Blog update

Almost two months without a post. That’s mostly because I simply haven’t had any time, but I’ve also been ambivalent about how and whether to continue blogging while I’m on the school board.

I’ve always thought of my role here as a combination of spare-time activist and amateur journalist; it was primarily a place for me to advocate, agitate, think out loud, and often just vent. I don’t think I can continue to blog in quite the same vein. I certainly don’t feel any obligation to be reflexively positive about everything in the school system just because I’m on the board, but I do think that a board member has to speak a little differently than a journalist or opinion writer, since board members are in some sense the public face of the local school system, even when they’re speaking only as individuals.

To recognize that difference, if only symbolically, I’ve decided to start a new blog to write about school issues as a board member. In a preemptive attempt to deflate any self-importance that might have attached to it, I’ve chosen the semi-ridiculous name Another Blog About School. You can find it here.

Incidentally, some of you may have noticed that the brick wall that was the background of this blog recently disappeared. I wish I could say that I replaced it with wooden boards to make a clever pun on “school board.” But the truth is that I was playing with the template, accidentally pushed the wrong button, and lost the bricks. For reasons that are not worth explaining but are related to my general lack of tech-savviness, it’s not so easy to bring them back, so I chose the Blogger-supplied graphic that most closely resembled a wall. (I didn’t think of the “board” pun until someone pointed it out to me.) I still like the bricks, though; maybe I can eventually find the time to figure out how to bring them back.

Thanks to all of you who read this blog at any time during its six years of life. I might continue to post here at some point (for non-school-board-related issues?), but for now I’ll primarily be using the new space, to the extent that I have any time to blog at all.
.

About those personal attacks

I’m not sure whether this is worth getting into, but the moderator of a local Facebook site on which school issues are discussed posted this today as a justification for excluding some people from access to the group (which counts a majority of the school board, as well as the district’s chief operating officer, among its members):

It’s a free country, and Eisele can run her site however she wants. But if she’s going to make accusations, she ought to at least link, so people can judge for themselves. By “contacting the employer of a person,” for example, I can only assume she is referring to this. Yes, if you write to the school district to disagree with something I said, I do have the right to respond, even if you are a school district employee.

As for “personal attacks” and “blatant lies,” maybe some links please? Reminder: It’s not a “personal attack” to disagree strongly with positions that people have publicly taken, and it’s not a “blatant lie” to say something that other people disagree with—especially since this is a publicly viewable site and anyone is free to post a response to anything I say here. When I get things wrong here, I’m happy to correct them (example here), but it helps if someone lets me know.

When I say something here, I say it front of everyone, and anyone can respond to it. Eisele makes her accusations on her members-only site, without substantiating them, and shields herself and her readers from any response from the people she’s accusing. Which approach is fairer? Which approach is likely to lead to a more informed discussion?
.

Everybody’s welcome here

You can imagine my bewilderment, as a starry-eyed new Facebook user, to find that I am, for undisclosed reasons, persona non grata at one of the local Facebook sites on which school district issues are discussed. (Insert sad emoji here.) It would be nice if that site, on which our district’s chief operating officer and at least one school board member regularly comment, were accessible to the entire public, but apparently I’m too hot a potato, or something. I think I’ll survive this blow to my social standing, if only because I didn’t have much of a social standing to begin with.

This post is just to reaffirm the policy of this blog: Anyone can read this blog and post comments here. I don’t spike comments that I disagree with, and never have. I moderate the comments because I get a lot of commercial spam—which usually looks something like this—and I do delete the spam. It’s also true that I won’t let you post under someone else’s name, as someone did earlier this week, though you’re welcome to post anonymously or using a screen name. I suppose I’d rule out violent comments or comments that run down people’s kids by name, etc., though I’ve never had cause to. But I don’t spike comments because I disagree with them, as a quick look through prior posts will demonstrate.

It is true, unfortunately, that Blogspot’s comment system is bug-filled and just generally sucks. Sometimes, you may have to post a comment more than once to be sure it goes through, though most of the time it seems to work fine. It sometimes takes me a while to check the email and approve the comments, but if your comment doesn’t eventually appear, please post it again. If it’s a continuing problem, let me know by email (the address is in the sidebar) and I’ll try to find a workaround.

On the Hoover issue in particular, I’d really like to hear the pro-closure arguments (and, yes, respond to them). It’s always seemed so strange how seldom anyone has publicly articulated the arguments for the closure, not just on this blog but anywhere. If they’re sound, they can withstand a public airing, no?
.

Hell freezes over

Never mind that other post. I decided I needed to get myself some twenty-first century skills. Stay tuned for my Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, Snapchat, Vine, Kik, and Yik Yak accounts.

The link probably won’t work. I’m already perplexed by the whole thing. Twitter seems downright elegant by comparison. Hopefully Facebook’s creepy data-harvesting will enable people to find me without my help.
.

Is there an optimal squeakiness?

One thing I’ve enjoyed about the book critic James Wood is the way he sometimes soft-pedals his own criticism and lets the book he’s reviewing indict itself. He’ll write a careful, restrained, and reasonable-sounding critique of a book, but then quote passages that reveal the book to be egregiously awful. You walk away from his review thinking not only that the book is terrible but that it’s very decent of Wood not to criticize it more harshly.

Something similar happens, I think, over at Karen W.’s blog. Karen does the unglamorous work of actually reading the education proposals that come out of the legislature and the state Department of Education (so we don’t have to). She comments in a matter-of-fact way and raises a few good questions, but she mostly lets that parade of horribles speak for itself.

For example, you can read her recent posts on the anti-bullying bill that would authorize schools to monitor kids’ social media accounts (and maybe even demand their passwords?), about the state’s plan to rank Iowa’s schools against one another, and about the state’s rules about what counts as “evidence” against its tourism-driven plan to require later school start dates. Even her more extended critiques are written in the calm voice of reason.

Not all bloggers (ahem) can muster that kind of restraint. Maybe that explains how she got invited to be on the state assessment task force, despite her previously skeptical stance toward the Smarter Balanced Assessments. (Or maybe our twenty-first century education officials didn’t realize she had a blog.) She ended up in a minority of one, but her dissent may find an audience with the legislature—certainly more of an audience than a simple blog post would have found.

Meanwhile, over at Parenting is Political, NorthTOmom describes a meeting she and her husband had with the vice principal of their daughters’ school about the amount of homework that the teachers were assigning. NorthTOmom methodically explained to the vice principal how the school was violating the district’s homework policy. When the vice principal refused to acknowledge the problem, NorthTOmom’s husband snapped, “There’s too much fucking homework!” Whether either approach will get results remains to be seen.

Michael Tilley, another local school blogger, recently wondered aloud what it takes to be effective at “squeaky wheel politics.” Seems like no one has solved that puzzle yet.
.

Blogathon update

I’ve been taking a short breather from the un-blogathon, but Karen W. has been more than making up for it. Check out her posts on “The Proper Role of the School Board,” and “Thinking Beyond Buildings: ‘It’s the Curriculum, Stupid,’” and all of her recent posts. Also check out Jack Hostager’s ongoing thoughts about the technology gap between schools and their students.

More here soon.
.

Did I mention there’s a blogathon?

Or an un-blogathon, as the case may be. Karen W. and Jack Hostager are joining me to ramp up the posting through Election Day. Maybe Scott will even provide some musical accompaniment?
.

I feel a little blogathon coming on

I don’t think I can do a post every day, but with the school board election just three weeks away: so much to blog, so little time!

Out-of-town readers, please bear with me, since I’m likely to focus mostly on local issues until September 10. Consider it a case study in school policy and democracy. Regularly scheduled programming will resume after the election.
.

The internet is too much with me

Thanks, everyone, for the comments you’ve posted over the past few weeks. I’ve been AWOL, both from posting and from commenting, for no reason other than that I need to get away from the internet for a while. I’ll be back as time allows, but I doubt I can match this blog’s January-February pace any time soon..

Is blogging rational?

Blogging once (or more) per day in January was a worthwhile experiment, but I don’t plan to make a habit of it. On the one hand, I finally finished some posts that had been half-written for years. On the other hand, my to-be-written list has, if anything, grown longer. I wanted to loosen up the style a bit, which proved to be harder than I anticipated. I do think quality suffered for the sake of quantity.

One drawback was that it was hard to keep up with my fellow blogathon travelers, Karen W., Nicholas J., NorthTOmom, and Scott, and with the commenters here, all of whom were posting great stuff. A tag-team blogathon would have made much more sense.

Maybe this is February talking, but I think the only rational take-away from immersion in this activity is a kind of hopelessness. You can throw yourself against an immoveable object only so many times. The values and assumptions reflected in most discussions of education today are more and more alien to mine. I don’t have any illusions that my kids will graduate from anything other than a virtually unchanged school system, or worse.

So why bother? I suppose the blogosphere in sum has made a difference, and that even small-circulation blogs do their part in generating and spreading ideas. One vote isn’t going to change the world any more than one blog is, but lots of people vote anyway. Why? It can’t be because they expect to cast the deciding vote; the elections with the highest turnout are those in which one vote is least likely to make a difference. I don’t think it’s out of duty or out of rational self-interest, though you could certainly justify it on both grounds. I think it’s more about whatever gratification comes from self-expression and, to some extent, from venting. The same seems true of blogging, but with an added element of conversation, and of pure compulsion. I’m not sure I could stop if I tried.
.

Best of the blogathon

Now I remember why I don’t usually post every day: because it makes it almost impossible to respond to people’s comments in a timely fashion, and to comment on other people’s blogs. Some great stuff has been flying by from my fellow blogathoners and in the comments here, and I can only struggle to churn out the next day’s post. With luck, I might be able to catch up on commenting; until then, my apologies.

Nicholas J’s blog is on fire. The value of his view from the inside is especially apparent in posts like “Would that diversity were so simple,” “The Enduring Impact of Budget Cuts,” and “Who is Really to Blame for Discipline Problems?” Anyone who thinks schools aren’t teaching to the test should read his description of how writing in taught in his AP history course. But just go to the front page and read all the way through.

Karen W. has apparently hired a staff of research assistants (a possible violation of blogathon protocol!) to help write her posts. When I see headlines about how the legislature will make education reform a priority, I usually reach for the bottle, but Karen goes to work. It is always easier to read this kind of news when it comes from someone who shares some basic skepticism about it. And her take on what “parent engagement” should really mean is not to be missed.

NorthTOmom, never one to blog daily, has nevertheless posted a four-parter on “Teachers: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly (plus the Sexy!).” Part 3(b), on “the Sexy,” is a great meditation on an aspect of education that few people talk about and that makes people nervous when they do. Also, I should point out that her posts inspired me to post about teachers and gender in the public imagination, which in turn led to a significant increase in traffic to this blog because of all the Google searches for “sexy teacher.” (Now I can disappoint that many more people.)

And when it all gets to be too much, check out Scott’s blog for a musical respite, with original commentary to boot. My favorite, so far, has been the Schubert accompanying this post. But the archives are full of good stuff, too. Scott’s involved in a bigger project of exploring the connection between jazz and American philosophy; you can get a taste here and here. And there’s never any shortage of great music: I’ve been hooked, for various periods, on the Duke Ellington here, the Nina Simone here, and the Van Morrison here, among others. (You can also read Scott’s film writing here.)

What will become of the blogathoners when February arrives?
.

Facts on the ground

One of my daughters had a teacher who would put one student’s name in an envelope each day. That student was the “Mystery Person.” At the end of the day, the teacher would open the envelope, and if the Mystery Person had been well behaved, he or she would get some special reward—a sticker or certificate or something. If not, the Mystery Person would get nothing, and the teacher would put the name back without revealing who it was. Sometimes, during the day, if the class was becoming unruly, she would say, ominously, “The Mystery Person is being watched.”

I happened to like a lot of things about that teacher, and I know she was not the only one to employ the Mystery Person technique. But I found the Mystery Person thing more than a little creepy, especially in light of all the other ways in which the school seems to be acclimating kids to life in an authoritarian culture. (I happened to think of it again after reading the news a few days ago.)

I don’t mean this blog to be of only local interest. I’m sure I would have much more comfortable relationships with our local school personnel if I just stuck to blogging about education issues in a more general way. But so many discussions of education—the policy proposals, the statistical analyses, the economic arguments, all the talk about “school reform” and “accountability” and “increasing achievement”—strike me as hopelessly removed from what actually happens between actual human beings in actual schools. It’s as if we’ve all tacitly agreed to avert our eyes from what’s right in front of us. If I didn’t occasionally describe the lunchroom whistles and the Dairy Queen attendance prizes and the silent single-file hallway lines and the Orwellian “Mystery People,” there would be little point in writing the blog.
.

A bloggaissance?

I’m not sure I fully thought through the idea of inviting other people to join the Blogathon; I can barely keep up with their posts, let alone mine. Karen W. is sprinting through the blogathon. Nicholas J. got a two-day head start. NorthTOmom (a/k/a @stepfordTO) has a cliffhanger going. And Scott at Billy and Dad’s Music Emporium, having been plied with crêpes Suzette, is serving up the musical accompaniment (with great commentary, too). Not everyone’s all hung up on the post-every-day thing, but just wait until they see how addictive it is . . .
.

It’s not too late!

There’s still time to sign on to the Blogathon Challenge (now officially capitalized!) of writing at least one blog post every day in January! Karen W. at Education in Iowa is willing to take a shot at it, and Nicholas J. at Straight from the Desk has decided to shoot for at least three posts a week. I’m also in negotiations with my friend’s excellent music blog (“maybe every other day?”). Anyone else? You’ve still got seven hours (Central Time) to write that first post . . .
.

Blogathon ground rules

I’m not sure whether I should be looking forward to the blogathon (that’s my grandiose term for my plan to post every day in January) or dreading it. I’m hoping it will force me to write posts that are less like finished products and more like thinking out loud. Also hoping it might inspire (provoke?) some conversation in the comments (hint, hint). Anyway, I’ve come up with some ground rules: it doesn’t count as a post if it’s (1) short enough to be a tweet, (2) a glorified link, without any real content of my own, or (3) just me whining about the blogathon. I’m not saying I won’t write such posts; only that they don’t count as the daily post.

Guest posts count, though (as long as they don’t link to onlineschools.org!). Any takers?
.

The coming January blogathon

I’m feeling that the blog needs a shot of adrenaline, or at least Ritalin, so I’ve decided to commit to posting every day for the month of January. I suppose one post per day is not exactly a blogathon, but even that may exceed my abilities.

Don’t expect lengthy posts, or even fully-thought-out ones. If nothing else, I should at least demonstrate that quantitative goals always come with qualitative costs.
.

What does this blog want?

Well, the blog is three years old today. A blog’s philosophy tends to come out in little pieces over time, so I thought I might use the occasion to try to put into words what this blog is ultimately about.

I’ve posted about a lot of topics here -- authoritarian education, behavioral rewards, standardized testing, school lunch periods, and many more -- but if you asked me to identify the central fact about K-12 education, I’d say this: Kids don’t get to vote. And when you don’t get to vote, you get screwed.

I’m not saying that six-year-olds should get to vote; kids are disenfranchised as much by their circumstances as by any law. But disenfranchised they are. And the history of enfranchised groups acting “in the best interests” of disenfranchised groups is a particularly sorry one. Think of the history of African-Americans, of women, of mental patients, or of prisoners. If there’s one thing we know, it’s that people cannot be trusted to act in the best interests of disenfranchised groups.

Our country’s treatment of children is a part of that history. I don’t mean that they are as bad off as slaves or prisoners, but they are similar in that they are seen as less than fully human, as more different from “us” than they actually are. At its worst, this means they get used for other people’s ends. I’m always struck by how openly politicians now express an instrumental view of children. They don’t even bother talking about what’s good for kids as individuals; the entire debate is about how we can best use kids as soldiers in the battle for global economic supremacy. (Granted, they may not see this as instrumental: What’s good for business is necessarily good for kids, right?)

Kids are at the mercy not only of those who would exploit them, but of those with the best of intentions. There has never been any shortage of clipboard-carrying “experts” eager to improve other people by coercing them into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise choose to do. The main protection adults have from being treated that way – from being seen that way – is their political enfranchisement. Kids don’t have that protection.

If someone were to give me a token prize in a transparent attempt to manipulate my behavior, I would feel patronized and used. If I were ordered by the government to use my free time to take classes that didn’t interest me, I would experience that as an unjust intrusion on my liberty. If I were made to sit silently in an uncomfortable chair at someone else’s whim, required to ask permission even to use the bathroom, given only ten or fifteen minutes to eat my lunch, and made to feel shameful or defective if I couldn’t comply with these “expectations” – all while being given no say over my treatment – I would quickly either become a revolutionary or settle into a clinical depression.

Yet we not only do those things to children, we think nothing of doing them. The idea that their freedom from coercion and manipulation might have value, like ours does – the idea that it should have any weight at all in our policy decisions – seldom even occurs to people. It’s as if children existed precisely for us to manipulate them. The guiding spirit of our treatment of children seems to be: “Look, there’s a child! Let’s do something to it! For its own good!”

So what does this blog want? I want people to be more conscious of the moral hazard posed by their power over this disenfranchised group. I want them to be less quick to find reasons to treat kids differently than they want to be treated themselves. I want them to be more aware of the possibility that we might be acting out our fears and neuroses on our kids. I want people to take kids’ freedom, autonomy, and dignity as seriously as they take their own. I want people to recognize that the central ideals of our society – democracy, civil liberties, constraints on authority, the importance of the individual – do not suddenly become irrelevant and frivolous at the schoolhouse door.

One reason I want to see more humane, less authoritarian schools is because I want to see a more humane, less authoritarian world. I worry that our schools are reflecting and modeling some of the worst impulses of our society, which seems increasingly ready to curtail individual liberties in the name of “security,” increasingly prone to using human beings as a means to an end, as in our brutal foreign wars, and increasingly draconian in its approach to crime and punishment, as it imprisons a huge chunk of its own population. I worry that our schools are teaching our kids to accept and conform to that world. This blog wants to ask whether that has to be so.
.

But I swear I won’t join Facebook

For some time I’ve wished there was a convenient way to share interesting links here without writing entire posts about them. I’ve decided to give Twitter a try. You can follow me on Twitter (@Chris_Liebig), or just keep an eye on the Twitter box that I’ve added to the sidebar. I’m still working out some of the kinks – bear with me . . ..

First day of school open thread

I haven’t had much time to blog lately; my apologies for being so slow to respond to people’s comments (including some that I still mean to respond to!). I have a lot of posts I’m eager to write, but in the meantime, here a few shorter items of interest.

• School started today – August 16! – in Iowa City. Luckily for the kids, the temperatures were mercifully mild. Our kids’ school, like many older schools, has no air conditioning. At this week’s school board meeting, one parent suggested that the central administrators (who work in an air-conditioned building) should try spending an hour at our school in late August. More coverage of that meeting here.


• That same parent also complained about the district’s chronic inability to keep an accurate count of how many students are in each school. The school board is now considering hiring an outside consultant to determine school capacity and enrollment numbers. Nick Johnson, in response, wonders what we’re paying our central administrators to do.


• The district’s Director of Special Services, Rozy Warder, who was hired for that position only a year ago, unexpectedly resigned last week, just as the school year was about to begin. This is likely to affect any family with a child in special education. I have no idea why she resigned – partly because I’ve seen absolutely no mention of it in the local media.


• My kids’ school, Hoover Elementary, is now a School in Need of Assistance (SINA) under No Child Left Behind. This is no big surprise; under NCLB’s patently unrealistic requirements, every school will eventually be a SINA school. But it will have effects, and I’m not exactly sure what they are. (Can Hoover families now transfer out on demand? Can the families who transferred from SINA schools to Hoover in past years continue to attend Hoover, now that it is also a SINA school?) The article makes it depressingly clear why school is now all about test prep, period.


• Grade-mixing is now a thing of the past at our elementary school. In previous years, the school grouped third-graders with fourth-graders, and fifth-graders with sixth-graders. (They stopped mixing first-graders with second-graders a year or two ago.) Now the grades are all in separate classrooms. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad change. The grade-mixing always struck me as an empty gesture toward progressive educational ideals; in reality I think it mostly served to enable the school to increase class size. (For example, if there were forty third-graders and forty fourth-graders, you’d need four classrooms if the grades were separate, but could get away with three if you combined the grades.) But if it’s a good decision, it seems like one made for a bad reason: to accommodate the increasingly regimented curriculum now demanded under the Common Core standards. An email from the school explained:

  These new materials are aligned with the statewide adoption of Common Core State Standards; these standards are written for single grades. In schools that previously taught students in multiage groups, it requires a shift to single grades so that the standards are taught by grade level. The standards expect students to be engaged with grade level texts therefore teaching the Common Core State Standards are most effectively accomplished in a single-grade setting.

  The principal later explained that single-grade classrooms are necessary to “provide the correct amount of instructional minutes in every subject area” and to “plan a schedule that allows students and teachers to plan these minutes effectively.” Does anyone really believe that there is a “correct amount of instructional minutes,” or that there is a simplistic direct relationship between “instructional minutes” and meaningful learning? That kind of myopic thinking is why our district has cut lunch and recess to such minimal levels. Yet somehow kids elsewhere manage to learn quite well in total disregard of the “correct amount of instructional minutes.”
  
  Strangely, the decision to end grade-mixing was made just two days ago, after the kids had all already received letters from their new teachers. The school thus had to send out an email saying, in effect, “If you received a letter from Teacher A, you will now have Teacher B,” etc. The email concluded, “it is better we make this change now than in 3 weeks.” True enough -- but two weeks ago might have better still! How long has the district known about the new standards?


• Some good links mailed in by readers: Some second thoughts about first-day-of-school traditions, Greg Forster makes a plea to bring “non-scientific sources of wisdom” to bear on educational policy debates, and a post on how every value – even kids’ physical health – is now discussed in terms of its effect on test scores.


• Nicholas J. left a comment here a few weeks ago, which led me to discover his blog. He’s an Iowa high school sophomore who blogs about educational issues; I can’t wait to read more of his posts. More blogs like this, please!

Feel free to comment on any of the above or to chime in with something new. .

Are for-profit online schools gaming Google (and me)?

This is something of a long story, and a pretty trivial one, but it gets curiouser and curiouser, so I think it’s worth telling.

Last year, I got an email from a Justin Birch, asking if he could write a guest post for this blog. He identified himself as a writer for onlineschools.org, and proposed to write on a topic that seemed to fit the blog. I had never had anyone ask to write a guest post before, and I told him I was open to the idea, but that I would have to see the post before I decided whether to accept it.

I should have paid more attention to his connection to onlineschools.org. That site prominently advertises for-profit online schools such as the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University. In 2010, federal investigators revealed that for-profit schools, including Phoenix and Kaplan, had engaged in “deceptive or questionable” practices to recruit students. As the Times reported, “recruiters would lure students — often members of minorities, veterans, the homeless and low-income people — with promises of quick degrees and post-graduation jobs but often leave them poorly prepared and burdened with staggering federal loans.” Some of the schools were accused of misleading applicants, or of encouraging applicants to commit fraud on their federal loan applications. (Video here.) The picture that emerged, in the words of InsideHigherEd, was of “an industry aggressively and universally going after ‘leads’ and ‘starts’ with the institutional objective of securing federal financial aid dollars.” Picture a school run by the characters of Glengarry Glen Ross.

I briefly wondered about Birch’s connection to online schools, but I didn’t discern any ulterior motive in his guest post. I figured he was just wanted to be able to say he had some online publications. His proposed post didn’t promote online schools, though it did mention them in passing, with a link to onlineschools.org. I wasn’t surprised that he threw in a link to his employer, and didn’t give it a second thought. I agreed with the thrust of the post, which is what I most cared about. So I went ahead and posted it.

Weeks went by and the post eventually slipped down off the front page. Meanwhile, though, I began to get emails from other people – “freelance writers” – wanting to write guest posts. Some of them mentioned that all they wanted in exchange was a link to their website. Some of the writers cited websites such as onlineuniversities.com, bestonlinedegree.org, and, again, onlineschools.org. One person wrote, “I am a freelancer and so for your posting of this original article I would be able to pay you.” There was obviously something fishy going on, so I declined these offers, when I responded at all.