At one point our district reorganized the library so the books were shelved by point value instead of by subject. A kid hunting for something on sharks first had to work out what a shark book was worth.
The program behind it gave students points for passing a quiz after every book they read. Harder books, more points. The quizzes drove everything. It took the joy out of reading, and the kids who struggled with tests were, in effect, being told they were crappy readers. Meanwhile the adults got a clean story. Teachers could say they were tracking reading and pushing literacy. Were they?
It took me six years of railing against it before anyone pulled the plug, which tells you something about my powers of persuasion. The program had been in place for years. Nobody wanted to reopen it. Easier to write the check than dig into the impact.
I thought about that program on Tuesday, when LAUSD did the thing I could never get done.
The second-largest district in the country approved the strictest student screen-time limits in America. No devices before second grade, hour caps through fifth, weekly limits after that. The caps got the cameras. Buried in the same resolution was a quieter order: review every existing classroom technology contract and publish what the review finds.
That is the line worth copying. The screen limits are a decision about the future. The review is a decision to go back and look at the past, in public, where the looking can be checked.
Here is why almost nobody does it. Almost nobody asked the right questions going in. These programs get bought in the name of innovation, and innovation is the easiest word in this business to hide behind. It turns a purchase into a virtue and a hard question into an attack. The reading software arrived with a dashboard and a pitch about literacy, and that was enough. Nobody asked what it would make easy to do poorly.
It made it easy to look like you were building readers while quietly teaching kids to game a system. The contract sat there doing exactly that, on budget, for years, because the activity looked like progress and no one was assigned to check. Multiply that by every district, every platform, every pilot that quietly became permanent. That is a staggering amount of money spent on the appearance of progress.
So here is what I am rooting for. If LAUSD actually reads every contract, in the open, it will not just find screens. It will find snake oil sold under the banner of innovation, of progress, of being “future-ready”, sitting on budgets nobody wanted to reopen, and it will have to write the names down where the rest of us can read them. Once one district publishes that list, the others lose the excuse.
Most snake oil in schools gets sold under the word innovation. A public audit is how you finally read the label.
A question for you
What did your team buy in the name of innovation that no one has been willing to reopen? What does it make easy to do poorly?
Hit reply and tell me which one came to mind. I read every reply.
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