What are we teaching about liberty and justice? (continued)

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m concerned about authoritarian approaches to K-12 education because I’m concerned about the increasing acceptance of authoritarian values in America generally. The choices that our schools are making often seem like miniature, entry-level versions of the choices that confront our country in areas such as foreign policy, state security, and criminal justice.

Earlier this week, in a post about the now-common practice of requiring kids to get their parents’ signatures on their homework, I argued that it violates basic principles of justice and due process for a school to punish a student for the conduct of his or her parents. Also this week, the issue of the limits of the President’s authority to target and kill American citizens finally received widespread attention in the media. In a short-lived filibuster against the nominee for CIA director, one senator alluded to the drone-inflicted death of a sixteen-year-old American citizen whose father was an alleged terrorist and asked, “If you happen to be the son of a bad person, is that enough to kill you?” The next day, the Senate confirmed the CIA nominee.

In less than fifteen years, we’ve gone from a country in which torture was uniformly reviled to one in which it is commonly defended. In less than five years, we’ve gone from a country in which one party was largely united against the use of torture and indefinite warrantless detention, even during wartime, to one in which there is wide bipartisan acceptance of the idea that the President can kill American citizens without any judicial process or oversight, potentially even on American soil.

I don’t know which is the egg and which is the chicken, but if we were trying to create schools that would make students inured to the erosion of civil liberties and the expansion of unchecked state authority, it’s hard to know what we would do differently.

Related posts here, here, here, here, here, here, and throughout the site.
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Don’t sign the homework (part 2)

There is an awful lot of talk lately about “helicopter parents,” who, we’re told, hover over their children and micromanage their childhoods. Teachers, understandably, find such parents particularly bothersome. Yet I’m struck by how closely schools now hover over kids and micromanage them—and even want me to help with the hovering, way more than I want to.

For example, all three of my daughters now have teachers who require them to obtain a parent’s signature on their homework, planners, tests, and/or reading logs. My wife sits at the kitchen table in the morning as the kids bring their papers for her to sign, like secretaries presenting paperwork to the boss.

My wife is willing to sign them, but I’m not. Here are my objections:

First, the parent signature requirement robs the students of autonomy over their own school work. I want my kids’ school work to be their business. I want them to get experience with being independent and taking care of their own affairs. I think that kind of autonomy is a key ingredient in building a sense of agency and competence. I wrote more fully about that reason in part 1 of this post.

Second, it’s demeaning to make kids prove to you every day that they’ve done their homework. It sends the message that you don’t trust them to be independent, and don’t think they’re capable of handling their school work on their own. It presumes them to be slackers until they prove themselves otherwise, over and over again. It encourages them to see themselves as doing the work to satisfy others, rather than to make it their own. The many kids who would do the homework on time without this intervention are robbed of the opportunity to prove that and to take pride in it. As I wrote in part 1, I think I would have become a juvenile delinquent if my parents had insisted on policing my school work the way parents are expected to today.

Third, it elevates rule-compliance over substance. Do the homework correctly, turn it in on time—and you’ll still lose points if you haven’t gotten your parent to sign it. There are kids at our junior high who routinely get Fs on that aspect of their homework, and it affects their course grades—never mind how well they know the material. Is the grade supposed to measure what they know and can do, or how obedient they are?

Fourth, it’s presumptuous. It would be one thing if a teacher asked parents if they were interested in signing their kids’ homework all the time. I would still decline the invitation, but at least my kids wouldn’t get a misimpression of how to ask politely for someone’s assistance. Instead, the typical approach is simply to tell the kids they must get the signatures, or to tell the parents they must provide them. (For example, “You will sign the log sheet to show the reading has been completed.”) Isn’t it rude to assume that someone will not only agree with your intervention, but actively participate in it, and that you don’t even need to ask nicely?

Fifth, the practice sends bad—and factually inaccurate—messages about authority. It’s hard to think of a more basic principle of justice than the principle that the government cannot punish you for someone else’s acts. If anyone wants to explain to me how it would be constitutional for a public school to penalize a child for a parent’s refusal to sign homework, I’d like to hear it. Yet, when my wife has been away and I’ve told my kids that I won’t sign the homework, they have always been anxious about getting punished. One thing the school has taught them well: No one should ever disobey the authority figure.

I’ve written notes to each teacher explaining that I won’t sign the homework when my wife is away; fortunately, they’ve been understanding about it. But, needless to say, not every parent who doesn’t get around to signing the homework writes a note explaining why. Lots of kids are getting the impression that the teacher has authority not only over them but over their parents as well, and can punish them for their parents’ conduct if they choose. I sometimes remind my kids that the schools are there to serve the public, not the other way around. I’m afraid they don’t learn that very well in school.

Why has the practice of requiring parent signatures become so common? What does it say about what schools now value? Stay tuned for part 3.
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Freedom of association for me but not for you

Our governor has endorsed a bill that would increase the power of schools to intervene in bullying, even if it occurs off school grounds or on social media. According to the governor’s office, the bill would define bullying to include instances, for example, in which “a group of girls shun another girl”—even, apparently, if it occurs outside of school.

Last year I wrote about how our elementary school surveyed the kids about whether they had seen or experienced bullying. Its list of what would count as bullying included the item, “left out on purpose.” The list made no attempt to distinguish between a kid who maliciously talks his or her friends into shunning another person and a kid who just wants to be able to choose whom to play with in what little free time the school day offers. Instead, the survey left the kids with the impression that they’re “bullies”—and thus can be disciplined—whenever they choose not to play with someone “on purpose.”

Don’t these examples go too far? As adults, there are many acts that we see as morally commendable—caring for elderly parents, giving to charity, reporting crimes and emergencies—but which we nonetheless choose not to legally require, and instead leave to each person’s conscience. When it comes to “leaving people out on purpose” from social interactions, we not only don’t penalize that conduct, but we have an amendment to our constitution (the First) protecting it. Just as there are certain people I enjoy associating with, there are others I prefer to avoid. I suspect everyone on the staff of our elementary school is guilty of this particular form of “bullying.” If you hold a party at your house, is there anything wrong with purposely not inviting certain people? Even outright intentional shunning, at least in the religious context, has been held to be protected by the First Amendment.

I don’t mean to minimize the very real pain of kids (or adults) who have trouble finding friends or are socially ostracized, or to say that the school should do nothing to help them. But coercion by the authorities is not the solution to every problem. As I’ve written before, I’d like to see a guidance program that got the kids imagining themselves in other people’s shoes and thinking for themselves about right and wrong, rather than one that just dictates what is or isn’t good behavior and then enforces it with rules. It’s possible to encourage kids to be kind and inclusive and still preserve some realm of personal freedom from adult scrutiny and state intervention. How can we hold our kids to standards from which we exempt ourselves?

Related post here.
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What is the point of arguing with government officials?

What is the point of arguing with someone whose job requires him to defend certain practices? My recent Twitter exchanges with the director of our state’s Department of Education, like my Q&A with our local school superintendent last year, tended to go in circles while probably aggravating everyone involved. Why bother?

Two reasons, I guess. First, though I may not persuade these officials, I might succeed in shedding light on their positions, and possibly in revealing flaws in their reasoning. The questions that don’t get answered can shed as much light as the ones that do. I’d like to know whether Jason Glass is making any effort to measure what is being sacrificed to increase reading and math test scores, and how he weighs the benefits of test score gains against those sacrifices. He either has to give an answer that I can hold up to public scrutiny, or remain silent and allow us to assume the worst.

The second reason is that it’s important for government officials to hear what people are concerned—and angry—about. Thanks to the internet and social media, many government officials can now be publicly confronted about their policies and practices in a way that wasn’t possible before. What Glenn Greenwald says about journalists here is also true of government officials:

One of the good things about the change the media has undergone is that it has amplified voices. So if you criticize a member of the journalist class, 15, 20 years ago they could easily ignore you, and the only way to hear about it was basically a letter to the editor—it was purely a one-way conversation. Now, it’s a two-way conversation, so if you’re a journalist, and you write something deceitful or propagandistic or sloppy or wrong, everywhere you turn, you’re going to hear it: in your email, on Twitter, in the comment section of what you write, you’re going to be besieged with criticism, and blogs have really fueled that. Something like that influences people and affects how they work.

Or at least it can. I don’t enjoy these exchanges, but I want to do my small part to make that aspect of the internet a reality.

Credit to Glass and Murley for making themselves available in this way. They could probably still get away with an imperious silence—though not as easily as in the pre-internet age.
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What is “test prep”?

After a day’s consideration, I’m inclined to stick with my definition of “test prep”: single-mindedly pursuing higher test scores at the expense of other values that are cumulatively more important.

I don’t yet know Jason Glass’s definition, but in his comment to my last post, he says that “simple fact/recall, memorization of likely test facts, guessing strategies, and test time management strategies” would qualify. Under his definition, apparently, it can’t be “test prep” if the school is using strategies and programs that he considers “evidence-based,” regardless of what other values are sacrificed in the process. (Never mind for the moment whether the “evidence base” consists of anything other than test scores.)

By contrast, I think a school that focused exclusively on tested qualities, to the neglect of untested and untestable qualities, would fairly be called a “test prep academy.” If lunch were cut to almost nothing, recess and “specials” eliminated, the school day extended, and the kids made to sit through nothing but reading programs that Glass considers “evidence-based” all day with little or no down time, all for the sake of raising literacy scores, I would call that test prep, even if those scores accurately reflected real gains in literacy. Apparently he would not.

Of course, we can disagree on the semantics. Maybe what I’m describing would better be called “edu-myopia,” or some such term. In any event, I’m happy to agree that what Glass is describing is a more limited phenomenon than what I am describing, however you might label the two. I wish he would agree that both phenomena should be avoided.
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Is there anything we shouldn’t do to raise test scores?

I just engaged in a lengthy (and ongoing) Twitter exchange with the director of our state’s Department of Education, Jason Glass. Earlier this week, the Department held up as exemplary a school district that cut recess time to raise literacy scores. (Teachers and students “weren’t happy with some of the things we had to drop, such as morning recess time because we really don’t need that,” one principal said.) Many people chimed in to point out that there’s no reason to think that cuts in recess help kids learn. What I wanted to know was how the department could be sure that the test score increases represented meaningful education, as opposed to just test prep. If there is a difference between the two, and Glass agreed that there is, then the test scores themselves can’t help you distinguish one from the other. So I asked what Glass’s criteria are.

You can be the judge of whether the discussion is going anywhere. But it seems clear that Glass must have a different definition of test prep than I have. Mine would be: single-mindedly pursuing higher test scores at the expense of other values that are cumulatively more important. One such value is providing a humane school experience. Another is preserving a child’s enjoyment of learning. Another is not teaching authoritarian values. Another is giving enough attention to subjects that aren’t tested or don’t lend themselves to testing.

I suspect his definition would focus more on whether the test score increases reflected a meaningful improvement in the particular quality they purport to measure. That would be a defensible definition, but it doesn’t excuse him from asking what has been sacrificed for the sake of that improvement. How does the DOE measure those sacrifices? I don’t think it does. If it did, how would it determine what sacrifices are “worth it”? Though Glass keeps referring to evidence-based practices, the latter question cannot be answered empirically, because it entails value judgments.

How does the DOE make those judgments? In what meaningful sense are they informed by the values of the families they affect?
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Refuseniks, continued

Yesterday I wrote that I don’t think we should be too quick to dismiss kids’ own judgments about what activities to pursue. It’s true that no one made me learn the piano, but it’s also true that my mother would have liked me to be altar boy, and that I refused, and that she didn’t compel me to. I have no reason to think anything bad would have befallen me as an altar boy, but given what we now know about the Catholic church’s history of ignoring and covering up sexual abuse of children, I remain glad I didn’t spin that particular wheel. In other words, there were compensations for not having learned the piano.

I suppose it’s even possible that my resistance to submitting myself to the authority of those strange, alien, probably harmless religious men might have been caused by some subconscious sense that there was risk involved. A few years ago, Andrew Sullivan collected readers’ stories about their brushes with child abuse in the church. One wrote about a particular priest, “Father K,”

who was much beloved by students. He was the only priest to ever visit our classroom. We were always thrilled to see him when he would show up unannounced for a visit. He was warm, engaging and energetic–the only priest that parishioners could relate to. We had 50 kids in our class, about half were boys. Fr. K was in charge of the altar boys.

When it was time to sign up for training as servers, something stopped me. I don’t know why I didn’t sign up and I lived in fear that my teacher, a nun, was going to come down on me for failing to volunteer. It turned out that two of my friends didn’t sign up either. Our teacher never said a word, even when we were, conspicuously, the only three boys left in class while the rest attended the occasional altar boy meeting. I envied classmates who left during the school day to attend meetings and serve Mass across the street and yet something had stopped me from volunteering. You know where this is going.

In the late 1990s, it was revealed that Fr K had been molesting altar boys in the 50s and the early 60s. I had a rough home life and would have been a perfect target for abuse. I’ve often wondered over the past ten years if our teacher knew what was going on and that’s why she didn’t give us a hard time. . . .

I still don’t know what stopped me from volunteering to be an altar boy. All I know is that I was one lucky kid.

The whole series is here. Needless to say, I’m not suggesting that all coercive parenting or schooling is somehow like exposing kids to sexual abuse, or that inaction doesn’t have its own risks. Just that kids can have hard-to-articulate reasons for their choices that shouldn’t automatically be ignored.
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Refusenik

I confess that I was a little refusenik: I wouldn’t learn an instrument, I wouldn’t play a sport, I wouldn’t join the Boy Scouts, etc. As an adult, sure, I think it would be great to know how to play the piano. But that’s not who I was at that time, and no one forced it on me.

I have no way of knowing whether I’d be better off if my parents (or my school) had been more prescriptive about how I spent my time, but I don’t think we should be too quick to dismiss kids’ own judgments about what to pursue. For all our data, growing up remains a mysterious thing. When I was young, I spent a lot of time very much in my own world, a lot of time by myself, and a lot of time doing things of no apparent value. I watched enormous quantities of television. I didn’t participate in any organized after-school activities. I read magazines and comic books but almost no “real” books, except what few were assigned in school. Nobody intervened. My parents had five other kids and bigger things to worry about. Those were the days.

Eventually, though—fifteen? sixteen?—I got tired of TV and suddenly became interested in the outside world. By the end of high school I was an aspiring politician and the go-to volunteer on local Democratic party campaigns—ringing doorbells, staffing phone banks, bonding with the local party regulars, and plotting my own future runs for office. No one could have been more surprised than my parents.

Anecdotal, yes. But does the prevailing way of thinking about kids leave room for that kind of anecdote?
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Required classes and 20/20 hindsight

People vary widely on the question of how much we should force educational experiences on kids against their will. It’s ultimately a matter of opinion, of course. But I do think there is sometimes a confirmation bias in the way that people think about the issue.

I hear two common reactions to the topic, variants of “I was required to take a foreign language, and now I’m glad I can speak Spanish,” and “I wish someone had made me learn to play the piano when I was young.”

In both examples, there is a kind of cherry-picking going on. You wish you could play the piano, so you wish someone had made you learn it. In reality, though, it would have been other people—parents? schools?—choosing what you would have to learn. There’s no reason to think they would have chosen the one thing your later adult self would like to have learned. Maybe it would have been field hockey, or equestrianism, or something you would have loathed. Maybe it would have been ten, twenty, or thirty things. And if you weren’t interested in learning piano at that time, how can you be sure it would have worked out as you now wish? (And what’s stopping you from signing up for lessons now, anyway?)

You’re glad you know Spanish, so you’re glad someone made you learn it. But many people would eventually choose to learn a language even if it were not required; are you sure you’re not one of those people? Moreover, the kind of people who would make you learn a foreign language are likely to make you learn a lot of other things, too, including things you might never have had any interest in; are you taking those costs into account? Can you be sure that the value of speaking Spanish outweighs the value of what you might otherwise have chosen to do with all that time if you had been given more say in the matter—including the value of gaining experience with independence and with making decisions for yourself? And isn’t there at least some reason to think that people who choose what to learn will learn it more effectively? It’s easy to support coerced learning when you compare it with nothing at all, but that’s not the real alternative.

That said, I’m much more comfortable with parents making those decisions for their own children than with the schools making a blanket decision for all kids—especially if that decision is being made by distant politicians and bureaucrats who know nothing about the kids as individual human beings.
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How are magnet schools possible?

Some proponents of our school district’s new diversity policy have emphasized the possibility of meeting the policy’s goal—to reduce the concentration in any one school of kids from low-income families—through the creation of magnet schools that would draw families voluntarily from many different parts of town.

I’ve got nothing against the idea of magnet schools; it would be great if the district could make progress toward its diversity goals through voluntary transfers. But I don’t really understand them, either. How exactly would, say, a “science and technology” magnet school differ from our current elementary schools?

Keep in mind that the district has so much instruction stuffed into its current school day, and finds all of it so indispensable, that it has shortened recess and squeezed its lunch periods down to fifteen minutes. And that the superintendent explained to me that the district can’t add even five more minutes to the lunch period because “it’s very difficult to both meet the minimal instructional minutes and get all the [state-mandated] Common Core content delivered in the classroom.” And that the assistant superintendent also explained that “we as public schools are charged with far more than providing core academic instruction. For example, we teach a bullying/harassement curriculum, a health foods curriculum (in several schools with grant money) and financial literacy.” And that the teachers’ union president recently told the school board that the district’s overstuffed elementary school day is short-changing the kids and causing morale problems among the teachers.

What parts of the current school day will suddenly become expendable to create a greater emphasis on science and technology (or whatever the school’s particular theme will be)? Either these magnet schools will be all talk without any real difference, or there is more room for change in the school day than the district admits. Which is it?

(Cross-posted at the Patch).
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Better than utter silence

More than anything, what mystifies me about our school board is how unbothered they seem by what high-stakes testing has done to our schools—probably the biggest change in K-12 education in our lifetimes.

What’s stopping them from passing a resolution like this one? Full text here.
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Was B.F. Skinner a “teacher” of his rats and pigeons?

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

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

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

So many education proposals seem to rest on this logic: “It would be great if everyone knew x. Therefore we must make everyone learn x.” If kids were Gumby figurines, whom we could just twist into whatever poses we wanted them to assume, this syllogism might make perfect sense. But kids actually have minds of their own, and individual personalities and predispositions, and emotions, and desires, including the desire for control over their own lives. In other words, they are human beings, and can’t be counted on—any more than adults could be counted on—to go willingly along with someone else’s plan to “improve” them.

When I wrote, about E.D. Hirsch, that “it’s as if he’s completely excluded psychology from learning theory,” that’s what I was getting at. (Not to mention the other age-old obstacles to implementing grand schemes, such as human error, inefficiency, corruption, and susceptibility to snake-oil salesmen.)

When people start wishing away the fact that kids have minds of their own, or seeing it as an obstacle to education, something has gone very wrong.
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Does “teach” conceal more than it reveals?

I’ve argued (here and here) that people often use the verb “to teach” to mean “to impose one’s will on another person.” One problem with the word is that it not only enables people to avoid confronting that fact, but also to avoid discussing the actual mechanics of imposing your will on another person. “We need to teach kids not to do drugs!” Okay, but easier said than done, no?

Here’s a passage from an essay by Diana Senechal:

Beyond giving students a foundation, schools must teach them what commitment means. Without apology, they should teach students to read, write, and practice without any distractions from the Internet, cell phone, or TV, and to make a daily habit of this. It doesn’t matter if they claim to know how to “multi-task”; multi-tasking amounts to compromise, and they need to learn to offer more of themselves. . . . Teachers should not hesitate to correct students, as students need to strive for accuracy when working alone. Students should learn how to put their full mind into their work, sometimes heartily, sometimes grudgingly, but with regularity and determination.

I don’t really understand how Senechal is using the word “teach” in this passage. It seems like a roundabout way of saying: here is a desirable outcome. To assert that schools should “teach” students, “without apology,” to do these things adds nothing that I can comprehend. Later in the same essay, she writes:

Many practices of solitude can be conveyed only through example. Teachers who practice their subjects—who think about them and work on them in their own time—can show students a way of life. They need not “model” for the students in any canned way; their very conduct is a model. When a teacher reads a poem aloud or presents a mathematical proof, her tone conveys whether she has thought about it at length, played with it, argued about it, and more. Students will likewise learn from teachers’ handling of conflicts that arise in class and in school. Problems and dilemmas will arise, and teachers will be put to the test. How does a teacher respond when one student taunts another, when one student seems far more advanced (or less advanced) than the others, or when one of the students objects to the tenor of the discussion or the premises of the lesson? How does a teacher respond to events affecting the whole school—a new principal, a change in the rules, or an emergency? A teacher’s bearing in these situations is complex and influences students enormously.

Is this by the same author? The first passage seemed to endorse unapologetic instruction to indoctrinate children into certain values. The second endorses a much more light-handed (and, I think, sensible) approach to transmitting values. The second paragraph completely avoids using “teach” as a verb, and ends up conveying a much more specific meaning.

Even if I were to believe that we should extensively intervene to shape kids to fit our desires (I don’t), I’d still concede that there’s a world of difference between wanting an outcome and making it happen. Our most common word for what schools do—“teach”—seems to function to conceal that gap.
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What does “teach” mean? (continued)

Nicholas J. and Karen W. have been posting about whether there is a better word than “instruction” to describe what schools should do. I like a lot of what they have to say, and their alternatives to “instruction” all seem like improvements, but I can’t say that any of them seem like a perfect fit.

I wrote here about how people use the word “teach” to mean two very different things, and I think there is also a third: to make someone adopt a certain opinion or value. You shouldn’t do drugs. Bullying is bad. You should respect your elders. You should be caring, honest, respectful, responsible, and courageous. Liberty, democracy, justice, due process, and individual rights are important, except when you are a child in school. That sort of thing.

I don’t think schools can or should avoid standing for a set of values, but I do think the transmission of values raises certain issues that the transmission of knowledge or skills doesn’t raise, so it would be helpful to have a particular word for it. “Indoctrination” carries a lot of negative connotations, but maybe that’s a plus, since it might help counteract people’s natural attraction to imposing their values on others. Maybe if we admitted that we’re indoctrinating, we’d have to think a little harder about just what values we want to indoctrinate kids with.

Teaching values also raises pedagogical issues that teaching skills doesn’t raise. Telling other people what to think is likely to trigger a different reaction than telling them how to do something. Coercive indoctrination is likely to provoke resistance and rebellion, and to model qualities that might be very different from the qualities you’re trying to instill. When it comes to transmitting values, I think the most defensible approach is modeling, combined with thoughtful, non-coercive discussion—always leaving kids the freedom to disagree. Dictating the mandatory values and then expecting the kids to parrot back “correct” answers is the worst and most counter-productive approach. From what I hear about our district’s “guidance curriculum,” it sounds like the latter approach has won the day, and I worry about what it’s really teaching.
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Who’s the Utopian?

We had an interesting discussion of E.D. Hirsch going in this comment thread, which I hope will continue (in the usual slow, on-again-off-again way of this blog). I can understand why people want to defend Hirsch, not just because he seems to genuinely want to improve life for the most economically disadvantaged students, but also because I think he’s probably right about a number of things, such as the importance of early vocabulary development. What I don’t share is his (and so many people’s) confidence that the good of imposing a worthy idea on all public schools and all children will necessarily outweigh the bad. Trying to force or coerce people to adopt a particular educational program against their will inevitably requires treating children, families, and communities like objects rather than like people—depriving them of any meaningful say over what goes on their schools. It also means treating teachers like workers on an assembly-line. Education, for many “reformers,” is mainly about telling other people what to do.

Here’s one thing our schools appear to be teaching very effectively: It’s always okay—in fact, necessary and commendable, something to be proud of—to impose your will on other people, as long as you think it’s for their own good. And it produces only the intended consequences!

I certainly have my own ideas about how schools should be run, but if I ever suggest that they should be imposed by law on every kid in every public school in America, or even Iowa, I should have my head examined.
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Is blogging rational?

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

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

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

So why bother? I suppose the blogosphere in sum has made a difference, and that even small-circulation blogs do their part in generating and spreading ideas. One vote isn’t going to change the world any more than one blog is, but lots of people vote anyway. Why? It can’t be because they expect to cast the deciding vote; the elections with the highest turnout are those in which one vote is least likely to make a difference. I don’t think it’s out of duty or out of rational self-interest, though you could certainly justify it on both grounds. I think it’s more about whatever gratification comes from self-expression and, to some extent, from venting. The same seems true of blogging, but with an added element of conversation, and of pure compulsion. I’m not sure I could stop if I tried.
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No toddler left untested

Universally available, non-compulsory preschool, subsidized based on means-testing, is worth doing purely because it would help low- and middle-income families deal with the difficulty of raising a family while both parents hold down jobs. It would also be a great form of economic stimulus, since both the recipients and the providers of the service are likely to be low- and middle-income people. Even if it had no lasting educational benefits, it would be a good idea.

It also has a lot of potential to give low-income kids a chance to become well-educated adults on a more equal basis with kids who come from money. That’s all to the good.

But please: let’s not create another layer of test-driven obedience schools. Unfortunately, that’s what we have every reason to expect from the people who brought us No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. The people running education policy today are among the very last people I would entrust a three-year-old to. I wish I thought otherwise.
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How I learned to stop worrying and love high-stakes testing

If the premise of your article is “High-stakes academic testing isn’t going away,” you won’t reach a happy conclusion.

h/t StepfordTO
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Take it to the Seattle school board

Teachers in Seattle’s Garfield High School have unanimously decided to refuse to administer their district’s required standardized test (the “MAP”), saying it “corrupts teaching and learning.” If there was ever a standardized test that deserved to be boycotted, it’s this one. Teachers say that it is not aligned with the district’s curriculum, sometimes testing topics that the students wouldn’t study until later grades, and that students don’t take it seriously because they know their scores don’t affect their grades or graduation status. Other concerns include:

(1) that the test was sold to the district while the sitting superintendent of schools, Maria Goodloe-Johnson, was on the board of the company that sold the test, which she did not divulge at the time, and (2) that the gains students are expected to make on the tests—at least at the high school level—are actually within the margin of error of the test grading, which makes the MAP appear pretty much statistically useless.

The superintendent has threatened disciplinary action against the teachers, and today is a “National Day of Action” to support the teachers. Supporters of the boycott are urging people to write to the superintendent or sign a petition addressed to him. (I signed the petition.)

I don’t understand why more people aren’t focusing their attention on Seattle’s elected school board, rather than its employee, the superintendent. The superintendent is just carrying out a requirement of the board, and his threat to discipline the teachers is based entirely upon a district policy enacted by the board. The board is in a much better position to solve this problem than the superintendent: Simply stop requiring the tests, and enact a policy protecting the teachers from being disciplined for the boycott. Maybe the board members won’t do that, but at least they can be held accountable at the polls. I would love to see a school board election focused on the issue of standardized testing.

In any event, I now have one of my questions for this year’s school board candidates: If our teachers decided as a group that certain standardized tests were harmful and refused to administer them, would you support a policy protecting them from disciplinary action for doing so?
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Bumper sticker for a new century: “Well-behaved girls please their teachers”

This study has been getting a lot of attention this week. Here’s Christina Hoff Sommers in the Times:

Boys score as well as or better than girls on most standardized tests, yet they are far less likely to get good grades, take advanced classes or attend college. Why? A study coming out this week in The Journal of Human Resources gives an important answer. Teachers of classes as early as kindergarten factor good behavior into grades — and girls, as a rule, comport themselves far better than boys.

The study’s authors analyzed data from more than 5,800 students from kindergarten through fifth grade and found that boys across all racial groups and in all major subject areas received lower grades than their test scores would have predicted.

The scholars attributed this “misalignment” to differences in “noncognitive skills”: attentiveness, persistence, eagerness to learn, the ability to sit still and work independently. As most parents know, girls tend to develop these skills earlier and more naturally than boys.

No previous study, to my knowledge, has demonstrated that the well-known gender gap in school grades begins so early and is almost entirely attributable to differences in behavior. The researchers found that teachers rated boys as less proficient even when the boys did just as well as the girls on tests of reading, math and science. (The teachers did not know the test scores in advance.) If the teachers had not accounted for classroom behavior, the boys’ grades, like the girls’, would have matched their test scores.

The commentary that I’ve read has focused entirely on how this means that boys are now academically disadvantaged compared to girls. I don’t doubt that the phenomenon the study describes is bad for boys, but I think it’s every bit as bad for girls, and maybe worse. The “classroom behavior” “skills” that the study identifies—“attentiveness, task persistence, eagerness to learn, learning independence, flexibility and organization,” all based on teacher reports—sound a lot like how a school would describe kids who do as they’re told, always pay attention, are never difficult, comply with all “expectations,” and don’t draw attention to themselves in way that makes trouble. (Call me a cynic, but I can’t help but think that “learning independence” means something closer to “don’t bother the teacher” than to “think independently.”)

If school rewards girls because they are more docile and compliant with the expectations of authority figures, that’s hardly good news for girls. For one thing, those are exactly the traits we shouldn’t want to develop in the people who will one day be deciding our elections. And even if we just look narrowly at the kids’ future employment: are those really the traits that will enable those girls to someday succeed on an equal basis with those “poorly behaved” boys? Or would being assertive and strong-willed potentially come in handy? (What happened to that old bumper sticker, “Well-behaved women never make history”?)

That this study is somehow good news for girls is a conclusion you could reach only if you think of education entirely in terms of maximizing grades, or entirely in terms of producing the ideal Walmart cashier.

Sommers concludes that “fairness today requires us to address the serious educational deficits of boys and young men.” Ugh, I can’t help but fear where that’s going: the solution is to make sure that schools train boys to be much more docile and compliant. Instead, how about we re-examine our “expectations” and our educational goals, and start encouraging traits that will enable all kids to become assertive and independent-minded members of a democratic society?

Related post here.
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RPS predictions?

I’m no Nate Silver—in fact, I’m probably closer to a Pauline Kael—but I thought I’d go out on a limb and make a prediction about tomorrow’s tomorrow’s RPS vote here, if only for entertainment’s sake. (For more information about the issue, see this post.) In other words, this is a completely frivolous post.

I don’t have much to go on, but I think most signs point to a “Yes” win. First, the pro-RPS side seems more organized and vocal. I haven’t kept a tally, but it’s been my impression that supporters’ letters to the editor have far outnumbered opponents’. The pro-RPS side also seems to be better funded—I’ve gotten at least one pro-RPS mailing, and this afternoon I even got a robo-call. (Is that a plus?) [Update: They’re even running radio ads!] Who knows, maybe that’s just because Vote Yes people are more profligate with their money; I’m glad a not a fundraiser for the Vote No side. In any event, the Vote Yes side has seemed more visible and active.

Second, for reasons I discussed here, I think the Iowa City area is likely to be predisposed toward arguments in favor of social spending.

Third, the last time an issue like this was on the ballot, it won by about a two-to-one margin—even a little higher if you just look at our school district, without the rest of the county that was also voting then.

Fourth, the RPS enables funding for infrastructure projects in all parts of town. People on both the east and west sides and in the North Corridor all have infrastructure hopes, all of which have a better chance of getting funded, and sooner, if the RPS passes.

Fifth, I think we’re unlikely to see much of a backlash against the district’s proposed diversity policy. Some areas may even be more likely to support the RPS because of the diversity policy. And the areas that seem most likely to oppose the diversity policy are also those who are most likely to want a new high school. There’s good reason to think that if the RPS fails, the school board will reallocate the money that’s been set aside for the new high school to other building needs. So many of the people who oppose the diversity policy have good reason to want the RPS to pass.

Sixth, turnout so far is low. The rate of early voting is a little more than half what it was the last time we voted on this kind of issue. I think a low turnout favors the more organized side, which appears to be the pro-RPS side.

The “No” votes will come from the more fiscally conservative voters who would rather have the tax relief, as well as from voters who are disgruntled enough with the district to cast a protest vote and those who simply want a clearer sense in advance of how the money is likely to be spent. I just don’t think there are enough of those voters to stop the measure from passing.

Fully prepared to eat crow, I predict the measure will pass with 70% of the vote. Feel free to chime in with your own prediction in the comments (or on Twitter).
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School board finds a backbone when it wants to

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

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

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

One thing that bums me out about the way our school district has portrayed the RPS ballot issue is its fear of the word “tax.” As I wrote here, the RPS is effectively a tax—that is, voters are choosing whether sales tax money should go for school infrastructure needs or, instead, back to the taxpayer in the form of property tax relief. The district has been at pains to obscure that fact, emphasizing that the measure “will NOT raise your property taxes,” and trying instead to cast the issue as one of local control. At the initial district presentation about the RPS that I attended, it took me about a half an hour even to understand the issue, because the district was dancing around the central fact of how the RPS relates to tax revenue.

What does it say when people who want to enable social spending—on education, of all things, in one of the bluest counties in America—are afraid of candidly making the argument in its favor?

The consolation is that people seem to be seeing through the spin. Activists on both sides have discussed the issue in terms of social spending and fiscal restraint. Many of the pro-RPS articles (including mine) have argued that voters shouldn’t let their dissatisfaction with district policies undermine their willingness to enable more funding for public education. Meanwhile, the opposition to the RPS has taken on the look of the usual “Vote No” campaigns run by Taxpayers’ Associations everywhere, with an emphasis on “living within a budget.” (The group’s leader, for example, is affiliated with a “free market, limited government think tank” with the web address “limitedgovernment.org.”) The anti-RPS group’s somewhat comical name, “People For All,” might more accurately have been “People Against All.”

Neither side is objectively wrong; they’re just expressing different values. My question is why the district would want to shy away from that view of the conflict in a place like Johnson County. By all appearances, the more the conflict has been put in those terms, the better the pro-RPS side appears to be doing. In Johnson County, the smart money is on the social-spending liberals, not the small-government conservatives. Yet some government officials still see any support for taxes, no matter the justification or audience, as a kind of political third rail that must be avoided with sheepishness and subterfuge. That’s no way to fund a school system.
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News from the cutting edge, Volume 1

Well, having decided to try my hand at something different to mark the end of the blogathon, I now have newfound respect for Matt Groening and the old Life is Hell cartoons. I do love the two talking heads down in the corner, though—my collaborator’s contribution.

Click the image to enlarge.

(Image © 2013 C. Liebig & I. Samuelson for ablogaboutschool.blogspot.com. Public domain baby photo from Wikimedia Commons.)
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Why not orange jumpsuits?

EduShyster is on a roll trying to find any data, anywhere, on college graduation rates of students who attend “no excuses” “college-prep” charter schools. Meanwhile, she came across this article about one such school in New York:

The Excellence Boys Charter School in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn was defending itself Tuesday against parent complaints that its new, “Scoreboard Behavioral System” was discriminatory and treating disciplined students like prisoners.

. . .

A father of two sons who attend the Middle Academy, grades 5 through 8, contacted PIX 11 about a memo sent out by the school in early January. The memo explained the Middle Academy would allow students to earn—or lose—achievement points, based on their behavior. Starting each school week with 50 points, any student left with 0 or less points by week’s end would be subject to five days of detention–and designated “Out of the Brotherhood”. This means they would be placed in a separate room for breakfast and lunch—and ordered to wear a light green Polo shirt, instead of the blue Oxford shirt boys in the Middle Academy typically wear as part of their uniform. Other scholars, as the school refers to students, would not be able to interact with the disciplined boys.

“It’s offensive,” said ‘Jason Vincent’ (not his real name), who e-mailed PIX 11 about the practice, “because, first of all, they’re all young, black men, and I don’t feel that I should have to be concerned with a school seeming like a prison. That’s not what I send my children to school for.”

The principal defended the program on the grounds that “We have a college prep school and everything we do here is about getting students ready for college. . . . What we’re doing here is about getting our kids to college.” And when they get there, what will they make of that completely alien environment?

Read the whole article.
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In defense of the protest vote

As I wrote yesterday, I’m voting for the RPS (our school district’s revenue-enabling ballot measure). But I don’t get as exasperated with the people opposing it as Jason Lewis does. Government is supposed to be a negotiation, not a take-it-or-leave-it enterprise. Many people reasonably think the district is not responsive enough to the community—as reflected in many of the seventy-nine pages of comments here, for example, or my selection from them here. When the district then wants those same people to step up and approve tax revenues, it’s hard to blame them for concluding that their dollars are the only thing the district listens to—the only effective bargaining chip they have in this particular negotiation.

When an employer and its employees can’t agree on a contract, and the employees go out on strike, you can’t just automatically blame one side or the other. The negotiation failed, and you can’t assess blame without examining how reasonable each side’s positions were. I don’t think all of those commenters in the Synesi report were selfish prima donnas. Many of their criticisms are perfectly reasonable, and it’s the district’s failure to address them that is unreasonable.

In this particular instance, I think that voting for the RPS will do more good than voting against it. But I’m sympathetic to the logic of the protest vote. Sometimes casting a protest vote is the least-likely-to-be-futile way of trying to get elected officials to change the way they interact with the public. It’s a big part of why I voted against our county’s new jail proposal this past November.

There will never be perfect harmony in a community where people’s values differ. But the best way to get the school board and district administrators back in sync with the voters is to have them start working for us, instead of for Governor Branstad and Arne Duncan. If you’re frustrated with the level of tension between community members and the school system, it’s worth thinking about how much the lack of local control is at the root of it. (Related post here.)
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Why I’m voting for the Revenue Purpose Statement

I’m outsourcing this particularly long-winded post to the Patch. Counterargument here..

Jason Lewis to run for school board

We have our first official candidate (to my knowledge) for this September’s school board election. Interesting that he leads off with the Ken Robinson video. Will that viewpoint be reflected in any concrete policy proposals?.

Stanley Kubrick on interest vs. fear

Stanley Kubrick, late 1940s

Not much time to post today, but I’ve been meaning to post this excerpt from John Baxter’s biography of Stanley Kubrick:

Kubrick’s three years at [Taft High School in the Bronx], from 1943 to 1945, were the unhappiest of his life. IQ tests rated him above average, but formal learning bored him. Alex Singer recalls, “Stanley and I had boundless curiosity, but not about the things they were teaching.” Kubrick agrees. “I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker. I never learned anything at school and I never read a book for pleasure until I was nineteen years old.”

His school days were dominated less by a search for learning than by fear: “Fear of getting failing grades,” he wrote later, “fear of not staying with your class.” He got Fs by betraying his lack of interest in set books like George Eliot’s Silas Marner and failed English totally one year, forcing him to make up the lost grade during the summer. When he graduated, it was with a mediocre 70.1 average, his only high marks those in Physics.

Grades, however, don’t tell the whole story. Kubrick could and would work if his interest was engaged: this was the man who, despite his disdain for George Eliot, created in Barry Lyndon the cinema’s best adaptation of Thackeray. Once he left school and was no longer required to do so, he read voraciously.

I suppose this is anecdotal evidence of the worst kind. Maybe Kubrick was just an oppositional prima donna, or a unique “genius” from whose experience we shouldn’t generalize. But it’s not as if the world is made up of a lot of people who are basically the same and a few who are different. Isn’t everyone different from everyone else? Who are these standardized students who learn equally well whatever is dished up, regardless of whether they are interested? I’d like to meet them!
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Let high school students vote in school board elections

Reading Nicholas J’s blog makes me think of how entirely oblivious I was, throughout my own time in school, to the fact that there are different ways to think about educating people—that the school system is the product of a series of choices, and that other choices are possible. I don’t think anyone wanted us to think about that, though it strikes me as something that could only be good for one’s education.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I think education would benefit from an infusion of democracy in many different forms. From top to bottom, our educational system seems to be pervaded by a fear and distrust of democracy, and a general sense that people cannot be trusted to make good decisions and must instead be dictated to from above.

One small way to buck that trend: Why not let high school students vote in local school board elections?

This is not a very revolutionary idea. It’s not as if it would change anything overnight. For one thing, state and federal control over education have left school boards with relatively little decision-making power. Students would probably not turn out in large numbers for school board elections—why should they be any different than the rest of us?—and would be unlikely to vote as a bloc. They would be unlikely to tip the scales in any election, and could do so only if the election were close anyway.

But I think it could change the dynamic in ways that would matter. For one thing, candidates naturally seek votes wherever they can find them. Board candidates would have a new set of voters to solicit, and would have to think about those voters’ interests in a different way. There would suddenly be an incentive for school officials to see students as more than just the passive objects of their attention, and to “respect” them in a way they’ve never had to before. Now there would be people inviting the students to think about their own education, and about how it might be improved. Wouldn’t that be desirable under virtually any theory of learning?

Enfranchising high school students, even in this limited way, would also present those students with a very different model of governance, one much more consistent with the traditional ideals of a democracy. Currently schools are little totalitarian states, geared toward producing obedient subjects, not active participants in a democracy. Yet these students are on the verge of turning eighteen and becoming fully enfranchised. Wouldn’t it make sense to offer them a little practice first?
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Cracks in the wall?

From Gov. Jerry Brown’s State of the State speech yesterday in California:

The laws that are in fashion demand tightly constrained curricula and reams of accountability data. All the better if it requires quiz-bits of information, regurgitated at regular intervals and stored in vast computers. Performance metrics, of course, are invoked like talismans. Distant authorities crack the whip, demanding quantitative measures and a stark, single number to encapsulate the precise achievement level of every child.

We seem to think that education is a thing—like a vaccine—that can be designed from afar and simply injected into our children. But as the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats said, “Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.”

This year, as you consider new education laws, I ask you to consider the principle of Subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is the idea that a central authority should only perform those tasks which cannot be performed at a more immediate or local level. In other words, higher or more remote levels of government, like the state, should render assistance to local school districts, but always respect their primary jurisdiction and the dignity and freedom of teachers and students.

Subsidiarity is offended when distant authorities prescribe in minute detail what is taught, how it is taught and how it is to be measured. I would prefer to trust our teachers who are in the classroom each day, doing the real work – lighting fires in young minds.

My 2013 Budget Summary lays out the case for cutting categorical programs and putting maximum authority and discretion back at the local level—with school boards.

I don’t know how much Brown can back those words up; there’s a limit to how much local control you can allow if you don’t opt out of No Child Left Behind. But it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

I think the bipartisan consensus favoring centrally-driven school “reform” is finally starting to break down. It is increasingly associated with polarizing right-wing governors like Scott Walker and Rick Snyder. Reformer-in-chief Michelle Rhee is increasingly identified as a “right-wing” figure. (Charles Pierce, a blogger revered on the left, takes on Rhee here.) The Democratic Party activists who populate DailyKos see school reform (accurately) as an attack on unionism. I’d love to see the approval ratings of the standardized testing industry. And now the governor of the largest state in the union is declining to follow the crowd.

It’s got a ways to go. (Blogger Atrios recently tweeted “a liberal member of congress spoke to me about michelle rhee as if she was jesus.”) But if large parts of one party’s base start turning against the top-down “reform” project, how long before “local control” becomes the safest, most people-pleasing position?

Previous post on Jerry Brown here.
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The voice of the bureaucracy speaks

Here’s an anonymous email that a local school activist (not me) recently received (I’ve edited the profanity only to prevent this blog from getting caught in anyone’s filter):

I’ve had it with this f---ed up district! The administrators are paid to run the district, but the board insists on micromanaging EVERYTHING! People like you and [another local school activist, also not me] act as though you want what’s best for the students, but the way you go about it makes our district look like fools. I read about Hoover roaches in the Quad City Times and the Des Moines Register for christ’s sake! How does that help the district? It makes the whole community look like fools!

The whole system is setup to fail. The district has the best superintendent they’ll ever have, yet power hungry volunteers, called board members, and community activists, better described as conspiracy theorists, make his job a living hell. If everyone would back the f--- up, he could actually accomplish something!! Why pay a guy over $200k per year, then not let him do what he is trained to do?!?! Most of the districts top administrators could double their pay in the private sector, especially the guys on the operations side, and pretty soon they’ll be jumping this sinking ship.

I’m writing to you because you are extremely vocal and I hope you will consider putting your time and effort into fixing this mess rather than contributing to it. Your actions have consequences. Please don’t ever forget that. Please make sure those consequences are intentional.

(I hope that you can get past the fact that I sent this “anonymously” and focus on the message rather than this.)

After I read the part about how our school board micromanages the district, it was a while before I could pick myself up off the floor and finish reading the email.

But imagine, hypothetically, that we did have a more assertive board. The administrators are paid to “run the district” and “accomplish something,” so why would the public and its elected representatives insist on having a say over just what it is they should be accomplishing? Why would the public insist on interfering in the public schools?
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Intellectual risk vs. regurgitation

Following up on yesterday’s post, here’s a short excerpt from The Hidden Curriculum—the much more interesting one, from 1971, by Benson Snyder:

I observed the professor in one class beginning the term by explaining that the students were expected to be creative and involved; in short, they were to be engaged. They would have the opportunity to take intellectual risks, to make mistakes. When I talked with the students in the class I discovered that many were quite surprised by his introductory statement; a few were puzzled and suspicious, others enthusiastic.

Five weeks later the first quiz was given. The students found that they were asked to return a large amount of information that they could only have mastered by memorization. There was a considerable discrepancy between the students’ expectations for the course and what they were in fact expected to learn in order to pass the quiz. In spite of the professor’s opening pronouncements, the hidden but required task was not to be imaginative or creative but to play a specific, tightly circumscribed academic game.

The consequences for the students varied: some became cynical and said, “Okay, if that’s the way you play the academic game, if that’s what he really wants, I won’t make the same mistake again. Next time I’ll memorize the key points.” Some students were discouraged and simply withdrew emotionally from the class, though they nominally remained in attendance and received satisfactory grades. But a large group approved the quiz. They had been apprehensive about their capacity to do original work and were relieved to find that rote memory would suffice to get a superior grade. Students of this latter group were, interestingly, the least likely to consult the college psychiatrist.

Assuming Snyder’s basic description here is accurate, what do you make of this passage? On the one hand, it seems possible that the professor wanted to encourage the students to be creative and take intellectual risks in addition to mastering the information, not in lieu of it. On the other hand, that kind of performance is pretty rare, so maybe the grades did all come down to regurgitation in the end. Should the professor just have made himself clearer, or was there (as Snyder seems to imply) a larger problem than that?
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The hidden curriculum, then and now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pull up your pants before coming out of the stall.

Do not talk about what you did in the bathroom.

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

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

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

Wait, wait, wait.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What will become of the blogathoners when February arrives?
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Defining “critical thinking” down

In my Q&A with our school district’s central administrators, when I questioned whether the kids were learning to think critically, the administrators said that our science and math curricula are particularly strong on teaching critical thinking. One assistant superintendent said:

And math – I was going to say, our science and math curriculum definitely. Fewer, you know – those two are, you know, more problem-based type of curriculum. Almost, our math to the point where we get criticized for it.

Well, my daughter’s junior high math textbook, part of Holt’s Mathematics series, does regularly include questions purporting to develop critical thinking. Here are a few, picked pretty much at random:

I don’t object to these as math questions, but in what sense do they conceivably involve “critical thinking”? Does “critical thinking” now mean “any thinking whatsoever”? Or “anything beyond straightforward computation”? If “critical thinking” is to mean anything at all, shouldn’t it at least involve critiquing something?

The book does sometimes ask questions labeled “What’s the error?” Here’s an example:

This at least involves critiquing someone else’s reasoning. But since the book tells the students in advance that there’s an error, it isn’t much different from simply asking the students to solve the problem themselves.

It takes a big leap of faith to think that any amount of questions like these will help kids develop the skill—and inclination—to question received notions and critique the world around them. Real critical thinking always involves challenging someone’s authority—not an easy skill to teach when you’re otherwise busy sending the constant message of “do as we say and don’t talk back.”
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There’s always time for more obedience training

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

1. Require all schools everywhere to follow the same detailed laws and regulations. Filter all decisions through a large, central bureaucracy. Vest ultimate policy-making power in the hands of people whose elections do not depend to any meaningful degree on their stands (or lack thereof) on education.

2. Allow educational policy to be set locally. Allow wide variations in approach. Vest decision-making power in local boards elected specifically to govern educational issues.

We are living through the first approach. It is inherently risk-averse. What it does best is minimize the worst-case scenario, preventing schools from falling below a certain basement-level standard, as measured by whatever the popular metric is. That comes at the cost, though, of constraining people from doing the sorts of things that might produce unusually good schools: experimenting, drawing on local knowledge and experience, departing from the conventional wisdom, pursuing unique alternative visions. Although our governor claims he wants to create “world class schools,” his wholesale embrace of the first approach pretty much guarantees mediocrity.

I like the second approach. Since communities differ on what they want from their schools, the second approach would, almost by definition, be likely to satisfy more people. It would free local communities to try a wide variety of policies, so its potential upside would be greater than that of the first approach. And because it would be more democratically accountable to the people it affects, it would have at least some built-in check against sub-basement outcomes. But I don’t deny that there’s a tradeoff—that any policy that permits wider variation opens the door to both better and worse outcomes than you’d get under a system of enforced mediocrity. I think the risk is worth taking, but I can understand how someone could disagree.

The people I don’t get are the ones who accept the premise that education policy should be uniform and centralized, but argue that we should just adopt really great uniform, centralized policies. They never stop hoping for shiny red apples to come out of the sausage grinder. Outstanding schools, however you might define them, aren’t likely to come out of a system that’s practically designed to prevent outliers.
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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..