Humans are humans

Between the paleo diets and the spate of articles on child-rearing and education (examples here, here, and here), hunters and gatherers are apparently getting their fifteen minutes of fame. I tend to take these articles with a grain of salt, since I don’t know how idealized their portrayal of hunter-gatherer life is, or how much of it can transfer over to life in our very different society. On the whole, though, I’m glad people are writing them. I think it’s nice to be reminded that there are a lot of ways to live in the world. When the box is so small that our school administrators can’t even imagine giving the kids ten more minutes at lunch every day, anything that helps people think outside it is all to the good..

The Designated Patient

Psychotherapists sometimes talk among themselves about the phenomenon of the “Designated Patient.” Parents will bring a child in for therapy, and before long the therapists realize that the entire family is dysfunctional, and the child’s problems are just a function of the larger family environment. But the other family members can deal with the situation only by conceiving of that particular child as the one with the mental health problem—the Designated Patient. “If that kid gets squared away, the family tells itself, everything will be great,” one therapist writes. “It’s that kid who has the problems, not us.”

It seems to me that education has become the Designated Patient in this country. Poverty, decreasing social mobility, the persistence of racial prejudice, the concentration of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands—those aren’t problems we can face. But if we could just get those standardized test scores up . . .

In the classroom, the Designated Patient is the kid who can’t sit still and be compliant. Never mind what the classroom environment is like, or how realistic and age-appropriate the expectations are, or how unengaging the curriculum is, or how little recess or lunch time the kid gets. Something’s wrong with that kid, and the school’s job is to fix him.

At least in psychotherapy, the designation of one person as the “patient” sometimes succeeds in giving the rest of the family a face-saving way of getting the therapy they need. If only the same were true with education.

Related post here.
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Board approves diversity policy

So the school board voted 4-3 to approve the second reading (of three) of the diversity policy, but only after board members emphasized that any major changes (for example, in attendance areas) would require further board approval. I think that’s a good outcome; my main concern was that the board was delegating too much policymaking power to the superintendent. There’s no harm in having the superintendent propose a plan that would then need board approval. The drafters should have made that clear in the wording of the policy.

On the other hand, that means the policy is effectively just lip service until the board approves an actual plan. The board’s not bound by the policy in any meaningful sense; future boards, or even this board, can choose to follow it or to ignore, amend, or repeal it. It’s easy to imagine “listening posts” ten years from now in which speakers say, “It’s been ten years since the board adopted its diversity policy, and we still haven’t seen any changes.”

I do think the policy’s supporters missed (another) opportunity to present a vision of how the district could implement the policy. Board members who supported the plan went out of their way to say that they did not intend to use large-scale busing of kids to meet the diversity goals. Some made statements (reported here and here) that seemed to imply that any changes in boundaries would be grandfathered—though it’s not clear how that’s consistent with the explicit deadlines contained in the policy. In any event, by only telling us what they wouldn’t do, and not what they would do, proponents of the policy unnecessarily allowed its opponents to define it.
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Devil’s in the details

I don’t know whether I support a diversity plan, because I haven’t seen one.
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Where’s the beef?

I started to write a post titled “Unanswered questions about the proposed diversity policy,” but the policy is so unclear, it’s hard even to formulate the questions. I understand the problem the proposal is designed to address; I don’t need much convincing to believe that concentrating large proportions of low-income families into a few elementary schools has a negative effect on the educational experience in those schools. What I don’t understand is what the proposed policy actually does.

On the one hand, the policy requires the superintendent to achieve specific diversity goals (bringing the percentages of kids from low-income households to within a certain narrow range in each school) by specific dates. It doesn’t explicitly rule out any particular means of doing so (except creating new non-contiguous attendance areas), though it does contain some language suggesting that “non-voluntary movement” should not be the first resort. On its face, it requires the superintendent to meet those goals no matter what it takes to do so.

(Caveat: Much of the policy is so vaguely worded that you can’t tell who is supposed to do what. The writing teacher in me can’t resist noting: I counted at least twenty-two passive voice constructions in twenty-five sentences.)

On the other hand, the most readily imaginable strategies for meeting those goals—such as setting up magnet schools or redrawing district boundaries—would require school board approval. So what’s the point of requiring the superintendent to reach the goals? If the district doesn’t meet the goals, the board can have only itself to blame, not the superintendent.

What, then, would the policy accomplish? It can’t bind future boards, or even this board. If a board someday has the votes to violate the policy, it necessarily has the votes to repeal or amend the policy. Isn’t it just lip service until the board chooses to back it up with real action? In that case, why not skip the policy and propose the real action?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to debate a real plan, rather than allowing everyone’s imaginations to run wild about a vague policy that barely enables anyone to do anything without further board approval?
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Sideshows

Now people are upset that a private citizen, Ed Stone, had extensive input into the wording of our school district’s diversity policy. “When did we start letting constituents write district policy?” one parent group asked. “One person (whose expertise is not equity or diversity) should not have been the sole author of language for such an impactful policy,” another commenter argued.

First of all, there’s nothing wrong with the role Stone has played. Elected officials can rely as much or as little as they like on whatever informal advisors they choose. There’s no reason to think Stone bribed anyone, or that he has anything to gain personally from the policy. (He’s an ophthalmology professor.) He’s an activist, and you have to assume that the board members who consulted him agree with him.

More importantly, who cares who wrote the policy? The identity of the drafter can’t possibly tell us anything about the merits of the policy that isn’t apparent from the policy itself.

Meanwhile, in response to the charges of improper influence, Stone “noted that the principals of the west-side secondary schools sent letters to parents that he felt were meant to stir up opposition to the diversity policy. ‘I would be much more concerned about that unfair political advocacy,’ he said.” Ugh. Wouldn’t the time spent accusing people of “unfair advocacy” be better spent articulating arguments for and against the policy on its merits?
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Merits, not motives

As I wrote yesterday, some people have reacted to our school district’s proposed diversity policy by questioning the motives—or, ominously, the “ulterior motives”—of the people who disagree with them.

I won’t say motives never matter; if you’re relying on someone’s expertise, for example, it helps to know whether a conflict of interest might bring that expert’s credibility into question. But compulsively focusing on a speaker’s motive very quickly turns into an ad hominem distraction from the actual substance of his or her argument.

So, just a reminder: The soundness of a policy argument does not depend at all on the motives of the person making it. An argument stands or falls on its own merits, regardless of whether it comes from the mouth of a hero or a villain. A bad motive doesn’t discredit a good policy, and a good motive won’t save a bad one.

People seem to find it very tempting, when they get worked up about political issues, to talk about motives or personalities or credentials or scandals or behind-the-scenes maneuvering—just about anything other than actually engage the substance of an argument. If that were less true, maybe fewer people would get freaked out by the disagreement and conflict that are an unavoidable part of the democratic process.

(Cartoon © 2013 I. Samuelson for A Blog About School.)
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Mother may I

Maria Houser Conzemius reports that today’s school board “listening post” on the proposed diversity policy

reminded me of the game “Mother May I.” The board tried to exercise far too much control over who talked and what they said. They insisted on alternating “pro” and “con” speakers on the diversity policy. They demanded respect, though I found nothing wrong with one speaker say that he didn’t trust the board to do what the board says it will do.

Can alternating between pro and con speakers—thus making someone’s permission to speak at a public meeting contingent on the viewpoint they’re planning to express—possibly be consistent with the First Amendment? Does it depend on whether the pro and con sides were roughly numerically equal? Is there any evidence they were? What about speakers who were neither pro nor con?

The school board’s discomfort with free expression never fails to surprise me. For crying out loud, just suck it up and let people talk. Related post here.
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It’s all political. What’s wrong with that?

Apparently there is another sub-controversy swirling around our school board’s consideration of a proposed diversity policy: whether the proposal is “political.” “Charges of politicking are going both directions,” one article reported. “Many people see an ulterior motive at play, one that is more political in nature.”

When people complained that the school board was moving too fast on the policy, the board chair said

that although she wants an expedited process, it’s not a political issue for her, and she’s disappointed it may be for some people.

“Because when you’re talking about students’ education, it should not be political,” said [board chair Marla] Swesey, a retired teacher. “It should be what is right for student achievement and what’s not.”

Some parents “view the diversity policy as a political document as much as an educational plan,” one administrator said; another said “he did not see politics at play.” A parent who supports the policy said that

it was wrong to suggest it’s a political tool.

“That’s offensive to me,” she said. “I think that there are a lot of people in this district who aren’t thinking globally. They’re only thinking about their selfish interests.”

It’s perfectly reasonable for people to disagree and to criticize opposing viewpoints. But to suggest that some views on a policy issue are “political,” while others are not, is just a semantic attempt to glorify one’s own viewpoint at the expense of others’, and a nonsensical one to boot. “Political” is not a pejorative term. Politics is the only (non-violent) means we have to work out clashes between different sets of values and interests. It inevitably involves disagreement and conflict, and that’s good. To say that education should not “be political” is to come awfully close to saying that it should not be democratically controlled—a sentiment that seems to be more widespread every day, and that is reflected in the board’s apparent willingness to delegate policy questions to an unelected administrator. I’d much rather have school policy decided by politics than by any alternative I can think of.
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Diversity policy evades the hard questions

I’m outsourcing this one to the Patch.

Related post here.
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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.
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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!
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No candor allowed

Rumor has it that the word has come down from our school district’s central administration that principals should not talk to parents (or anyone) about the proposed diversity policy being considered by the school board—even in response to questions—or that if they do, they should stay on the script provided by the district.

We must be protected from hearing the actual thoughts and opinions that our school employees have about a proposed policy change—for our own good!

If the rumor is true, I’m hoping that the district at least had the sense to confine that directive to remarks made on school grounds or using school channels of communication. Public employees, of course, have a constitutional right to express their opinions about issues of public concern. Somehow, though, if I were a school principal—even more so if I were a teacher—I’d feel very reluctant to speak out about this policy, and would fear employment repercussions for doing so. Closely policing staff members for “against the rules” speech will inevitably chill protected speech, too.

It’s not just the speaker who suffers in that circumstance: the public suffers because of the information that is withheld from it. What is the harm that the district is trying to prevent that justifies chilling the flow of information to the public about a proposed policy?

Related post here.
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What a crazy radical

Here’s Noam Chomsky on two concepts of education:



The kind of education he’s advocating for here has been essentially outlawed in the United States, at least in public schools. Even if everyone in your school district shared these values, there isn’t a state in the union that would permit you to put them into practice, because they do not acknowledge raising standardized test scores as the ultimate goal of education, and do not concede the importance of instructing all kids on a standardized body of knowledge (i.e., a Common Core).

Because some people (for example, me) prefer reading text to watching video, I’ll put the transcript below the fold.

Fiction about school

I find that the more I read about education, the more I need a good book. For me, one of the pleasures of reading good writing of any kind, and especially fiction, is that it’s a respite from the falseness and emptiness of so much of what we hear and read, from politicians and bureaucrats and advertisers and public relations departments and much of the media, and so on. (A teacher of mine called fiction “the last textured place.”) A few pages of Virginia Woolf can go a long way to cleansing the system of phrases like “increasing achievement” or “student success” or “parent-teacher bidirectional communications.”

It seems to me that good fiction tends to treat the enterprise of school with much greater skepticism than we generally hear elsewhere. Maybe that’s inevitable, given the one-dimensionally sunny way in which education is usually discussed; just about any complication of the usual portrayal would require some darkening. The other day I mentioned The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Charles Baxter’s short story “Gryphon”—both pretty dark. George Orwell’s essay “Such, Such Were the Joys” also comes to mind. Then there’s Donald Barthelme’s great short story “The School.”

Readers: any recommendations?
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Help wanted

As I wrote yesterday, my kids’ elementary and junior high schools are both hiring new principals next year. There are a lot of qualities I’d like to see in a principal. They have little to do with whether he or she can maximize test scores and control behavior, and a lot to do with respecting kids and cultivating a humane educational environment. We had a temporary interim principal at our elementary school for the last couple of months who was particularly well-liked by the kids, and seemed to have a great rapport with them. I don’t know much else about him, but that seemed like an awfully good sign. I was sorry to see him go.

Unfortunately, there’s another quality that I’m beginning to think is crucial: seniority. A principal with some seniority can push back against some of the nonsense that comes down from above, and can serve as a real advocate for the school’s families. But seniority is just what you’re unlikely to get when you hire a new principal. When the new hire starts at our elementary school next year, he or she will be the sixth different principal (counting interims) at the school in seven years, which itself might explain a lot.
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The cogs seem less engaged lately

Gallup reports that kids grow less engaged in school as the years go on:

Nearly eight in 10 elementary students who participated are engaged with school. By middle school that falls to about six in 10 students.

And by high school, only four in 10 students qualify as engaged.

The executive director of Gallup Education, Brandon Busteed, who is scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the Business Summit on Education Reform in Des Moines today, had this reaction:

Imagine what our economy would look like today if nearly eight in 10 of our high school graduates were engaged — just as they were in elementary school.

Could it be that looking at kids primarily in terms of economic stimulus is part of the problem?
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Government by groupthink

The more I read Roger Schank, the more I agree with him:

I believe that every single subject taught in high school is a mistake.

. . .

Here are most of the subjects you take in high school, listed one by one, with an explanation about why there is no point in taking them.

You can click through to read his reviews of high school Chemistry, History, Biology, Economics, Physics, and French. Here he is on English:

There is exactly one thing worth paying attention to in English. Not Dickens (unless of course you like Dickens.) Not Moby Dick, or Tennyson, or Hawthorne, or Shakespeare (unless of course, you like reading them.) What matters is learning how to write well. A good English teacher would give you daily writing assignments and help you get better at writing (and speaking). By writing assignments I don’t mean term papers. I mean writing about things you care about and learning to defend your arguments. Learning to enjoy reading matters as well but that would mean picking your own books to read and not having to write a book report. Lots of luck with that.

He concludes:

So here’s my advice: Learn what matters to you. If you want to graduate from high school, go ahead and memorize a lot of nonsense but don’t expect it to matter a bit when high school is over.

Even if you disagree with him, isn’t it true that inertia—“we’ve always done it that way”—explains about ninety-nine percent of the high school curriculum? That inertia is increasingly worse as a result of the devotion to standardization and uniformity: we have to teach Algebra because it’s on the SAT, and we have to teach Chemistry because it’s in the Common Core, and every state has to follow the same standards, so the only way you can meaningfully change the curriculum at your local school is if you get the entire country to change its curriculum, too.

Why not let a school district pursue Schank’s program if it wants to? Is he so obviously wrong that not a single community in America should be permitted to adopt any of his proposed policies? When did we trade in “laboratories of democracy” for “government by groupthink”?

(Thanks to Sheila Stewart for the link.)
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Teachers and gender in the popular imagination

In her post yesterday about teachers and sexiness, NorthTOmom suggests that readers “Google ‘sexy teacher’ and see what comes up.” This got me thinking about my post about the “cool teacher.” So I did an experiment: first I did a Google image search for “sexy teacher.” (Suggestion: Do not do this at work.) The results were overwhelmingly female. Here was the top result:

Then I did a search for “cool teacher.” The results were much more male, and here was the top result:

Maybe that’s nothing more than a reflection of the gendered connotations our society gives to the words “cool” and “sexy.” But I also stumbled across this video of the “Top Ten Movie Teachers.” In reality, about three-quarters of public school teachers are female. Quite the opposite for teachers in popular movies, apparently:





What is going on in that warped collective mind of ours? And how does it affect the school experience?
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The unelected administrator hired by an unelected administrator appointed by a deferential school board elected by a tiny fraction of the public

Principals are not very high in the school system hierarchy, but I think they can make a big difference in the day-to-day experience of a school. The hiring of principals is entirely within the control of the local school district, so it would seem to present a good (and rare) opportunity for the district to assert its sense of the community’s educational values. As I understand it, our school board members don’t get involved in filling particular vacancies—that’s for the superintendent—but they could try to set the overall tone for what characteristics the superintendent should be looking for. I don’t get the sense they do, though. Instead—as with so many school policy issues—there seems to be a refusal to acknowledge that there are even any value choices to be made.

This year, our district is hiring new principals at my kids’ elementary school and at our junior high. When I emailed the district to ask whether parents would have any opportunities for input into the selection, the Human Relations Director explained that “The district will be inviting one to two parents to sit on the interview team during the selection process for each administrative opening.” When I asked how those parents would be chosen, he replied, “We are going to work with each school’s PTO.” I then asked who does the actual choosing—the PTO or the district—and his response was that

While the district does reserve the right to make the final decision regarding the selection of individuals for the interview teams, the selection process for parent/community participants will be a collaborative effort between the school PTO and the administration. We will be sending more specific guidelines to the PTOs when we are closer to the interview period.

He agreed to send me those guidelines when they become available.

I suppose any parent participation is better than none, but that process hardly seems like a recipe for ensuring that the choice of principals reflects community values.

Since neither you nor I will probably wind up on the selection committee, let’s put our two cents in here. More posts soon.
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Uncommonly good

I don’t spend as much time browsing in bookstores as I used to, but I do look forward to the terrific used book sale held by the Shelter House here every year, with seemingly endless quantities of books. As the shelves get depleted, volunteers bring out more books to fill the spaces. The fiction is broken up by genre, and the non-fiction by topic. I love the book sale, but buying books, even when they’re cheap, is always such a gamble: just knowing the genre or topic is such a poor indicator of whether a book is worth reading. Every year, I think to myself: If only they divided them up by “Really Well-Written Books” and “All Others.” I’d be interested in just about anything in the first category, regardless of what it was about.

When I read about how the Common Core standards are leading textbook publishers (and therefore schools) to enforce specific ratios of non-fiction to fiction and poetry (to the disadvantage of the latter two, apparently), I have pretty much the same reaction. Not only does mandating a ratio seems patently silly, but that particular taxonomy doesn’t at all reflect what people who love to read actually value about reading. Something tells me I’d hate to see how the assigned readings in school break down between Really Well-Written Books and All Others.
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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.
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“Contracts” with kids aren’t contracts

The latest thing to go viral is an eighteen-point “contract” that a mother insisted her 13-year-old son sign before she would let him have a cell phone. I don’t really have a problem with a parent who insists on certain rules before getting her kid a phone, since she’s under no obligation to get him a phone at all (though I do agree with most of what this parent has to say). But, as someone who taught Contracts to first-year law students for years, I’m awfully tired of people dressing up adult authority over children in the language of “contract,” especially because, in many instances—for example, with the bogus behavioral “contracts” foisted upon kids in many schools—the child is given no meaningful choice in the matter. (See this post.)

These parents and teachers might be less quick to boast about their contracts if they knew more about the actual law of contracts. The general rule in America is that contracts with minors are voidable at the option of the minor. That means the child can enforce the adult’s contractual obligations, but the adult cannot enforce the contract against the child. If an adult, for example, sells a car to a minor, and fails to turn over the car, the minor can sue to enforce the contract. But if the adult performs her side, the minor can still change his mind and back out. If the minor, for example, fails to make the payments on the car, the adult cannot hold him to the contract, so long as the minor returns the car—or what’s left of it. “A minor who has smashed an automobile or a house trailer need only return the wreck” to be excused from his own obligations under the contract, according to one authoritative treatise. “Even if a minor has squandered or destroyed what has been received, the loss is regarded as ‘the result of the very improvidence and indiscretion of infancy which the law has always in mind.’” There are a few exceptions to the rule, and individual states vary, but the general rule is still true in the wide majority of states.

In other words, one of the dumber things you can do, legally, is make a contract with a child. If this particular parent really thinks of her arrangement as a legal contract, she will be disappointed to learn that it is all downside, no upside for her. But of course everyone knows it’s not really a contract. If anything, it’s the opposite: if the kid reneges, the mother will take away the phone, but if the mother reneges, the kid has no recourse. It’s just the same old exercise of one-sided parental authority, no more or less legitimate than it ever was, aggrandizing label notwithstanding.
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O Captain, My Captain

Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society

Everyone has a story about the cool teacher: the refreshingly unconventional one, the memorably irreverent one, the one who broke the rules, the iconoclast.

It recently occurred to me that, way more often than not, the teacher in those stories is male. I don’t think I’m imagining that, though you might convince me otherwise. Two counterexamples that come to mind are both from literature: Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Charles Baxter’s short story “Gryphon.” But the portrayal of the female teachers in those works is considerably darker than that of the typical “cool teacher”; in the former she’s revealed to be a fascist, and in the latter she’s insane.

Hypothesis: women do not have the same societal permission to be unconventional and irreverent in the workplace, and have to worry much more about being called unprofessional. I’ve heard women in academia, for example, say that they have to worry more about projecting an air of authority in the classroom, or about being “tough” enough that they don’t lose the students’ respect. I think it is much easier, for example, for a male professor to allow students to call him by his first name than it is for a female professor.

Is there truth to that hypothesis? If so, what effect does it have on K-12 schools, which are staffed predominantly by women?
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Facts on the ground

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

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

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

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

Continuing this morning’s topic: The mindset of the district’s engagement website is nicely encapsulated by its current “Featured Topic,” a poll about the Revenue Purpose Statement that we’ll be voting on in February:

Is the information on our website helpful in understanding why the District is asking for the Revenue Purpose Statement to be reauthorized on February 5th?

__ Yes, the revenue purpose statement information provided by the school district is helpful.

__ I would like additional or clarifying information regarding the revenue purpose statement.

It’s okay to offer a choice starting with “Yes.” But “No” sounds so, well, negative. It might even be seen as critical – or disrespectful – or [gasp] inappropriate!
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Broken engagement

I got a kick out of our district’s new e-newsletter, The District Dialogue. Despite the title, there is no way to comment on the articles. Maybe, as another parent said to me, “they are confusing the word dialogue with the similar word monologue.”

The newsletter directs people to the district’s engagement website to “join the conversation.” It’s a great site to go to if you want your dialogue to be channeled, micromanaged, and straitjacketed. (See posts here and here.) It’s the kind of “dialogue” you’d expect from people who really like multiple-choice tests. Unsurprisingly, the “conversation” at the site has dwindled to nearly nothing, only a few months after the site began.

Of course, the internet and social media provide endless opportunities for people to connect with each other and discuss issues in whatever way they like, sans the self-serving paternalism. Why go to the baby pool when the ocean is right there?

Karen W. has a great post up about what meaningful engagement does and doesn’t look like. Call me a Luddite, but I’d be happy just to have a bulletin board. I’ve often wondered what would happen if I were simply to post a sign on the wall at our elementary school. Nothing big – maybe just a sheet of paper protesting the short lunch periods, posted where parents dropping off their kids would see it. Do you think the school would let it stay up? If not, what would their rationale for removing it be?
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It’s not too late!

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

It’s so common now to hear people of a certain age (roughly mine) half-joking about the diagnosis they would have gotten if they had been children today. It’s usually ADHD or Asperger’s, which I suppose makes sense, given that those diagnoses (as labels) didn’t exist when we were kids, and have more recently been diagnosed with increasing frequency. I say people are “half-joking” because it’s never quite clear whether they’re just engaging in comic hyperbole, or whether they’re actually indignant that they would qualify for a diagnosis, or indignant about not having gotten one. Many of these people are successful in their jobs and happy in their personal lives. Most of them, in my experience, are men.

The joke is clearly true, at least as to many people (though not necessarily those who are joking about it). Many of us would have been diagnosed and treated for mental disorders if we had grown up today. There are, of course, many people who have been diagnosed as adults, and I assume that many of them are glad to finally have received treatment. Yet there must also be many, many adults who would have been diagnosed and treated as children under today’s standards, but, having been born too soon, have gone through life without a diagnosis – and have managed, for better or worse.

I don’t doubt that some kids are better off with treatment, but when I see the numbers – one out of eight boys has ADHD? – it’s hard for me not to think that we must be overdiagnosing kids. (See this post.) In any event, what a peculiar phenomenon: a big chunk of society, having grown up largely without diagnoses, watching as the rest of society is diagnosed and treated at much higher rates. What should we make of it? Does the undiagnosed generation see itself as worse off for having been born too soon? Or would they be reluctant to trade places with the today’s kids?
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Blogathon ground rules

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

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

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

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

Hoover Elementary School here in Iowa City has had a longstanding problem with cockroaches, and the school district has recently been trying to address it with a stepped-up regimen of pesticide treatments. Another parent asked the school for information about the pesticides, and I thought it made sense to post that information here, in case others were curious.

School staff identified the pesticides as Talstar (information here and here), Zoecon Gentrol IGR Concentrate (information here and here), and Suspend SC (information here and here).

I know that people can hardly function in modern life without being exposed to all kinds of synthetic chemicals, and that we generally have little choice but to trust the government to ensure that we aren’t harmed by them. I don’t have any reason to think that these pesticides are creating any health risks; nor do I feel capable of evaluating that question. Especially because the spraying is occurring more frequently than would be typical (every couple of weeks, from what I gather), I figure it’s better just to put the information out there. If any of you have any particular knowledge of this field, feel free to chime in in the comments.
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Equity: Thinking Beyond Facilities (Guest Post)

Intra-district equity is about to become a hot topic here in Iowa City, as the school board appears on the verge of approving an equity policy aimed at balancing out socioeconomic disparities among district schools’ student populations. I asked Karen W., who frequently comments here, for her thoughts about how curricular choices might also raise equity issues. This is her response.

The upcoming Revenue Purpose Statement election gives the community another opportunity to revisit the issue of what equity requires with regard to facilities. Certainly every child deserves to attend school in a well-maintained facility that is not overcrowded. And it is hard to argue with the notion that each school in the district ought to have similar amenities (air conditioning, technology, library collections, and adequate playground equipment, for example). Whether equity requires new buildings or upgrading current facilities, and whether equity requires adjusting attendance boundaries to balance student demographics, are issues that need to be publicly debated and resolved by school board members.

However those issues are resolved, I hope that the public conversation about equity in the district doesn’t end with facilities because instructional and curricular decisions can also contribute to inequity within a district.

My husband had a conversation with a recently retired teacher (not from around here, by the way) about seeing more and more job applicants unable to sign their own names to job applications. The teacher, defending not teaching cursive, said that cursive is not needed in a world of computers and that teaching cursive “is a good place for parents to step up.”

Maybe being able to sign one’s own name is less of a hallmark of literacy than it used to be, although I wouldn’t personally gamble on that, so let us consider that a district might have a policy of not systematically teaching phonics or grammar, not requiring “rote memorization” of math facts, or de-emphasizing paper and pencil proficiency with traditional math algorithms. Having those policies does not make phonics, grammar, memorization of math facts, or paper and pencil proficiency with traditional math algorithms inessential to later success in reading, writing, and mathematics. But it does shift the burden to families to recognize that their children may need help in these areas and to effectively provide that help.

So when decisions like these are made, such as not to teach X or to teach X in this way and not that way, I think equity requires us to consider the consequences for children whose parents are either unaware of the need to “step up” or whose parents are unable to “step up” for any reason.

What does “teach” mean?

I’m always struck by how people use the word “teach” to mean such very different things. Sometimes, as Karen W. points out, people act as if “teach” just means “tell.” As a teacher (of law students), I know there have been lots of times when what I “taught” did not coincide with what my students learned.

But even if you focus on the desired end, “teach” seems to have at least two very different meanings:

1. To help someone learn something that he or she wants to learn.

2. To make someone learn something regardless of whether he or she wants to learn it.

There are better and worse ways of doing the former, but it’s not rocket science. Certain qualities help – being good at whatever it is your student wants to learn to do, being able to put yourself in your student’s shoes, being a good listener, patience – but if someone really wants to learn something, you’re already most of the way there.

The second definition describes a much more difficult enterprise. Yet we’ve come to see education almost exclusively in this sense, at the expense of the much simpler activity described by the first definition. More and more, education is now about deciding what kids must learn and then making them learn it, with no regard for what they might be interested in learning, or whether they retain any interest in learning at all.

So many of the features of our educational system – the endless curricular fads, the packaged programs, the reward charts and stickers and behavior management systems, the obsession with high-stakes standardized testing, the movement toward uniform mandatory curricular standards, the authoritarian discipline, the infantilizing micromanagement, the ed school empirical studies, the teacher training programs, the layer upon layer of administrators, you name it – exist almost entirely to serve this second function. Billions of dollars and immeasurable amounts of time and energy are spent on it. Yet, as far as I can see, trying to make people learn against their will – whether it be through outright coercion or through tricks or bribes or elaborate performances, etc. – remains a low-percentage enterprise, not to mention one with many unwelcome side-effects. This seems particularly true when the measure is not how students do on the test at the end of the unit, but whether they retain knowledge and understanding and skills into adulthood.

I don’t find a world in which we simply offered people an education, rather than forcing it on them, as unimaginable as most people do. But regardless, do we have to go quite so far in the opposite direction as we’ve gone?

Part two here.
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Junk food as a reward, run amok

Not long ago I posted about Ronald McDonald’s visit to my kids’ school. Now our district has a new program under which kids who have perfect attendance for a certain amount of time get gift certificates for ice cream at Dairy Queen.

Kids who stay home sick are disqualified from the prize. So the program gives kids who have contagious illnesses an incentive to come to school, and penalizes those who don’t. When one parent complained to a school administrator about the unfairness of penalizing kids for being sick, the administrator replied that kids need to learn that life isn’t always fair.

The program violates the district’s own Wellness Policy, which prohibits the use of junk food as a reward for academic performance or good behavior. (Nutritional information on Dairy Queen products is available here. Even the basic vanilla ice cream cone and the plain vanilla shake violate the nutritional requirements that the Wellness Policy puts on foods that are used as rewards. At least one child got a gift certificate for a hot dog, which also violates the policy.) The program also undermines the district’s own policies requiring sick kids to stay home (see page 7-8 here).

As is so often the case with the district’s use of material rewards, the program sends a negative, materialistic, anti-educational message: that school is so aversive that you need to be bribed to attend, and that ice cream is what every normal person really wants.

But apparently it didn’t occur to any of our district administrators that this program might not be such a great idea. Junk food, policy violations, advertising to kids, behavioral manipulation, contagious illness – what’s not to like?
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Buildings, budgets, boundaries: what’s missing?

Borlaug Elementary School, Iowa City, built in 2012

One-room schoolhouse, Johnson County, Iowa, date unknown (source)

A couple of years ago, people in our school district were intensely engaged in debating possible boundary changes between attendance areas. Now, we seem to have moved on (after making only very minimal boundary changes) to the topic of improving facilities and possibly building new schools. Having been unable to prioritize its building needs without angering large groups of people, the school board will apparently propose a bond issue that purports to fund everyone’s desires at once.

I didn’t write much here about the issue of boundary changes, and I expect I won’t write much about the facilities issue either. It’s not that I don’t think the issue is important; many of the arguments for facilities improvements are very persuasive. (I’m not sure whether to be happy or sad that our school’s roach infestation might get addressed in the district’s long-term plan.) But so much energy goes into discussing buildings and boundaries, and so little into discussing what goes on inside those buildings.

Will the conversation ever turn to whether we are offering a meaningful, humane education? To whether the district is too myopically focused on standardized testing, and whether it has taken a wrong turn with its increasingly authoritarian emphasis on behavior and discipline, and whether its curriculum is too lock-step and unengaging, and whether its demands on the kids are justified and developmentally appropriate? To the values that the district stands for, and its understanding of how people learn, and its conception of what it means to be well-educated?

Facilities aren’t entirely irrelevant to those questions. But given the choice between continuing our district’s current educational approach in shiny new high-tech buildings and pursuing a meaningful, humane educational experience in run-down World War II Quonset huts, I’d take the Quonset huts in a heartbeat.
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The “streetlight effect” and the Great and Powerful Oz

Esther Quintero sums up the misguided use of data that is the central characteristic of so much of today’s educational policymaking:

Remember the parable about the drunk man searching for his wallet under a streetlight? When someone comes to help, they ask “Are you sure you dropped it here?” The drunk says, “I probably dropped it in the street, but the light is bad there, so it’s easier to look over here.” In science, this phenomenon – that is, researchers looking for answers where the data are better, “rather than where the truth is most likely to lie” – has been called the “streetlight effect.”

Quintero questions whether people are “develop[ing] the ideas to fit the data they have, rather than finding the data to test the most important ideas.” She concludes that:

Excessive faith in data crunching as a tool for making decisions has interfered with the important task of asking the fundamental questions in education, such as whether we are looking for answers in the right places, and not just where it is easy (e.g., standardized test data).

I think Quintero’s post is terrific (read the whole thing), but I wish she had gone further. Why are so many people attracted to using data in this utterly unscientific way? Quintero generously assumes that everyone is acting in good faith in trying to bring data to bear on policy, and concludes that many people just aren’t thinking deeply about what data can tell us. I wish she had considered whether some people might be using data for other purposes. Yes, if your purpose is to shed light on policy questions, much of today’s discussion of data is very misguided. But if your purpose is to justify preconceived conclusions, and to deter laypeople from examining them closely, and to squelch discussion, then it’s enough that your data look impressive on the surface and be accompanied by an academic-looking citation. Some people use data as a light; others use it as a club.

Are our educational policymakers stumbling drunkenly in the wrong area, or are they more like the Wizard of Oz, fraudulently extracting allegiance with smoke and mirrors? Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
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Maybe try standing for something?

Project Vote Smart is a non-profit organization that asks candidates and elected officials about their positions on issues and then posts the responses online, to enable people to vote intelligently. When Vote Smart sent its issue questionnaire to Iowa legislative candidates, a Democratic Minority Leader – thus presumably a member of the Iowa House, where Democrats are in the minority – responded, “I will not answer your questions and will be advising Iowa Democrats not to either.” Almost nobody answered the questionnaire.

When I sent a much smaller set of questions about education policy to Iowa legislative candidates, another House Democrat responded, “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.” Almost nobody answered the questionnaire.

This morning, the Iowa Democrats are . . . still the House minority. On the morning after you lose, wouldn’t you rather not wonder whether it was because you refused to tell anyone your positions on issues they care about, and chose instead to run a vapid, content-free campaign?

UPDATE: I emailed Vote Smart to see which legislator actually said “I will not answer your questions and will be advising Iowa Democrats not to either.” It turns out it was a Democratic state representative named David Schrader, and that the quote is from some years ago, not from this session. Nonetheless, it’s clear from the other quote above (which was made directly to me this year) that the same message went out to this year’s Democratic candidates.
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New “engagement” looking a lot like old imperviousness

Our school district has now “closed” the school lunch discussion thread on its new public engagement website. Before it closed, several people had submitted posts in favor of giving kids more time for lunch, and those posts had received far more “seconds” than any other proposals on the site – one of them receiving 32 votes. My own proposals, “a more humane environment” and “less emphasis on reflexive obedience to get material rewards,” also received a higher-than-average number of seconds – 11 and 12, respectively.

Through some mysterious process – the engagement website is particularly convoluted – the district can put some ideas into the “Great idea!” or “Recommended to Schools” categories. Even though the school lunch thread attracted far more participants than any of the other categories, the district did not designate any of the lunch ideas “great” or “recommended.” The only “great” idea was “More Bike Racks,” and the only “recommended” idea was one promoting National Walk to School Day. Those ideas received 9 and 7 seconds, respectively.

The district did post a non-committal statement thanking people for the lunch suggestions and saying that “The district is assessing this situation and has implemented some changes in buildings to improve the situation.” None of those changes, however, involved lengthening the lunch period. Nor did the district put any of the lunch ideas into the “researching” category.

The district has still not opened any threads on curriculum, or on the proposed bond issue, or on the controversial plan for a new high school.

The public engagement site was hard to take seriously at the outset. It’s not getting any easier.
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