One of the hardest things about this project, and about offering any kind of counter-narrative to the “Public schools suck/Teachers are terrible/If only we could [insert gimmick here] our problems would be solved!” party line, is dealing with the culture of fear that exists in so many schools (and other work environments, for that matter!). The culture of fear is what prevents so many teachers from coming forward and talking about their experiences as teachers, and what causes others to do so anonymously or pseudonymously.

Because of this, it’s easy for self-styled reformers (you know, the folks who’ve never taught, and may not have ever even attended public schools, but know all the answers to the problems in education) to pretend we’re all lying or exaggerating when we talk about the pitfalls of their pet projects. I’ve come to think of the culture of fear in schools as one of the most public secrets ever– most teachers have experienced it in at least one school, but many people outside of schools either don’t like to admit it exists, or can’t believe that it does.

For instance, when I first started having trouble with my administration this year, a lot of my non-teacher friends would say things like, “Well, don’t you have a union? Aren’t they supposed to crush your principal into dust for even looking at you wrong?” From there, a conversation would ensue about how lucky unionized teachers are to be so well-insulated from any kind of accountability, and how in no other profession can you be terrible at your job and keep it for life blah blah blah, and I would tune out and drift to the mental happy place I visit during savasana in order to not go completely nuts.

(I won’t really get into the union thing right now, ’cause that is a can of worms I’m saving for a day when I have a much heartier stomach. For now, I will offer this well-clicked link instead: The Myth of the Powerful Teachers’ Union. Note that I offer it only for the comparative statistics on teacher job security in unionized vs. non-unionized public school systems, and the appropriate call to stop blaming schools for societal problems. There are a few places where I think he’s being really disrespectful to low-income students and communities, and I disavow that completely. Bottom line: Teachers’ unions are not as powerful or protective as people think.)

In well-functioning school environments, there is no culture of fear. Teachers, administrators and parents (and students, wherever possible) trust and listen to each other, respect and value each others’ input, and make decisions based on mutual consent. Students win because the adults in their lives have the energy and resources to do what’s best for them; teachers win because they’re respected as professionals and are free to focus on instruction; administrators win because they can focus on positive management of personnel and resources; and parents win because they can trust that when they send their children to school, they’ll be safe and well-educated.

Unfortunately, too many schools these days don’t fit that description. Districts responding to state and/or federal mandates are increasingly inflexible, and judge schools based on a few easy-to-report measures of performance. Those measures–the all-important Data– may or may not tell anyone much about real learning, but to folks who don’t understand education or see schools or students up close, they’re all that matter. If a school comes up “short” on these measures, then harsh “turnaround” strategies are often employed.

Fear kicks in.

The fear pushes administrators to crack down on those areas that are most visible to the district. If they don’t, they risk losing their own jobs in a turnaround or school closure. They pass the fear along. For teachers, there’s a difficult choice: should you teach to the Test, or to whatever your principal and district value at the moment, or teach to students’ needs, abilities, and interests? Theoretically, those things should not conflict, but when high-stakes assessments can’t be adjusted to suit different learning styles, only account for a narrow range of subjects, and produce information only after a cohort of students have left a given classroom, conflict is inevitable. The fear looms: is it best to go along with the program–”play the game”– even though it’s not real education? Is it worth it to risk a steady salary/your professional standing/your entire career to stand up for what’s right for the kids?

When teachers question anything about the current way of doing things, that poses a problem for administrators. On the one hand, they have a point. On the other hand, no one’s listening to that point, and I can’t do anything about that this year. Do I allow that, or do I shut it down so I can keep the bus rolling until this fad passes? The easier thing to do is to shut it down. Silence those teachers, so others don’t start questioning too. The other teachers witness what happens to someone who doesn’t quietly go along, and they quickly learn to keep their mouths shut. Yeah, this situation is failing the students, but I’ve got a family to support. I’ve worked my whole life for this career. I can’t afford a bad evaluation, or an involuntary transfer, or to get passed over for a promotion, or to lose my job completely. They might gripe in the teacher’s lounge, or blow up at kids for being bad, or lazy, or unmotivated. But they won’t publicly take a stand, because they fear what might happen if they do.

(Note how slippery this is for a teacher’s union. If a teacher gets fired for questioning or resisting district, state, or federal policy, there’s not much they can do to protect that teacher. If “doing your job” means going along with the policy, then that teacher was not doing his or her job; there’s really no official recourse for that teacher. The only way to keep good teachers in the system (and support them to do real teaching) is to work to change the policy. Of course, if the flawed policy is touted as a much-needed “reform,” how can you resist it without also appearing to be against reform?)

So, as a teacher, you’re on your own. Work becomes about keeping up your guard. Can I trust my teammate enough to share my real feelings about how things are going? Should I admit that I’m struggling with something– class size, lack of materials, a new curriculum, forms and reporting requirements– and ask for help, and risk being seen as incompetent, or a complainer? Should I talk to outsiders about what’s going on, and risk a superior finding out about it and retaliating against me?

Which school would you rather send your children to: the one where people work together and teachers can spend their time focusing on their actual work, or the one where administrators and teachers don’t trust each other, and don’t do what they think is best for students because they’re all afraid they’ll lose their jobs?

The good news about this situation is that it’s fixable. Cultures develop as people respond to the circumstances they face, and we have the power to change our responses and those circumstances. The bad news is, that means we need to be brave enough to make those changes. Teachers need to come together and speak out against abuses in the system, and reclaim our expertise in the education reform arena. If the public is going to become informed enough to resist well-intentioned but short-sighted (and thus, potentially harmful) plans to “fix” public education, we are the only ones who can inform them. Likewise, administrators need to be brave enough to foster cultures of openness and respect, and take their employees’ concerns seriously. Districts need to hold everyone–teachers, administrators, and themselves– accountable for behaving professionally, which includes addressing well-founded dissent instead of suppressing it.

“I said, ‘Somebody should do something about that.’ Then I realized I am somebody.” -Lily Tomlin

This is especially true when we consider charter schools.

I support charters if they lead to the general improvement of public education. I realize that there are many ways to define “improvement,” but for the sake of this post let’s just say improvement as defined by state and local governments. I am not so supportive of charters if the sole purpose is to offer “choice” to parents, since I do not believe that choice, in and of itself, leads to better schools.

Charters present diverse approaches to teaching our children; approaches that can be used in other schools. Because of this I support charters in school districts that are struggling to effectively teach our students. But what if we have school districts that are successful–school districts that more than effectively, as a whole, meet or exceed state and local expectations? Should charters be allowed in these districts?

I am ruminating on this topic because the Wall Street Journal ran a story about some affluent and successful school districts in New Jersey that have denied charters. The story describes the issue:

At the heart of these New Jersey cases is the question of who can and should be served by charter schools, which receive public money but can be run privately. School-choice advocates assert that charters should be open to parents who want something different from what public schools offer. They argue that demand alone should be the test.

Those who oppose charters in high-performing areas—a group that often encompasses the public-school districts themselves—say that charters are only viable in urban areas where parents are faced with failing schools.

So I wonder fellow bloggers and readers, where you stand on this issue? Should charters be allowed simply based on demand, so if I have enough students interested in learning Mandarin Chinese with a focus on stage design, it should fly? Or should charters only be delegated to those poor, underperforming school districts that just can’t find a way to do it on their own?

I know that I have flippantly presented the two sides, but hey it’s summer and you need a little provocation to stir you from your midday nap.

One must pay attention when a book on education—yes, education!—garners so much talk it is likely to influence policy.  Or it certainly hopes to. This reader finds Diane Ravitch’s book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” both fascinating and disappointing.

It is fascinating to follow her review of education reform in America over the past twenty years—and to compare and contrast her look at standards, choice, and accountability, and the work of foundations, with what I have seen in Colorado over this time.  But it is disappointing to see how inaccurate and unfair she can be in her critique.

I admire many sections of the book.  I’d love to quote entire paragraphs on too much dependence on multiple choice tests and on her vision of good schools with a rich and rigorous curriculum.

But given the largely positive press she has received, including two reviews in The New York Times, I will focus on what I find unsatisfying. For I would be sorry to see her account go unchallenged. If you accept her position—get off the charter school bandwagon! Teach for America is no answer! tell those market-based foundations to take a hike!—you too might want to join the members of the National Education Association who gave Ravitch a standing ovation after she spoke at their convention (July 6).  Reformers have to ask themselves tough questions, and I’m glad she poses them. Why indeed so little progress? But praise her stance as “completely logical”? No.

The subtitle of her book, “How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education,” gives me the first topic; then I will address two others: new teachers and the curriculum.

1. Choice and Charters

Ravitch fails to show how choice harms public schools in part because, for a highly respected scholar, she proves surprisingly inaccurate in defining her terms.  Her definition of charters is a slippery one, and grows increasingly far removed from the truth. She first says they “were considered public schools under private management” (ch. 7–“Choice: The Story of an Idea,” 121).

She then says “private managers” and “private firms” operate many of these schools.  A page later she acknowledges charters can be managed by “a local community group,” which is most common in Colorado.  (Only a minority of Colorado’s 153 charters have a “contract with an outside company or agency” according to an email I received from Kelly Grable, Colorado League of Charter Schools, July 15. Fewer than 20 of our schools contract with for profit companies.)

But in this chapter—and in recent statements and speeches—she harps on the theme that charters are part of a movement to “privatize public education.” By the end of this chapter, she says charters now “are supposed to disseminate the free-market model of competition and choice” (146).

In a recent interview on “Democracy Now” with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez she went further:

(The Obama Administration has) said to the states in the “Race to the Top” … that the requirements to be considered are, first of all, that the states have to be committed to privatizing many, many, many public schools. These are called charter schools. They’re privatized schools…. And I think that with the proliferation of charter schools, the bottom-line issue is the survival of public education, because we’re going to see many, many more privatized schools and no transparency as to who’s running them…. (March 5, 2010)

She is wrong; charters are not privatized schools. Were the parents overseeing the charters I taught in “privatizing public education”? Ravitch’s misleading comments continue, including her claim that “charters often get additional resources from their corporate sponsors, enabling them to offer smaller classes, after-school enrichment activities, and laptop computers for every student.” (I can hear most Colorado charters asking, where ARE those corporate sponsors?)  It’s not my experience, and it contradicts the study from Ball State University, “Charter School Funding: Inequity Persists,” May 2010, which states: “charter schools continue to receive nearly 20 percent less funding per pupil than district schools.”

She concludes this chapter with excessive harshness: “The rhetoric of many charter school advocates has come to sound uncannily similar to the rhetoric of … the most rabid haters of public schooling. They often sound as though they want public schools to fail” (146).  Again, Ms. Ravitch, definitions! Charters ARE public schools.  Is she listening to superintendents like Bennet and Boasberg who would argue that charters make the system stronger? And many charters have been pleased to share their strategies and lessons learned with non-charters in their community.  Haters? Really?

All of us who have worked for and taught in charter schools know they are not perfect. We have seen enough over the past 17 years (I’ve visited 50 in four states) to know that too many—even our own schools!—fall short of our expectations.  But the movement deserves more honest criticism than this.

Finally, it is too easy to say the advocates of a specific reform oversell it as THE SILVER BULLET, and then, lo and behold (what a surprise!), the idea proves far less transformative and magical…. Ravitch makes a habit of this, suggesting the most extreme (and naïve) voices urging a certain reform speak for all, when in fact many of us have been more moderate in our expectations.  One example: “The advocates of choice—whether vouchers or charters—predicted that choice would transform American education….They invoked the clarion call of A Nation at Risk as proof that America’s schools were caught in a downward spiral; only choice, they argued, could reverse ‘the rising tide of mediocrity’ …” (126-127).

“Transform”? “Only choice”? Were we all such “true believers” that we put so much faith in this one strategy?  In four issues of Another View #21-#24 in the summer of 2000, I examined what seemed at the time to be four key components of education reform: standards, choice, governance, and teacher development—a fairly common definition.  Few of us put all our eggs in one basket.

She does this again in looking askance at the push for small high schools as a meaningful option in our cities (as I did in Another View #44). “The movement’s ardent adherents believed that small schools were the cure to the problems of urban education” (205).  Of course by speaking of us as so simple-minded to think this was The Cure, we are bound to be proven wrong. But please first tell me who called it such a silver bullet?  Shame on us if we did. Most of us were more inclined to speak of it as one way to better meet the needs of many high school students. And we’d still argue that.

2. Opening the door to new teachers / alternative licensure

Ravitch again oversimplifies when she examines the recent trend to focus on teacher quality, which has given new life to the movement for alternative licensure.

The teacher was everything: that was the new mantra of economists and bottom-line school reformers. And not only was the teacher key to closing the achievement gap, but the most effective teachers did not need to have any paper credentials or teacher education. … there was no reason to limit entry into teaching; anyone should be able to enter the profession and show whether she or he could raise test scores. (184)

Not exactly.  The Gates Family Foundation, for whom I worked, partially funded the alternative licensure office at the Colorado Department of Education in the early 90’s, and later I evaluated an alternative licensure program for the University of Colorado at Denver. Paper credentials still matter—but they often have to do with what a person studied in college, the courses taken and how well they did, as well as previous work experience. (Just as this mattered at the private school that first hired me; of course the headmaster cared about my “credentials,” but they had nothing to do with education courses and a license.)

Alternative licensure programs and pathways like Teach for America do not open their doors to “anyone.”  This past spring, TFA selected only 4,500 applicants out of 46,359 applicants.  (Name me a School of Education as competitive as that!) Again Ravitch mocks TFA for what no one claims it can do: “it is simply an illusion to see TFA as the answer to the nation’s needs for more and better teachers.” Another straw man; another bow to the unions.  Of course TFA is not The Answer.  But do we believe public education in Colorado is stronger for welcoming another 150 TFA folks this fall to teach in our highest-need schools? Yes!

3. How ironic: The curriculum she admires – is here largely due to choice

My favorite section in the book is on the importance of a strong curriculum (“Lessons Learned,” 230-238).  Ravitch articulates how vital it is to develop a rigorous and well-rounded academic program.

One of the unintended consequences of NCLB was the shrinking of time available to teach anything other than reading and math. Other subjects, including history, science, the arts, geography, even recess, were curtailed in many schools. (107)

So it is not surprising to see her praise the “sequential, knowledge-rich” curriculum of Core Knowledge (236). Here she sounds like the Ravitch who co-authored “What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know?” (1987). But consider the irony, given her criticism of choice. (I tip my hat to Vincent Carroll, who made a similar point in “Don’t write off the ‘Orcs’ just yet,” Denver Post, May 15, 2010.  This would be the wrong week for me to be guilty of plagiarism!)

1. In our Race to the Top application, Table 2 lists the major “recognized school reform models” in Colorado’s charters (p. 170).  Core Knowledge is first—49 charter schools; Expeditionary Learning and Montessori are tied for second with 4 schools each.
2. Colorado has the highest percentage of Core Knowledge schools in the country, and only New York state has more of them.  Of the 770 public and private schools in the United States “using all or part of the Core Knowledge curriculum,” over 90 are in Colorado (see list at the Core Knowledge Foundation website).

Look back at the mid-90’s and recall how few Core schools existed prior to the early success of several Core Knowledge charters: Littleton Academy, Cheyenne Mountain Charter Academy, and Liberty Common School among them. Schools that, in part because of their autonomy and clear academic mission, could stay committed to a well-rounded curriculum rather than succumb to pressures—from the state, the district, or even parents—to narrow their program.  Schools that—to speak to another of Ravitch’s criticisms—will neither be consumed nor compromised by tests.

Isn’t it fair to say that choice and charters in our state stimulated the rapid growth of public schools with the very kind of curriculum—“rich in knowledge, issues, and ideas”—Ravitch advocates?     So much for undermining education in Colorado.

The big question: Can we overcome the tendency of public K-12 education to become a progressively more costly and less productive enterprise? And if so, how?

The implications:

More than a year into the fiscal crisis we know what we can expect if costs continue to rise and revenues remain constrained: hiring freezes, teacher layoffs, school day furloughs, and wage and benefit reductions. Together these actions work to erode the existing system with absolutely no upside for students.

The thesis: We can’t afford inaction. Despite the current budget crunch, education officials need to make the small sacrifice of investing in genuine research and development to find and test needed productivity gains that can be scaled throughout the system.

The plan: Hill and Roza present a basic, five-step action plan, which includes studying how other service sectors have overcome Baumol’s disease and testing how similar practices might apply to (and succeed in) K-12 education.

I agree with the authors’ thesis. We need to look to make more progress in the areas of information technology, deregulation, mission focus, labor innovations and genuine organizational change. Serious leadership is needed to help re-think carefully what we want our public schools to do and more efficient possibilities for how they might work. A growing body of evidence strongly suggests the possibility that Baumol’s disease can be overcome. Why not in K-12 education?

Nevertheless, I remain somewhat skeptical (though tempted, I resist using the word despair) that our local and state policy makers can find the incentive to pursue the research and development approach. Additional creativity also may be needed to add the incentive. Where the incentive comes from at this point, I don’t know.

Hill and Roza are highly qualified and experienced, and hardly anywhere near the ideological fringes. While the R & D approach they propose is truly bold (and downright adventurous and/or scary for some in the K-12 world), it is also very vital. Someone else will have to make a compelling case for how our schools can afford not to do this. In the meantime, I hope against hope that someone in Colorado will seize the moment and take the innovative lead in this approach.

The research is clear about this: it works. Rick DuFour has advocated for professional learning communities for many years now, and he writes a blog about their use.

In his most recent post, he writes about three competing approaches to school reform.

The first approach is made by those who feel that teachers are doing the best they can and schools do not need to make any changes. Instead, changes need to come from outside of the school. Society needs to end poverty, parents need to be more involved, and so on.

The second approach to school reform is that educators know what they need to do but they need to be incentivized to make changes. Therefore, conditions need to be created to motivate teachers – pay for performance, punitive actions for schools that don’t hit performance standards, etc.

The third approach embraces the notion that teachers work hard but they cannot be successful as individuals – they need to work collaboratively to locate successful strategies and to establish positive school cultures.

DuFour summarizes his three positions:

The first approach contends educators have no responsibility for either the current state of public education or the effort to improve it.

The second approach views educators as the cause of the problems in education and sets out to coerce and cajole them into better performance.

The third approach assumes that educators are working hard and doing the best they can in the flawed systems in which they work. However, if that system is to be improved, educators themselves will play the major role in doing so.

The first two approaches are, in my view, the easiest to implement. Blame society – this tends to be a teacher response – or blame the teachers. The third and the hardest to implement has the best chance, in my view, of making the most significant changes in education reform. The general public may view the collaborative approach as too abstract. Teachers view collaboration as infringing on their autonomy and moving teaching from art to science.

Perhaps this is why education reform tends to obsess on the first two approaches. The recent debate over Senate Bill 10-191 is a great example. The third approach will take the concerted efforts of teachers along with the support of society in general. Not an easy task.

A thanks goes to Andy Smarick for raising critical questions and providing thoughtful analysis,  while Public Impact provides some great resources.

Based on some of the recent rhetoric from all levels of education, it’s as if schools, districts, foundations and states have only just started doing school improvement, redesign and replacement work.

You can bet there are lots of “turnaround consultants” madly creating workshops and slide decks with lots of fancy flowcharts and arrows hoping they can land a district or state consulting contract at a couple thousand bucks per day.

It would be great if there were a federal clearinghouse that had descriptions of schools that had dramatically improved with all the research about strategies and effectiveness.

It would also be nice to have some kind of website that collected data/feedback on school consultants and their organizations.  It will be interesting to follow who gets the contracts, what they do and how much they are paid.

I know there is much more learning about what has failed than what has worked.  There are few schools that have been turned around where improvements lasted.  This is particularly true when you look at the waves of attempted high school transformations over the last 20 years from Annenberg, Carnegie, Gates, Comprehensive School Reform Program, California’s SB1274 and the multitude of district efforts.

Funny, it seems an understanding of ed reform history might help us to steer clear of déjà vu all over again.

Manual HS – Principal Search Finalists – Community Meeting 6.9.10 from Manual High School on Vimeo.

We learned today why other countries are eating our lunch when it comes to education. We paid a visit to Ibrahim Büyükkoyuncu hıgh school on the outskirts of Konya, a provincial capital in south-central Turkey. It’s a private Gülen school for boys grades 9-12. Actually, it’s two schools in one (and there is a girl’s equivalent across town) – one focused on sciences, one on languages.

Before I describe the graduation requirements, think about where you or your children attend or attended high school. Three years of math, maybe three of science, right? If you were a math and science geek, you could elect to take four years of each.

OK, get a load of this: Students in the science school must take four years of physics, four years of chemistry, four years of biology and four years of math. In the 14 public science high schools, students must take at least five hours of math per week and three hours each of the three science subjects. At Büyükkoyuncu, though, each of those requirements is doubled.

So not only are these top students, the ones against whom our top students will be competing, taking science all four years of high school, they’re actually taking the equivalent of  12 years. And where our students might be taking five to seven hours per week of math and the same amount of science…well, you get the picture. Oh, and the school day is nine hours long.

I’m not trying to go all Thomas Friedman on you, but isn’t it glaringly obvious why U.S. students fare so badly on international comparisons? And the empirical evidence I gathered today suggests that the gap would be even greater if we compared our top students to, say, Turkey’s.

I wrote on this blog last week that I wasn’t overly impressed with the Gülen school in Izmir, not because it wasn’t a fine school, but because it was the equivalent of an elite private U.S. school, filled with kids from wealthy families. It’s a lot easier to be a top performer when you’re working with kids from wealthy families. Study after study has shown this to be true.

Such is not the case at Büyükkoyuncu. Yes, the kids are high-performing, especially those at the science school. To gain admittance, they must ace a 100-question test, which, according to physics teacher Murat Demirors, is a difficult test of general scholastic aptitude.

“You had better score a 97 or higher if you want to have a chance to get in,” said Demirors, who earned a master’s degree in physics from City University of New York. But the students who get in come from all walks of life.

“Teaching here is a challenge because the students are really good,” Demirors said as we ate a four-course school cafeteria lunch (it was superb and may well have been several cuts above what the students get, but I’ll never know for sure). “As a teacher, you have to be prepared every day. I have to study two hours each night to keep ahead of the students.”

Here’s one of several kickers: All 110 science students get full scholarships. That’s right. It costs them nothing to attend one of the top 10 private high schools in Turkey. Students in the other section of the school pay $4,500 per year, plus $1,700 for students who board at the school (200 of the 600). But 30 percent of the language-focused students are on full scholarships as well.

Alptekin said that the school solicits donations from businessmen in Konya to fund scholarships.

The school’s origins also demonstrate a commitment to education that surpasses ours. A man named Ibrahim Büyükkoyuncu, a Gülen follower, donated the land on which the school sits some 20 years ago. It’s on the outskirts of town and was well outside the city limits back then. But a new university is opening nearby, and the area is crazy with construction.

In any event, Büyükkoyuncu, an elderly and successful businessman,  donated not only the land but enough money to fund the school’s construction. But the money ran out before the school’s founders could buy furniture or educational materials. At that point, Büyükkoyuncu sold his apartment in Konya so he could see the job finished.

“He said his dream was to see students in this school,” according to Hanifi Davarci, the principal. Büyükkoyuncu saw his dream come true. He died, in his early 90s, a year after the school opened 14 years ago.

How do followers of Gülen explain their overriding commitment to education? “Turkey has a very large popuation of young people,” Davarci said. “The only way to a bright future for our country is give all these young people an excellent education.

“We love human beings, that is our main philosophy of education. That is why we are opening schools like this all over the world.”

There are over 1,000 Gülen schools in Turkey alone. Over 4,500 students attend Gülen schools in Konya. It’s a growing movement, and it’s hard to imagine its influence doing anything but grow in the years to come.

I see a changing of priorities for many teachers when it comes to the purpose of teachers unions. More and more teachers would like to see unions move to a proactive role in recognizing the importance of teacher effectiveness and less of a focus on the traditional bread and butter union issues of wages, hours, and working conditions.

I saw this played out in the debate over SB 191. Some of the push for redefining the purpose of teachers unions comes from new-to-the-profession teachers.

I was reminded of this when I testified before the House Committee on Education a few weeks back in support of SB 191. The committee chair was Mike Merrifield, a vociferous opponent of the bill. Merrifield limited the panel of teachers that I testified with to two minutes of testimony each. He made a point of asking each teacher, except for me,  how many years of experience they had teaching.

When the first teacher said, “three years,” Merrifield made a point of overtly smirking at the response. He did the same to the next teacher who responded with, “two years.” Merrifield seemed to be discounting their testimony because of their lack of experience. Thanks to a Republican committee member I was able to answer “fifteen years,” when asked how long I had been teaching.

I think teachers unions can be major players in reforming education. It will take a concerted effort on the part of reform-minded teachers to push their unions to think about the profession as well as the job.