this has happened to me twice – and they install classroom lights on a timer that turn off when there is not enough movement in the room, meaning during my planning period the lights cut off every 10 minutes and I have repeatedly stand up from my desk and walk around the room to get them to come back on.) It’s very clear to me that school classroom architects believe that teachers never need to do any work that requires lighting when students aren’t in the room, and based on how little prep time teachers are given in the US, I’d say the general public believes the same. No one seems to realize that, when students aren’t in the room, teachers need to spend a ton of time planning lessons, grading student work, setting up hands-on activities, cleaning up hands-on activities, testing out and learning new technology, getting broken technology fixed, organizing supplies, making photocopies, contacting families about students, filling out paperwork about students, and reaching out to case managers and counselors about students. Contrary to popular belief, amazing lessons don’t just happen on the fly in the moment; amazing preparation (not amazing PD, not amazing collaboration) leads to amazing lessons.

We cannot PD our way into improving education in the US. We often look at the success of other countries, like Finland, and hope that changing our curricula, or our standards, or our standardized testing structure will make us better. I think one of the most-overlooked, yet most telling, statistics is that Finland’s teachers spend an average about 600 hours a year in front of students. US teachers spend nearly 1,000 hours per year, on average, in front of students. What do you think Finland’s teachers are doing with all that “free” time? Surfing the internet? Chatting with their colleagues? Well, based on their country’s results, it looks like they are using that time to plan and prepare awesome lessons and get meaningful, important work done! (And I’ll bet their schools are even willing pay for their classroom lights to be on while they do it.)