So shines a good deed in a weary world

Note to my school district: There might be something wrong with your “good behavior” program if it can work only when all the kids are materialistic and acquisitive and when no one gets any ideas about sharing the wealth. I’ve known some kids who disliked PBIS enough to simply say “No, thank you” when offered a reward ticket. This kid goes a step further toward addressing the utter amorality of this “good behavior” program.

It’s still far from ideal that kids who don’t get reward tickets should have to depend on the philanthropy of a kid who gets lots of them—what kind of society does this model?—but given the choices this kid faced, good for him. So creepy even to put kids in that situation.
.

Why is it wrong for a kid to cheat on a test?

This post by Justin McBrayer got me thinking about the moral status of children. The author criticizes the common practice of teaching students that opinions are unprovable “beliefs” while facts are provably “true”—thus, in effect, teaching them that there can be no moral truths. As a result, the author contends, students think a statement such as “It is wrong to cheat on a test” is merely an opinion, and cannot be “true.”

I agree with McBrayer at least to this extent: Whether there are “moral facts” is a philosophical question, open to debate, which means the school should not be teaching any view of it as a settled fact. Under the school’s own definition, the assertion that “value claims cannot be true” is itself an unprovable opinion, a “mere” belief. From the piece, though, it sounds like the author believes that the opposite “fact” should be taught as true. Either one looks like indoctrination to me.

The more interesting question, for me, is why we think it’s wrong for a kid to cheat on a test in school. I’m not saying it isn’t wrong, but I do think it matters how we get to that conclusion. It can’t be simply because the school prohibits it, right? Certainly the school can’t be the final arbiter of what is morally right and wrong. If it were, then the worst practices would become morally right just because a school requires them. (Was it morally wrong for a black child to try to attend a whites-only school?) So how should a child reach the conclusion that cheating is wrong?

Little kids, not goblins

Not a perfect analogy, I know, but for what it’s worth: In 2009, our elementary school became a receiving school for families who chose to transfer out of “schools in need of assistance” under No Child Left Behind. About sixty or seventy new students showed up at the school. Not all of them were eligible for free-and-reduced-price lunches (“FRL,” our district’s proxy for low-income status), but enough were that the school’s FRL rate rose significantly. By 2010-11, the FRL rate was more than twice what it had been four years before.

My only point is: This was not a big deal. I can’t speak for other parents, but I had three kids at the school and so was in contact with a lot of other families and kids there. The particulars of the transition were rocky, since the influx of new students overcrowded the school and was announced just days before the school year started. But the presence of the new arrivals at the school just wasn’t a big deal. They were just a bunch of Iowa Citian little kids.

I suppose the orthodox thing to say is that the increase in racial and economic diversity enriched the experience for everyone. Maybe it did, I don’t know. All I know is that, at least in terms of my own kids’ school experience, the presence of the SINA transfers at the school was a big non-event. If we hadn’t been told it was happening (and it hadn’t caused crowding and last-minute logistical problems), I doubt I would even have noticed.

I certainly can’t speak for the families who transferred in. I don’t know whether they found it a welcoming place or whether it improved their kids’ school experience. I wasn’t crazy about the way the school administration reacted to the change. That was the year the school implemented PBIS; it felt as if the administration had decided that the arrival of the transfer kids was exactly the moment when everyone needed a more intense (and more dehumanizing) kind of behavior management. But that was a problem with the administration, not with the kids. The kids were fine.

I know people have a lot of different concerns about redistricting; I share some of them. I don’t like the process the district has used; I was against the particular diversity policy the board adopted; I think there is value to keeping the distance to elementary school short, and to minimizing disruptive changes to kids’ lives. I’m never automatically persuaded by assertions about what “research has shown.” But I don’t need an academic study to convince me that we don’t need to pack the bulk of our low-income families into three or four elementary schools, some of which have FRL rates near eighty percent. I can’t help but think that we can bring those numbers down without doing anything outlandish with the boundaries.

In any event, to the extent that fear of the unknown is playing a role in the discussion, it shouldn’t. It’s easy to imagine stuff that just isn’t real.
.

MLK and the ICCSD

The school district here made a well-intentioned but poorly vetted decision to hold school on Martin Luther King Day this year, on the theory that the holiday would be more meaningful for kids if it were accompanied by a day of school programming on King. The many people who protested the decision at last month’s school board meetings made more good arguments than I can repeat here. It seems a particularly bad idea to single out MLK Day, of all holidays, for different treatment, especially in a way that makes it seem like, well, not a holiday. Nobody asks whether Labor Day or Memorial Day might be more educational if the kids went to school.

Many parents explained that they would prefer their children to spend the day in the company of family or at community- or church-sponsored activities. I don’t blame people for wondering whether the school district’s celebration of the day might be less than ideal. Of all holidays, Martin Luther King Day seems like a particularly bad fit for school.

One problem for the school district is that King stood for something: that there was political, philosophical, and religious content to his message. Fifty years later, there is still great disagreement in America about what racial justice means and entails. The school district can’t (and shouldn’t) tell kids what opinions to hold on politically charged issues. As a result, the district is likely to confine its celebration of King to his role in history fifty years ago, rather than to his relevance today, or to limit itself to high-level generalities (civil rights are important; all people are equal under the law) or to some vague notion of “service.” A public school is also poorly situated to discuss the role of Christianity in King’s life, which would be central to any understanding of him. In other words, any school celebration of King is likely to be impaired by institutional constraints.

It doesn’t help that schools are particularly authoritarian institutions, while King’s mission required him to confront authority at every turn. It would be easier for the district to teach about King if it had a history (on the other 179 school days) of emphasizing the importance of individual conscience rather than reflexive obedience to authority, and of welcoming dissent and criticism rather than trying to quash it. It also doesn’t help that the district has been accused of disciplining minority kids, and referring them to special education, at disproportionate rates. At the same meeting at which the board discussed MLK Day, it discussed its plan to require IDs and background checks of parents who want to enter their kids’ schools. (After a lot of people objected, the board decided to revisit the plan at a future meeting, but the central administration is apparently still pushing for it.) It’s hard not to conclude: School district, teach thyself.

So many people want to see our schools as agents for transforming society that it’s easy to forget that the school system is a creature of society and likely to embody as many of its faults as its virtues. An enormous, bureaucratic, political institution is much more apt to reproduce the status quo than to transform it. Trying to urge humane values on school officials is a worthwhile effort, and I certainly don’t think it’s futile. But the state will probably never be the ideal candidate for teaching kids about political protest, civil disobedience, or the rights of the individual against the state; the conflict of interest is too great, and the likelihood of mixed messages high. That’s another good reason not to make kids spend Martin Luther King Day in school.
.

Our “grassroots” educational system

When I’m lucky, my readers write my posts for me. From a reader email:

From an article in The Gazette about Saturday detention:

“I am in favor of supporting what the principals need for their buildings,” said Ann Feldmann, assistant superintendent for the Iowa City schools. “What we don’t want to do is create a program and force it upon our buildings. It has to be a grassroots sort of program.”

Too bad they don’t feel that way about PBIS.

Good point. My kids’ education has been an uninterrupted story of programs foisted on their school from above. Moreover, “grassroots” can’t just mean high-level administrators deferring to lower-level administrators in a system that’s almost entirely insulated from what the community itself wants. Who are the real grass roots?
.

Was B.F. Skinner a “teacher” of his rats and pigeons?

Is there any difference between (1) using material rewards and punishments (including grades) to elicit behavioral responses from kids; (2) telling kids what to think about value questions, and then assessing them on how well their answers conform to the “correct” ones; and (3) trying to engage kids’ minds, reason with them, and help them think for themselves about the world around them?

Are the behaviorists right that the answer is “no”? That behavior is all, that “thinking” and “the mind” are useless illusions, and that education should focus only on eliciting desired behaviors?

I propose we use the word “teach” to describe only the third category. I wonder how much of what now goes on in our schools would count as “teaching” under that definition.
.

School board finds a backbone when it wants to

Our school district’s proposed diversity policy would require the district to balance out the disparities in the number of low-income families at each school, using a child’s receipt of “free and reduced lunches” as a proxy for low income. Last week, though, the state of Iowa informed the district that the policy’s use of free-and-reduced-lunch data would be illegal. “Please revise the Diversity Plan to remove all reference to the free or reduced eligibility status,” the state’s letter concluded.

A majority of the board, however, has apparently decided to go ahead with the policy anyway.

I’m not in favor of the proposed diversity policy, for the reasons I stated here. But I can’t help but be encouraged by any sign of rebelliousness by the board against state intervention in its policies. You go, school board! Now, when the district claims that state mandates leave it no choice but to squeeze lunch and recess to the bare minimum, and to inflict behaviorist obedience training on all the kids, and to subordinate all educational values to the task of raising standardized test scores, I’ll know what precedent to cite.
.

The hidden curriculum, then and now

In 1971, Benson Snyder published a book called The Hidden Curriculum. In it, Snyder examined the disparity between the ostensible goals of education and the covert rules and agendas that students discern (or not) as they make their way through the system.

Students receive one set of official, formal messages—the rules, the prescriptions, the goals. In effect, these are what one must do to pass, to succeed, to move ahead from university to the larger society. At the same time the students are monitoring another, more informal, covert set of cues that tell them what really matters—what in fact leads to rewards and success. It is a dissonance which affects those of us who have lived with it for some time.

For example, Synder wrote, we give lip service to the idea that we want students to think creatively and take risks, but the way we use exams and grades often actually encourages rote memorization and risk-avoidance. “Education, instead of developing and expressing thought, has come all too often to conceal and prevent thought.” “Disillusionment, alienation, or gamesmanship has become the context in which increasing numbers of students view their education.”

Snyder’s book was thoughtful, original, and very readable. It was the work of a thinker, driven by a spirit of inquiry and reflection.

Fast-forward to 2004. Another book titled The Hidden Curriculum appears. This one is subtitled “Practical Solutions for Understanding Unstated Rules in Social Situations.” The book, by Brenda Smith Myles, Melissa Trautman, and Rhonda Schelvan, is marketed as part of a curricular program called Social Thinking, which is designed to train kids to discern and conform to the social expectations of the people around them. Though it was initially developed for children with autism, the program’s creators have argued for its use with neurotypical children as well. Longtime readers of this blog will remember that my kids’ elementary school was using the Social Thinking program in general education classrooms until some parents (including me) complained.

Like the 1971 book, the 2004 book sets out to discern the “unstated rules” of school and other social settings. But this book’s goal is not to examine those rules critically. Instead, its purpose is to make those rules explicit so that we can better instruct children to conform to them:

Some of us require more instruction in the hidden curriculum than others. Some seem to learn the hidden curriculum or aspects of it almost automatically. Others learn the hidden curriculum only by direct instruction. And that is where this book comes in.

The book then endeavors to break down social “expectations” in an absurd level of detail. Here are just a few of the book’s “Bathroom Rules”:

Make sure that you flush the toilet after you use it.

Pull up your pants before coming out of the stall.

Do not talk about what you did in the bathroom.

For boys: When using the urinal, instead of pulling your pants down, just unzip them, pull out your penis, urinate and put your penis back in your pants and zip them up.

Much of the book’s advice is hard to argue with, though some of it is oddly specific (“Do not explain to a person with a new puppy that the breed she bought has a terribly aggressive disposition”). Some of it, though, reveals a more particular view of how to live:

Find out what music is cool. Opera or classical music is usually not cool when you are a teenager. Some kids do like opera or classical music, but they don’t talk about it.

Wait, wait, wait.

Breaking the law is never a good idea, no matter what your reason is.

Refrain from making negative comments. Try to be as polite as possible.

The book is a detailed instruction manual for social conformity. It may be that a small percentage of kids can actually benefit from some direct instruction about social conventions. (If you think that this kind of instruction is reserved only for kids with genuine social impairments, though, you should check out our elementary school’s Expectations Stations tour). But what’s striking is the book’s uncritical acceptance of any and all social conventions, and the utter absence of any acknowledgement that “expectations” should be scrutinized and sometimes even defied.

Could two books be further apart in spirit than The Hidden Curriculum of 1971 and The Hidden Curriculum of 2004? And is there any doubt that the spirit of education today—despite all the talk about the importance of critical thinking—is far more consistent with the latter than with the former?
.

There’s always time for more obedience training

Our school district says that it can’t spare any “instructional minutes” to find five or ten more minutes to add to the measly fifteen-minute lunch period in elementary school. But there is always more time for the infantilizing PBIS behavior-management assemblies. After the holiday break, our elementary school spent the morning walking the kids through the PBIS “Expectation Stations” yet again—the second time this school year. This included the usual bathroom tour, in which the kids are brought in groups into the bathroom and given a demonstration of how they must flush the toilet and told just how many squirts of soap or paper towels they can use. This time the “playground expectations” included a special emphasis on what the kids are allowed to do with snow (answer: not much). For this, my daughter’s class missed all of its daily hour of math class and part of its language arts class. But what could be more important than training the kids, ad nauseum, to obey school rules?
.

What happened to that discussion about stickers, prizes, and gimmicks?

Following up on yesterday’s post: Here is a comment from earlier this week, by VickiS:

The point here is that, ultimately, you want your child to choose to behave properly because it’s the right thing to do. You help them learn over time that doing the right thing has inherent rewards. Doing the right thing makes you feel good about yourself. You have friends. You earn the respect and trust of others, etc. Doing something simply to earn a privilege (the cell phone contract) or a reward (PBIS) or to avoid punishment (from an authoritarian parent)cheapens the acts and doesn’t seem to promote true moral development.

Is this really so controversial an opinion that it should not even be discussed? Only to the school district.

When our school board chair ran for the board, she told this blog:

I have never been a believer of stickers or prizes used to reward students for good work or behavior. Students should be motivated to feel the intrinsic worth of doing a good job on their schoolwork or doing a good deed. Students are capable of feeling pride in their accomplishments without prizes. Students are naturally curious and should get excited about learning without all the gimmicks. There are times when classes need to celebrate in some way for accomplishments or great deeds that the class achieves. But these celebrations would not be done on a regular basis. Once again, this is not a decision for the school board to make but it certainly can be a discussion with the Superintendent so that he can pass on the discussion with the school principals, who in turn can discuss the issue with the teachers.

Why a district-wide behavior management program isn’t “a decision for the school board” is a mystery, but if those discussions with the Superintendent, principals, and teachers ever occurred, you sure wouldn’t know it. A year and a half later, PBIS continues in full force.

Related post here.
.

Uncontroversies

I hope to write a post about our school district’s proposed diversity policy soon. In the meantime, one quick thought. Over the past few years, our district seems to have been roiled by one controversy after another, as redistricting plans have been proposed, rejected, modified, redrawn, and postponed, and different constituencies have lobbied for conflicting spending priorities, and now as the district considers a proposal to minimize socioeconomic disparities between school populations.

All that’s fine; there’s nothing wrong with conflict and controversy. Yet I can’t help but think: if the district gave all elementary schoolers a thirty-minute lunch period, starting today, absolutely nobody would complain. There would be no angry phone calls. Nobody would start a petition to cut lunch back to fifteen minutes.

If the district suddenly stopped requiring all the schools to implement PBIS—its behavioral reward program that uses prizes to get kids to be quiet and obedient—nobody would complain. There would be no controversy. Many parents would be happier; others would accept the change passively, just as they accepted the institution of PBIS three years ago. Even parents who like the program would be unlikely to make a stink. No petitions, no angry email chains, no packed school board meetings.

If the district cut the amount of standardized testing in half (or more!), no parents would protest. None.

But those ideas are the ones that are ignored, considered unrealistic, outside the mainstream? Please explain!
.

School employees’ speech should be encouraged more, policed less

Our school district is debating the adoption of a “diversity policy” that would require socioeconomic disparities between school populations in the district to be brought within a relatively narrow range. I hope to post about it soon. In the meantime, I wanted to chime in on the latest sub-controversy: supporters of the diversity policy are up in arms over the fact that a principal at one school sent parents an email, on his school email account, conveying his opinion about the proposed policy, and that administrators at another school sent a letter, on district letterhead, urging parents to express their views on the policy to the school board. (I haven’t seen the email and letter in question, but am assuming, for sake of argument, that those characterizations are true.)

One supporter of the diversity policy, Ed Stone, questioned whether such communications were “appropriate, ethical and legal,” and called on the school board to ask the superintendent to

send a letter to all district principals telling them that it is inappropriate to use district email accounts, district letterheads, and district mailing lists to express any political opinions and that this prohibition includes communications designed to “alert” families to topics currently under consideration by the board and/or suggestions that the recipients contact the board to voice their opinions.

I think those concerns are overblown. Sure, school staff should not spend district money to lobby the public about their own views on policy issues. But I don’t think alerting parents about pending issues and asking them to voice their views crosses that line. And, yes, it would be better if people didn’t use district email accounts to lobby the public, either—but an email costs the district nothing, and anyway the recipients aren’t magically deprived of their power to think for themselves.

Shouldn’t I be concerned about administrators using the school’s “confidential address lists” to promote their views? Maybe I should be, but I’m not. How far would that principle extend? On a daily basis, school principals have in-person access to parents in a way that others don’t have, but does that mean we should muzzle them from expressing their opinions about policy issues when they’re talking to parents on school grounds? Policing employees’ speech in that way, even in the name of fairness, can only end up chilling free expression and making people less informed. When I talk with the staff at my kids’ school, I want to hear what they really think; I’m afraid complaints like Stone’s will make that less likely.

I certainly don’t think district staff feel too free to express their opinions about district policies and practices. (My experience with the district’s behavioral reward program, PBIS, convinced me of the exact opposite.) We should be begging these people—and not just the administrators, but the teachers—to express their opinions about what the district is doing. Again, nobody’s forcing anyone to agree.

If some employees felt free to speak while others feared repercussions, that would be a big problem, and that may actually be true in our district. But the solution isn’t to more closely police how school staff are expressing themselves; it’s to invite everyone—administrators, teachers, and everybody else—to talk freely about their opinions.

Stone says the board should

invite all members of the community to get their information about board activities first hand, or from the newspaper, or from some private citizen who is using his or her own resources to convey his or her own opinion (the cornerstone of our democracy).

I don’t see how inviting people to get their information only in certain approved-of ways is the “cornerstone of democracy.” I wish people would resist the impulse to police and regulate the flow of information and opinion, even when they may technically have valid grounds to do so. Even if it’s a bad idea for employees to use a school email account to express themselves, engaging the substance of what they’re arguing is much more valuable than obsessing over whether they violated a district rule.
.

Johnson County candidates: are you out there?

I just emailed all of our state’s legislative candidates again, in hopes of getting a few more responses to my questions about state education policy and its effect on day-to-day life in our public schools. So far, from two-hundred and twenty-seven candidates, I’ve received only ten on-the-record responses. I’m particularly disappointed in the candidates from my own county – several of whom are running unopposed, for crying out loud.

Dave Jacoby, Bobby Kaufmann, Vicki Lensing, Mary Mascher, Dick Schwab, Steve Sherman, and Sally Stutsman: Why won’t you let us know where you stand on these issues?

UPDATE: Dave Jacoby responded this morning.
.

High-stakes testing denialism

I’ve been surprised by some of the responses I’ve gotten from legislative candidates (some for attribution, some not) on the question of local control. “‘Lack of local control’ is exaggerated,” one candidate said. “Local school boards have tons of latitude - yet few exercise any.” Another suggested that I speak to my local school officials about my concerns about short lunch periods and cuts in recess time. When I pointed out that my superintendent has repeatedly attributed those policies to pressure from the state to raise standardized test scores and maximize instructional time, this legislator responded, “Other than the Iowa Core which has been in the works for over 5 years we have not made any changes at the state level regarding reading or math minutes during the school day. The feds have not made any changes in their requirements either. . . . I don’t appreciate the local officials blaming the state for their schedule and I don’t think this kind of behavior is helpful.”

I agree that our district should do what’s right and not whatever the state pressures it to do. But for a legislator to deny that the state is pressuring districts to raise test scores at all costs is willful blindness. Memo to legislators: you didn’t just require that schools use testing to “measure student progress,” you enacted high-stakes testing. You enacted a law that imposed overwhelming incentives on local districts to sacrifice all other educational values to the pursuit of higher standardized test scores.

Under our state laws, if a school doesn’t raise its test scores, its administrators and teachers can be fired, and the school can be closed. But if it cuts recess to the bare minimum and gives the kids a measly ten minutes for lunch, or makes learning such a boring, joyless enterprise that the kids can’t wait to stop doing it forever, or teaches the kids that unquestioning obedience to authority is the highest value, or works to inculcate values (the reason to be well-behaved is to get a reward!) that are morally bankrupt, or turns out kids who are better prepared to be subjects of a totalitarian state than citizens of a participatory democracy – nothing bad will happen to it.

That’s the system our state legislators enacted. There’s lots of blame to go around, but no one is more responsible for it than they are. When defenders of that regime talk about how we need standardized testing to “measure progress,” it’s like an arsonist explaining that, well gosh, all buildings need heat and light. And when they act like high-stakes testing has nothing to do with local decisions about how to allocate time in the school day, they’re insulting our intelligence.

So much endless talk about accountability; so much lecturing the kids about responsibility; yet so much buck-passing by the people who actually make the decisions.
.

Public engagement by people who fear public engagement

Our district has created a new website, Engage Iowa City Schools, to “start an online conversation” about “your thoughts and ideas to enhance our educational system.” If there was ever a website designed by school administrators, this is it. All of the district’s worst tendencies – the infantilization, the hovering micromanagement, the obsession with control, the discomfort with dissent – are built right into the site.

Rather than just allow people to start threads and debate topics of their choice, the district has chosen four topics, and participants have to either suggest an “idea,” or respond to someone else’s “idea,” about one of those four topics. (One of the topics is “What Are the School District’s Biggest Strengths?”) If you respond to an idea, you are prompted with the phrase “I would improve this idea by . . .” The site repeatedly admonishes users that the site “relies on positive interactions,” that they should “be respectful” and say nothing “derogatory,” and that there “is no need to sharply criticize another member’s ideas.” “If you need to ask yourself twice if it’s appropriate, it’s probably not appropriate.”

In fact, even to sign up for the site – a public forum established by a government entity – you must agree not to say anything that is “inappropriate” or “otherwise objectionable.” The company that administers the site makes it clear that it reserves the right to censor any material that it, “in its sole discretion, deems objectionable,” and to deny access to anyone who violates its guidelines. As the district’s community relations director put it, “If someone has an idea, you can like it, but you can’t put an idea down, so hopefully it will have the ability to keep things positive and productive just because of how it’s designed.” (See this post.)

Even the district’s embrace of behavioral conditioning and material rewards is reflected in the site. By creating an account and posting ideas or comments, you earn points that you can then redeem – I’m not making this up – in the “Rewards Store,” for items that range from tickets to a high school play (200 points) to lunch with the superintendent (750 points). I currently have fifty-two points, but when I find a way to post my “idea” that the district should stop using material rewards for behavior management, I’ll get ten more.

Is there any other public institution that works so hard to control and manage the way people talk about it? One of the fundamental principles of a democratic society is that free and vigorous debate will lead to better policymaking. Why is our district so afraid of it?

Here’s my Idea: Let’s see ten or twenty more blogs by parents like this one, or by students like this one, or by concerned citizens like this one. Let them link to each other and disagree with each other and argue with each other and maybe even get angry (oh no!) sometimes. Let them treat each other like adults and not get too caught up in whether everyone is showing sufficient respect. Then see what ideas survive the debate and end up persuading people. I’d submit that idea to our district’s website, if only it would let me.
.

Candidates’ responses (or lack thereof)

Last week, I emailed all 227 candidates for our state legislature a set of seven questions about education policy. I have now set up a separate site to post the responses. So far, the response rate is about three percent – quite a contrast to the sixty percent response rate I got when I sent a similar list of questions to our local school board candidates last year. (There is still a lot of time for candidates to respond, though, and a handful of candidates emailed me that they would respond when they could.)

One legislator declined to answer and wrote that “our candidates have been encouraged not to respond to these types of surveys. There are many reasons for this. Candidates often have comments taken out of context or they are used against them in campaign ads. People are often wary of these types of requests because the issues are complex and often take a great deal of time and thought to answer.”

One of the questions is about local control. Maybe I should have rephrased it: “Who should set educational policy: school board members who are elected to focus exclusively on school issues, or state legislators, whose elections seldom turn on school policy and who won’t publicly answer questions about their positions on school issues?”

In the responses that I did receive, there is certainly a lot that I disagree with. Nonetheless, it’s hard not to appreciate someone who’s willing to answer questions, whatever the answers might be.
.

Questions for legislative candidates, continued

I’ve been struggling to winnow down the number of questions I want to submit to candidates for our state legislature. To maximize the possibility of getting responses, I set myself a limit of five, but in the end I had to allow myself two more. I tried to focus on questions that I thought other groups (for example, teachers’ unions) were unlikely to ask. I cut several questions – for example about whether our schools are inculcating authoritarian values and whether we should give teachers and students more autonomy – because I thought they were unlikely to elicit meaningful responses (which, I realize, might be true of all questions). The final seven aren’t perfect, but time’s a-wastin’, and I hope that the answers to these seven might at least give you a pretty good idea of where someone’s coming from.

I had initially planned on sending them only to candidates whose districts overlap with our school district, but now I’m feeling ambitious and thinking I might send them to all legislative candidates in Iowa. (Hat tip to John Deeth for directing me to the master list of candidate email addresses.) I haven’t yet figured out exactly how I’ll post responses, but I’ll find a way and link to the responses from this post.

Apologies to those who made good suggestions that I ultimately did not include. (Candidates, check them out!) Here’s what I settled on:

1. Opting out of testing. Many parents are concerned that important educational values are being sacrificed because of the use of high-stakes standardized testing to evaluate kids, schools, and educators. Would you support legislation to permit parents to opt their children out of such testing without repercussions?

2. Cuts in lunch and recess. In our district, the time devoted to recess has been reduced, and the elementary school students get only fifteen minutes or less to eat lunch. District officials attribute those changes directly to state pressure to teach more material and maximize “instructional minutes.” (See posts here and here.) What, if anything, should the state do to remedy the situation?

3. Local control. Because of state and federal regulation, individual communities now have relatively little control over the educational policies that govern their schools, and many parents feel that they have little to no say over what goes on in their kids’ schools. Do you think that local school districts should have more control over educational policy? If so, in what specific ways?

4. More school? Should state law require all kids to spend more time in school – either by lengthening the school day, extending the school year, or both? (See this post.)

5. PBIS. The state Department of Education wants to require all school districts to implement Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), a program that uses material rewards to train kids to reflexively obey school rules. (See posts here and here.) Do you support requiring all school districts to use PBIS?

6. Class size. Do you agree with our state Director of Education that we should tolerate larger class sizes in exchange for programs designed to “improve educator effectiveness”?

7. No Child Left Behind. Have No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top done more harm than good, or vice versa? Should Iowa opt out of No Child Left Behind, even if it means forgoing federal funds?

UPDATE: For the candidates’ responses, click here.
.

Educating = infantilizing?

It’s bad enough when our elementary school spends the first days of the school year extensively lecturing the kids about behavioral expectations, including the now-standard restroom tour, in which groups of kids are taken to the bathroom and instructed on how they must flush the toilet and use no more than two squirts of soap and one paper towel. (These practices appear to have continued essentially unchanged from last year, as part of our school’s implementation of PBIS.) It turns out, though, that even our junior high school does this – the seventh-graders are taken out of science class and led in groups into one of the bathrooms, where a teacher explains that they must flush the toilet after using it, and then has one student wash his or her hands while the entire group sings “Happy Birthday,” to demonstrate how long you should spend washing your hands.

When did educating become synonymous with demeaning and infantilizing?
.

Coercion is always the cure, never the problem

When I asked our superintendent what problem was being solved by our district’s intensified focus on behavior and discipline, he said:

Steve Murley: Well, I’ll pull back, I’ll do kind of a 50,000-foot view, which is, and having spent seventeen years in Wisconsin before I came here, it’s not an anomaly in Iowa City. This is something that you’re seeing across the country. PBIS [our district’s behavioral rewards program] was an initiative with the State Department of Public Instruction in Wisconsin and it’s an initiative with the Department of Education here in Iowa so, it – I don’t think it’s a – it’s not a Hoover issue, it’s not an Iowa City issue, I think it’s an issue you see that’s systemic across the country, and I think that the reason you see it out there, from my exposure in Wisconsin and down here in Iowa, is it is in response to issues that have been brought forward at the state level by concerns about whether behavior is an impediment to learning. That is, are incidents in the classroom arising to a level that is making it difficult for teachers to teach and students to learn?

CL: Meaning that the behavior is worse than in previous years?

SM: Mm-hmm.

CL: Is there some limit, though, to what you can do as far as behavior goes?

SM: Oh sure, when you look at, between the time that a child is born and the time that a child turns eighteen, they spend probably twelve per cent of their time in public schools; they spend eight-eight per cent of their time somewhere else. And so, when you look at it from that standpoint, and I again, I’ll go from – I have more experience with the implementation piece in Wisconsin than I do here, because they went through the process of selecting it here when I wasn’t here, so it’s difficult for me to speak to that – but I know in Wisconsin, when they looked at PBIS, one of the things that they looked at are issues that do affect us here in Iowa City, and that I think you see in many urbanized centers, which is a significant change in stability and mobility – that is, there are more kids moving in and out of your district and more kids moving from school to school in the district, and part of the underlying theoretical background of PBIS is to provide more uniformity from classroom to classroom in a school, and from school to school within a district, and from district to district within a state, so that there is more commonality than differentiation as kids move from building to building. Right or wrong, that’s the underlying theoretical basis of that.

Full context here.

The superintendent thus takes his place in the centuries-long line of people complaining about how kids today are so much more ill-behaved than the generation before them. If we were to believe every generation that made that complaint, we would conclude that by now all children must be serial killers.

What has changed recently: the nature of children, or the nature of our educational policies? If the kids aren’t meeting the school’s expectations, is it possible there’s something wrong with the expectations, and not with the kids? Is it possible that No Child Left Behind’s emphasis on raising standardized test scores is forcing our schools to make unrealistic demands on children? Is it possible that kids are acting out because of the way the schools are treating them?

Don’t expect school officials to consider those possibilities. Yeah, sure, under No Child Left Behind, school is increasingly about preparing for and taking standardized tests, and school personnel are more and more stressed out and fearful for their jobs, and the kids’ behavior is scrutinized and managed like never before, and recess has been cut to a minimum (when it’s not withheld entirely as a punishment), and lunch is down to fifteen minutes or less. But if the kids are acting out, it must be because children are different now, or because their “stability and mobility” has changed, or because their families aren’t teaching them the proper respect.

I’d be acting out, too, if I had to sit through school today.
.

Nobody cares how behavior and discipline policies are affecting your child

Over the past three or four years, we have seen big changes in our district’s approach to behavior and discipline in the schools. At our elementary school last year, the incidence of disciplinary measures skyrocketed, even though the principal conceded that the kids were no worse behaved than in previous years. Although the kids get a measly fifteen-minute lunch break, the school has decided to use that time to police and manage the kids’ behavior and “voice levels” much more than in years past – at times even requiring the kids to spend a big chunk of their brief lunch period in total silence. (See posts here, here, here, and here.) The district has also implemented a pervasive behavioral conditioning program (PBIS), under which kids are rewarded, primarily for being quiet and obedient, with tokens, candy, small toys, or tickets into a weekly raffle.

As readers of this blog know, I’m concerned about what these discipline and behavior policies are teaching the kids, and about how they’re affecting the kids’ experience of school. Are the kids learning unquestioning compliance with authority? Are they learning mindless conformity to the “expectations” of those around them? Are they learning not to think for themselves about right and wrong? Are they learning that the reason to be well-behaved is to get material rewards? Are they learning that good behavior is about acquisitiveness and competition with their classmates? Are they internalizing increasingly authoritarian values?  Are they learning that “being good” in school is primarily about being quiet and obedient? Are they experiencing school as the place where their behavior is constantly scrutinized, judged, and micromanaged? Are they learning to scrutinize, judge, and micromanage the behavior of their classmates? Are they learning that there is no sphere of life that the authorities cannot rightfully monitor and manage? Are they learning that it’s okay to punish everyone whenever it’s too hard to sort out the innocent from the guilty? Are they learning that it’s their job to monitor and report on the misbehavior of their friends and classmates? Are they learning that education is a chore that no one would engage in without constant coercion and manipulation? Are they learning that school is a big drag?

Nowadays, school policies are often defended as being “evidence-based,” so I wanted to know whether the district is assessing all of the effects of these policies, or just their effects on test scores and the rate of office referrals. In my view, adopting a policy based entirely on the assessment of one or two effects is like prescribing a drug without having any idea what the side effects are. So in my Q&A with the district administrators, I asked about how these policies would be assessed: