Skyrocketing rate of discipline at Hoover School

It turns out that parents who thought that our school’s use of disciplinary measures was skyrocketing were not imagining things. After a series of email exchanges with the principal and district administrators (starting here), I submitted this formal request for information. Here’s what the district’s response to it showed:

Last academic year, from the start of school until Winter Break, the school sent 15 written disciplinary reports home to parents. This year, during that same period, the number was 196. Yes, that’s a twelve hundred percent increase.

Last year, during that time, there were no in-school suspensions (technically called “in-school restrictions”). This year, there were 17.

Last year, during that time, there were no out-of-school suspensions. This year, there were three. There were no expulsions in either year.

The superintendent’s office included a letter arguing that no one should use these data for comparison purposes because of the many variables that affect how disciplinary incidents are recorded. I don’t find the argument very convincing, and I’m especially put off by its attempt (foreshadowed by the principal’s emails) to scapegoat the previous principal. Both the superintendent’s letter and the principal’s emails were quick to imply that the previous principal was doing something wrong, but they couldn’t quite get their story straight about what she was doing wrong. On the one hand, the superintendent’s office, like one of the principal’s emails, implies that the previous principal did not keep accurate records of disciplinary incidents. The superintendent’s letter says that last year’s numbers seem “unlikely,” and so it is “likely that the parent contacts were made but not recorded.” At the same time, though, the principal’s emails repeatedly emphasize that there is “a difference in how those behaviors which are bad choices are being handled this year” and that there were “behaviors that should have been worked through in the past and never were.” (And again, many parents have commented on the increase.) So was there a big increase, or not?

It’s true that the numbers for the second half of last year are higher (though still far lower than this year’s): 1 out-of-school suspension, 1 in-school suspension, and 50 disciplinary reports sent home to parents. But it also seems reasonable that the numbers would naturally be higher in the second semester, since you would expect that there would be some warnings given early in the year before the reports kicked in. One can only imagine what the numbers for the second half of this year will be. In any event, you can read the superintendent’s letter, below, and see if you agree that the reported numbers shed no light on whether discipline has steeply increased from last year to this year.

Here’s what I think the most plausible hypothesis is: Last year, we had a principal who used a lighter hand with discipline. Maybe when kids were sent to the principal’s office, she had a serious talk with them, and then sent them on their way. Maybe she put a high value on remaining approachable. Maybe she contacted parents only for serious problems, and then often by phone or in person instead of through an impersonal letter. Maybe she would have balked at the idea of accusing a third-grader of sexual harassment. I certainly had my disagreements with the previous principal, but that approach to discipline seems perfectly reasonable for elementary-school-age children.

This year – although the new principal herself acknowledges that misbehavior has not increased, and that the kids are, “overall, very well-behaved” – somebody decided to step up the use of discipline by several orders of magnitude. Why? We can only guess. The principal seems to believe that this heavy-handed law-enforcement approach to behavior is just what kids need. Another theory is that the district is worried about the racial disparities in its discipline numbers, and has decided to address the issue, not by treating minority kids better, but by treating all the kids harshly. In any case, nobody involved seems interested in how the kids are experiencing this disciplinary crackdown, or how their attitude toward school is affected by this constant emphasis on behavior and discipline, or what values they learn by being subjected to this increasingly authoritarian approach, or whether this policy is creating a negative, adversarial environment in the school.

If the district really believes that this kind of steep increase in discipline and punishment is good for the kids, why doesn’t it just say so? Why does it try to evade the question of whether there’s really been an increase? Why doesn’t it directly address people’s objections to the policy, and defend it publicly? Why didn’t it announce the increase in advance, and try to persuade the community that it was a good idea before imposing it? If it’s such a great idea, what are they worried about?

I should point out that the district did not charge me for compiling the information, as it initially said that it would. Its letter makes a point, though, of saying that the district is under no obligation to compile any more numbers for me. To read the full response, click on the “Read More” link.

A request for information about discipline at Hoover School

As I described here, I’m concerned that our local elementary school has ratcheted up its focus on behavior and discipline this year, to the point where it’s creating a negative atmosphere at the school and needlessly stressing out the kids. When I asked the principal just how much the discipline numbers have gone up from last year, she told me that I would need to make a public records request to get that information. In the ensuing series of email exchanges I had with the principal and district administrators, it became obvious that the district was not interested in hearing what parents might have to say about how the disciplinary system is affecting the kids. So I figured it was time to go ahead and get the numerical information – even though, as the assistant superintendent had reminded me, I would have to pay the cost of gathering the data.

So, in place of the relatively simple question I had asked the principal, I drafted a more detailed information request. I asked about four types of discipline: behavior reports sent home to parents, in-school suspensions (technically called “in-school restrictions”), out-of-school suspensions, and expulsions. For each type of discipline, I asked for this year’s numbers up until Winter Break, and last year’s for that same period, as well as last year’s year-end total. I also asked for copies of the paperwork that accompanies a behavior report.

To be continued.

To read the full request, click on the “Read More” link.

A parent asks a question (part six)

After five email exchanges (starting here) with our elementary school’s principal and district administrators, I felt no closer to an answer about how much the school had increased its use of disciplinary measures this year. In her last message, the assistant superintendent offered to arrange a meeting to explain the district’s “curriculum” to me, but showed no interest in hearing what parents had to say about what’s actually happening in the school. I wrote back:

Well, I’m getting the strong impression that you’re not interested in hearing what parents have to say about what is actually happening at Hoover. (Please correct me if I’m misreading you.) The possible meeting that you’re describing is sounding awfully one-sided.

In any event, I think it makes sense to get the numerical information before having any kind of meeting. Could you send me the forms that I would need to get information about the increase in incident reports and suspensions at Hoover from last year to this year?

Thanks,

The reply:

Good afternoon, Mr. Liebig. Thank you for writing.

Please find attached the district’s guidelines for submitting a request for public records. If you would like us to provide an estimated cost associated with your information request, you may request this at the same time you write the specific nature of your request to the custodian of our district records, Superintendent Murley.

If you have any questions about this procedure, please let us know.

Thank you again,

Yes, I outright invited her to correct my impression that the district is not interested in what parents have to say. Invitation declined.

To be continued.
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A parent asks a question (part five)

When I finally asked our school’s principal whether other parents had also complained about the school’s intensified emphasis on discipline, the reply came from the assistant superintendent, who offered to arrange a meeting with “district leaders who support the methods being used” at the school. Of course, that didn’t answer my question, and I wasn’t sure why I’d want to meet with people who have apparently already made up their minds about the issue. So I wrote back:

Thanks. That was my next question – how much of this new policy is being dictated by the district? There’s no point in me complaining to the principal about things that she is being made to do. Still, it’s not clear to me just who the decisionmaker here is – something I have always found hard to pin down in the school system.

I think a meeting with concerned parents could be a good idea. But I worry that it sounds like you have already decided that you “endorse the methods the methods being used at Hoover,” before you’ve even heard what parents have to say. What are you thinking the purpose of that meeting would be?

The assistant superintendent’s reply:

Good afternoon, Mr. Liebig. Thank you for writing. You are correct in your notation that the social-emotional system used at Hoover and all other elementary schools is a district-endorsed curriculum. I was not suggesting that we must have a meeting you with, but offering the idea if you wanted to learn more about the curriculum.

Again, thank you,

Readers, there is a reason why the background of this blog is a brick wall. Is the district completely impervious to input from the public about how its policies are working? Are the central administrators at all curious about how individual principals are actually implementing their policies, or about how kids and families are experiencing them? Apparently this is the district’s idea of engagement with the public: they’re happy to talk to you, but don’t expect them to talk with you.

To be continued.
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One question too many

Having tried three times (reported here, here, and here) to get a sense of how much our school’s use of disciplinary measures has increased this year, I still felt no closer to an answer. The principal’s last response blamed her predecessor for not “working through” behavioral issues, and then explained why the school can’t just ignore misbehavior – which, of course, I never suggested. I wrote back:

Thanks. I’m not sure it explains much to say that there “should have been” more discipline in previous years. Previous principals apparently used a lighter hand, which seems perfectly defensible.

I would think that whether we “should” have this new policy ought to depend on the actual overall effect it ends up having on the children – not just on their behavior, but on their attitude toward school. If it really is creating a negative culture at the school, and making the kids see the adults who run the school as their adversaries, I would think that that would weigh pretty heavily against the policy.

Again, it’s my impression that it is having that negative effect, but I realize I’m only one person. Have other parents raised similar concerns?

The reply came not from the principal but from the assistant superintendent, Ann Feldmann:

Good afternoon, Mr. Liebig. I write to offer to arrange a meeting with our district leaders who endorse the methods being used at Hoover Elementary and all other elementary schools in our district. If you would like to discuss our system further, I know that there is an interest in hearing your concerns and sharing our perspective.

I also ask that you direct your further questions on this topic to Becky Furlong and me, rather than to Ms. Bradford. I will ask Ms. Bradford to acknowledge your emails but to forward them to one of us for a response.

Certainly, if you have other questions pertaining to your child, a correspondence with Ms. Bradford should proceed. However, on this topic (general student discipline methods, practices, inquiries, concerns), I would ask that we have an opportunity to address your thoughts at a systems level.

Thank you for your polite emails (the ones I’ve been fortunate to see). It truly makes a difference when there is civil interaction with each other.

Thank you,

A meeting with “our district leaders who endorse the methods being used”? The writing teacher in me wondered whether there are also district leaders who don’t endorse the policy, and why I couldn’t meet with them, too. But the parent in me wondered: if you were a district administrator, and a parent expressed concern that a school practice was creating a negative, stressful, and distrustful school atmosphere, would you announce in advance that you support the practice, before even meeting with the parent?

Notice that, once again, the question I asked – have other parents complained? – went entirely unanswered.

To be continued.
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A parent asks a question (part three)

When I emailed our school’s principal to ask how much disciplinary measures had increased this year, I found her initial responses (here and here) unrevealing. So I emailed again:

Thanks. I wasn’t really asking whether there was an increase in misbehavior – I wasn’t thinking there’d be any reason for that to change significantly from one year to the next. But if the level of misbehavior is basically the same, I don’t understand why there’d be a lot more discipline going on, which seems to be the case.

I understand that you consider a lot of the discipline to be “processing” rather than punishment, but I don’t think the kids are experiencing it that way. I wouldn’t either, if I were them – if, for example, the principal of the school sent a report home about my behavior, which my parents then had to sign and return. I certainly wouldn’t experience suspension as anything but a punishment.

My concern is that the kids are increasingly seeing the adults at the school (especially the non-classroom-teachers) as their adversaries. I don’t want my kids to fear and distrust the adults at their school. Even if everyone’s a little better behaved, it’s not worth it.

It doesn’t seem like you’re taking into account the way the kids are experiencing the increase in discipline, or the negative atmosphere it’s creating at the school. Do you at least agree that there are downsides to this intensified focus on behavior and discipline?

The principal’s reply:

Mr. Liebig -
By no means is my objective to scare or cause mistrust from the students I talk with. As I said, the behaviors (I believe) are the same- some of these behaviors, however, are behaviors that should have been worked through in the past and never were. That puts me in the position of having to work through the appropriate expectations when such behaviors do occur - so that the students, as a whole, are safe and respected by others. As I mentioned before, some of the students I have talked with, in the office or outside their classroom door, have never interacted with the principal before and, yes, If this is their first interaction, I do think that can cause some stress and fear (even if my tone is calm and non-threatening). This does not mean, however, that I should not address these concerns with these students. When I walk the hallways at Hoover or work in classrooms or with small groups of students, I do not have the feeling Hoover has a negative atmosphere - nor do the teachers and many of the parents I do see volunteering at school.

This response, like the previous one, seems to be responding to something I did not say. No one is suggesting that the school should not address misbehavior when it occurs. It doesn’t follow, though, that a draconian law-enforcement approach to discipline is the answer. There is more than one way to address misbehavior. Some ways are needlessly punitive, and some punishments don’t fit the crime. The school has a choice about how to handle discipline, and I’d like to discuss why it’s making the choice that it’s making, whether that choice has been needlessly extreme, and how that choice is affecting the kids and their experience of school. As a first step, I’d like to find out just how different this year’s approach is from last year’s.

Of course the principal herself doesn’t think the atmosphere is negative, just as other principals in our district didn’t see anything wrong with having kids rush through their lunches while bundled up in parkas and snow pants to preserve precious “instructional minutes.” Unsurprisingly, school administrators tend to overestimate people’s satisfaction with their policies. (The Synesi audit, for example, found that only 8% of our administrators think that the district is unresponsive to the needs of the community, while 44% of parents do.)

To be continued.
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A parent asks a question (part two)

Yesterday, I posted my email to our elementary school’s principal asking how much of an increase there had been, compared to last year, in the number of disciplinary incident reports and suspensions. She replied that I would have to file a formal public records request to get an answer to that question. (She also cc-ed the superintendent and two assistant superintendents, who were then included in all of the correspondence that ensued.) My email in reply:

Well, I’m a little puzzled by that response. I’m just trying to get a sense of whether there’s been an increase in the disciplining of students this year at Hoover. I haven’t asked a lot of questions – maybe three emails this year? – and in the past I’ve always appreciated your willingness to answer them, even if the answer wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I’m not sure why your answer this time is so different. I don’t know any more now than I did before I asked the question.

As I’ve said before, I’m concerned about what Hoover is teaching the kids, and about the atmosphere the school is creating, through the way it handles discipline. Those are certainly issues that people can disagree about. But if it’s true that the school is issuing a lot more incident reports and suspensions than it did in the past, that would be an important thing for people to know as they think about whether Hoover should be handling discipline differently.

It’s true that, like most parents, I’m not active in the PTA, but I hope that doesn’t disqualify me from asking questions. I do read the PTA’s website and haven’t seen those questions answered in any of the material posted there.

I certainly didn’t think I was making a public records request. I’ve asked questions before about things happening at Hoover, and no one ever suggested that I had to make a public records request to get an answer. I don’t really understand how you’re deciding which questions you can just answer, and which ones require a public records request. In any event, without digging up the actual numbers, can you tell me whether it’s your impression that there’s been a significant increase in the number of incident reports and suspensions at Hoover this year?

The principal’s response:

In response, I have been advised to ask for public records paperwork to be completed if you would like specifics. As per the general question - no, I do not believe there has been an increase in behaviors at Hoover. The students, overall, are very well-behaved. There is, however, a difference in how those behaviors which are bad choices are being handled this year. This does affect our student discipline numbers - which are accurately being entered this year.
Thanks for your inquiry and if you would like more specifics I would be happy to send the paperwork request to you.

I found that response a little frustrating. I hadn’t asked whether misbehavior had increased; I asked whether incident reports and suspensions had. The principal’s response seems to imply that there’s been an increase – but doesn’t actually say it. And it seems to imply that it wasn’t her decision to insist on a records request (“I have been advised”) – but doesn’t actually say it. And it seems to imply that the previous principal didn’t keep accurate records -- but doesn’t actually say it. So has there been a significant increase, or not?

To be continued.
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What’s going on at Hoover School? (continued)

As I wrote here, a lot of the parents at our local elementary school have noticed an increase in the school’s use of disciplinary measures this year. In my view, the school was already overemphasizing behavior, to the point where school seemed to be more about being quiet and obedient than about inquiry or critical thought. But this year, the school seems so focused on behavior and discipline that it’s creating a negative, stressful atmosphere in which the kids increasingly see the adults at the school (especially the non-classroom teachers) as their adversaries.

I’ve written elsewhere about the school’s excessive emphasis on unquestioning compliance with school rules, and also about the atmosphere in the lunchroom, where the lunch attendants are constantly yelling at the children to be quiet during the few minutes they get to socialize over a meal. What’s new this year is the added layer of over-the-top discipline.

It’s hard to get a fix on what’s happening, since of course the school can’t talk about specific disciplinary incidents, but I’m certainly hearing things I haven’t heard in past years. I hear, for example, about the school accusing a third-grader (eight, nine years old?) of sexual harassment, requiring him to attend behavior classes, and threatening to expel him – all by letter to his parents. I hear about kids getting written up not for bullying, but for failing to report other kids for bullying. One parent told me that, after one particularly bad interaction her son had with the school, she has told her sons that if they are sent to the principal’s office, they can refuse to answer any questions until their parent arrives. I hear about whole groups of kids being punished because a few are too loud, and the kids being encouraged to police each other’s behavior if they want to avoid punishment themselves. One of the only two parents on the school’s PBIS Committee recently quit the committee because she felt that the school’s approach to behavior management was making the kids anxious and stressed out, and that the committee wasn’t taking those concerns seriously. I hear about more and more incident reports being sent home to parents, and suspensions, both in-school and out-of-school.

So last month I sent this email to the principal:

Hi – I’m just writing to ask about discipline at Hoover. It seems to me that there’s been a marked increase in the emphasis on discipline this year, and I’ve never heard so many stories of kids getting suspended or having incident reports sent home, etc. Is this just my imagination? If not, what is the rationale for the increase?

Is it possible for you to tell me how many incident reports and suspensions Hoover has had this year compared to last year? Of the suspensions, how many have been out-of-school as opposed to in-school? Again, it just sounds like it’s happening a lot more, but I don’t really know how to compare to previous years.

Thanks for any information,

The response, which was cc-ed to the superintendent and two assistant superintendents, was this:

Mr. Liebig -
I do post and share information in a public forum during PTA meetings. You are always welcome to attend these on the second Thursday evening of each month. Unfortunately, we are not meeting in December. The next meeting is scheduled for January 12, 2012. I am referring you to the superintendent’s office, as this is a public records request. If you feel this is the route you would like to take, I can get the administrative procedure document from his office to send to you
Thank you

A public records request? Really? So much for transparency.

To be continued.
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Can’t do

Today’s Press-Citizen has a front-page article reporting on people’s complaints about the short, unpleasant lunch period at our local elementary schools. I am quoted in the article, but, as a Facebook holdout, I cannot post a comment on it. So I’ll do that here.

First, there is one factual inaccuracy that I must correct or I may never live it down. The article states, “Chris Liebig, a parent of three students at Hoover Elementary, said he packs his children’s lunches every day to ensure that they have the most time to eat it as possible.” In fact, my wife usually packs the lunches, not me.

Second, I wish the newspaper had fact-checked the district’s assertion that all the kids now get a full fifteen minutes to eat after going through the lunch line. I won’t say they haven’t made any efforts, but the fact remains that the kids who go through the lunch line still often end up with less than fifteen minutes to eat. (Not to mention that fifteen minutes is inadequate anyway.)

Third, the district asserts that “to allow more time for lunch, the district would have to lengthen the entire school day. “We need a longer school day,” [the assistant superintendent] said. “We would like that not only for a longer lunch but for the academics and also time for all the other things — art, music, P.E. — all the good things that happen at school.”

I don’t like the idea of lengthening the school day, because I don’t agree that, when it comes to school, more is better. Six and a half hours is enough time for kids to learn what they need to learn to make it to age twelve, and I think kids benefit from getting away from school, especially because our schools are becoming increasingly stressful places.

More importantly, it’s just baloney to suggest that the only way to add five minutes to lunch is to lengthen the school day. Six-year-olds could live with fifty-five minutes of math every day instead of an hour, and that’s just one example. (Much of the “guidance” program is another example.) Before the district panics at the effect on test scores, it should take a look at Finland.

Finally, why should anyone believe that the additional time in a longer school day would be devoted to anything other than what the existing time is devoted to? The reason there’s not enough lunch, art, music, etc., right now isn’t because there’s no time for it; it’s because the district has decided that raising standardized test scores is a higher priority. If you add more time to the day but fail to change that way of thinking, the extra time will ultimately go to more test prep. On the other hand, if you do change that way of thinking, there’s no need for the extra time.

We saw with the Longfellow class sizes what the district can do when it sets its mind to something. On the lunch issue, though, the administrators’ attitude is strictly can’t-do.
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Different drummer

I confess that I’m nerdy enough (and old enough) that one of my childhood idols was the once and future California governor, Jerry Brown. His girlfriend was Linda Ronstadt; he flirted with Eastern philosophy; he lived in an unfurnished apartment instead of the governor’s mansion, and dined on the floor; he was the Un-Candidate for President.

As youthful enthusiasms go, that one embarrasses me far less than most. (Ditto for Linda Ronstadt, come to think of it.) I even ended up voting for Brown years later, in the 1992 Connecticut Democratic presidential primary, which, surprisingly, he won. And now he’s governor again, and it turns out he’s the voice of reason on educational “reform”:

Deviating sharply from education reform policies championed by President Obama, California Gov. Jerry Brown is calling for limits on standardized testing and reduced roles for federal and state government in local schools. . . .

Besides taking on testing, Brown called for getting the federal and state government out of the details of schooling.

“What most needs to be avoided is concentrating more and more decision-making at the federal or state level,” Brown said. “We should set broad goals and have a good accountability system, leaving the real work to those closest to the students.... We should not impose excessive or detailed mandates.” . . .

The tests take “too damn long,” Brown told the [L.A. Times]. “Second-graders take five days of tests. That’s longer than I spent on the bar exam. I think that’s absurd. You’ve gotta have some room for creativity.”

He was similarly insistent about limiting the role of Washington.

“The federal government should butt out,” Brown said [last year]. “You have more and more people who aren’t teaching, who are managing the flow of the money and all the various rules and mandates.

“They have this idea that schools are like businesses and if you set the right metrics, can you reward and punish and you get the outcome,” Brown said. “I don't feel things quite work that way.”

Maybe this will earn Brown a new generation of young fans?

(Link c/o Mandy. Photos c/o Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons.)
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How education bureaucrats think of parents

I want to thank Karen W. again for her post summarizing the governor’s education proposals. When I talk up the idea of meaningful local control over education, a lot of people are wary. Many people who are dissatisfied with their local schools think that the state should step in and fix them – until they see what the state wants to do. I hope people who have mixed feelings about local control will read through Karen’s post, or for that matter, will try dipping randomly into any literature generated by our state’s educational bureaucracy.

Karen linked, for example, to the state’s “Parent Information Resource,” so I clicked and took a look around. It wasn’t long before I was reaching for the Dramamine. The site is overflowing with the worst kind of bureaucratic edubabble (click here for a discussion of how to “assist district and building leadership in forming, developing, and facilitating an action team to make decisions and implement family engagement as one strategy to increase student achievement in the district or building”). Blogging about it extensively would be like shooting fish in a barrel, but I had to comment on this link, identifying “messages educators and community members can deliver to families regarding specific actions they can do that can impact their children’s school performance.” The theory is that if enough people deliver these messages “loudly and often” – “verbally and in writing” – then “student achievement may increase.”

Here are some of those “messages”:

Dear Families, this is what you can do at home to help your child do well in school! Teaching your child the names of colors will help him/her do better in school. Talk about colors when you are driving in the car, playing, or looking at pictures—anytime, any place! Our world is full of colors. When you are first teaching your child colors, name the color for him/her, “That car is red.” “The plate is red.” After you have done that several times, and for many days, ask your child to tell you what color the car is. Thanks!

Dear Families, this is what you can do at home to help your child do well in school! Children can learn new words at any time, in any place. Talk with children a lot. For example, when buying milk, “There are many kinds of milk. There is white milk (point to it), chocolate (point), and strawberry (point).”

Describe what you are doing. When cooking say, “I am going to stir flour into the melted butter. Then we will add sugar and chocolate chips.” Children who know and understand lots of words will be great readers!” Thanks!

Dear Families, this is what you can do at home to help your child do well in school! Tell your children often that school and learning is important. “Do your best in school! It is important to learn all that you can so you can get a good job when you grow up.” Thanks!

Dear Families, this is what you can do at home to help your child do well in school! Help your child get to school on time! You don’t want him/her to miss a minute of school!

Dear Families, this is what you can do at home to help your child do well in school! Many teachers have a system they follow for assigning homework. Some use assignment notebooks, folders, or sign-off sheets. Find out what the teachers want. Support the system by making sure you and your child do your part. Thanks!

And so on. The patronizing tone and infantilizing content epitomize the state’s attitude toward parents, and for that matter toward school boards, teachers, and kids. These are the people who should step in and tell us how to run our schools?

That one link could inspire a dozen rants, but I’ll just focus on just one aspect of it here: In the minds of our state educational overlords, what do struggling or disengaged parents need? Messages! Instruction. If those parents would just do as we say, the problem would be solved! It’s hard not to be reminded of the way our schools think about behavior and discipline. Forget about any effort to understand why people are acting as they do, to ask them what their needs are, or to address the root causes of their trouble. Just tell them what to do, “loudly and often.” (PBIS is the embodiment of that approach.) It’s an attitude that quickly segues into “If we make the instructions really clear and they still don’t follow them, then they get what they deserve.” All the worse when it’s aimed at seven- and eight-year-olds.
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Guest Post: World-Class Schools?

Karen W., who regularly comments here, has done us the service of wading through the details of Governor Branstad’s education proposal. Here is her summary and some of her thoughts. (One apology about the post title: I packed a lot more irony into that question mark than perhaps any one character ought to bear.)

The Branstad-Reynolds administration recently released a legislative brief describing their education reform recommendations for the 2012 legislative session. The details are now available in the 156 page Senate Study Bill 3009 available here. The recommendations, in a nutshell, are to further centralize control of Iowa public schools in the Iowa Department of Education (DE). (Note that I am summarizing primarily from the legislative brief—I haven’t had time to wade through SSB 3009 yet).

Section I—Great Teachers and Leaders. Proposes to have the DE control a statewide job listing and application system which would include the results of a required personality and disposition assessment of the applicant (even though 80% of districts voluntarily use another listing service). Proposes to require a 3.0 cumulative college GPA and a passing score on unspecified exams (likely Praxis exams) for admission to teacher preparation programs and to obtain a license without any serious public discussion about what prospective elementary teachers learn in the teacher preparation programs (hint: it isn’t the five components of science-based reading instruction—see the NCTQ report here). Proposes to bring educator licensure under the DE and relegate the current Board of Educational Examiners to handling ethics complaints. Proposes to create uniform systems of educator evaluation, lengthen teacher/administration probationary status, end judicial review of dismissals (lawyers make things complicated), and end seniority-based layoffs (introducing the opportunity for arbitrary decisions). Proposes to expand a School Administration Manager program (DE wants principals to be assigned other duties). Proposes that the DE will decide what professional development (PD) should be done each year and DE approval will be required for all PD programs (one-size-fits-all comes for teachers/districts). Proposes to create a task force on teacher leadership and compensation (which presumably will make the same recommendations already rejected at public meetings around the state).

Section II—High Expectations and Fair Measures. Proposes to provide model curricula to aid districts in implementing the Iowa Core standards (remember that the Iowa Core began as voluntary, model standards). Proposes to “expand the Iowa Core into other areas that have been neglected for too long, such as music and other fine arts, foreign languages, entrepreneurial education, physical education, applied arts, and character education” (note that there is no reason to think that school districts have neglected these areas so watch for recommendations for new assessments aligned to these new standards so teachers of these subjects can be drawn into standardized-test driven evaluation and accountability). Proposes more assessments: kindergarten readiness measures, high school end of course exams, PISA, and college and career readiness measures ($6.3 million). Proposes a value-added measure for accountability that will take student demographics into account. Proposes a statewide literacy program to support high-quality reading programs (from the same people who wrote balanced literacy into the Iowa Core) that includes a controversial third-grade retention component.

Section III—Innovation. Proposes an Innovation Acceleration Fund (amounting to $3.94 per student enrolled in public and accredited non-public schools). Proposes a pathway to competency-based education systems. Proposes expanding online learning opportunities. Proposes removing restrictions on charter schools, but just the ones limiting them to school districts so that universities, community colleges and nonprofit organizations could also apply. Proposes that the director of the DE have authority to waive compliance with rules and statutes to provide flexibility for school districts trying to improve learning (note use of the rule of man approach introduces the likelihood of arbitrary decisions—why not use a rule of law approach to create more certain flexibility by repealing rules and recommending the repeal of statutes that are identified as preventing districts from improving instruction?). Proposes a task force on time and schools even though Iowa students have more compulsory hours of instruction than students in Finland (see here and click on table—maybe we should be looking at more effective use of time rather than just adding more of it). Proposes a statewide parent engagement network. The legislative brief refers to the ISPIN program and IPIRC, which offer tips on how parents should take responsibility for homework completion, and what questions we should ask our children about school. SSB 3009 (p. 127) requires the DE to create a Statewide Parent Advocacy Network with parent representatives identified by the District Boards of Directors.

To what extent do we have “public” schools in Iowa anymore, in the sense that the public (local community to be served by the school district) has any meaningful participation in decision-making about the educational program offered by the district? The Iowa Core mandates what, when, and how students should learn. The Iowa Core favors use of technology, constructivism over instruction, balanced literacy over direct, explicit, systematic, and complete instruction in phonics, and has rejected traditional math and science. Is there any compelling reason these decisions (or any of the ones raised by the Branstad-Reynolds proposal) should be made at the state level rather than the local level?

Any thoughts on the Branstad-Reynolds education reform proposal are welcome. What action would you like to see the legislature take on education this session?
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If only these boys could be more like girls

A friend recently told me about her son, who graduated from our local high school a year or two ago. He had struggled throughout his school experience. He didn’t apply to college, but his mother hopes that he might eventually enroll in a vocational or technical program and learn a trade that he might enjoy. His school experience was so negative, though, that he’s reluctant to sign up for any more of it.

A few days later, another friend told me how concerned she was about her grandson, a high schooler here. He, too, had always struggled with school, even though he was a smart kid. He had had enough behavioral problems that he had been medicated for a large part of his childhood. His family finally decided that the medication was making him miserable – it was “killing him,” his grandmother said – and insisted that he be taken off it. Now he was trying to adjust to high school. He had found a subject that he liked – Chemistry – and she hoped that he might finally get some enjoyment from school. When she talked about the behavior problems he had experienced, we joked that there was a scientific name for it: it’s called “being a boy.”

I think of what it must be like to be a boy at my kids’ school. Of the sixteen classroom teachers at the school, one is male. The remaining fifteen are women, as are the principal, the office staff, the guidance counselor, the nurse, the gym teacher, the music teacher, the art teachers, the lunchroom staff, and the recess attendants. One of the special ed classrooms has a male teacher, and there is a male custodian that the kids seem to like.

I’m certainly not suggesting that you need to be male to teach boys, or that men are better teachers than women. Many of the school’s teachers are great at what they do, and the kids – both boys and girls – respond well to them. But kids are very aware of gender, and the virtual absence of men at the school must have an effect on them. It doesn’t help that the school’s administration has decided to ratchet up its emphasis on behavior and discipline. To any boy who has trouble meeting “expectations,” school must seem like the place where you go to have women lecture and scold you about your behavior and tell you to sit still and be quiet. What does that do to a kid’s self-concept? What does it do to his attitude toward women?

(And what does this atmosphere do to the girls’ conceptions of gender? The qualities most rewarded by the school – docility, obedience, quietness – are the very qualities that have served girls in particular so poorly. The “problem kids” are punished for not learning those qualities, and the “well-behaved” kids are punished by learning them.)

Shouldn’t the school at least reflect on this gender disparity, even if it can’t change it? If the school’s “expectations” are hurting, rather than helping, a significant number of kids, shouldn’t they be reexamined? Is it possible that the absence of male staff has an effect on how the school conceives of what is age-appropriate behavior? Does a group of women reach the same conclusions about what’s “appropriate” behavior as a group of men would?

Boys need role models – not just to show them what good behavior is, but to show them how good behavior can be consistent with masculinity. Who wouldn’t trade a thousand lectures on bullying for one instance of a respected male teacher treating a socially marginal kid as one of the guys, or de-escalating a conflict without losing face, or challenging a racial or homophobic slur? Not every male teacher could do that effectively; but even the best female teacher cannot model compassionate, kind, intelligent masculinity.

Unfortunately, it’s not always easy for a boy to be kind, or book-smart, or respectful of women, or tolerant toward people who are different, and still be accepted by his male peers. Boys need some examples to see how it can be done. Instead, at our school, they get lectures and behavior prizes and law-enforcement-style disciplinary practices. None of it addresses their need. If they have to choose between being good and being boys, I know what they’ll choose – even if it means deciding that they’re not cut out for school.
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District addresses overcrowding issue

In response to parents’ concerns about large class sizes, our school district has decided to dip into its cash reserves to hire ten new teachers, effective (almost) immediately. They will be hired as long-term substitutes; presumably the district will reevaluate the school-by-school numbers next year. Details here and here.

Three of the new teachers (one of whom will be part-time) will teach at Longfellow Elementary, where the parents’ petition originated, and where some classrooms had as many as 34 students. When I find out just how much smaller the affected classes there have become, I’ll report it in a comment to this post.

It would have been nice if the district had addressed the problem before it occurred, instead of waiting until enough parents made a stink about it; switching teachers in the middle of January has to be a little disruptive. But still, it’s great that the district made a real effort to respond to the parents’ concerns. Now when will they address lunch?
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What is going on at Hoover School?

I recently received this email from the parent of another child at our elementary school:

Hi, Chris.

I wonder if you’ve heard anything about kids at Hoover being suspended. I’ve just talked to a third parent who has mentioned it as something they've endured OR something they have been threatened with (via a letter, of course). In all three cases, the interaction with the administration at Hoover was dismal.

OK, here’s what I want to know: If PBIS is about POSITIVE behavior support, why are eight and nine year old kids getting SUSPENDED at Hoover? Isn’t suspension a punitive reaction? I keep hearing that it is a district policy but on what grounds are kids this age being suspended from school, losing that precious instructional time? In the cases I’ve heard of, the kids involved have been rough (hitting on the playground) or disruptive (walking around the classroom) but I cannot FATHOM how out-of-school suspension is the answer. Do you think we’re not hearing about it because those of us who are outraged at this idea have kids who don’t get in that kind of trouble?? I’m tempted to go straight to [Superintendent] Murley and ask about this.

Have you heard anything?

The school definitely seems to have intensified its (already over-the-top) focus on behavior this year, as I’ve described, for example, here and here. I have also heard more reports of disciplinary incidents and notes being sent home to parents. My sense is that the kids have experienced these changes as anything but “positive.” I think this parent’s question is a good one.

Update here.
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Parents think our school district is unresponsive; administrators disagree

As part of its audit of our school district’s operations, the auditing firm surveyed parents, community members, school teachers, staff, and administrators on several issues. It’s interesting to note the disparity between parents and administrators in some of the responses.

For example, half of the administrators agreed with the statement “School lunches are nutritional,” while only 37.5% disagreed. Among parents, though, only 21% agreed, while 54% disagreed.

Almost one-fifth of the parents disagreed with the statement “Overall school climate is positive and productive,” while 0% of the administrators disagreed.

As for “District is responsive to the needs of the community,” 44% of parents disagreed, as compared to only 8% of administrators. Only 30% of parents agreed, compared to 64% of administrators.

The teachers as a group generally fell between the parents and the administrators – but closer to the parents.
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When will Iowa City give its schoolchildren a decent lunch?

The school district has now released the outside audit it recently commissioned of district operations. The report contains all of the comments that people from the community submitted. What I found most striking was the number of comments, mostly negative, about the district’s school lunches. Many commented that the kids aren’t given enough time to eat. Many others complained about the food quality or the lunchroom atmosphere. Here are just a few of the comments:

I wish the kids had a little more time to EAT their lunch. I don’t like that kids get only one recess per day in the upper grades.

Lunches at the elementary level are HORRIBLE all the way around: * Children are not allowed enough time to eat. * The para-educators in charge of lunch run it like it’s a prison. * The “fixed somewhere else” and “warmed-up at the school” lunches are not appealing * The lunches all seem to be some variation of bread and cheese. Get rid of the behavior management system with tickets - or at least only put it in at schools with behavioral issues. It alienates good students and they think it is stupid.

Year-end blog roundup

Batocchio at Vagabond Scholar has posted his annual list of Best Blog Posts of the Year (Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves). Batocchio’s list is a nice way of promoting small blogs (I’ve been getting a lot of new visitors today as a result of my own entry) and can lead you to some interesting finds.
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Our school’s message to students

I’m afraid our elementary school’s recent message to students on its website is more revealing than inspiring:

Students: We are proud of your accomplishments so far this year! Congratulations on completion of the many assessments that have occurred: DIBELS, DRAs, Iowa Assessments, and the District Writing Assessment. Your behavior and academic achievements are to be commended!

I know a lot of kids at this school. There are so many things to be proud of them for. Being well-behaved test-takers is very, very low on that list.

(Via Doris.)
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“Kids as grist for the law enforcement mill”

Charles Pierce at Esquire, reflecting on youth arrest rates, writes that “something is seriously out of whack in the way we’re asking our law enforcement community to interact with our children”:

We have raised, and are now raising, generations of children who are completely ignorant of the rights they have as citizens, and we are doing it through the application of the most coercive powers the state possesses.

Read the whole post.
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Does Jason Glass know better than you do?

The latest “education reform” talking point is that class size doesn’t matter. It’s been empirically proven!

[Economist Roland] Fryer found that class size, per-pupil spending, and the number of teachers with certifications or advanced degrees had nothing to do with student test scores in language and math.

. . .

Schools that focused on teacher development, data-driven instruction, creating a culture focused on student achievement, and setting high academic expectations consistently fared better.

I remember taking an SAT prep course when I was in high school. We all listened as the instructor worked through exercises designed to get our test scores up. I suspect it was all very data-driven. If that’s your vision of education, it’s probably true that class size is largely irrelevant. And who could want more for their children?

One of the people arguing that class size is unimportant is our State Director of Education, Jason Glass. “Given where class sizes currently are in most schools in the United States, I am willing to trade holding the line or even slightly increasing class size in exchange for improving educator effectiveness.” With that stance, Glass couldn’t get elected to any school board in the state of Iowa. Yet he has more control over our kids’ education than any school board has. What’s wrong with this picture?
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A more human scale

Detail of Leviathan, from Giacomo
Rossignolo’s fresco, “The Last Judgment.”

Mark Mitchell writes this about the European economic crisis:

Ultimately, the issue turns on matters of scale. Through this lens, the current crisis (and this is merely part of a broader crisis that extends beyond Europe) appears as a failure to appreciate the fact that optimal human institutions—those that facilitate human flourishing—cannot exceed a certain scale, and when they do, they will inevitably suffer.

Europe’s problems, then, present an opportunity to reconsider ideas that have been ignored for too long. A renewed commitment to the principles of political decentralism, economic localism, and cultural regionalism is a radical prescription for a Europe haunted by the specter of unity, but it would provide the opportunity for Europeans to reconsider the meaning of citizenship, culture, and community on a scale that is meaningful, which is to say, suited to human beings.

Couldn’t he just as easily be talking about America’s approach to education? Anyone who’s had any interaction with their local school system knows how un-local it actually is: there’s always someone higher up to blame for whatever is being done. The federal government has effectively dictated a uniform philosophy of education – one that sees its only goal as raising standardized test scores – and the states have filled in the blanks by dictating what local school systems can and cannot do. Even within a school district, it’s never clear exactly where the buck stops – The principal? The superintendent? The school board? In the face of such a huge, increasingly centralized bureaucracy, the natural response is resignation and learned helplessness.

Isn’t that more human scale a part of what you get for your tuition dollars at a private school? Why deny it to public school students?

The concentration of policymaking power in the hands of federal officials (and to a lesser extent state officials) seems to reflect nothing but a prevailing sense that ordinary people cannot be trusted to make good decisions and need to be told what to do, for their own good. This attitude infects the entire educational system – from the way the federal government treats the states, to the way the states treat the local school boards, administrators, and teachers, and most of all to the way everyone treats the kids. It equates power with superior judgment. Why give people autonomy when you know better than they do?
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Some company in Maine

In the comments to this post, Emily G. mentioned that she was working on an article about parents’ objections to PBIS in her small town in Maine. That article is now available here.

The parents’ objections to the program are very similar to those raised here:

“It felt to me like they were frequently sort of at risk of getting in trouble for being too loud,” [one parent] said. “Of all the things I would like my kid’s school to emphasize, I would like them to emphasize academic effort ... and being a good friend,” not quiet and obedience.

Parents also complained about lunchroom aides “yelling into microphones for students to be quiet,” and the “a huge disconnect between the culture of the school this year and the culture of the schools last year.” The article also contains the usual euphemisms and excuse-making on PBIS’s behalf – that it’s about feedback to create “social confidence,” and that if there’s any problem, it must be with how the program is being implemented, not with PBIS itself.

Check out the article’s sidebar as well – apparently a school board member criticized teachers for presenting only a one-sided picture of PBIS rather than discussing both the program’s strengths and drawbacks. The board member later apologized for using terms like “dog-and-pony show” and “rah-rah session” to describe the teachers’ presentation, but maintained that the school department had highlighted only “the positive side of an issue rather than making a balanced presentation.”

Sound familiar? The main difference seems to be in how actively the school board members are scrutinizing what’s going on their schools.

Maine readers: A more complete statement of my objections to PBIS appears here.
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Some thoughts on “bullying”

Glenn Greenwald has a post up about the use of the word “terrorism.” An excerpt:

This topic is so vital because this meaningless, definition-free word — Terrorism — drives so many of our political debates and policies. Virtually every debate in which I ever participate quickly and prominently includes defenders of government policy invoking the word as some sort of debate-ending, magical elixir: of course President Obama has to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process: they’re Terrorists; of course we have to stay in Afghanistan: we have to stop The Terrorists; President Obama is not only right to kill people (including civilians) using drones, but is justified in boasting and even joking about it, because they’re Terrorists; of course some people should be held in prison without charges: they’re Terrorists, etc. etc. It’s a word that simultaneously means nothing and justifies everything.

I wonder if a similar phenomenon is starting to occur with the word “bullying.” Of course, no one likes a bully, and we’d all like to see less bullying in schools. But when I hear people talk about a “War on Bullying,” and about “crackdowns” and “zero tolerance,” and when I hear the word applied to an increasing range of conduct (see Iowa City’s definition here), I get an uncomfortable sense of deja vu. I can’t help wondering whether the word “bullying” is being used as a rhetorical tool to generate support for – or quell opposition to – the schools’ use of increasingly authoritarian practices to “manage behavior.” Is policing more conduct and punishing more kids the best way to teach kids to treat each other well?

I don’t think we should take the War on Drugs, for example, as our model for how to address a social problem. Bullying, like drug abuse, is a real problem, but it doesn’t automatically follow that a heavy-handed law enforcement approach is the solution.

This is particularly true in the context of bullying, because the more schools use coercion to address bullying, the more they are modeling coercive behavior. The school, after all, is telling the kids how to act, giving them no say in what it demands of them, then policing their behavior and punishing them if they don’t comply – sometimes even casting them out of the community (via suspension or expulsion). Schools can’t avoid doing some of that. But consider how often “bullying” resembles those same actions. Is it possible that some of the bullies are acting out what they see around them? How confident can we be that, if the school intensifies its focus on punitive enforcement, the kids will start to treat each other better instead of worse? And shouldn’t we be concerned about the other values that end up getting taught – even to the “well-behaved” kids – the more the school starts resembling a police state?

Greenwald and others have also written about the double standard that often applies when the words “terrorism” and “torture” are used to refer only to what other people do, and not to what we do. Similarly, it’s hard to come up with a fair definition of “bullying” that wouldn’t apply to some of what schools do to kids in the name of compulsory learning. When one kid coerces and intimidates another, it’s “bullying.” When the school coerces and intimidates the kids, it’s apparently something else – maybe “enhanced education techniques”?

The first step to addressing bullying should be to model humane treatment of other people. Schools, given the power they have over the children who attend them, are in a particularly good position to model humane treatment of those who are weaker and more vulnerable. Wouldn’t that necessarily involve giving them some say over their own treatment? Wouldn’t it involve treating them more gently, and with more understanding, dignity, and compassion, than one could get away with? What else is bullying but a disregard, through superior force, of those principles?
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Questions you’re not supposed to ask

The Answer Sheet reports on a school board member who decided to take his state’s high-stakes standardized tests and make his scores public, because of his growing doubts about the tests’ value:

“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.

He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.

“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.

. . .

“It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”

Yet the unquestionable “need” to raise those test scores now drives everything that happens in our schools. How much drudgery and obedience training have been imposed on kids for the sake of it? The article continues:

My school board member-friend concluded his email with this: “I can’t escape the conclusion that those of us who are expected to follow through on decisions that have been made for us are doing something ethically questionable.”

I can’t escape that conclusion either. Read the whole post. My related thoughts here.
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How many classroom teachers would this pay for?

There is a now just a year-and-a-half left in the federal grant that funds our district’s pervasive behavioral rewards program, PBIS. Apparently it’s unthinkable to stop the program now – regardless of whether it’s harming our kids’ educations – because then we might have to give some money back. But isn’t it time for the school board to start thinking about whether it will continue this program – with district money – once the federal funding runs out?

Of course, I think the program has been an unmitigated disaster, and outright harmful to the kids. But even those who feel less strongly will have to ask: does the district really want to pour resources into a program like PBIS when it could devote those same resources to other goals – such as reducing class sizes?
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Treating kids like pets, continued

I.P. Pavlov in his laboratory

Commenter Hienuri’s mention of Stalinist Russia reminded me of this passage from A People’s Tragedy, Orlando Figes’s history of the Russian Revolution:

In October 1919, according to legend, Lenin paid a secret visit to the laboratory of the great physiologist I.P. Pavlov to find out if his work on the conditional reflexes of the brain might help the Bolsheviks control human behaviour. “I want the masses of Russia to follow a Communistic pattern of thinking and reacting,” Lenin explained. “There was too much individualism in the Russia of the past. Communism does not tolerate individualistic tendencies. They are harmful. They interfere with our plans. We must abolish individualism.” Pavlov was astounded. It seemed that Lenin wanted him to do for humans what he had already done for dogs. “Do you mean that you would like to standardize the population of Russia? Make them all behave in the same way?” he asked. “Exactly,” replied Lenin. “Man can be corrected. Man can be made what we want him to be.”

Whether it happened or not, the story illustrates a general truth: the ultimate aim of the Communist system was the transformation of human nature. It was an aim shared by the other so-called totalitarian regimes of the inter-war period.

Obviously Iowa City is not Soviet Russia. But when you hear someone theorizing about the potential of operant conditioning to make everyone behave in a standardized way, it’s hard not to think of PBIS. And when you look at PBIS’s promotional materials, it’s hard not to recognize some of that transformational utopianism that seems to go hand in hand with a totalitarian mindset. The common link is a view of people as objects to be manipulated, rather than thinking autonomous beings to be engaged.
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What is our school teaching about liberty and justice?

Reproduction of a poster that appears
in the movie “Brazil,” purchasable here

In America, if you commit a crime, the state can jail your friends and neighbors. In America, the state can punish an entire group whenever it is too hard to sort out the innocent from the guilty. In America, you have to monitor your neighbors’ conduct, and you can be punished if you fail to report their crimes. In America, it is your duty to pressure your fellow citizens into obeying the authorities, even if you have no say in what the authorities demand. In America, you must always be willing to sacrifice your freedom in the name of law and order.

Any school that taught those false statements in a civics class would be guilty of gross educational malpractice. I worry, though, that my kids’ school is teaching them every day, in the way it handles discipline. In its zeal to enforce behavioral rules, the school is willing to punish the innocent along with the guilty, and to coerce the kids into serving as informants on one another.

Take the lunchroom. As I described here, our school is engaged in a baffling War on Lunchroom Noise, even though both parents and kids report that the lunchroom is not all that noisy, and even though no one even bothers to close the door to the room during lunch, and even though the gym classes held in the same room are significantly noisier. To achieve this dubious goal of a needlessly quiet lunchroom, the lunchroom attendants make a special point of telling the kids that their whole table (of up to sixteen kids) will be punished – by having to eat in silence – if any of them are too noisy, and so they had all better pay attention to how their table-mates are behaving. If the room gets “too noisy,” the person in charge tells the kids to raise their hands if their “neighbors” are talking.

Similarly, if the school catches a child bullying another child, it doesn’t stop at disciplining the bully. Now, apparently, the school has taken to disciplining kids who happened to see the bullying and did not report it. In such a case, the school sends an incident report to the bystander’s parents, telling them to sign it and return it to the school.

Last year, as I described here, a teacher told a roomful of kids to search each other’s desks and backpacks to find an eraser that had supposedly been stolen from the teacher’s desk.

Why would a school choose to model values and practices that are so contrary to those that our country stands for?

Collective punishment – that is, punishing an entire group for the actions of a few – has a long, ugly history. In the American criminal justice system, its use would be unconstitutional. Its use during armed conflict is a war crime under the Geneva Convention. The International Committee of the Red Cross, in its commentary on the Convention, explains that collective punishment defies “the most elementary principles of humanity,” and that collective punishment and related measures “strike at guilty and innocent alike. They are opposed to all principles based on humanity and justice.”

Requiring people to police each other’s conduct, and to report each other’s offenses to the authorities, also raises serious concerns about individual civil liberties. The general rule in America is that citizens have no legal duty to report crimes that they witness. Though such a duty would certainly have some positive effects, American law has generally rejected it, and for good reasons. Such a duty would greatly expand the power of the state over the individual. By requiring everyone to mind everyone else’s business, such a duty would make every citizen an involuntary agent of the police, and would give the state a pretext to arrest any number of otherwise law-abiding citizens. The practice evokes images of the Salem witch trials and the McCarthy era. Like collective punishment, it is one of the hallmarks of a police state.

It makes sense for the school to encourage kids to report bullying, but the school shouldn’t punish kids for not reporting other kids. Better to cultivate kids’ empathy for the victims of bullying than to depend on their fear of being punished. (When it comes to discipline, it sometimes seems like our school knows of only two ways to engage with children: carrot and stick.) As for the lunchroom, it seems like the school is going out of its way to teach these authoritarian values. The “problem” of lunchroom noise is one invented by the school; the kids in surrounding classrooms aren’t bothered by it, as the school basically acknowledges by leaving the lunchroom door open. And besides, is it really that hard to figure out which kids in the lunchroom are the noisy ones, without enlisting the other kids to become informants?

The school preaches that kids should resist peer pressure. But with these practices, it employs and encourages peer pressure as a tactic to enforce compliance with school rules.

Do the school personnel think that their treatment of the kids has no effect on what the kids will come to see as normal and acceptable? That what they model has no effect on what the kids learn? Or is it that they don’t care what the kids are learning, as long as they’re quiet and following the rules?
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PBIS: Inherently bad, or just badly implemented?

I received this email today from Dan Howard:

Hey Chris....Originally intended this as a comment on the blog, but it was too long:

I’ve been reading your blog for a few months now, and have been meaning to comment on many of your posts, and to thank you for creating a great forum that points out many of the problems with “rewards” based systems like PBIS. Having worked in many schools that utilize this model, and also having been a part of the early development of PBIS back when it was used primarily in organizations that provide services to people with intellectual disabilities, I have some insight into how and why PBIS has developed into something that it was never intended to be in the first place. Your assertion that it circumvents moral reasoning and fails on many levels is completely and sadly accurate. But if people understood what PBIS was really intended to do and be, it would be different.

PBIS was never intended to be a “system.” When it was first put forth back in the late 80’s, it was intended to help instill a set of *values* that would guide the actions, responses, and priorities of the *adults* and other people providing services-i.e., teachers. It was a simple introduction to the notion that it’s important to focus more on what kids are doing right than on what they’re doing wrong. The whole “5 positives to 1 negative” thing. And most importantly, it was designed to break negative behavioral patterns of the adults who were getting more and more frustrated by the behavior of their students, and reacting in an angry manner that virtually always made things worse.

Nobody noticed

LAB’s comment on a recent post seemed worthy of a post of its own:

I have a child with ASD, and this kind of nonsense is the cornerstone of special education in the public schools. Teachers and aides are breathing down the necks of special ed kids in this country, making sure they don’t “disrupt” or do something unusual. Now the schools have expanded on this idea, called it “PBIS,” and are applying these ABA-style reward/punishment behavior modifications to all students. Nobody noticed when special ed kids were being treated this way for years, but now that the icky approach used to keep them in line is being used with all kids, some people are sitting up to take notice. Thank god! So-called “positive behavior supports” are simply threats and punishments dressed up as lessons of respect and harmony. We fought for positive behavior supports for our son (as opposed to outright punishment) in public school...until we actually saw what this entailed. It’s just another way to punish kids for being less than perfect. Worst of all is that, for something like PBIS (or any ABA or reward/punishment system), it matters who is doing the punishing and the rewarding. It’s often random, at the whim or mood of the teacher or lunchroom aide, or something the same “good” kids benefit from and the same “bad” kids suffer at the hands of. You are describing our public school exactly when you say they have become obsessed with monitoring every aspect of the students’ behavior. Pure hell for both my kids. We pulled them out.

I think this comment raises some good questions. I hear about what goes on in the special ed classrooms in our elementary school, and I recognize a lot of the things I’ve been writing about on this site – except taken to an even greater extreme. I haven’t written about it here, though – not because I haven’t noticed it, but because I don’t feel sufficiently informed to make a judgment about what kids in special education need. I can’t be sure what I’d do, or what I’d want, if I were in those parents’ shoes, so it seems presumptuous to express a strong opinion about it. But I’ve wondered whether that means that I’m turning a blind eye to the treatment of kids in special ed – passively deferring to “expertise” in ways that I never would for kids in general education classrooms. How should parents like me think about our schools’ special education practices?
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Talking down to kids

I went to work the other day and there was a sign posted near the faculty offices. On the sign was a photo of smiling faculty members walking single-file down the hall. Under the picture, it said: “I walk quietly down the hallways. I never run, talk on my cell phone, or disturb people who are working in nearby offices.” Above the photo, in big letters, it said, “Hallway Expectations.”

Actually, that never happened. If it did, you can bet that there would be a minor uprising. Not because the “expectations” themselves would offend, but because the sign would be so condescending.

Yet there are signs just like that one throughout my kids’ school. “Restroom Expectations,” one sign says. It then elaborates:

I use a 0 or 1 voice level.

I flush the toilet when I am finished.

I wash my hands with ONE pump of soap and TWO pulls for a paper towel.

I take care of my business quickly!

I report inappropriate activities.

Above each “expectation” there is an instructive photo of one of the school’s students, including one of a second-grade boy flushing the toilet.

Why do people think that kids prefer, or need, to be addressed in such an infantilizing way? What would be wrong with a sign that said simply, “Please flush the toilet,” or “Please keep your voice down in the bathroom?”

I wonder whether those signs serve the needs of the adults who make them more than of the kids who read them. I wonder the same thing about the euphemisms that are so common at the school, such as calling rules “expectations,” and calling obedience “respect.” Maybe the proliferation of rules, the ubiquitous reminders of them, and the obsessive emphasis on behavior make the school staff uncomfortably aware of how much the school is starting to look like an obedience training academy. Much better to pretend that the kids themselves are issuing the rules – with smiles on their faces, no less.
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“The point is that it works!”

I’ve posted before about how our school’s elaborate behavioral rewards program, PBIS, teaches the kids to adopt the most primitive form of moral reasoning: “I should do as I’m told because then I’ll get a material reward.” In fact, by attempting to elicit automatic, unthinking responses to the prospect of a reward, the program arguably tries to short-circuit moral reasoning entirely. When I point that out to people who work in the schools, though, they inevitably respond with some variation of “But it works!” What they mean is that it increases compliance with school rules and reduces office referrals. They have no idea what effects it might be having on the kids’ values, and on their sense of right and wrong, and they don’t care. If it increases compliance and reduces office referrals, how could anyone object?

I couldn’t help but think of those conversations when I recently re-watched parts of A Clockwork Orange (prompted by my mention of it in this post). The story, as you probably already know, is set in a dystopian world in which violent young hoodlums roam the streets raping and murdering. One of them, Alex, is caught and subjected to an elaborate behavioral modification treatment designed to make him physically ill whenever he is tempted to do wrong. In one scene, the Minister of the Interior demonstrates the effectiveness of the treatment by bringing Alex, who has been “cured,” in front of an audience of government officials. A man comes on stage and insults and assaults Alex, but Alex does not fight back. A nearly naked woman appears on stage, but Alex’s arousal makes him fall ill. At the end of the demonstration, the prison chaplain protests:

Prison Chaplain: Choice! The boy has no real choice, has he? Self-interest – the fear of physical pain – drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. Its insincerity was clearly to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice!

Minister of the Interior: Padre, these are subtleties. We are not concerned with motives, with the higher ethics. We are concerned only with cutting down crime! And with relieving the ghastly congestion in our prisons. He will be your true Christian, ready to turn the other cheek, ready to be crucified rather than crucify, sick to the very heart at the thought even of killing a fly. Reclamation! Joy before the angels of God! The point is that it works!

Wouldn’t that Minister of the Interior make a great PBIS Facilitator?
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Overcrowding at Longfellow Elementary

Parents at Longfellow Elementary are concerned about the school’s unusually high class sizes, and have started a petition to bring the issue to the attention of the school board and superintendent. Some Longfellow fifth-and-sixth-grade classrooms, which are smallish rooms to begin with, have thirty-four kids in them. By comparison, my daughter’s fifth-and-sixth-grade class at Hoover, a few blocks down the road, has twenty-five students in it. Here’s the petition. From the Press-Citizen’s coverage:

“I feel as a parent, as someone who’s volunteered in the classroom every year, there’s a level of stress in the building that I haven’t felt,” said [Maeve] Clarke, the mother of a Longfellow second-grader. “There’s an overemphasis, out of necessity, of focusing on being quiet, staying in line, at the expense of focusing on learning.”

A few observations:

First, I support the petition. Thirty-four kids is way too many for one classroom, and it’s hard to understand why one school should have such a disproportionate number of large classes. Unfortunately, smaller class sizes, like those at Hoover, haven’t prevented the additional stress on the kids and the overemphasis on being quiet and staying in line, because of PBIS. Longfellow is just now in its second year of using PBIS.

Second, the superintendent points out that class size is driven in large part by the legislature’s determination of annual “allowable growth” for school district spending. It seems at least worth asking why state law should prevent a school district from choosing, through its elected representatives, to raise and spend more than the state-mandated amount of money on public education.

Third, if the overcrowding gets any worse, Longfellow parents might want to try what Detroit parents tried.
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Do they think that kids think?

I would think that educators of any stripe – and anyone who has any interaction with children – would agree on one thing: Kids are constantly trying to make sense of the world. Though they may not always be learning what adults want them to learn, kids’ minds are working overtime to figure out the people and things around them – from the workings of an iPod to the subtleties of their parents’ and teachers’ facial expressions and tones of voice, or the way a basketball bounces, or the way their friends react to them, or the sorts of things people do and don’t do, believe and don’t believe, value and don’t value. This project of understanding how the world works – processing, synthesizing, considering and reconsidering, weighing cause and effect, testing one’s understanding against reality and adjusting it accordingly, making sense of things – is practically the essence of childhood.

That’s one reason I’m continually puzzled and disappointed by our school’s embrace of PBIS, its elaborate behavioral rewards program. This program, under which the school is continually giving the kids token rewards and prizes for complying with school rules, evinces absolutely no interest in the workings of kids’ minds. To PBIS, a child is simply a collection of behaviors. If offering material rewards evokes the desired behaviors, then mission accomplished!

But what do the kids make of this extensive, openly manipulative intervention in their lives? How do they understand it? Why do they respond the way they do? Do they conclude that “good behavior” means doing whatever leads to profit? Do they devalue “being good” as something you would do only for payment? Do they learn to passively accept the moral choices made for them by others, rather than to make their own? Do they learn that the best way to influence others is by bribing them? Do they internalize the school’s conception of them as easily manipulated, as unworthy of being reasoned with, as incapable of the most basic aspects of good behavior without remedial training and conditional treats? Do they accept as normal the constant scrutiny and micromanagement of their conduct? Do they learn that unquestioning compliance with rules is the highest value? Under PBIS, nobody cares.

Under the program, the kids trade in their rewards for tickets into a weekly prize drawing. A few weeks ago, as I described here, several kids won prizes who had not put any tickets in, including a girl who had registered for the school but never attended it, and another girl who had moved to South Dakota weeks before. The kids noticed that this happened. It completely contradicted what the school had told them about how the drawings would be run. When I asked the principal about it, she explained that someone had decided to give prizes to all the kids who hadn’t yet won any. She concluded, “This has been discussed and we have moved forward.” Notably missing from this forward movement was any effort to address the questions the incident must have raised in the kids’ minds. What must they be thinking about what these adults are up to?

When they announced the prizes that day, one girl, who knew she didn’t have any entries in the drawing, was surprised to hear her own name called. The girl – who was apparently among those kids who had never won the weekly prize for good behavior – went straight to her teacher and told the truth: “But I didn’t put any tickets in.” The teacher (who presumably had no idea what had happened either) sent another girl to accept the prize instead.

What does that child make of that episode? Does anyone care?

So shines a good deed in a weary world.
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The quietest kids of all, continued

A couple of weeks ago I posted about a strange occurrence in the weekly prize drawing that is part of our school’s behavioral rewards program (PBIS). Under the program, the teachers are continually giving kids rewards for “good behavior” (which usually means being passive and quiet), and then the kids turn those rewards in for entries into a weekly prize drawing. (I dislike the program for the many reasons stated here.) But that week, the prize-winners included one girl who had moved away weeks before, and one girl who had registered to attend the school but had never actually attended. I said that it raised questions about whether the school was being honest with the kids about how the prize winners are chosen.

I emailed the principal to ask about it, and she explained how it happened. The school keeps track of which students have won the weekly prizes. That week, when the principal happened to be out, someone decided to give prizes to all the kids who hadn’t won any so far this year. No one realized that the list contained the names of some kids who weren’t actually enrolled.

I consider that a pretty understandable and well-intentioned mistake. Once they’ve told the kids how the drawings work, they shouldn’t rig them; but I have a good deal of sympathy for the person who decided to make sure that nobody went that long without a prize. To me, it shows that not everyone at the school is entirely comfortable with the reality of PBIS. (It’s interesting that it occurred during a week when the principal was away.) Under PBIS, the rewards are supposed to be entirely conditional; otherwise, the incentive for the kids to comply with the school’s desires would be undermined. The natural result is that some kids will get more rewards and prizes than others, and that some may never get a prize. PBIS advertises itself as a “positive” alternative to punishment, but watching everyone else get rewards and prizes, while you’re getting none, seems a lot like punishment to me -- and apparently to someone at the school, too.

Of course, some things in school will inevitably be conditional, and schools can never avoid punishment entirely. But that doesn’t mean we need to invent reasons to treat children like lab rats. School should be about engaging the students’ minds, not about manipulating their behavior. It should develop the kids’ ability to think for themselves, not encourage them to mindlessly chase whatever reward is dangled in front of them. It should focus on intellectual inquiry, not on unquestioning obedience.

Here’s what I really don’t understand. From the way the school sometimes acts, you’d think it was swarming with hordes of juvenile anarchists just barely being restrained from revolution by the school’s behavioral interventions. It is, in fact, a collection of relatively well-behaved kids in a relatively tame Midwestern college town -- not without its problems, but much closer to It’s a Wonderful Life than to A Clockwork Orange. On the whole, the teachers are good and the kids are trying hard. So why not make school about what goes on in the classroom -- where the school’s real strengths are -- instead of slathering everything with this thick layer of manipulative bullshit?
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A thousand words saved

Here’s one reason why I prefer local control over educational policy to federal control (click to enlarge):

Article here. Image from here.
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