The publication from the Innosight Institute, a think tank spun out of Harvard Business School and the work of Clayton Christensen in Disrupting Class, is entitled The Rise of K-12 Blended Learning. However, a better title might be The Dubious Rise and Increasing Influence of Corporations and Charter Schools in America, so appallingly biased and flawed are its suppositions. Artificially pumped up by its own politically charged rhetoric and veiled contempt for education as a field, this document is little more than propaganda for their funders, the Charter School Growth Fund, as well as the commercial, for-profit content production complex of the “existing education system,” a term that contributors Hernandez, Hassel, and Ableidinger imply in the pejorative.

The “existing education system” is presented as a zero-sum operation in a “factory-like, monolithic structure” that is ripe for their prescriptive, innovative disruption. Interestingly, policy makers, superintendents, and school principals are called to act with urgency in embracing their patent brand of disruption, preventing “the cramming of online learning into the traditional system,” which leaves me utterly bemused. While I have long had my suspicions, I was unaware that policy makers, superintendents, and school principals were actually outside the “existing education system.” If this is, in fact, true, it explains so much. Wait, maybe they are onto something, after all.

While I will admit that I have not read Disrupting Class, although I have read a lot about it. Yet, after reading this white paper, I am a whole lot less likely to bother. Their brand of disruptive innovation seems exceptionally long on disruption and desperately short of innovation. In framing blended learning as the potential inoculation for revolutionizing education, they slog a lot of business-speak, the kind that seems to continually seep into every conversation about education reform. So they hard sell potential in the form of pace, productivity, and efficiency increases, which all sound remarkablly “factory-like” to me.

Even better, they highlight some solutions demanded by educators, which specifically include integrated systems and hundreds of hours of dynamic content.  Of course, this means the best possible hope for all education will undoubtedly need to come from the giant, “factory-like, monolithic structure” of the education publishing industry, read K12 Incorporated, Pearson Education, McGraw-Hill, and others scrambling to get in on the game.

Perhaps most distressing of all is that almost every alternative option proffered is still based essentially on consumption-driven models, the very kind of thing being contested with the bullseye placed on lecture-based instruction. Instead of listening to a teacher, teachers are exceptionally conspicuous in the document by the way, students can watch digital videos and follow pre-fabricated lesson plans aligned to new educational standards. In fact, in many exemplars there is even less need for teachers at all. Paraprofessionals can administer and support the turnkey solutions that will fulfill the promise of this innovative education model. After all, paraprofessionals are significantly cheaper, which undoubtedly will assist overall efficiency. Couple that with the magic solution of harnessing the power of 3x teachers, the greatest, incentivized teaching money can buy, and  all pre-selected, charter school students win, then the rest of the ”existing education system.” Right.

Essentially, there is very little true innovation offered at all. Instead it is a little more than shill job for a wing of education reformers that are currently successfully framing the debate and dubiously gaining power and momentum nationally. What bothers me most is how many people are continually taken in by the slick, easy solutions, failing to see the wolves in sheep’s clothing salivating on the sidelines waiting to sink their teeth into even more of the public money funding the “existing education system.”

In reading some of the self-assessments and reflections from my ninth grade students, I am finding a common thread, corroborated by the number instances and the individuals writing the same thing. While students are admittedly not the most reliable reporters, I continue to see statements that suggest my students have already written more in my class already then they have in their entire eight grade year, and we are not even through the first semester. Interestingly, many of the students reporting this I would rank a bit higher on any reliability scale. Plus, I know it is probably adolescent hyperbole. Yet with sadness I must admit, this would not shock me if it proved true.

Perhaps more curious to me is I genuinely wonder just how much writing they are asked to do and what the nature of it is. On this point, I am genuinely inquisitive and not looking to just pass judgments. Given the chance I want to have some conversations with teachers not just in the middle school where I teach, but I also feeling some compulsion to make inquiries  of other teachers in the high school, particularly outside the English department. Honestly, I have always been a bit reluctant to do this, for fear that it might seem aggressive and judgmental.

Now I know I make the kids write a lot, although I try to be careful about believing my own hype on this, not to mention “a lot” is a pretty relative term. Still, I am growing a little weary reading accounts of how minor the writing demands are, be it middle school, other departments, or even within my own department. I guess my suspicions are mounting again on this front, which happens from time to time.

Part of what may be fueling all this suspicion and concern is my steadfast feeling that many teachers simply do not consider themselves writers, which brings me back to the Writing Project. One of the core values of the Writing Project effort focuses on the teacher as a writer. Many a Writing Project teacher is likely to echo the idea that it is hard to teach anyone how to write if you are not engaged in writing yourself. Thus, if many of my colleagues just don’t think of themselves as writers how much instruction are they really able to provide?

What’s more, it seems to me that as I informally look around writing is almost synonymous with assessment. Is it any wonder that I encounter so many fourteen year-olds that are reluctant or weak writers? Almost every time students put pen to paper it is to produce work destined to become fodder for teacher’s judgments, teachers who do not consider themselves writers but seem to believe they know good writing when they see it. Even more disconcerting is when the only real value of student writing has is merely a means for extracting some knowledge that they should have obtained. Talk about a recipe that would make anybody gag, not to mention a mess of mixed messages.

I certainly don’t feel like I am breaking any new ground here, but I guess I have been feeling some of this more acutely as of late. This seemed as good a place as any to show it. It all makes me want to stop reading student writing and get to writing some more of my own.

I have been feeling more compulsion to write a lot lately, more than normal. Some of it is even making it to online spaces.

When I was a kid my mother used to always declare, with a certain degree of ironic exasperation, that I collected collections. I suppose there was a grain of truth in that, although I am not sure how much complicity that she had in that observation.

As a child, I was very much into complete sets or series, action figures, Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars, trading cards, comic books, and more were to my liking. It was as if some advertising executive was thinking of me when the phrase “collect them all” was coined. I even remember trying to convince my parents to keep going to Burger King, just to get all of the Star Wars collectable glasses with each film release.

As I grew older, my tastes changed, but my urge to assemble sets did not. I still have a few sets from my youth, stored somewhere in boxes. All of my the toy cars are packed neatly into two of those carrying cases with the plastic mesh trays, with a slot for each car. I even have a few boxes of comic books, each individually packaged in a plastic sleeve with an acid-free cardboard backer.

I often wonder why I hang onto all of it, especially after having purged all kinds of stuff each time I have moved. Every once in a while, I still marvel at how much crap kind of naturally collects while I wasn’t paying very close attention.

Now while it might seem as though there still are a few collections of collections in my house, it really all comes down to books and music. I have a lot of books and CDs, too many really. My penchant for sets has never really ebbed, I guess. Amidst the overflowing shelves I have accumulated, are some revealing runs of musicians and authors.

There is every novel by Hemingway, from my post high school binge, between ages eighteen and nineteen, after I read The Sun Also Rises in a senior humanities class and fell in love with it. To this day A Farewell to Arms remains one of my favorite novels of all time. It is a book that so much affected me it took threats from my wife to ensure I would be present for the delivery of our first child. Of course, I am glad she insisted.

There is every CD that Paul Weller has ever made, another adolescent affair. Aren’t nearly all of our great musical love affairs sparked when we are our teens? The British Modfather has never really caught on Stateside, but he started banging out music as a nineteen year-old in 1977 with The Jam and has kept making music ever since. Last count that meant over 30 discs bought by this fan.

There is every novel written by Neil Gaiman, the cult fantasy writer, who I discovered in the aftermath of his Sandman success, despite vaguely recognizing the name. While that collection didn’t start until I was already well into adulthood, it still draws heavily on my young connection to the comic book genre, which where he made his name first. Of course, I have very slowly endeavored to go back and read those early Sandman stories in trade paperback, although I don’t have all of them just yet.

Then there is the many near sets that litter my house’s office space. They include runs from names that I have most but not quite every single title.

In music, these are the likes of Steve Earle, Bruce Springsteen, John Hiatt, Lyle Lovett, Elvis Costello, Peter Gabriel, and Eric Clapton, just to name a few. My wife laments that we cannot ever simply shuffle my iPod on long trips because every third song is likely going to be a Weller, Earle, or Springsteen single.

Amongst the bookshelves, that now overflow into almost every room in the house, are mainly subject sets, including double-digit counts on soccer, teaching, and increasingly dated web development books. In fact, I also have so many theatre books form my undergraduate days that I would need to have an entire, exclusively devoted  shelf system if I wanted to display them all. This is on top of Narnia, Harry Potter, Artemis Fowl, and more series that I look forward to rereading with my kids when they get a bit older.

By the way, my less-than-guiltless mother, who complained of the mess from all the collections, would later buy me a complete set of Star Wars figures when they were re-released with the second set of movies, all because she forced me to get rid of it all as a kid. This was when I was in my thirties. I still don’t even know where to put it all.

Interestingly, it all goes back to childhood and adolescence for me. It may have started with toy cars and Star Wars figures but it morphed into music and books. You can tell so much about people by what they collect. Perhaps, in writing this I am frightfully learning that I have never really grown up. Although I am not sure that’s true, it probably lets on more of a wistful need for nostalgia.

One revealing moment does still remain in my mind, however. I still vividly recall attending a party when I was in high school. It was a birthday party for a girl whose name has long vanished. She lived in a beautiful, large, old house with far more rooms than my parent’s tiny Cape Cod. Most amazing to me was the fact that this house had a library. I got lost in that library, away from the party, for most of the evening, staring at the leather-bound series of Great Books, as well as the hundreds of other titles packed on exquisite, cherry built-in shelves. There was even a small section of music, vinyl, cassettes, and an impressive number of CDs for all of their newness at the time. I was mesmerized by it all.

The nameless birthday girl, whose face eludes me too, found me in that room surrounded by all those books at one point. Before beckoning me back to the action, she commented, “Yeah, my dad reads a lot,” with a leaden heaviness emphasizing “a lot.” Literally, it was at that party, a prescient moment occurred. It was then that I thought, “I want to have library when I grow up,” and I began saving my books and music ever since. My grandest of collections was born right then.

“Here, take this,” he said, slipping a five dollar bill into my small hand. I hesitated, not sure if it was alright.

It was 1977, when five dollars went a lot further and it seemed like an awful lot of money to the five year-old me. The man handing me the fin was my father’s friend, Bishop, on account of his name being John Bishop. He had one of the most distinctive voices I have heard in my life, his laugh as distinctly hearty and husky.

“No, it’s alright. Take it. Get those guys some street clothes,” said the tall, black Bishop, bent down on one knee, reassuring me, so that I might take the money.

While I did end up taking it (my parents even approved), my amazement as to why he gave me money would last far longer than my trepidation. At five, I couldn’t fully understand his generosity. After all, I hadn’t really done anything to deserve it; and although Bishop wasn’t exactly a stranger, no one other than a relative had ever really offered me money. It wasn’t until I was much older that I could appreciate his act of kindness.

The guys to whom he referred, were Muhammad Ali and an unnamed opponent, two ten-inch action figures I played with constantly as a kid. Legend has it that the opponent was supposed to resemble Ken Norton, but for me, he was always Joe Frazier. When I heard Joe Frazier died, my moment with Bishop played over and over in my head.

See, the toys were part of the Mego Muhammad Ali Boxing Ring set, of course. Made in the year following Super Fight III, there would be no Joe Frazier play sets. Ali had yet again captured the popular consciousness and was heavyweight champion of the world. I still remember seeing Ali fight at the end of his career, when boxing meant something and every title bout was an event that everyone couldn’t help but discuss and wager.

I was quite young when I fell for the sport of boxing, and Muhammad Ali, The Greatest, might have been my first real sports hero. If ever there was an athlete that seemed larger than life, it was Ali. He continues to be the screen upon which we collectively project one of our culture’s most complicated and revealing narratives. Ironically, Joe Frazier’s death resurrects the nostalgia and complexity of his greatest and hated rival. It is the kind of dark cruelty and paradox that requires maturity to understand.

I still find Ali an extraordinarily compelling and fascinating figure. Yet, as I grew older and deeper into adulthood, I would come to appreciate Joe Frazier more and more, in an odd way justifying my childish insistence that the unnamed toy boxer of my play set was Smokin’ Joe.

Frazier too reflected a collage of symbolism for our culture, with no thanks to Ali’s antics during the Super Fight era, but the charged rhetoric that would cast Frazier as a villain to Ali’s hero would fade for the most part. But history is never written by the loser, so Frazier would fade from the popular consciousness, pushed to the fringe by the omnivorous Ali myth machine.

Joe Frazier was by all accounts a kind, humble, and decent human being. He was a truly great fighter, in his own right; but he was just that, a fighter, not a force of nature icon. In a cruel twist of fate, Frazier is inexorably linked with a man he loathed, a man who vilified him, a man to whom he would ultimately lose on that October night in the Philippines – the greatest prizefight the world has ever seen.

Perhaps it was the fact that Frazier lived and trained in Philadelphia, the city of my birth, that started my re-examination of him. More likely, it was gaining a greater appreciation of substance over flash, recognition that things are not always as they appear. The truth is usually more complicated.

There was not much flash to Joe Frazier in the ring, with the possible exception of the red streak of his vicious left hook. He was simply relentless, a rare brawler who could take as much punishment as he could deliver. He just kept coming, never quitting. He was one of boxing’s most honest fighters, proving best of all in the first of the Ali trilogy. For a short time, he was a people’s champion.

There was nobility in Frazier’s unceasing reliability. He forced someone to stop him. In The Thrilla in Manila, it was his trainer that stopped him, stopped him from Ali, stopped him from himself, and probably even stopped him from dying that night. Frazier’s will never waned.

The truth is that Ali and Frazier, to me, represent something more akin to two great loves, Frazier the reliable, constant, the one that makes sense to marry, and Ali, the bewitching charmer, the magnetic one that beckons a stormy affair. After the flush is gone, I want honesty and substance to win, but, sadly, it rarely does.

I am still captivated by Ali, in many ways, but now it too is more complicated. What’s more, I feel some pangs of remorse that the two are so inexorably paired. On some level, they can never be separated, despite death. In my mind, Joe Frazier is the more tragic figure of the two. He was the lunch pail loser, the simple fighter; perhaps the one we all should have been hoping would prevail.

Hearing the news of Joe Frazier’s death struck me more than I ever would have expected. I never knew him personally, and the passing of famous people generally doesn’t affect me much. Nevertheless, this one sent me revisiting my long-lost love of boxing, my fascination with those three fights that had all the pageantry and tragedy of classical theatre, and a nostalgic trip through childhood memories.

So in my mind, that unnamed boxer from my play set, clad only in blue boxing silks and a robe, could only ever be Frazier. I don’t remember if I got any street clothes for him. However, upon hearing the news of Frazier’s untimely death, I couldn’t help being transported in time, to my moment with Bishop and my Mego Muhammad Ali Boxing Ring set.

Ultimately, Bishop was shocked by a little white boy unabashedly playing with action figures of two black men in the suburbs. He didn’t really know what else to do. He was at a bit of a loss, but nonetheless moved. Upon hearing that Smokin’ Joe Frazier died…so was I.

I am not terribly sure I like the question, or at least I think it is a weak question that obscures a path to an much deeper answer that is far more worthy of a stronger, more fundamental question. That being said, I have been giving a lot of thought to the nature of questions lately, how they are formed, how they shape the thinking that follows, how to craft better ones. Nevertheless, here were my initial thoughts.

On a fundamental level, I think that grades are deeply flawed in their ability to provide an accurate picture of learning in a class. They are far too abstract and are unsystematically abstracted from student learning. So from that standpoint, I am not convinced that the systems that are generally in place, both here and elsewhere, can actually accomplish this aim at all. The common grading system is far too laden with competing factors that render it Byzantine at this point.

Yet, the only way that I know to provide an accurate picture of learning through the use of “grades” is by engaging in consistent and rigorous conversations with students about goals and objectives, means by which those will be assessed, and always providing opportunity for the student to remediate those assessments in some way. Without those three elements I would challenge the accuracy and validity of any grade.

There will always be some measure of subjectivity or bias, but the assessor can take measures to limit or control them in an effort to be as objective as possible. Often it is not easy, nor is it nearly as scientific or coldly mathematical as we might like. There is an artificiality to grades that belies the spectrum of understanding or the potential for learning. Yet we, as the institution of education, continue to try and make the best of a bad situation, with highly questionable results.

Interestingly, I had a colleague read this before I posted it, worrying that it might seem too wonky or inaccessible. For some reason, I felt a bit more tentative about declaring some of my deep-felt thoughts about grading. Truth is I hate grading. It is absolutely the worst part of my job as a teacher. Most fascinating is knowing I am not the only one that feels that way.

I have written about grading in the past, some experimentation that I have tried and the results, and I even recently discussed some of my thoughts about all this with my classes. While I am still delaying a lot of grading this year, I am not making as big a deal about it with the students. Amazingly, there have not been as many outcries or much visible frustration yet. Yet, I made an effort to reassure all my students that they needed the opportunity to make mistakes in order to learn and that grades tend to get in the way of those efforts. They seemed to get it on the surface, at least.

Quite simply, I wish there were only three grades that expressed something along the lines of “not good enough or meets a/the ‘standard’,” “good or meets a/the ‘standard’,” and “beyond good or exceeds a/the ‘standard’.” I mean that is generally how we all nearly simplify any kinds of assessments in life, and I am not just talking about school or teaching. When I think back to every evaluation that I have gotten in a workplace, prior to becoming a teacher, that is about what those assessments amounted to. Sure they might have used fancy language or adopted some “quality” lingo and prepackaged form, but what always mattered most were the conversations that I had with the person or people doing the evaluation. And in every case those conversations were driven by the three qualifiers I outlined above.

I wish we could adopt something like this in schools. Instead we continue to insist on fragmenting the simple for increasingly more discrete pseudo-measurements, as if it is all so scientific, analytic, and smoothly translates into mathematical numbers. Yet to me that is all about sorting and nothing to do with assessment, and we have built entire institutional and societal norms on dubious methods of measurement.

The more distance a grade is from the context of the class and the teacher that give it the more distorted that grade is. Still, so much false value is placed on them and they are used as the currency for so many judgements. To me grades, as they typically exist today in schools, are the central properties in a increasingly widening distortion field.