Preparing our kids for the workplace

We’ve reached the point at which ad campaigns can depict workers courageously demanding not better health care benefits or decent wages or collective bargaining rights but . . . to be given a few minutes for lunch.

Is this what Iowa City schools are teaching our kids to expect?

C/o digby. Related Times article here.
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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.
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Is our district powerless to lengthen lunch? (Part three)

I wrote in my last post about how, contrary to our superintendent’s argument, the state regulations about instructional time do not prevent our district from doubling (or even tripling!) the measly fifteen minutes it gives elementary schoolers to eat lunch. So who’s responsible for the fifteen-minute lunch – the state, or our district?

I don’t doubt that the district has chosen to shorten lunch to fifteen minutes to maximize instructional time, and that it’s at least partly in response to the number of subjects that the state requires the district to teach. And I know that the district can potentially face penalties, eventually, if it fails to raise standardized test scores. But it is one thing to say that the state requires you not to devote more than fifteen minutes to lunch, and quite another to say that you’ve chosen to minimize lunch to spend the maximum time possible on the teaching of state-required subjects.

From my Q&A with the district’s central administrators:

CL: It’s one thing to say [that cutbacks in recess are] a national issue; it’s another thing to say that we don’t have some leeway to do what we want.

Superintendent Steve Murley: Well, but, again though, when you look at the argument, you look at the discussion in a holistic manner, you’ve got the U.S.D.E. pushing for more instructional minutes, you’ve got Governor Branstad pushing for more instructional minutes, you’ve got the state D.E. that gives us a minimum amount of instructional times that’s required. Now couple that with expectations that they place on us, especially as we move to the Common Core, and they say “these are the things that you will teach,” it’s very difficult to both meet the minimal instructional minutes and get all the Common Core content delivered in the classroom. You can argue –

CL: Isn’t it, though, the role of the district to push back against some of those things if they think they are not good for the children?

SM: Sure, we can push back against that, but at the same time you, you – well, you’re familiar with the law, you’re familiar with how that works – absent a decision that says that you don’t have to do it, you have to do it until such time as you are told not to.

CL: If it’s required, but some of this stuff isn’t required.

SM: Well, Common Core is required.

CL: But the cutbacks in recess – where were those required?

SM: Okay, Common Core is required. Can we agree that the Common Core is required?

CL: Yeah, but does that translate into a certain number of minutes that is required?

SM: Well, it’s translated into a certain number of things that must be taught.

CL: Sure.

SM: Okay. And Iowa Assessments are required.

CL: They’re required to take them.

SM: Okay. Right, we’re required to give them. Students are required to take them, that’s based on the Common Core. Okay? So therefore, if you give – if the end result is that you must do the assessments, and you must teach the curriculum, then, somewhere in there, we are required to find the time to teach that content.

CL: But there’s no set number of minutes that you have to teach that content.

SM: A minimum twenty-seven-and-a-half hours in a five-day period.

CL: But if we’re not exceeding that – if we’re not going below that number, and if recess does count toward that number, how does that translate into cutbacks in recess? I’m still mystified about that.

SM: We don’t have an answer to that. Becky and I weren’t here when that happened. It happened at the elementary level at which Ann didn’t work. We could get that answer for you.

Readers: Are you convinced that our district is helpless to devote even ten more minutes per day to giving the kids a decent lunch break?

Does anyone believe that ten fewer instructional minutes a day would prevent the district from teaching the required subjects? Or that children learn better when time for recess and lunch is minimized? Sure, the state should share the blame here. Yet our district – not the state – has decided that the best way to get our kids to learn the state-required subjects is to cut lunch and recess to the bare minimum. To pretend that it had no choice in the matter is disingenuous, and serves only to disempower our community from thoughtfully considering its options.
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Is our district powerless to lengthen lunch? (Part two)

Yesterday I wrote (again) about our school district’s paltry fifteen-minute elementary school lunch period. When I complained about it, the superintendent repeatedly cited a state regulation requiring 27.5 hours of instructional time per week. Because of that requirement, the superintendent argued, the district cannot possibly devote even ten more minutes to lunch without lengthening the school day.

That sounded funny to me. When I looked at my own kids’ schedules, compliance with that regulation seemed to hinge entirely on whether recess counts as instructional time. If it does, then there’s ample time left over to lengthen lunch. If it doesn’t, then the district is already failing to meet the state’s requirement of 27.5 hours of instructional time per week.

So a few days ago I emailed the state Department of Education and asked how the Department interprets the requirement. The response was that yes, recess counts as instructional time. (See the full exchange below.) The regulation also expressly states that passing time between classes counts as instructional time. Only lunch is expressly excluded from the calculation.

My kids go to school for 31.5 hours each week. The state requires them to get 27.5 hours of instructional time each week. That leaves four whole hours, doesn’t it? If everything but lunch counts as instructional time, couldn’t lunch be as long as forty-eight minutes without violating the state requirement and without lengthening the school day?

Am I missing something? Can someone please explain how the 27.5-hour instructional-time requirement has any bearing whatsoever on whether our district could add ten or fifteen (or even thirty!) minutes to the lunch period?

Part three here. To read my email exchange with the state Department of Education, click on the “Continue Reading” link.

Did the Supreme Court just strike down No Child Left Behind?

One of the less-discussed parts of today’s ruling on Obamacare involved the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicare. Under the Act as written, if a state chose not to participate in the expansion of Medicare, it would forgo not just the money that would fund the expansion, but also the federal funding of its existing Medicare programs. The Court limited that aspect of the Act, prohibiting the federal government from withholding existing funding in retaliation for a state’s refusal to take part in the expansion. According to Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion, “Congress cannot simply ‘conscript state [agencies] into the national bureaucratic army.’” Seven of the nine Justices, some writing separately, agreed that the federal government could not condition Medicare funding in this way.

The federal No Child Left Behind Act also conditions continued receipt of pre-existing federal funding on compliance with new “reforms.” There are several distinctions that could justify treating NCLB differently than the Medicare expansion – most importantly, federal education funding makes up a smaller portion of the state’s budget than federal Medicare funding does, and so the threat of withholding it might not rise to the level of being “so coercive as to pass the point at which ‘pressure turns into compulsion.’” But it certainly opens the door to an argument that NCLB is an unconstitutional use of Congress’s spending power.

On the one hand, the threat of losing federal education funding was compelling enough that none of the fifty states chose not to adopt the federal program. To get the federal money, states have undoubtedly pursued policies that they wouldn’t otherwise have chosen to pursue – that’s the whole point of making funding conditional. Recently, for example, our state’s Education Director admitted that there was little evidence to support some of the proposals he was making, but that they were nonetheless necessary to get the federal NCLB waiver and the accompanying “relief for schools.”

On the other hand, would it really be so hard for a state to pass up federal education funding and the (often expensive) mandates that go with it? As Roberts writes, “In the typical case we look to the States to defend their prerogatives by adopting ‘the simple expedient of not yielding’ to federal blandishments when they do not want to embrace the federal policies as their own. . . . The States are separate and independent sovereigns. Sometimes they have to act like it.” When it comes to No Child Left Behind, I wish they would act like it.
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Is our district powerless to lengthen lunch? (Part one)

As I’ve posted about before, the lunch break in our district’s elementary schools is a measly fifteen minutes long – and sometimes even shorter, if you’re one of the last kids through the line. When I’ve asked our school superintendent about the issue, he has repeatedly deflected responsibility (that is, passed the buck) to the state. In particular, he has repeatedly cited the state’s requirement that there be 27.5 hours of weekly instructional time.

In my recent Q&A with the district’s central administrators, for example, the superintendent said:

there’s no room in our schedule to increase lunch, because the state requires that we have twenty-seven-and-a-half hours of instruction in a rolling five-period – five-day period. So for us to get more time for lunch, we would have to take time away from other unstructured periods of the day, or lengthen the school day.

. . .

we’ve looked at it, and what I can tell you without having it in front of me is that there wasn’t – that we didn’t have time in the schedule to build that in, when you look at the early releases that we have on Thursday for professional development, there isn’t, there isn’t that time available that would allow us to increase lunch ten or fifteen minutes a day, which is what most parents ask, and when I then ask parents, “well, what do you think about lengthening the school day?” that got a universally negative reaction from parents about lengthening the school day in order to provide that time for lunch. And that’s, that’s a tough one, because if they’re not comfortable with lengthening the school day, and there isn’t enough time in the day to carve it out for lunch, we can’t solve the problem.

Full context here.

In an email exchange last year, the superintendent cited that same 27.5-hour requirement. But when I looked at my kids’ schedules, I couldn’t understand how that requirement could affect the length of lunch. If you exclude lunch and recess, my kids weren’t getting anywhere near 27.5 hours of instruction every week. If recess counts as instructional time, though, we were more than satisfying the requirement, with ample time left over to increase the lunch period. When I pressed the superintendent on the issue, I found it hard to get a straight answer about the instructional time requirement. (See below.)

Granted, the superintendent has also talked about the need to maximize instructional time to teach everything that is required by the state. But one issue at a time: does the state’s 27.5-hour instructional-time requirement have any bearing on whether our district can lengthen lunch?

Continued in tomorrow’s post. To read my email exchange with the district about the issue, click on the “Continue Reading” link.

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:

Q&A with the Superintendents

Back in April, I had an email exchange with our school superintendent to ask why our elementary school had decided to spend the students’ very short lunch period haranguing them to be quiet – for a while insisting that they remain completely silent for the last five minutes of lunch, at times threatening them with assigned seats if they weren’t quieter, at times blowing a loud whistle to quiet them down – and generally policing their behavior to a degree that far exceeded previous years and seemed entirely unmerited by the what the kids were actually doing. (See posts here, here, here, and here.)

The superintendent would not answer the question via email, and insisted that we meet in person instead. (See posts here and here.) I argued that it was important that the administration answer questions publicly, not just in one-on-one meetings. Finally, we agreed to meet in person but to tape-record the meeting. So on May 14, I met with Superintendent Steve Murley, as well as Assistant Superintendents Becky Furlong and Ann Feldmann, for a kind of Q&A session on issues about discipline, behavior management, and lunch.

I will post separately about some of superintendents’ specific responses to my questions. But I want to post the entire transcript first, so the full context will available to anyone reading the later posts. The only editing I have done is to redact a brief section of the discussion in which the superintendents discussed particular district employees in a way that I am not comfortable posting online.

Of course as I now read over the transcript there are questions, and entire lines of questioning, that I wish I had thought (or remembered) to pursue, but time was short and my brain, as usual, somewhat scattered. Maybe there will someday be a sequel. Although I was unhappy with many of the answers I received, I do want to give the superintendents credit for agreeing to answer questions on the record.

My specific commentary on the exchange begins here. To read the entire transcript, click on the “Continue Reading” link below.

Compulsory education is great for other people

There seem to be more and more proposals to lengthen the school day (or year). Someday I will list all of my objections to that idea. (Briefly: I think the benefits are speculative to the point of illusory and are entirely outweighed by the costs. More is not always better.) For now, I’d like to point out just one bothersome aspect of the discussion – one that is true of the discussion of many so-called school “reform” proposals.

Suppose we could confidently identify some quantifiable benefit from subjecting kids to hundreds more hours of school each year. Suppose we knew, say, that requiring full-day school attendance would eventually increase the math abilities of the average adult by five percent. Should we do it? Suppose it would increase ability by only three percent, and suppose that we’d need to send the kids to school year-round, six days a week, from 7:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. to achieve that gain. Would it be worth it? Can the burden on kids ever be too great, or the potential gain too minimal, to justify the compulsion?

If so, you wouldn’t know it from today’s educational debates. The discussions focus exclusively on whether any given proposal would “increase achievement.” Whether that alleged gain is big enough to justify the burden on children is simply not a concern. Who cares about burdens on children?

Adults hold the state to a pretty high standard: we expect that the government won’t impose on our freedom without a good reason, and the bigger the imposition, the more compelling the reason should be. With kids, though, any justification at all will do. If it raises test scores, we must do it! Children’s freedoms count for nothing at all. It’s as if the scale has only one side, and is thus tipped by any “achievement gain” whatsoever. How easy it is to require sacrifices from people who have no say in the matter.

Of course, we could also “increase achievement” by requiring adults to undergo continuing education throughout their lives. If anyone ever proposes that, something tells me there will suddenly be two sides to the scale.
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Problem solved

A few weeks ago, I posted about a nine-year-old in Scotland who started a blog, called NeverSeconds, on which she posted daily photos of her school lunches, prompting worldwide criticism of the quality and content of the school’s food. I joked that if she had done that in America, one of the first things the school would do is ban cameras from the lunchroom. Turns out Scottish school officials aren’t that different from their American counterparts.

UPDATE: Following “a storm of protest on the internet,” the council has reversed itself, and will allow Martha Payne to continue taking pictures of her school lunches.

If only they could ban the internet itself!
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Mad scientists, cont’d

I may have to start a new post label for Clockwork Orange analogies. Here’s the description of a $498,055 grant funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation through Clemson University:

Purpose: to work with members of the Measuring Effective Teachers (MET) team to measure engagement physiologically with Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) bracelets which will determine the feasibility and utility of using such devices regularly in schools with students and teachers

Forget about reducing class size. This is where our Corporate Reforming Overlords think the future lies.

(C/o Diane Ravitch’s Blog. Earlier Clockwork Orange references here and here.)
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What “supportive” could mean

A reader sends this link about a school that tried approaching discipline more in terms of helping students with problems than manipulating behavior through rewards and punishments.

A student blows up at a teacher, drops the F-bomb. The usual approach at Lincoln – and, safe to say, at most high schools in this country – is automatic suspension. Instead, [principal Jim] Sporleder sits the kid down and says quietly:

“Wow. Are you OK? This doesn’t sound like you. What’s going on?”

. . .

“We began focusing our concern on what we know that’s going on that might be causing behavior in a kid,” versus what type of punishment to mete out.

When a kid erupts in class, teachers intervene quickly. “A kid that I have a really great relationship with might blow up,” says [teacher Erik] Gordon. “So, I step out of the classroom with that kid and ask: ‘What’s going on? Because that was really intense.’ I know that something is bumming this kid out, because normally, we really enjoy each other.”

. . .

Instead of talking [in staff meetings] about disciplining problem kids, they focus on why that teen’s having problems, develop a plan to help the teen, and make sure to follow up.

In the last two years, the Lincoln High staff has noticed that the kids’ ability to regulate their own emotions has dramatically improved. “There’s not near the number of huge emotional explosions that there used to be,” says Gordon. “Even the way the kids interact with each other is more subdued.”

They way the kids see it is that the teachers have chilled out.

Some aspects of the article put me off a bit – some of it tends toward the propagandistic (does in-school suspension really take place in a “quiet, comforting room” where you can “talk about anything with the attending teacher”?), and I’m not sure we need concepts like “toxic stress syndrome” and the “trauma-sensitive classroom movement” to discuss basic ways of treating other people with dignity. But the system it describes seems to get a lot of things right. Its focus on engaging the kids as thinking, feeling human beings who might have articulatable reasons for acting the way they do is a vast improvement over an approach that sees kids as nothing more than collections of behaviors that can be modified through the right combination of rewards and punishments. (Notice, for what it’s worth, that Lincoln High says that its approach cut the number of disciplinary measures significantly, as opposed to, say, increasing them thirteen-fold.)

I do think even relatively humane approaches to discipline like this one (Collaborative Problem Solving is another) would benefit from more explicitly acknowledging an elephant in the room: kids are made to attend school, whether they want to or not, and are given no say in the rules that govern them there. Few us of would not chafe under those conditions. Some degree of resistance might even be a sign of intelligence.

In approaching discipline, I wish schools would try to follow at least these five principles:

1. Treat people the way that you would like to be treated in their place.

2. Do not treat children differently from adults unless you have sufficient justification, and do not be too quick to assume that you have sufficient justification.

3. Be conscious of the fact that kids in school (and out, for that matter) have been deprived of much of the freedom that adults take for granted, and that that might affect how they feel and act.

4. Be conscious of what your actions model about the relationship between authorities and the people they govern.

5. If a child is not meeting your expectations, do not assume that the problem is with the child, rather than with the expectations.
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Treating teachers as professionals

Karen W. at Education in Iowa has a great post questioning whether all the talk of treating teachers as professionals is consistent with depriving them (and their students) of so much say over what happens in the classroom. “The heart of a profession,” she points out, “is the special duties that a professional owes to persons with whom we enter professional relationships” – in this case, the children. She then imagines what the teaching profession might look like if it carried with it the kind of professional obligations to children that lawyers have to their clients. Lawyers, for example, must often defer to their clients’ wishes, and cannot permit third parties who pay them to control their exercise of professional judgment. Should analogous principles come into play in the teaching profession? Check it out..

Mind the gap

Yesterday’s post reminded me of a saying I once heard: “Expectations are resentments under construction.” As I understand it, the saying does not mean that people chafe and grow resentful when much is expected of them. Instead, it means that people who expect too much from others, or from life, are likely to end up disappointed and resentful. Applied to life, the saying is a little too dark for me. Applied to compulsory education, though, I think it has a lot of truth to it.

Teachers are only human. When you’re under pressure to get a class to master certain material on a certain schedule, or to live up to certain behavioral rules, it is only natural to feel frustrated and upset when the kids fail to meet the goals. If the kids still fail to meet them despite the teacher’s best efforts, I think most teachers would, at some point, reconsider whether the goals are realistic. But if those goals are imposed from above, and the teacher is stuck with them, it’s unsurprising if the school atmosphere becomes more adversarial.

Compulsory education, by definition, involves some degree of coercion, but some approaches are more coercive than others. There are strong arguments (for example, here) that the best way to promote learning is to accommodate kids’ interests and inclinations as much as possible, and to give them a relatively large degree of autonomy, rather than simply dictate what they must know, when they must know it, and how they must behave. But there’s another argument in favor of the more accommodating approach, separate and apart from its effect on learning outcomes: it is more conducive to a kind and humane school environment.

Our school officials seem to think that we need more emphasis on behavior and discipline because something in the nature of children has changed. I think their focus on behavior is more likely driven by a change in the nature of schooling: that we are increasing the gap between what we want to make kids do and what they are interested in doing. Increasing that gap is naturally going to lead to a more coercive, adversarial dynamic, in which schools are more likely to employ authoritarian practices and model authoritarian values, and in which school staff are more likely to feel frustrated and angry with the children and to treat them accordingly. Not all school staff will fall prey to that dynamic, but the greater the gap, the greater the odds.

Promoting a humane school environment has value in and of itself, separate and apart from its effect on learning, though you would never know it from today’s educational debates.
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Behavior über alles

The Associated Press reports:

Public schools in Jackson, Mississippi, will no longer handcuff students to poles or other objects and will train staff at its alternative school on better methods of discipline.

Mississippi’s second-largest school district agreed Friday to the settlement with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which had sued over the practice of shackling students to a pole at the district’s Capital City Alternative School.

. . .

The Mississippi lawsuit was filed in June 2011 by Jeanette Murry on behalf of her then-16-year-old son, who has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It said staffers routinely restrained students for hours for offenses as minor as dress code violations, forcing them to eat lunch while chained to a stair railing and to shout for help when they needed to go to the bathroom.

What can you say about news like that? Given that Jackson’s population is seventy-nine percent black, it’s impossible not to suspect that race plays a large role in that story. But aren’t some other factors at work, too?

The more schools obsess over enforcing behavioral “expectations,” the more frustrated and angry school staff will naturally become with the kids who don’t comply. It’s only a quick step to justifying harsher and harsher treatment of the kids: if they choose not to follow the rules, they get what they deserve. It is a recipe for creating an adversarial, inhumane school environment. It may find some of its worst expression in Jackson, Mississippi, but it’s happening at some level across the country, including in Iowa City.
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The power of public protest

Unsatisfied with the quality of the lunches at your elementary school?

Traditional adult strategy: Discuss the issue privately with the principal. Maybe ask about it at a PTA meeting. At worst, write letters to the superintendent and school board. When nothing changes, at least you tried.

Nine-year-old strategy: Start a blog. Post photos of lunch daily, and rate the lunches for tastiness, quantity, healthiness, and number of stray hairs. Watch blog go viral and receive (reportedly) over a million hits. Less than two weeks later, enjoy the school’s new policy of serving unlimited fruit, salad, and bread.

At least the kids are learning something.

Of course, we can only speculate about how this would have played out in America (as opposed to Scotland, where this nine-year-old lives). My guess is the school would have responded more like this:

1. Discipline the child for disrespectful internet behavior.
2. Ban cameras from the lunchroom.
3. Patiently explain that school menu decisions are driven by higher forces beyond the control of the local school system.
4. Back down on disciplinary action after the ACLU threatens a First Amendment lawsuit.
5. Wait for the whole thing to blow over, then continue serving the same lunches as before.

But even in America, public protest is still the percentage play, isn’t it?
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Recess is not expendable

The Illinois state senate just passed a bill that would require all elementary schools in the state to have at least twenty minutes of recess every day, outdoors if possible. Twenty minutes isn’t much, but apparently some schools in Illinois offer no recess at all. As of last year, more than half of Chicago’s elementary schools, for example, offered no recess; even at the kindergarten-through-third-grade level, 46% offered no recess. Incredible.

The bill’s sponsor explained what shouldn’t need explaining:

“We can’t lose sight of the fact that kids need to be kids,” [State Sen. Kimberly Lightford said.] “Our children deserve a chance to play and relax during the school day. Learning to make friends and use your imagination is every bit as important as learning multiplication and grammar.”

Even more remarkably, the bill also “forbids schools from withholding recess as a disciplinary action.” I know a school that would have some big adjustments to make if a bill like that ever passed in Iowa.

Why doesn’t our school board pass a policy like this one about recess, or about lunch? But we know that our board sees these as “building-level decisions” in which it should not intervene. (I don’t mean to pick on one school board member there; from all appearances, the entire board agrees.)

When the state steps in and decides school issues, everyone accepts it as routine. When administrators decide school issues with no oversight, everyone accepts it as routine. How is it that the one body that would be overstepping its bounds by intervening is the one actually elected by our community to decide school issues?
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Why the lunchroom?

I posted some comments here, and another on this post, that seem to have coalesced in my mind into a post of their own.

Over the three years I’ve been writing about educational trends on this blog, I’ve become a big believer in local control of educational policy. Someday I will post my Top Ten Reasons to Decentralize Education Policy, but I already know which reason will top the list: the more you put the policymaking power into the hands of the people who actually know the children as individuals – parents and teachers – the more humane those policies are likely to be.

I don’t expect to agree with everything my kids’ teachers do. I wish, for example, that they were less prone to using rewards systems and particularly to using candy and junk food as a reward, and less inclined to punish kids by depriving them of recess. At least some of that, though, seems to be in response to the pressures put on teachers from above; I think we’d see less of it if teachers themselves had more say in educational policy. Anyway, I’m not suggesting that we should write teachers (or teachers’ unions) a blank check about how to run our schools, but I do believe that they are the most humane element in a less and less humane system.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the aspect of school that has most visibly been worsened by our district’s behavior management craze is the lunchroom -- the one place where the classroom teachers play virtually no role. In the lunchroom, and in the disciplinary practices described here, we’re seeing what happens when administrative dictates, driven by federal and state policies, are carried out without any classroom teachers serving as a buffer. I would happily trade that top-down system for one based on policies freely chosen by the Iowa City community, in which parents and teachers would likely have a more meaningful say.
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“You will be rewarded for your subordination”

I don’t agree with the idea that children are essentially cannon fodder in the War to Maintain American Global Competitiveness, and that our schools should be designed accordingly. But even if I did, I’d worry about whether today’s schools are really promoting the kind of thinking that will serve our economy – or our kids – in the future. In that spirit, from Forbes Magazine, here are “Nine Dangerous Things You Were Taught in School.” A taste:

6. Behaving yourself is as important as getting good marks. Whistle-blowing, questioning the status quo, and thinking your own thoughts are no-nos. Be quiet and get back on the assembly line.

Read the whole piece.
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Hunger games

Now, in one of the lunch periods at our elementary school, some of the kids have been enlisted to help patrol the lunchroom and to write up their classmates who are not complying with “voice level expectations.” Stranger still, it is the same child (who gets to choose a friend to help) every day.

That pitting the kids against each other in this way might teach the kids some bad lessons about the use of authority, or might create (or worsen) an adversarial school environment, or might needlessly make what is already a very short lunch break just a little more unpleasant, has apparently not occurred to the adults in charge of the lunchroom.
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If it ain’t broke, break it, then make everyone miserable fixing it

The “Principal’s Piece” in this week’s issue of our school’s newsletter:

The Intermediate (3/4) and Upper (5/6) students participated in a lunchroom survey. The students, overwhelmingly, shared that their lunchroom experience was a negative one. About half of the students stated that it was a negative experience because they felt they were not being respected and wanted to be able to carry on conversations instead of following staff members’ re-directions throughout lunch. The other half stated it was a negative experience because the lunchroom was too noisy and uncomfortable for them. I approached the students with a compromise. We are no longer turning the lights off and requiring students to sit silently during the last 2 minutes of lunch. A clap pattern is done to quiet students down to get the table wipers ready and tables are dismissed or students are dismissed based on those who are sitting quietly and respectfully, with clean areas, and ready to go. The students have shared with me that they like this much better. They shared there is still room for improvement and we are asking for your help. Through the end of this school year, we invite all parents to Hoover to eat lunch and help students follow table/eating expectations (similar to what you would expect in a restaurant). We hope to start a parent volunteer program for next year to help model these expectations.

What a piece of work this “Principal’s Piece” is. The fifth- and sixth-graders can remember when lunch, though rushed, was at least a pleasant break from their day. Now, in the name of teaching “expectations,” the school has succeeded in making everyone unhappy. Does anyone believe that half the students find the lunchroom too noisy? Could it be that it is “uncomfortable” for them because of the response it triggers from the lunchroom attendants?

With less than three weeks of school left, the school has finally realized that its year-long lunchroom behavior management program has left the children feeling “overwhelmingly” that lunch is a negative experience. Never mind that people have been pointing it out since the first week of school. (Recall that the principal told me in December that “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.”) I would think that in those circumstances the school would take some responsibility – maybe, Heaven forbid, even apologize – rather than attribute the problem to the children’s own incorrigible misbehavior.

Clay Shirky once said that “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” Sometimes, apparently, they have to create the problem first.
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There is no good indoctrination

Well, I didn’t have much luck getting the panelists on bullying to respond to my concerns about the potential for anti-bullying interventions to be counterproductive and to model some of the same traits they are trying to discourage. The goal of reducing bullying is a good one, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that every proposal to address it is a good one. Discussions about bullying are always well-meaning, but they often seem to proceed from an unexamined and very questionable premise: that we can mold kids’ values to order simply by telling them, in a sufficiently elaborate and pervasive way, what to think.

At some level, I think everyone perceives the word “indoctrination” to have a negative connotation – that it’s something a free society shouldn’t do, and that it’s the opposite of real education. But many people seem to make an exception when the message that is being indoctrinated is a commendable one (for example, that bullying is bad). That exception, of course, would entirely swallow the rule: people never think the message they are pushing on others is a bad one. The idea is similar to the idea that freedom of speech is great as long the speech isn’t really offensive.

There are good reasons to think that indoctrinatory approaches to behavior and bullying are likely to backfire. First, people naturally resist being told what to think. Second, indoctrination models a dehumanizing way of interacting with people. Our school’s approach to behavior, for example, treats kids as if they are incapable of reaching their own moral conclusions – as if they’re not fully people. I’d be worried about using an approach like that to discourage bullying, which is also a form of dehumanizing people.

I don’t think I’m saying anything very radical. A school can have rules about conduct, and can enforce them. Its administrators and teachers can explain to the students why they have those rules, and they can explain what the school’s values are and why. They can insist that the children follow the rules, but they should stop short of insisting that the children agree with the school on what are, ultimately, value questions. That’s where they cross the line from enforcing rules to indoctrinating minds. And any system of behavioral rules should be accompanied by an effort to get the kids thinking for themselves about right and wrong, without the school dictating right answers, so that the kids aren’t simply learning mindless obedience. (For a thumbnail sketch of what such an approach might look like, see this post.)

If school officials think they can just tell kids what to think about right and wrong, they don’t understand what a conscience is. Unless people are given the freedom to reach their own conclusions about what’s right and wrong, they can’t possibly develop real consciences, since a conscience sometimes requires you to do what’s right even when no one else thinks it’s right. That’s why herding kids into agreeing with the school’s rules and values by subjecting them to pep-rally-like behavior assemblies or having them chant memorized slogans couldn’t be more misguided. If you want people to develop their own moral compasses and to resist peer pressure, you don’t achieve that by appealing to their desire to please authority figures and conform to the crowd.

Bullying is real and has many causes, but many behavior crusaders seem eager to look for sources of bullying everywhere but in their own techniques for addressing it.
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Indoctrination is a counterproductive way to address bullying

The Iowa City Patch has invited its readers to discuss the issue of bullying with a group of panelists. I’ve been chiming in with comments that will sound familiar to readers of this blog – for example:

In addressing the bullying issue, people should be mindful of the difference between persuasion and indoctrination. Trying to use reason to persuade people to a set of values is a respectful way of engaging with people. Indoctrination – telling people what to think – is not. Indoctrination is a form of dehumanization, just like bullying, and is part of the problem, not the solution.

Right now, the approach of the Iowa City schools is indoctrination. The behavioral rewards program used in all the schools (“PBIS”) is entirely about telling the students how to act, and then using material rewards to get them to comply. It has no component designed to get the kids thinking for themselves about right and wrong and how to treat other people. In the end, all it teaches is obedience to authority.

I’m not saying the schools shouldn’t have rules. But simply dictating rules does nothing to help kids develop their own moral and ethical reasoning about how to treat other people. Without more, it just models treating people like objects to be bossed around and manipulated.

If we want kids to treat each other with dignity, we need to treat them with dignity, and engage them in reasoning about what’s right and wrong – not just tell them what to think.

So far, the panelists have had little to say in response to my comments, but the thread is still developing . . .

Update here.
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Better writers vs. better papers

I’ve had little time to blog recently because I’ve been grading the end-of-semester legal briefs in my legal analysis, writing, and research course. These students have learned a ton over the course of their first year in law school, but their writing and analytical skills are still developing, and there are a lot of ways their papers could still improve. Reading their year-end briefs always gets me thinking about the teaching process.

One of the challenges of teaching the class – and I assume that some version of this challenge is true of all teaching – is in deciding how much help to give students along the way, and what kind of help. In my class, each student submits a draft of each section of the brief, which I give extensive comments on; then the student revises the drafts to produce a final brief. So the question arises: how much should I give away at the draft stage? If I think there’s a great argument that the student isn’t making, should I point it out? If the student is misreading a key case, or not citing the case at all, should I point it out? If a sentence is unnecessarily wordy or confusing, should I suggest a clearer alternative?

It’s a fine line to walk. I comment as much as I can on whether the draft makes sense, whether it raises unanswered questions in my mind, whether it says anything that sounds so improbable that it should be double-checked, whether its language is confusing or abstract, whether its organization is hard to follow, etc. But I have to constantly fight the temptation to be too prescriptive about what the draft should say. I want the students to keep wrestling with the analysis. I want to give them a chance to find the missing case, or discover the strong argument, on their own. That means taking the risk that they won’t all write the perfect brief, but if I were to short-circuit that process by being too prescriptive, they’d miss out on the most valuable part of the learning process.

In other words, I have to keep reminding myself that the goal is to produce better writers and better thinkers, not better papers. There’s an easy way to get better papers: just tell the students what to write. But no one learns how to write, or how to think through a legal problem, simply by taking dictation.

Now imagine that all of the briefs were sent to a standardized testing company. Imagine that the testing company had its employees (or even a computer!) assess the quality of the briefs and give them a score. Imagine that my salary, or even my job, depended on those scores. Even if we assume that the company could validly assess the quality of the briefs, wouldn’t I have to teach very differently? Wouldn’t I have to focus on the product at the expense of the process, and on the short-term at the expense of the long-term? Wouldn’t I have to tell the students how and what to write, as much as I could get away with, instead of letting them reason their way through the analysis on their own?

It’s always going to be easier to raise test scores artificially and through short-cuts than to facilitate real learning. High-stakes testing just makes that temptation irresistible. That’s part of the problem with what Ken Robinson calls the “fast food model of education.” I’m lucky – and I think my students are, too – that that model hasn’t yet taken hold at the law school level. Kids in K-12: not so lucky.
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What top-down looks like

I am continually surprised at how little value school administrators place on any kind of meaningful buy-in by teachers and parents to the latest “reforms.” Three years ago, for example, our district foisted its behavioral rewards program (PBIS) on our schools without regard to whether the teachers, parents, or kids wanted any part of it. (Full diatribe here.) Thus the district created an additional task for itself: managing the teachers, parents, and kids who resisted PBIS.

A recent occurrence at one of our district’s elementary schools illustrates the dynamic. Apparently some higher authority (the district?) determined that the school’s teachers weren’t passing out enough PBIS rewards. The school’s PBIS committee, in response, asked the PTA if it would fund weekly incentives for teachers to boost their support for the program – that is, “$5 gift cards or small tokens that can be drawn for each week by the teachers.” Classic PBIS logic at work: if the teachers are insufficiently enthusiastic about PBIS, we can just use small token rewards to alter their behavior!

Alas, the parents were no more enthusiastic than the teachers. One parent responded that she was “strongly opposed to the PBIS program” and objected to “further emphasizing, through rewards, this focus on obedience and rule following I think sends our children some really unfortunate messages about what’s important and valuable in our learning environments and communities.” She concluded, “My vote would be a resounding ‘no.’” From what I hear, the PTA didn’t pursue the idea any further. If the district learned anything from the incident, it doesn’t show.

One of my objections to PBIS is that it is demeaning. Trying to reason with kids and get them thinking for themselves about how they should act would be a way of treating them with dignity and respect. By contrast, trying to buy their obedience with token rewards is just plain insulting. The point is just as compelling with teachers as with kids: If you were a teacher with reservations about PBIS, how would you feel if the school thought it could buy your cooperation with a five-dollar gift card?
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“Welcome to fast-food nation, kids”

Mother Jones chimes in on short school lunch periods.

UPDATE: Time to eat lunch may be scarce, but there is no shortage of candy and junk food in many classrooms. Bettina Siegel at The Lunch Tray posts a manifesto about it here.
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Write by numbers

The Times reports on a new study claiming to show that computers are as good at grading student essays on standardized tests as people are – proving once again that it’s easy to achieve reliability if you toss validity out the window.

As a counterpoint, the article quotes Les Perelman, who studies the algorithms that the Educational Testing Service uses. According to Perelman, ETS’s “automated reader can be easily gamed, is vulnerable to test prep, sets a very limited and rigid standard for what good writing is, and will pressure teachers to dumb down writing instruction.”

The e-Rater’s biggest problem, he says, is that it can’t identify truth. He tells students not to waste time worrying about whether their facts are accurate, since pretty much any fact will do as long as it is incorporated into a well-structured sentence. “E-Rater doesn’t care if you say the War of 1812 started in 1945,” he said.

To prove his point, Perelman wrote an essay explaining how the high costs of college are the fault of greedy graduate teaching assistants.

“The average teaching assistant makes six times as much money as college presidents,” he wrote. “In addition, they often receive a plethora of extra benefits such as private jets, vacations in the south seas, starring roles in motion pictures.”

The computer gave his essay the highest score, as it did another Perelman essay that was “padded with more than a dozen nonsensical sentences.”

ETS officials are unfazed by Perelman’s criticisms. “E.T.S. officials say that Mr. Perelman’s test prep advice is too complex for most students to absorb; if they can, they’re using the higher level of thinking the test seeks to reward anyway.” Think about the implications of that statement: It doesn’t matter if the test really measures writing ability, or whether it will cause teachers to turn English classes into test-prep sessions. It’s fine if you can game the test, because test-gaming is just as important an ability as writing well. It’s the ultimate, all-purpose justification for turning schools into test-prep centers!
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Report from the lunchroom

At the request of our school superintendent, I sat through an hour of lunches at our elementary school earlier this week. I can’t say I’m any closer to understanding why these kids are being told to be completely silent during two minutes of their already very brief lunch, or why they are being threatened with assigned seats at lunch if they don’t quiet down, or why the adults who supervise the lunchroom feel compelled to police the kids’ behavior as closely as they do.

The kids weren’t noticeably noisy or ill-behaved, and just seemed like ordinary kids. The lunchroom attendant walked back and forth among the tables, intervening to stop kids from breaking lunchroom rules (for example, by sharing their food), sometimes “writing people up” in her notebook. (At one point, a kindergartner who I know was sitting at the table behind me and turned around to talk with me. As we were talking, the lunch attendant came up and physically turned her around to face her own table. So much for that conversation.) Throughout the first lunch period that I attended, the principal also walked the room, monitoring the kids, at one point scolding a student for talking back to the lunchroom attendant in a way that was disrespectful, but which didn’t sound like talking back or disrespect to me. I have no way to tell whether my presence there affected the routines.

To the extent the experience was reassuring at all, it was only because the kids seemed to ignore the school’s more unreasonable rules. No silence was achieved during the two-minute “voice level zero” periods, though the room quieted down a little. I suppose the school’s administration would consider that a bug, not a feature.

I timed two of the lunches. In one, the last kid through the line had thirteen minutes to eat before the supposedly silent two-minute dismissal period began. In the other, it was ten minutes. There were lots of unoccupied tables, indicating that longer lunches would at least be possible, in terms of capacity.

There are some signs that the school is trying to make some changes. Recently the classrooms teachers distributed a survey to the kids about the lunchroom environment, which I think is a great thing to do. Word has it that the teachers brought the issue up in a staff meeting. The kids report that the lunch attendant is a little more restrained lately – less likely, for instance, to take food away from a child for misbehaving – though she still sometimes yells at the kids loudly enough to be heard in the nearby classrooms. This week’s school newsletter included the following:

The Hoover Family invites you to have lunch with your child during the month of May. We are working on listening to students concerns and ideas to make their lunchtime more comfortable and welcoming. We are, also, working to establish the lunchroom expectations of Entering, Eating, and Exiting. These expectations are:

ENTER: Line basics, Use a Level 0 or 1 voice, Take only two side items

EAT: Body basics, Use a Level 1 or 2 voice, raise your hand if you need something

EXIT: Lights off, zero voice, Leave no trace

Your support in teaching and modeling these expectations during lunch will greatly benefit the students and lunchroom environment. We want to ensure respect, responsibility, care, honesty, and courage are practiced at Hoover. Thank you to those parents who have taken the opportunity to visit Hoover’s lunchroom.

I wish I knew what the problem is that they are working so hard to solve. I think they should work less hard, and just let the kids eat their lunches.

Or, if that’s too outlandish, how about getting the kids together and saying this:

We want to ask for your help in keeping the lunchroom from being too noisy or too messy. We’ve been imposing a lot of rules on you this year, and we’ve realized that many of them are unnecessary. We want to treat you the way we’d like to be treated ourselves, and everyone needs at least a little social down time in their day, when they’re not being overly monitored and scrutinized. But there are some problems that can arise, so we’d like to ask you to be conscious of a few things. First, please don’t be so loud that people in the classrooms will be disturbed. Second, please don’t make a mess, and if you do, please clean it up. Third, sometimes we need to make an announcement. When we do, we’ll signal it by flicking the lights on and off; please stop and listen when we do. But we won’t ask you to be silent just so we can dismiss tables; the lunchroom attendant will just let your table know when you can leave. Finally, of course, please be kind to each other.

As long as we’re achieving those basic goals, there’s no reason for us to interfere with what you’re doing. Where you sit, which way you’re facing, whether you move around, and what you do with your food is your business. If you do become too loud, the lunchroom attendant will ask you to be quieter. And of course, if you do cause a real problem, you’ll get in trouble. But we won’t punish an entire group just because a few people are causing a problem. Most importantly, we know we need your help to achieve these goals, and we think the best way to get people’s help is not by threats or prizes, but by appealing to their good will. We think these few rules are good for the entire Hoover community, so we hope you’ll help us with them, but if you think any of them are unnecessary or unfair, please let us know and we can talk it out as a group.

Wouldn’t that approach be more comfortable and welcoming than the current, more authoritarian and intrusive approach? Wouldn’t it model better ways of interacting with people? Wouldn’t it be at least as likely to achieve its goals?
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Déjà vu

Some sixth graders in Minneapolis are the voice of reason:

In the Minneapolis public schools, we are supposed to have 15 minutes to eat, which would be bad enough. But realistically we get only 10 to 11 minutes (we have been timing it).

. . .

Teachers always tell us to socialize at lunch and recess, not in the classroom. But we cannot do that if we are scarfing down our lunches in 11 minutes.

. . .

Connor Snowdon, also in our grade, agrees: “We should get a half-hour, and the behavior of other kids shouldn’t take away our time. If you wanted to eat your entire lunch, you wouldn’t have time to talk to your friends.”

Read the whole article. One of the comments on it: “Great and well-written article by these students! Sadly, the lesson they will ultimately learn is that school is not about them, it is about the adults.” Given our experience with the stingy lunch periods here in Iowa City, it’s hard to disagree.

Why is elementary education – even at a public Montessori school! – becoming a rat race? Is there any way to understand that trend other than as a direct result of the laws that make raising standardized test scores the sole goal of education?
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“Addicted to incarceration”

What kind of society does this to children? Picture your own twelve-year-old when you click on that link and the ones that follow.
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Rules, norms, and consensus

As a college student, I took a course on Social Psychology. One of the few things I remember from the class was our discussion of social norms – defined, roughly, as widely accepted but unwritten rules of social conduct, violations of which are punished with various forms of censure. One day, the professor assigned us to violate a social norm and then write about the experience. As I recall, I fulfilled the assignment by blatantly eavesdropping on a couple at an adjacent table in the dining hall. This was a very uncomfortable experience, as it was supposed to be, since the point of the assignment was how powerful norms can be in shaping people’s conduct.

Norms are often more effective in restraining our behavior than laws are. No law says you have to shower regularly, but most people do. On the other hand, going five or ten miles per hour over the speed limit is illegal, but many people do it, because there is no corresponding norm calling down social censure on moderate speeders.

As the speeding example shows, norms cannot be legislated. They depend on consensus.

Norms can be a very good thing; we can all be grateful for the norm against eavesdropping. But some norms serve some people’s interests at the expense of others’. When enough people begin to think that a norm is unfair or dysfunctional, the consensus can break down.

I think we’re seeing that in the way that some parents are reacting to the norms that prevail in the public school system, especially as educational policies become more responsive to the desires of distant politicians and bureaucrats than to those of the parents and kids they serve. The mere existence of this blog is experienced by some people as a norm violation. (Indeed, many establishment institutions – in particular the mainstream media – sometimes seem to think of the blogosphere itself as one big norm violation.) My interactions with the school district about our school’s approach to behavior and discipline have convinced me that some of the prevailing norms serve only to perpetuate the status quo, and do not at all benefit the kids or improve their education. Don’t persist in asking a question when you don’t get an answer. Don’t publicly criticize anything that goes on in your kids’ school. Don’t expect school officials to publicly explain their reasons for their policies. Breaking these norms brings back some of those same feelings I felt during that Social Psychology homework assignment, but, against all my expectations, parenting has turned me into a serial norm violator.

I think something similar is happening in our school’s lunchroom. The school has the power to set rules and enforce them, but it can’t force the kids to buy into them or accept them as norms. Instead of recognizing that fact, the school is overestimating what it can achieve just by asserting authority over the kids. From what I hear, there are kids breaking rules in the lunchroom who seldom break them in their own classrooms, where the teachers have more successfully cultivated environments of cooperation and mutual respect. But creating an environment like that requires at least some consideration of whether your rules, and your efforts to enforce them, are reasonable and necessary. Like it or not, consensus is a two-way street.
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Is there anything I can do to get on-the-record answers to questions?

Apparently our school district officials might be willing to answer your questions directly as long as you do not hurt their feelings by criticizing their policies and practices, or by – Heaven forbid – publicizing what these public officials say to you. The superintendent’s response to my last email:

Thanks for writing to share you perspective on this issue. If you will indulge me, I feel the need to back up and explain not only this communication, but also other emails that I have previously sent to you.

I believe that true communication always occurs within a context. That context is based on the relationship of those communicating with each other. Although society has evolved to the point that many people are comfortable having "electronic only" relationships, this does not work for me. I am unable to ascertain as much from email dialog as I can from in-person communication. For this reason I have repeatedly entreated you to pick up the phone or schedule an appointment with me and/or other administrators in the District.

Given your propensity to take your question-and-answer email dialog and cut and paste content to your web site, your emails come across as accusatory, interrogatory, and intended to prove your point. I am going to assume that you will take affront to the previous sentence. I am also going to presume that in a face-to-face dialog with you, this conversation would feel very different for both of us. In fact, I would surmise that having this type of face-to-face dialog would influence the interpretation that both I and members of my administrative team may have regarding future email inquiries from you. However, absent the face-to-face dialog that I continue to advocate for, these assumptions can not be fully ascertained.

Given the above, neither I nor my administrative team are trying to make you jump through hoops. I am concerned about your perceptions about Hoover ES and would like to discuss these so that the administrative can better understand how and where to address these issues. We are merely asking you to engage us in a true dialog about these issues in person. If/when you are willing to do so, we will make ourselves available.

My response:

Thanks for the quick reply. I have certainly been critical of some district policies – that’s the whole point of sending these emails. But if the district sees all criticism as “accusatory, interrogatory, and intended to prove a point,” it’s created an awfully convenient recipe for never publicly responding to any challenging questions or criticism.

Rather than fuss over whether the criticism was posed with just the right degree of deference and eggshell-walking, why not just rise above it and provide a public answer? In the amount of time it must have taken for you to write your last email, you could have gone a long way toward explaining why the district has pursued these policies on lunch, behavior, and discipline. Instead, all the energy goes into explaining why you can’t just answer the questions. (I have to admit: I have no idea what you mean by discussing issues “in context,” or why that can’t occur in writing.)

No one likes being on the receiving end of criticism, but it is very hard for the public to evaluate school policies if the district refuses to publicly state reasons for them. I don’t understand how that can possibly be good for the schools, or the children who attend them. It’s hard to see how the district is any better off, for example, for having stonewalled Ed Stone’s questions for years. All it did was drag out the process of getting legitimate concerns addressed, cause transparency to become an issue in the school board elections, and leave the district with a bill for Stone’s attorneys’ fees. Now Iowa City is cited as one of the primary examples of why we need a stronger Open Records law. There must be more productive ways of engaging with criticism.

It’s not as if I’m the only person raising concerns about the atmosphere in elementary school lunchrooms. Lots of people have, in the Synesi audit, the lunch petition, in comments on my blog, and elsewhere. Surely they’re not all so accusatory that they don’t deserve an on-the-record response. (For what it’s worth, your own assistant superintendent thanked me in our last exchange for my “polite emails” and “civil interaction.”)

I should point out: when I ask who made a given decision, it’s not out of a desire to personalize these issues or seek any kind of consequences. It’s because I want to know why the decisions were made, and don’t even know whom to ask. The buck seems to stop nowhere.

In any event, I’m willing to do whatever I need to do to get the district to give a public, on-the-record response to these concerns. I’m worried that the meeting you’re describing wouldn’t lead to that. There’s no point in doing it if it’s just going to be a lot of non-committal talk that I’m not supposed to repeat publicly. Would you be open to recording the meeting?

I’m sure I will break down and arrange a meeting. But I sure would like to know what a guy has to do to get a public school official to give an on-the-record answer to a question about the district’s policies.
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R.I.P., local control

The Iowa State House of Representatives has just passed this bill – because our state overseers cannot rest if even one school district is operating on a different calendar!

I have often thought it’s crazy that our district starts school so early in the year – this year on August 16. At the same time, though, I know that Iowa City is a university town, and I’m usually grateful that my kids are in school during that week, since I start teaching my own classes the following week.

Reasonable people could certainly disagree about the best time to start school. But what possible reason is there for the state to intervene?

Oh, I mean, other than boosting attendance at the state fair and making money for the tourism industry.
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The two least welcome questions

I guess I still have old-fashioned (naive?) ideas about how government in a democracy is supposed to work. One of them is that public debate over policy choices, even if it gets contentious at times, can only lead to better decisions. Another is that public officials, when asked, should explain the reasons for their decisions, so the public can engage in an informed consideration of whether those reasons make sense. The more openly and publicly those reasons are discussed, the more informed the community’s decisions can be.

The school system is certainly confounding my model. Publicly explaining the reasons for their decisions seems to be the very last thing that school officials want to do. As readers of this blog know, I recently had to submit a public records request to demonstrate that our school had exponentially increased its use of disciplinary measures this year, and even then the district took pains to explain away the numbers rather than give reasons for the change. Somehow, in this Age of Educational Accountability, the two least welcome questions are: Who made this decision, and why?

Last week I emailed the district to ask why our school has put so much emphasis this year on scolding the kids to be quiet in the lunchroom, to the point where the principal threatened to require assigned seats at lunch if the kids weren’t completely silent for the last few minutes of the lunch period. I won’t reprint the entire email here (you’ve heard most of it before),
but I concluded with this paragraph:

I am sending this email to both the principal and the central administrators because that is what the central administrators asked me to do in our previous exchange. But the only person who can explain why Hoover is pursuing these policies is the person making the decisions. Other local schools are not pursuing the same policies, so I assume that the person ultimately responsible for them is the principal. Can I please get an explanation of why the school has spent the past year haranguing the kids in the lunchroom for not meeting what are obviously unrealistic expectations, and why it is so important that there be utter silence while the lunchroom is being dismissed?

The superintendent’s response:

Thank you for sending your inquiries to us. Rather than engaging in a back-and-forth via email, I would ask you to contact [the principal and the assistant superintendent] (email or telephone) to set up a time to both visit the lunch and discuss your concerns. I am a firm believer in placing issues in the appropriate context and I believe that a visit to the lunch room would most likely be a good start to this dialog.

My response:

Thanks for getting back to me. I’m not against having a meeting or having lunch at Hoover, but I don’t understand why anyone should have to jump through hoops just to get an on-the-record answer to a question, or for that matter, what would be so bad about a “back-and-forth via email.” Why not just respond to questions with answers, instead of treating them as conflicts that need to be managed?

One of the reasons I ask these questions in emails is that I think it’s important that there be public discussion of public school policies. I’d like to be able to understand who is deciding what and why, and then to hold that reasoning up for public scrutiny. Asking me to have a meeting with school officials is not a substitute for that, unless you want to rely on me to accurately summarize what district staff members say in those meetings.

What is frustrating is that for the past three years, I’ve watched the district make school more and more about behavior and discipline, and about being quiet and obedient, to the point where I can barely recognize Hoover anymore. Yet the district has not only avoided articulating any reason for these changes, it’s avoided even acknowledging that anything has changed.

If something I’ve said about the lunchroom at Hoover is inaccurate, I wish someone would point it out. (No one has.) Otherwise, it remains unclear to me why the district can’t give straightforward answers to straightforward questions. Why is it important to require the kids to be utterly silent (“voice level zero”) at the end of lunch before they can be dismissed? Why is it a good idea to punish them with assigned seats if they don’t comply? Why is so much effort going into telling the kids to be quieter at lunch, when that wasn’t considered necessary in previous years? Is there any reason you can’t just tell me who made these decisions, and why?

This strategy of avoiding public answers genuinely puzzles me. It just makes the district look defensive, as if it lacks confidence in its own practices. I’m only one parent; I know I can’t force my views on a principal or the school superintendent. Why not just explain the reasons for these choices?

But – zOMG! – it might provoke a follow-up question!
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Lunchroom insanity continues

The war on lunchroom noise at our elementary school continues. Yesterday, the principal told the kids that if they were not totally silent during the last few minutes of lunch every day for the next week, they would have to sit at the tables in the order in which they come into the lunchroom – that is, that their seats would be assigned, and that they could not sit with their friends from other classrooms. But if they are sufficiently silent, they will be allowed to have music played during their Friday lunch – an offer that seems strangely inconsistent with the idea that the lunchroom is too noisy.

The principal also explained that the gym classes that are scheduled in that same room could not start on time if the kids took too long to become quiet – because the kids can’t possibly be dismissed if they are not first utterly silent, even though that was never required in previous years.

Despite three years of PBIS and a year-long campaign of haranguing the kids on a daily basis to be quieter, the school apparently still thinks the kids aren’t quiet enough. Some people might take that as a reason to reconsider whether the lunchroom expectations are reasonable or necessary, especially since the older kids can remember when lunch didn’t involve having their “voice levels” constantly policed, and lunch was a much more pleasant (though still short) experience.

It should be obvious – and apparently was obvious to previous Hoover administrations – that a large group of kids eating lunch is necessarily going to make some noise, and that there is nothing to be gained from setting unrealistic expectations and then constantly harassing the children for failure to meet them.

I sent an email last night asking why the school has turned lunch into such a negative, adversarial experience, and why it is so important that there be utter silence while the lunchroom is being dismissed. Stay tuned.
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Educational thalidomide, or What’s wrong with “evidence-based education”

Pregnant women should take thalidomide because research shows that it’s effective.

What’s wrong with that assertion? It’s true that thalidomide has been proven effective, as measured by its ability to reduce morning sickness. Why shouldn’t pregnant women take it, then? We all know the answer: because it has other effects, too – some of which, as we all now know, are terrible. Before taking a drug, you’d want to know what all of its effects were, and whether the good effects outweighed the bad. No one would argue that we should reduce morning sickness at all costs.

But that basic principle is completely absent from most discussions of empirical research on education. Educational “reformers” are eager to proclaim that their proposals “work” based on very incomplete information about their effects on children. If an intervention appears to cause short-term standardized test scores to rise, it is enthusiastically embraced, regardless of what its other effects may be. But does anyone think that we should raise test scores at all costs? If beating the kids made their test scores go up, is that all you would want to know about the practice?

Ultimately, test scores are just a proxy for something much harder to measure: whether we have achieved our educational goals by the time our kids reach adulthood. But as soon as you put it that way, you realize how pathetically inadequate those proxies are. Education has lots of goals: we want our kids to be proficient in reading and math, but we also want them to grow up to be independent, to be intellectually curious, to be appropriately skeptical, to be self-supporting, to be mentally and physically healthy, to participate willingly and capably in democratic self-government, to be ethical, and assertive, and honest, and brave, and kind, and fair, and to lead lives they find fulfilling. Many of these goals are impossible to assess empirically, especially over the long-term. Even if we could measure them, a rise in one value would often come at the expense of another. Trying to raise test scores too single-mindedly, for example, can produce stressed-out unhappy people who dislike learning. Similarly, an exclusive focus on reducing disciplinary referrals can turn schools into obedience training academies that teach authoritarian values. Where is the assessment of those effects?

“Evidence-based education” has an army of enthusiasts, but I have never heard a response from any of them on this basic point. There are gaping holes in their evidence, and they don’t seem to care at all. Yes, analysis is easier if you don’t hold more than one value in your head at a time, and if you don’t ask any questions that you don’t want to know the answer to. But is that the sign of a scientific mindset, of a respect for evidence and empiricism?

What is the response?
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Quote of the week archive

I’ve had fun running the little sidebar titled, “Quote of the Week” – though I’ve used the term “week” very loosely – and have been meaning to create a post that would serve as an archive for the quotes that have appeared there. This post will now officially serve that purpose; I’ll update it each time I change the quote, and I’ll put a link to it in the sidebar.

Conscious that the internet overflows with spurious quotes, I make a genuine effort to source these quotes and link to the source whenever possible.

One of the first quotes I ran here was from fellow Iowa Citian Marilynne Robinson, a great defender of humane values in education. Her most recent book came out last month, and it led me to collect several new quotations from her recent essays. As much as I like the quotes, though, I don’t really want to turn the sidebar over to Robinson for a full two months. So I’m going to kick off the quote archive by running a new Robinson quote each day this week (though I may be using the word “day” loosely).

For the full quote archive, click on the “Read More” link.

It’s about time

From today’s Press-Citizen:

Changes in Store for Elementary Schools

As part of a series of changes being introduced in local elementary schools, Iowa City schoolchildren will get a full thirty minutes to eat their lunches every day, School Superintendent Steve Murley announced this week.

“We concluded that we owe it to our kids to give them time to eat a nutritious, unhurried meal with their friends,” Murley said.

The change came in response to increasing concerns expressed by parents and community members about the elementary school lunch period.

Some parents said that, taking transition time into account, their children had as little as ten minutes to sit and eat lunch.

Murley said that the school board, reacting to community sentiment, had made the change a priority.

According to Murley, building administrators had resisted the move, citing concerns about the loss of instructional time and its possible effects on student achievement.

“I reassured them that the district would stand behind their efforts to ensure that school is about more than just maximizing class time and test scores,” Murley said.

“Some things can’t be measured by tests,” Murley said. “Our district believes that real education has to start by treating kids with dignity and respect, as we all want to be treated.”

Murley added that there was no reason to believe that a longer lunch period would lower student achievement.

Murley also said that school principals would be discouraged from enforcing overly harsh rules about noise and “voice levels” in the lunchrooms.

“You can go overboard in trying to stop kids from being kids, and it can end up being counterproductive,” Murley said. “Our goal isn’t to produce docile, submissive robots.”

“Seriously, sometimes I don’t know what these people are smoking,” he added.

Finally, Murley said that the district was considering abandoning its use of the Positive Behavioral Supports and Interventions (PBIS) program.

The program requires teachers to distribute frequent material rewards, such as bracelets made of colorful string, to students who display good behavior.

“It was a flop,” Murley said. “Parents complained about it, teachers resisted it, and then we messed up the recordkeeping so we couldn’t even assess what effect it had.”

“To top it off, it taught the worst possible values,” he added. “‘Do as I say so you can get a toy.’ Education by insult. Then we complain when the kids don’t respect us -- D’oh!” Murley said, hitting his forehead in an apparent imitation of television cartoon character Homer Simpson.

“We would have stopped it months ago, but then we would have had to give back the grant money,” Murley said. “Man, we learned our lesson with that one.”

Alas, I’m only kidding, of course. Happy April 1 anyway.
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