While the Institute is away at a corporate retreat, far, mostly, from the interwebz, I've arranged for some dips into the archives.
An important idea to bring up, now that districts are looking for things to cut.
Stop "Defending" Music
Today I ran across one more xeroxed handout touting the test-taking benefits of music education, defending music as a great tool for raising test scores and making students smarter. It was just one more example among many of the "keep music because it helps with other things" pieces out there.
I really wish people would stop "defending" music education like this.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query stop defending. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query stop defending. Sort by date Show all posts
Monday, July 20, 2020
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Stop "Defending" Music
Today I ran across one more xeroxed handout touting the test-taking benefits of music education, defending music as a great tool for raising test scores and making students smarter. It was just one more example among many of the "keep music because it helps with other things" pieces out there.
I really wish people would stop "defending" music education like this.
I get that music programs are under intense pressure, that all across America they are sitting hunched over with one nervous eye on a hooded figure stalking the halls with a big budgetary ax. Music programs are watching administrators race by, frantically chasing test scores and ignoring music in schools. So it may seem like a natural step to go running after the testing crowd hollering, "Hey, I can help with that, too."
Don't. Just don't.
First of all, it's a tactical error. If your state gets swept up in the winds of test dumpage and suddenly tests are not driving your school, what will you say to the ax guy (because, tests or not, the ax guy is not going away any time soon)? If your big selling point for your program has been that it's actually test prep with a horn, you've made yourself dependent on the future of testing. That's a bad horse on which to bet the farm.
Second, it's just sad. And it's extra sad to hear it come from music teachers. Just as sad as if I started telling everyone that reading Shakespeare is a great idea only because it helps with math class.
There are so many reasons for music education. Soooooooo many. And "it helps with testing" or "makes you do better in other classes" belong near the bottom of that list. Here are just a few items that should be further up the list.
Music is universal. It's a gabillion dollar industry, and it is omnipresent. How many hours in a row do you ever go without listening to music? Everywhere you go, everything you watch-- music. Always music. We are surrounded in it, bathe in it, soak in it. Why would we not want to know more about something constantly present in our lives? Would you want to live in a world without music? Then why would you want to have a school without music?
Listening to music is profoundly human. It lets us touch and understand some of our most complicated feelings. It helps us know who we are, what we want, how to be ourselves in the world. And because we live in an age of vast musical riches from both past and present, we all have access to exactly the music that suits our personality and mood. Music makes the fingers we can use to reach into our own hearts.
Making music is even more so. With all that music can do just for us as listeners, why would we not want to unlock the secrets of expressing ourselves through it? We human beings are driven to make music as surely as we are driven to speak, to touch, to come closer to other humans. Why would we not want to give students the chance to learn how to express themselves in this manner?
Music is freakin' magical. In forty-some years I have never gotten over it-- you take some seemingly random marks on a page, you blow air through a carefully constructed tube, and what comes out the other side is a sound that can convey things that words cannot. And you just blow air through a tube. Or pull on a string. Or whack something. And while we can do a million random things with a million random objects, somehow, when we just blow some air through a tube, we create sounds that can move other human beings, can reach right into our brains and our hearts. That is freakin' magical.
Music connects us to other humans in amazing ways. I have played in concert bands, a couple of jazz bands, and pit orchestras; I have directed church choirs and community musical theater. It is both indescribable and enormously compelling to see the many ways in which humans making music come together and connect to each other. I imagine the experience of playing team sports is something similar. You are part of something-- something bigger than yourself and more than the sum of the parts. I can't think of any other school subject that so completely fosters cooperation, collaboration, and connection between students. Students learn to help and mentor each other, support each other, lift each other up, and come together into something glorious and way, way cool.
In music, everyone's a winner. In sports, when two teams try their hardest and give everything they've got, there's just one winner. When a group of bands or choirs give their all, everybody wins. Regrettably, the growth of musical "competitions" has led to many programs that have forgotten this-- but music is the opposite of a zero-sum game. The better some folks do, the better everybody does. In music, you can pursue excellence and awesomeness without having to worry that you might get beat or defeated or humiliated. Everybody can be awesome.
Music programs give back to communities forever. See that big list of community music groups I've worked with? I am not in a large community, but all those groups exist, and they can all exist because every single person in them came through a school music program. Your community band, your church choir, your local theater-- all those groups that enrich the cultural life of your community are the result of school music programs.
Music programs can be a huge source of pride for school and community. Just like a football team, a band or choir can draw a crowd of fans who take great pride in the traditions and accomplishments of the groups. And if you're not getting your program out in front of the public to help build that following and support, you're messing up.
My high school band director is a hell of a guy, and he absolutely altered the trajectory of my life. When people talk about him, they often talk about all the music teachers and professional musicians that came out of his program, but I think his greatest success was all the students like me who went on to do something else, but whose lives have always been enriched by music.
Music is awesome. It's human. It's universal. It's big business precisely because it is something that everybody wants.
Music does not need to make excuses for itself, as if it had no intrinsic worth. It does not have to dress itself up in test-taking robes or mathematical masks. It has deep, powerful human value, and all of us who love it should be saying so, over and over and over again.
Do not defend a music program because it's good for other things. That's like defending kissing because it gives you stronger lip muscles for eating soup neatly. Defend it because music is awesome in ways that no other field is awesome. Defend it because it is music, and that's all the reason it needs. As Emerson wrote, "Beauty is its own excuse for being." A school without music is less whole, less human, less valuable, less complete. Stand up for music as itself, and stop making excuses.
I really wish people would stop "defending" music education like this.
I get that music programs are under intense pressure, that all across America they are sitting hunched over with one nervous eye on a hooded figure stalking the halls with a big budgetary ax. Music programs are watching administrators race by, frantically chasing test scores and ignoring music in schools. So it may seem like a natural step to go running after the testing crowd hollering, "Hey, I can help with that, too."
Don't. Just don't.
First of all, it's a tactical error. If your state gets swept up in the winds of test dumpage and suddenly tests are not driving your school, what will you say to the ax guy (because, tests or not, the ax guy is not going away any time soon)? If your big selling point for your program has been that it's actually test prep with a horn, you've made yourself dependent on the future of testing. That's a bad horse on which to bet the farm.
Second, it's just sad. And it's extra sad to hear it come from music teachers. Just as sad as if I started telling everyone that reading Shakespeare is a great idea only because it helps with math class.
There are so many reasons for music education. Soooooooo many. And "it helps with testing" or "makes you do better in other classes" belong near the bottom of that list. Here are just a few items that should be further up the list.
Music is universal. It's a gabillion dollar industry, and it is omnipresent. How many hours in a row do you ever go without listening to music? Everywhere you go, everything you watch-- music. Always music. We are surrounded in it, bathe in it, soak in it. Why would we not want to know more about something constantly present in our lives? Would you want to live in a world without music? Then why would you want to have a school without music?
Listening to music is profoundly human. It lets us touch and understand some of our most complicated feelings. It helps us know who we are, what we want, how to be ourselves in the world. And because we live in an age of vast musical riches from both past and present, we all have access to exactly the music that suits our personality and mood. Music makes the fingers we can use to reach into our own hearts.
Making music is even more so. With all that music can do just for us as listeners, why would we not want to unlock the secrets of expressing ourselves through it? We human beings are driven to make music as surely as we are driven to speak, to touch, to come closer to other humans. Why would we not want to give students the chance to learn how to express themselves in this manner?
Music is freakin' magical. In forty-some years I have never gotten over it-- you take some seemingly random marks on a page, you blow air through a carefully constructed tube, and what comes out the other side is a sound that can convey things that words cannot. And you just blow air through a tube. Or pull on a string. Or whack something. And while we can do a million random things with a million random objects, somehow, when we just blow some air through a tube, we create sounds that can move other human beings, can reach right into our brains and our hearts. That is freakin' magical.
Music connects us to other humans in amazing ways. I have played in concert bands, a couple of jazz bands, and pit orchestras; I have directed church choirs and community musical theater. It is both indescribable and enormously compelling to see the many ways in which humans making music come together and connect to each other. I imagine the experience of playing team sports is something similar. You are part of something-- something bigger than yourself and more than the sum of the parts. I can't think of any other school subject that so completely fosters cooperation, collaboration, and connection between students. Students learn to help and mentor each other, support each other, lift each other up, and come together into something glorious and way, way cool.
In music, everyone's a winner. In sports, when two teams try their hardest and give everything they've got, there's just one winner. When a group of bands or choirs give their all, everybody wins. Regrettably, the growth of musical "competitions" has led to many programs that have forgotten this-- but music is the opposite of a zero-sum game. The better some folks do, the better everybody does. In music, you can pursue excellence and awesomeness without having to worry that you might get beat or defeated or humiliated. Everybody can be awesome.
Music programs give back to communities forever. See that big list of community music groups I've worked with? I am not in a large community, but all those groups exist, and they can all exist because every single person in them came through a school music program. Your community band, your church choir, your local theater-- all those groups that enrich the cultural life of your community are the result of school music programs.
Music programs can be a huge source of pride for school and community. Just like a football team, a band or choir can draw a crowd of fans who take great pride in the traditions and accomplishments of the groups. And if you're not getting your program out in front of the public to help build that following and support, you're messing up.
My high school band director is a hell of a guy, and he absolutely altered the trajectory of my life. When people talk about him, they often talk about all the music teachers and professional musicians that came out of his program, but I think his greatest success was all the students like me who went on to do something else, but whose lives have always been enriched by music.
Music is awesome. It's human. It's universal. It's big business precisely because it is something that everybody wants.
Music does not need to make excuses for itself, as if it had no intrinsic worth. It does not have to dress itself up in test-taking robes or mathematical masks. It has deep, powerful human value, and all of us who love it should be saying so, over and over and over again.
Do not defend a music program because it's good for other things. That's like defending kissing because it gives you stronger lip muscles for eating soup neatly. Defend it because music is awesome in ways that no other field is awesome. Defend it because it is music, and that's all the reason it needs. As Emerson wrote, "Beauty is its own excuse for being." A school without music is less whole, less human, less valuable, less complete. Stand up for music as itself, and stop making excuses.
Tuesday, July 26, 2016
Home Stretch (7/26)
I am on a two-week vacation, driving cross-country with my wife to spend time with family in Seattle. In my absence, I have dug into the archives and pulled up some reruns for you. Though what I most suggest is that you check out the blogroll on the right side of the page. There are some outstanding bloggers, and if there are some folks you've never sampled, there's no day like today.
If everything went according to plan, I should be getting home today. So let's wrap up this rerun festival with a random assortment.
Stop Defending Music
The most viewed post here on the mother ship, as well as the one that has brought the most requests for reprints. Why we should stop trying to make excuses for music education.
Teacher Diversity Matters
The teaching field is mostly white ladies. That needs to change.
The Myth of the Hero Teacher
Larger than life. Leaping tall filing cabinets with a single bound. Taking a few moments out of every day to personally reach out to every single student and making that child feel special, while at the same time inspiring greater levels of smartitude just by sheer force of teacherly awesomeness. The Hero Teacher shoots expectation rays at students, making them all instant geniuses.
River To Classroom
One of the privileges of living in a small town on the river.
If everything went according to plan, I should be getting home today. So let's wrap up this rerun festival with a random assortment.
Stop Defending Music
The most viewed post here on the mother ship, as well as the one that has brought the most requests for reprints. Why we should stop trying to make excuses for music education.
Teacher Diversity Matters
The teaching field is mostly white ladies. That needs to change.
The Myth of the Hero Teacher
Larger than life. Leaping tall filing cabinets with a single bound. Taking a few moments out of every day to personally reach out to every single student and making that child feel special, while at the same time inspiring greater levels of smartitude just by sheer force of teacherly awesomeness. The Hero Teacher shoots expectation rays at students, making them all instant geniuses.
River To Classroom
One of the privileges of living in a small town on the river.
Thursday, August 18, 2016
Post #2000
This is the 2,000th post on this blog, which coincidentally goes up just two days after the three year birthday of this blog.
I'm not a big fan of blogging about blogging, but it's good now and then to reflect on what you're doing. 2,000 posts are a big pile of posts, even if some of them are brief and/or not so special. Sometime today I'll also pass the 3,400,000 hits mark. It's humbling to imagine that many moments in which somebody thought it worth the bother to read what's here, and it has been humbling to have so many people reach out to say that something here has made an impression.
And as always, I consider the readership of this blog to be a measure of how many people really care about the world of US education. As of today, these are the top ten posts on the blog:
Stop "Defending" Music
So Sorry, Minneapolis Teachers
FL: Attacking Children and Teachers
North Carolina To Teachers: "F#@! Off
Directory of Anti-Teacher Trolls
FL: District Officials Lose Their Damn Minds
Obama's Testing Action Plan Sucks
Teacher "Shortage" Coast to Coast
[More Update] Ohio Gunning for Specialists
A Not Quitting Letter
Three years ago I was just starting to understand what the heck was happening, and I was able to educate myself thanks to the work of bloggers who came before me, and over the last three years I've seen other bloggers step up to help get the word out.
It's a great time to be a writer, a time in which the power of the word has been amplified again, a time in which an English teacher from a small town (and with a budget of $0.00) can reach out to a national audience about topics that really matter.
I started this first to organize and collect my thoughts, then progressively to vent my frustrations and amazement at the crazy things that are happening to one of America's most important public institutions. I never imagined that I would end up reaching out to so many people, and the lesson there, for all of us, is that we need to do what we can to get the word out and to keep getting the word out. Thanks for reading. Now I have to go get started on #2,001.
I'm not a big fan of blogging about blogging, but it's good now and then to reflect on what you're doing. 2,000 posts are a big pile of posts, even if some of them are brief and/or not so special. Sometime today I'll also pass the 3,400,000 hits mark. It's humbling to imagine that many moments in which somebody thought it worth the bother to read what's here, and it has been humbling to have so many people reach out to say that something here has made an impression.
And as always, I consider the readership of this blog to be a measure of how many people really care about the world of US education. As of today, these are the top ten posts on the blog:
Stop "Defending" Music
So Sorry, Minneapolis Teachers
FL: Attacking Children and Teachers
North Carolina To Teachers: "F#@! Off
Directory of Anti-Teacher Trolls
FL: District Officials Lose Their Damn Minds
Obama's Testing Action Plan Sucks
Teacher "Shortage" Coast to Coast
[More Update] Ohio Gunning for Specialists
A Not Quitting Letter
Three years ago I was just starting to understand what the heck was happening, and I was able to educate myself thanks to the work of bloggers who came before me, and over the last three years I've seen other bloggers step up to help get the word out.
It's a great time to be a writer, a time in which the power of the word has been amplified again, a time in which an English teacher from a small town (and with a budget of $0.00) can reach out to a national audience about topics that really matter.
I started this first to organize and collect my thoughts, then progressively to vent my frustrations and amazement at the crazy things that are happening to one of America's most important public institutions. I never imagined that I would end up reaching out to so many people, and the lesson there, for all of us, is that we need to do what we can to get the word out and to keep getting the word out. Thanks for reading. Now I have to go get started on #2,001.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Common Core Now Loves Inertia
It is by far the weakest argument presented in favor of the Common Core (well, the weakest argument that is not, like "written by teachers" or "internationally benchmarked," based on fabrications and falsehoods). It is the argument that we must stick with Common Core because dropping the standards would be too costly and disruptive.
This argument has been around since CCSS support started to erode. One of the first signs that Louisianna Governor Bobby Jindal and his state superintendent of education John White were growing apart was White's spirited proclamation that dumping the Core testing would throw teachers into a "state of chaos."
Within the last month, two more states have given voice to plaintive cries of "stay the course!" The Hechinger Report presented "Tennessee Common Core Backtrack Leaves Teachers Stranded" which includes several concerns about the Volunteer State's backtracking (a de-Core-ifying augmented by the departure of reformster Kevin Huffman from the state education commissioner position). Tennessee's back-transition leaves teachers straddling both old and new standards. Said one teacher, "I make sure my students are exposed to both standards, but it's only fair that they're assessed genuinely and authentically to the way they're instructed." Not to mention the additional mess the discombobulated assessment creates in a state that is still all in on VAM, using test based bad data and magic formula voodoo to evaluate teachers.
Meanwhile, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant is making noises about reclaiming Mississippi's educational autonomy and dumping the evil federally over-reaching Core. Some teachers are quoted as being not happy.
"I don't think we've been teaching the standards long enough to tell if it's going to fail," said Robin Herring, a fifth-grade teacher at Eastside Elementary in Clinton. "It really scares me that if we stop in the middle of what we're doing that we're just going to move backwards."
It's not that I don't think these folks have a point. But all of this seems... familiar, somehow. Look at the following quote:
"The education of ... children should not be 'politicized' in this way. This is not about what is best for students or best practices in education or even based on proven research, but rather more political rhetoric based on taking advantage of the latest buzz phrase or issue of the day and today it just happens to be 'Common Core.'"
Quick quiz. Were those words spoken by someone opposing the Common Core a few years ago, or someone defending the Common Core today?
Answer: someone defending Common Core today. But you weren't sure, were you?
Yes, it makes a mess when you change an entire system quickly and with little foresight and planning. Yes, it's unfair to give Big Important Tests on material that's not actually being taught. Yes, it's bizarre to implement programs when we don't even know if they work. Those objections to quickly booting out Common Core are valid today, just as they were when they were raised regarding the implementation of the Core in the first place.
When we were implementing the Core, we were all about blowing up the status quo. We were fighting inertia. We were building planes in mid-air and anybody who complained was just a tool of the establishment. We werer throwing out standards that had been rated higher than the Core because we needed to move forward, and do it quickly (even if we had no earthly way of knowing whether forward was really forward). People who complained about moving too quickly, testing too unfairly, throwing out programs and materials without reasons-- these were just people who Didn't Get It. Back in those days, disruption was necessary. Disruption was good.
Now, suddenly, disruption is bad. Inertia is to be revered and respected. We have no proof-- none-- that Common Core is working, but we shouldn't disturb it or throw it off course.
This has been a repeated pattern for reformsters. They used political gamesmanship, emotional leveraging, and rhetorical smoke and mirrors to install the Common Core, and now that those tools are coming back to bite them in the butt, they want to change the rules of the game. "You're making this too political," cry the people who used insider political power plays to get their agenda in place. "You are being too disruptive," complain the people who treated disruption as a virtue when it served their purposes.
It's too bad we're not having more of a conversation about Common Core's (lack of) virtues, but that was a choice reformsters made five years ago. Those who live by the creative disruption must die by it as well.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
This argument has been around since CCSS support started to erode. One of the first signs that Louisianna Governor Bobby Jindal and his state superintendent of education John White were growing apart was White's spirited proclamation that dumping the Core testing would throw teachers into a "state of chaos."
Within the last month, two more states have given voice to plaintive cries of "stay the course!" The Hechinger Report presented "Tennessee Common Core Backtrack Leaves Teachers Stranded" which includes several concerns about the Volunteer State's backtracking (a de-Core-ifying augmented by the departure of reformster Kevin Huffman from the state education commissioner position). Tennessee's back-transition leaves teachers straddling both old and new standards. Said one teacher, "I make sure my students are exposed to both standards, but it's only fair that they're assessed genuinely and authentically to the way they're instructed." Not to mention the additional mess the discombobulated assessment creates in a state that is still all in on VAM, using test based bad data and magic formula voodoo to evaluate teachers.
Meanwhile, Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant is making noises about reclaiming Mississippi's educational autonomy and dumping the evil federally over-reaching Core. Some teachers are quoted as being not happy.
"I don't think we've been teaching the standards long enough to tell if it's going to fail," said Robin Herring, a fifth-grade teacher at Eastside Elementary in Clinton. "It really scares me that if we stop in the middle of what we're doing that we're just going to move backwards."
It's not that I don't think these folks have a point. But all of this seems... familiar, somehow. Look at the following quote:
"The education of ... children should not be 'politicized' in this way. This is not about what is best for students or best practices in education or even based on proven research, but rather more political rhetoric based on taking advantage of the latest buzz phrase or issue of the day and today it just happens to be 'Common Core.'"
Quick quiz. Were those words spoken by someone opposing the Common Core a few years ago, or someone defending the Common Core today?
Answer: someone defending Common Core today. But you weren't sure, were you?
Yes, it makes a mess when you change an entire system quickly and with little foresight and planning. Yes, it's unfair to give Big Important Tests on material that's not actually being taught. Yes, it's bizarre to implement programs when we don't even know if they work. Those objections to quickly booting out Common Core are valid today, just as they were when they were raised regarding the implementation of the Core in the first place.
When we were implementing the Core, we were all about blowing up the status quo. We were fighting inertia. We were building planes in mid-air and anybody who complained was just a tool of the establishment. We werer throwing out standards that had been rated higher than the Core because we needed to move forward, and do it quickly (even if we had no earthly way of knowing whether forward was really forward). People who complained about moving too quickly, testing too unfairly, throwing out programs and materials without reasons-- these were just people who Didn't Get It. Back in those days, disruption was necessary. Disruption was good.
Now, suddenly, disruption is bad. Inertia is to be revered and respected. We have no proof-- none-- that Common Core is working, but we shouldn't disturb it or throw it off course.
This has been a repeated pattern for reformsters. They used political gamesmanship, emotional leveraging, and rhetorical smoke and mirrors to install the Common Core, and now that those tools are coming back to bite them in the butt, they want to change the rules of the game. "You're making this too political," cry the people who used insider political power plays to get their agenda in place. "You are being too disruptive," complain the people who treated disruption as a virtue when it served their purposes.
It's too bad we're not having more of a conversation about Common Core's (lack of) virtues, but that was a choice reformsters made five years ago. Those who live by the creative disruption must die by it as well.
Originally posted at View from the Cheap Seats
Monday, September 9, 2019
Online Pre-K Continues To Spread Like A Big Stupid Plague
So this article pops up on my screen-- the Hechinger Report's Bracey Harris asking "Can 15 minutes a day of online preschool help prepare a child for kindergarten?" I might have suggested a rewrite on the headline, something along the line of "Why in the name of all that's holy are you putting a four-year-old child in front a screen and subjecting her to kindergarten prep software!"
Look, I'll warn you right up front-- long time readers of this blog will not find me saying anything here that I have not said before, but 1) I'm pretty sure most of this should be repeated daily until it sinks into certain skulls because 2) this is a terrible idea that stands on the shoulders of other terrible ideas and every time it shows up wrapped in uncritical boosterfluff like this I get the kind of angry that I can best work off by hammering these keys. I am even going to bold things, because dammit, I've got a pair of two-year-olds napping fifteen feet away from me, and this bullshit has got to stop.
Focused on Mississippi, Harris's piece contains most of the classic features of what is unfortunately becoming a genre. For instance, a mis-framing of the problem--
Of the more than 35,000 Mississippi kindergarten students who took the state’s skills assessment last fall, about 64 percent scored below the state’s readiness benchmark. Since then, the state has made few strides in expanding efforts to help more of its youngest children prepare for school.
If most of your state's five year olds are not ready for your kindergarten program, then it is the kindergarten program that is messed up. It is not a small child's job to get ready for school-- it is the school's job to get ready for that child. It is not the family's job to meet the needs of the school-- it is the school's job to meet the needs of that family.
This is the legacy of No Child Left Behind and its bastard cousins and children. One of the effects of the accountability movement has been to turn schools upside down, to flip the school student relationship. In the flipped relationship, the school (and the state) need students to be generators of reliably high test scores, and so, in the accountability-flipped school, we do not ask students, "What do you need? How can we help you?" Instead we ask each other, "How can we get these kids to cough up an acceptable score?" And part of that answer has been, consistently, to try to get to them sooner, to start them ASAP, so that we can get them ready for the third grade literacy test that gets them ready for the state-issued reading and math Big Standardized Test and so on and so on. Can't let these little slackers just sit around and play and waste time and stuff-- we need to get them ready so that kindergarten can be the new first or second or third grade so that we can get them more ready sooner even though there isn't a damned bit of evidence that getting more ready sooner has any beneficial long term effect whatsoever but plenty of evidence that it's bad for the children. But hey-- as long as we can squeeze some good scores out of them.
This particular article is plugging UPSTART, an online program that started out in Utah, where it did the double duty of providing some semblance of pre-school at much lower costs than backing actual pre-school would have cost, as well as pushing what money the state did spend into the coffers of a Utah company in the district of the legislator who sponsored the bill adopting UPSTART for the state.
From there it has spread like poison ivy, especially to corporate-reform-friendly states like Ohio and Indiana. It's currently in 532 districts and independent schools. The program itself is essentially Personalized [sic] Learning for very tiny people. From their website
UPSTART is designed for very young children. It uses large buttons, obvious directions, and support that helps children progress. Each child moves through a personalized learning path that is designed to meet his or her skills and needs. The software assesses the child's progress at key milestones to determine what type of instruction each child will receive.
The program (and the computer that delivers it) are free, courtesy of UPSTART's many partners, which include the New Schools Venture Fund, TED, Comcast, Intel, and Raspberry.
The Hechinger piece is a classic fluff sandwich-- about 2/3rds of the way down, an opposing view is given one sentence before we get back to the happy fluff about this awesome idea. The opposing view that Harris scoots past is a statement issued jointly by Defending the Early Years and the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood that seriously lambasted this practice (and which Hechinger did cover at the time). Harris mentions that "some experts" have misgivings, but makes no attempt to report those concerns in detail or examine their validity. The statement offered plenty of research and reports to back up their objections; here are must a few of the highlights:
"All children should have access to high-quality, fully funded preschool," said Diane Levin, Professor of Early Childhood Education, at Boston University's Wheelock College. "Online ‘preschool’ lacks the concrete, hands-on social, emotional and intellectual educational components that are essential for quality learning in the early years. Further, online preschools are likely to exacerbate already existing inequalities in early education by giving low-income children superficial exposure to rote skills and ideas while more privileged children continue to receive developmentally sound experiences that provide a solid foundation for later academic success.”
“Allowing tech companies to push online preschools will lead to further marginalization of low-income families who already lack access to high-quality affordable child care,” said Dr. Denisha Jones, Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at Trinity Washington University and DEY Advisory Board member. “If the parents of Silicon Valley won’t put their own children in online preschool, why would we think this is good for other people's children?”
You should read this part, too:
Recognizing the estimated $70 billion a year “preschool market,” an increasing number of Silicon Valley companies with names like “K12 Inc.” and “CHALK" are selling families and policymakers the idea that kindergarten readiness can be transmitted through a screen. What these companies offer is not preschool, but a marketing scheme designed to sell a virtual facsimile of real preschool. By adopting online pre-k, states are selling out kids and families for the benefit of private industry.
All of our knowledge about human development demonstrates that children learn best through exploratory, creative play and relationships with caring adults. As the American Academy of Pediatrics notes, “Higher-order thinking skills and executive functions essential for school success, such as task persistence, impulse control, emotion regulation, and creative, flexible thinking, are best taught through unstructured and social (not digital) play.” By contrast, there is virtually no evidence showing that online preschool improves outcomes for kids.
Online pre-K may expose kids and families to new types of risks. Research shows that screen overuse puts young children at risk of behavior problems, sleep deprivation, delays in social emotional development, and obesity. Extended time on screens diminishes time spent on essential early learning experiences such as lap-reading, creative play, and other social forms of learning.
Utah did a study of its own, asserting that UPSTART raised some BS Test scores, and isn't that what you're most hoping for when you hand your tiny human over to the care of a school system? I could spin off into a rant about the BS Tests, but let's leave it that there is no reason to believe that higher tests scores, particularly for elementary students, say anything at all about the child's future-- and even reformsters know it.
I dream of the day when the folks who work at UPSTART suddenly look up and say, "My God! What the hell are we doing?!" Then just shut everything off and walk away, turning out the lights behind them. But of course, as suggested above, they are not the only players in this stupid game. Search for online pre-k and you can find plenty of vendors like ABCmouse, which offers online reading activities and for the love of God-- just get the kid a book! Dolly Parton will send your child one book a month for free, a real actual book that you can hold in your hands and read to your little while she is curled up in your lap! Or there's Time4Learning, which will start your little out with a software program:
The interactions (verbal instructions, interface buttons, graphics, and format) are designed for pre-readers with an early learning level of attention, fine muscle control, and vocabulary. It is designed so that, after the first session, a child could use the program on his or her own with minimal adult supervision
Excellent. I can just tell my four year old to go play on the computer on his own. What an excellent learning experience.
Yes, the argument is going to be that this will reach children who don't have access or finances to go to pre-school, that this can be a resource for isolated families, to which I say this is like saying there are families that don't have access to enough nutritionally rich food, so let's mail them all cases of diet soda and arsenic. Yes, this targets families and children who need something-- but what they need is not this. Nobody needs this.
Modern education reform has spawned plenty of awful things, but plunking three and four year olds in front of a screen-- even for just fifteen minutes a week-- so that they can get ready for kindergarten is one of the worst, most glaring signs that some folks have totally lost their way and that the search for more revenue streams knows no shame.
 |
| Stop farting around and get to work kid |
Focused on Mississippi, Harris's piece contains most of the classic features of what is unfortunately becoming a genre. For instance, a mis-framing of the problem--
Of the more than 35,000 Mississippi kindergarten students who took the state’s skills assessment last fall, about 64 percent scored below the state’s readiness benchmark. Since then, the state has made few strides in expanding efforts to help more of its youngest children prepare for school.
If most of your state's five year olds are not ready for your kindergarten program, then it is the kindergarten program that is messed up. It is not a small child's job to get ready for school-- it is the school's job to get ready for that child. It is not the family's job to meet the needs of the school-- it is the school's job to meet the needs of that family.
This is the legacy of No Child Left Behind and its bastard cousins and children. One of the effects of the accountability movement has been to turn schools upside down, to flip the school student relationship. In the flipped relationship, the school (and the state) need students to be generators of reliably high test scores, and so, in the accountability-flipped school, we do not ask students, "What do you need? How can we help you?" Instead we ask each other, "How can we get these kids to cough up an acceptable score?" And part of that answer has been, consistently, to try to get to them sooner, to start them ASAP, so that we can get them ready for the third grade literacy test that gets them ready for the state-issued reading and math Big Standardized Test and so on and so on. Can't let these little slackers just sit around and play and waste time and stuff-- we need to get them ready so that kindergarten can be the new first or second or third grade so that we can get them more ready sooner even though there isn't a damned bit of evidence that getting more ready sooner has any beneficial long term effect whatsoever but plenty of evidence that it's bad for the children. But hey-- as long as we can squeeze some good scores out of them.
This particular article is plugging UPSTART, an online program that started out in Utah, where it did the double duty of providing some semblance of pre-school at much lower costs than backing actual pre-school would have cost, as well as pushing what money the state did spend into the coffers of a Utah company in the district of the legislator who sponsored the bill adopting UPSTART for the state.
From there it has spread like poison ivy, especially to corporate-reform-friendly states like Ohio and Indiana. It's currently in 532 districts and independent schools. The program itself is essentially Personalized [sic] Learning for very tiny people. From their website
UPSTART is designed for very young children. It uses large buttons, obvious directions, and support that helps children progress. Each child moves through a personalized learning path that is designed to meet his or her skills and needs. The software assesses the child's progress at key milestones to determine what type of instruction each child will receive.
The program (and the computer that delivers it) are free, courtesy of UPSTART's many partners, which include the New Schools Venture Fund, TED, Comcast, Intel, and Raspberry.
The Hechinger piece is a classic fluff sandwich-- about 2/3rds of the way down, an opposing view is given one sentence before we get back to the happy fluff about this awesome idea. The opposing view that Harris scoots past is a statement issued jointly by Defending the Early Years and the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood that seriously lambasted this practice (and which Hechinger did cover at the time). Harris mentions that "some experts" have misgivings, but makes no attempt to report those concerns in detail or examine their validity. The statement offered plenty of research and reports to back up their objections; here are must a few of the highlights:
"All children should have access to high-quality, fully funded preschool," said Diane Levin, Professor of Early Childhood Education, at Boston University's Wheelock College. "Online ‘preschool’ lacks the concrete, hands-on social, emotional and intellectual educational components that are essential for quality learning in the early years. Further, online preschools are likely to exacerbate already existing inequalities in early education by giving low-income children superficial exposure to rote skills and ideas while more privileged children continue to receive developmentally sound experiences that provide a solid foundation for later academic success.”
“Allowing tech companies to push online preschools will lead to further marginalization of low-income families who already lack access to high-quality affordable child care,” said Dr. Denisha Jones, Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at Trinity Washington University and DEY Advisory Board member. “If the parents of Silicon Valley won’t put their own children in online preschool, why would we think this is good for other people's children?”
You should read this part, too:
Recognizing the estimated $70 billion a year “preschool market,” an increasing number of Silicon Valley companies with names like “K12 Inc.” and “CHALK" are selling families and policymakers the idea that kindergarten readiness can be transmitted through a screen. What these companies offer is not preschool, but a marketing scheme designed to sell a virtual facsimile of real preschool. By adopting online pre-k, states are selling out kids and families for the benefit of private industry.
All of our knowledge about human development demonstrates that children learn best through exploratory, creative play and relationships with caring adults. As the American Academy of Pediatrics notes, “Higher-order thinking skills and executive functions essential for school success, such as task persistence, impulse control, emotion regulation, and creative, flexible thinking, are best taught through unstructured and social (not digital) play.” By contrast, there is virtually no evidence showing that online preschool improves outcomes for kids.
Online pre-K may expose kids and families to new types of risks. Research shows that screen overuse puts young children at risk of behavior problems, sleep deprivation, delays in social emotional development, and obesity. Extended time on screens diminishes time spent on essential early learning experiences such as lap-reading, creative play, and other social forms of learning.
Utah did a study of its own, asserting that UPSTART raised some BS Test scores, and isn't that what you're most hoping for when you hand your tiny human over to the care of a school system? I could spin off into a rant about the BS Tests, but let's leave it that there is no reason to believe that higher tests scores, particularly for elementary students, say anything at all about the child's future-- and even reformsters know it.
I dream of the day when the folks who work at UPSTART suddenly look up and say, "My God! What the hell are we doing?!" Then just shut everything off and walk away, turning out the lights behind them. But of course, as suggested above, they are not the only players in this stupid game. Search for online pre-k and you can find plenty of vendors like ABCmouse, which offers online reading activities and for the love of God-- just get the kid a book! Dolly Parton will send your child one book a month for free, a real actual book that you can hold in your hands and read to your little while she is curled up in your lap! Or there's Time4Learning, which will start your little out with a software program:
The interactions (verbal instructions, interface buttons, graphics, and format) are designed for pre-readers with an early learning level of attention, fine muscle control, and vocabulary. It is designed so that, after the first session, a child could use the program on his or her own with minimal adult supervision
Excellent. I can just tell my four year old to go play on the computer on his own. What an excellent learning experience.
Yes, the argument is going to be that this will reach children who don't have access or finances to go to pre-school, that this can be a resource for isolated families, to which I say this is like saying there are families that don't have access to enough nutritionally rich food, so let's mail them all cases of diet soda and arsenic. Yes, this targets families and children who need something-- but what they need is not this. Nobody needs this.
Modern education reform has spawned plenty of awful things, but plunking three and four year olds in front of a screen-- even for just fifteen minutes a week-- so that they can get ready for kindergarten is one of the worst, most glaring signs that some folks have totally lost their way and that the search for more revenue streams knows no shame.
Monday, December 12, 2022
School Choice Is Not The Goal
Well, Jay Greene told us what he was going to do. Back in February, in his gig as Defund Public Education Guy at the Heritage Foundation, Greene published "Time for the school choice movement to embrace the culture wars." And he's been giving it a big sloppy hug ever since. At the same time, he's part of the choice movement that is revealing it isn't really interested in choice at all.
A teacher who is an active supporter of Democrats could be a perfectly fine teacher of the children of active supporters of Republicans in the same way that the children of Baptists could receive a quality education in a Catholic school. But we don’t compel Baptists to send their children to Catholic schools nor should we compel conservative, rural Texans to send their children to public schools dominated by progressives.
Rural superintendents have been blocking the expansion of school choice in Texas by whispering in their state legislators’ ears that doing so might jeopardize jobs in the local public schools. But it is unclear why rural legislators should heed these concerns given that rural educators may be undermining the values of their constituents and donating to their political opponents.
In a piece for Fox News, Greene and his colleague Ian Kingsbury (Educational Freedom Institute) offer some really half-assed "research" to show that there's a "disconnect" between rural Texas teachers and rural Texas ("Progressive teachers vs conservative families: School choice can help level the playing field").
Let me break down how hard they reached to prop up their point.
They dug up 1,400 contributions by checking school district employees against zip codes with fewer than 500 people per square mile. Then they determined that 90.2% of those contributions were made in support of Democratic candidates. But hey-- Greg Abbott won re-election with 80.7% of the vote. So there you have it-- rural teachers are out of touch with rural parents.
Here are some things they don't look at. How many of those school district employees are teachers? How many teachers are there total in those areas-- are the 1,400 contributions out of 100,000 employees? How did things go in elections other than Abbott's gubernatorial race?
Nor do they offer a theory about what exactly is happening. Are a bunch of progressive teachers being airlifted into rural areas as part of some socialist assault on rural areas? Or do rural teachers go to teach in rural areas for the same reasons that other folks go to live in rural areas?
They don't mention that teachers are remarkably non-monolithic, as witnessed, for instance, by the huge number of NEA members who voted for Donald Trump. They do mention that rural areas of Texas has been staunch in their opposition to school choice, particularly the vouchers that Greene and Kingsbury are pushing in this article.
And push they will. Having manufactured their point, they move to the sell.
Which is a heck of a leap--should we just assume that everyone who believes something is automatically trying to impose that belief on everyone they encounter? And then this
Rural superintendents have been blocking the expansion of school choice in Texas by whispering in their state legislators’ ears that doing so might jeopardize jobs in the local public schools. But it is unclear why rural legislators should heed these concerns given that rural educators may be undermining the values of their constituents and donating to their political opponents.
Choice is not the point.
I spotted this piece on Twitter because choicer Corey DeAngelis was using it as part of his reply to Elon Musk's tweet of "The woke mind virus is defeated or nothing else matters."
Select quotes from the article that he chose to use in that conversation include "All that school choice would do is shift some of the jobs from public schools dominated by Democrats to other schools whose values would be more likely to align with those of parents in those areas" and also "There is no reason to trap rural families in schools dominated by people with sharply different values and priorities." This is thin-sliced baloney (first, Greene and Kingsbury proved nothing and second, do these rural districts not have elected school boards?) but it points us at the real idea here, as does one other response to Musk
we win this war with school choice. https://t.co/iXMewD5Cxk
— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) December 12, 2022
In other words, the goal for these folks is not choice. It's to replace the current public school system with a private one that's aligned with the Proper Values, to wipe out any and all school systems that teach The Wrong Values.
There are folks in the choice world who believe that choice is in and of itself a virtue. There are people who believe we should have woke schools and conservative schools etc etc etc. But these are not those people.
I have long argued that people do not really want choice, that they just want to get what they want.
We are seeing repeatedly that choice is not what some folks who nominally support choice actually want. Choicers have campaigned against LGBTQ charters. Patron choice saint Ron DeSantis is not in Florida fighting for every parents' right to have whatever school they want, but to Stop WOKE and CRT wherever it appears. The Libertarians of Croydon, NH, actually trashed a functioning school choice system because they wanted lower taxes. We are seeing repeatedly that choice-loving folks like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education don't want choice for everybody--they just want schools to reflect their values. The book banners do not campaign for libraries where everyone can get the books they want, but libraries where people can only get the books the banners approve of.
Hell, we've now got an entire legal theory that argues that the Framers didn't really want liberty and democracy--they wanted a government that was based on the Right Values.
I will say, again, that this is not all school choice fans. Education policy makes strange bedfellows (remember back when that wacky Common Core united people who love public education and people who hate it). But right now this is a big chunk of the school choice crowd clamoring for an end to schools that teach things they don't approve of. We don't really need choice, reads the subtext. We just need one system that teaches the things we want it to teach.
This is not a system that would serve anyone but a select few. It's not democratically owned and operated public education in a pluralistic society, and it's not actual school choice, either. It's just another version of the conservative-ish christianist call to "take back our schools" and make them all ours again (and keep us from having to pay taxes to fund schools for Those People). This is not a system that would uphold any of the ideals of American education.
Wednesday, September 3, 2014
McClusky and Petrilli Reboot CCSS Debate
In Monday's Washington Times, Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Institute and Neal McClusky form Cato made an attempt to reboot the debate about the Common Core by writing a list of basic points on which folks from all sides ought to be able to agree. It's a worthy effort from two men who share a conservative sensibility but not an identical point of view about the Core, and it deserves a serious look. So, although I represent the Guys With Beards and Blogs Foundation, I'm going to go ahead and do that.
Have they identified legitimate baseline points on which all of us can agree? Let's see.
First, there is no evidence that most Core opponents or advocates are ill-intentioned.
Agreed. Sort of. I think some Core advocates have intentions to dismantle US public education, but I'll stipulate that they don't intend to do so out of some desire to commit institutional vandalism. Their intentions may well be good, but there objectives are destructive in a way that I am unlikely to embrace.
But in pretty much all debates, I think it's useless to insist that all reasonable and intelligent people must reach the same conclusions I do. Declaring that anybody who disagrees with me must be either deluded, ignorant or evil is not useful and almost always untrue.
Next, the Core was not created by Washington, but groups that saw crummy state standards and tests and agreed on the need to improve their quality. In particular, these organizations wanted to ensure that “proficient” meant the same thing in Mississippi as Massachusetts, and sought to reduce the huge proportion of people arriving at college or workplaces without the skills to succeed. Responding to this, the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers started discussing whether common, higher standards could be forged in the basic subjects of reading and math. With support from the Gates Foundation, they launched the effort that eventually became the Core. All this occurred, importantly, before Barack Obama was elected president.
McClusky and Petrilli lay out a history of the Core that comes much closer to the truth than the old "written by a bunch of teachers" or "hatched in the bowels of DC by commie conspirators" narratives. The generic noun "groups" is a bit disingenuous, but okay. They go on to describe the feds role in promoting the Core, in particular offering a explanation of how state adoption was not exactly forced and not exactly free.
Core adoption was technically voluntary: States could refuse to seek Race to the Top money or waivers, and a few did. The allure of hundreds of millions of dollars and No Child Left Behind relief, though, were certainly powerful. Some Core advocates wanted federal incentives. The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers called for them in their 2008 report “Benchmarking for Success,” and some supporters reportedly worked with the administration in formulating Race to the Top.
They finish up with a list of questions to consider for going forward.
Is there good reason to think common, rigorous state standards will improve outcomes? Does the Common Core fit that bill? What roles should Washington, states, districts and parents have in deciding what standards guide classroom instruction? We have different answers to these questions, but agree on at least one thing: We must stop fighting over basic facts, and respectfully tackle these crucial questions.
I think there's a major factor in the debate or conversation or word salad wrangling about education that they've overlooked, and I'll post about that next. But in the meantime, this represents a shift in the position for some of the conservative fans of the Core. For that matter, it indicates a willingness to talk, which is an all new position from the days that reformsters took the position that teachers should sit down, shut up, and do as their told while the Core and its attached reformy ideas were rammed through as quickly as possible.
Certainly there are better uses for energy on all sides than in defending tired and indefensible talking points. And Petrilli and McClusky are correct in that ultimately the fate of CCSS ought to be decide based on its actual merits (as well as the merits of any national standards). Whether we can have that debate, let alone have it guide decisions, is a more difficult question.
Have they identified legitimate baseline points on which all of us can agree? Let's see.
First, there is no evidence that most Core opponents or advocates are ill-intentioned.
Agreed. Sort of. I think some Core advocates have intentions to dismantle US public education, but I'll stipulate that they don't intend to do so out of some desire to commit institutional vandalism. Their intentions may well be good, but there objectives are destructive in a way that I am unlikely to embrace.
But in pretty much all debates, I think it's useless to insist that all reasonable and intelligent people must reach the same conclusions I do. Declaring that anybody who disagrees with me must be either deluded, ignorant or evil is not useful and almost always untrue.
Next, the Core was not created by Washington, but groups that saw crummy state standards and tests and agreed on the need to improve their quality. In particular, these organizations wanted to ensure that “proficient” meant the same thing in Mississippi as Massachusetts, and sought to reduce the huge proportion of people arriving at college or workplaces without the skills to succeed. Responding to this, the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers started discussing whether common, higher standards could be forged in the basic subjects of reading and math. With support from the Gates Foundation, they launched the effort that eventually became the Core. All this occurred, importantly, before Barack Obama was elected president.
McClusky and Petrilli lay out a history of the Core that comes much closer to the truth than the old "written by a bunch of teachers" or "hatched in the bowels of DC by commie conspirators" narratives. The generic noun "groups" is a bit disingenuous, but okay. They go on to describe the feds role in promoting the Core, in particular offering a explanation of how state adoption was not exactly forced and not exactly free.
Core adoption was technically voluntary: States could refuse to seek Race to the Top money or waivers, and a few did. The allure of hundreds of millions of dollars and No Child Left Behind relief, though, were certainly powerful. Some Core advocates wanted federal incentives. The National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers called for them in their 2008 report “Benchmarking for Success,” and some supporters reportedly worked with the administration in formulating Race to the Top.
They finish up with a list of questions to consider for going forward.
Is there good reason to think common, rigorous state standards will improve outcomes? Does the Common Core fit that bill? What roles should Washington, states, districts and parents have in deciding what standards guide classroom instruction? We have different answers to these questions, but agree on at least one thing: We must stop fighting over basic facts, and respectfully tackle these crucial questions.
I think there's a major factor in the debate or conversation or word salad wrangling about education that they've overlooked, and I'll post about that next. But in the meantime, this represents a shift in the position for some of the conservative fans of the Core. For that matter, it indicates a willingness to talk, which is an all new position from the days that reformsters took the position that teachers should sit down, shut up, and do as their told while the Core and its attached reformy ideas were rammed through as quickly as possible.
Certainly there are better uses for energy on all sides than in defending tired and indefensible talking points. And Petrilli and McClusky are correct in that ultimately the fate of CCSS ought to be decide based on its actual merits (as well as the merits of any national standards). Whether we can have that debate, let alone have it guide decisions, is a more difficult question.
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Couple Days Off
I have just returned from a few days on a lake in Maine with my lovely wife. We had a window of opportunity and cause to celebrate (my wife will be back where she belongs—in a classroom—come the fall), so we hopped in the car and headed north for some r & r.
We stayed in a cabin that my grandfather (a general contractor) built back in the fifties. It’s quiet, and this weekend it was clear and perfect
It is also completely without wi-fi, so I’ve been unplugged for several days (our phones are not smart, not even a little bit wise). But with the time to sit and read and reflect cut off from the torrent of information, I’ve found some renewed focus about a few things. I learned some stuff on my summer vacation.
Well, in some cases I've simply confirmed old knowledge. Devil Dogs are awful, but I love them anyway. They seem to made of chocolate tinged cardboard and fluff, but they taste like summer and home and outdoors to me. Also, with all due respect to my friends in the pilgrim state, all residents of Massachusetts should have their cars confiscated and they should never be allowed to drive ever again.
What I’ve learned is that while I can go a while without being able to check the blogs and the news and e-mail (I worry about the Nigerian prince), I have a powerful need to be able to look stuff up. It reminds me that we live in such a miraculous time, a time in which we have access to mountains of information—it’s almost like being smart. At the very least, the internet has changed what it means to be smart—but the inequity of access means the internet is also one more amplifier of the gap between the haves and have-nots. I need to find ways to address all of that in my classroom.
We read a bunch while we were up north. I read a bio of Edwin Drake, Our Children, The Cage-Busting Teacher, and The Warmth of Other Suns (and re-read Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire). Each read alone has a lot of interesting things to say; read together, they struck a few extra sparks in my brain. I’ll get back to you with some of it in this space. I’m glad to learn that I can still read entire books.
I've relearned something I learned earlier this summer-- when you are in the ongoing stream of news and reaction and dissection and re-reaction, you lose sight of just how quickly it moves (Chris Christie wants to punch who??). Earlier this summer I absolutely depended on Mercedes Schneider to report on the ESEA rewrite amendments, because I had a new round of rehearsals, a dying refrigerator, and some family business to attend to. In other words, I was having trouble keeping up because I was dealing with the exact sort of everyday stuff that ordinary people deal with. Sometimes it takes all of peoples' time and attention just to live their lives-- we can't be shocked, surprised, or upset that people busy with life didn't take a few hours to read up on the latest eruption in the education policy world (or dozens of hours over the last month to understand the context). This is one of the advantages that the thinky tank guys and the lobbyists and the policy wonks have-- their everyday life IS keeping up with this stuff. For people who have actual lives, it's more of a challenge. Having a network-- and being part of a network-- is critical to the mission of defending public education.
Likewise, I've learned that it can be worth it to take your head out of the unending high-speed swirly that is the education debate to stop and clear your brain a bit and remember what we care about, why we care about it, and what we want to do about it. It's easy to get caught up in the one-damn-thing-after-another of it all.
It's a marathon, not a sprint. Never give up and never surrender. But run too fast, too hard, too much of the time, and you not only run the risk of not finishing, but you lose track of where the finish line even is.
We stayed in a cabin that my grandfather (a general contractor) built back in the fifties. It’s quiet, and this weekend it was clear and perfect
It is also completely without wi-fi, so I’ve been unplugged for several days (our phones are not smart, not even a little bit wise). But with the time to sit and read and reflect cut off from the torrent of information, I’ve found some renewed focus about a few things. I learned some stuff on my summer vacation.
Well, in some cases I've simply confirmed old knowledge. Devil Dogs are awful, but I love them anyway. They seem to made of chocolate tinged cardboard and fluff, but they taste like summer and home and outdoors to me. Also, with all due respect to my friends in the pilgrim state, all residents of Massachusetts should have their cars confiscated and they should never be allowed to drive ever again.
What I’ve learned is that while I can go a while without being able to check the blogs and the news and e-mail (I worry about the Nigerian prince), I have a powerful need to be able to look stuff up. It reminds me that we live in such a miraculous time, a time in which we have access to mountains of information—it’s almost like being smart. At the very least, the internet has changed what it means to be smart—but the inequity of access means the internet is also one more amplifier of the gap between the haves and have-nots. I need to find ways to address all of that in my classroom.
We read a bunch while we were up north. I read a bio of Edwin Drake, Our Children, The Cage-Busting Teacher, and The Warmth of Other Suns (and re-read Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire). Each read alone has a lot of interesting things to say; read together, they struck a few extra sparks in my brain. I’ll get back to you with some of it in this space. I’m glad to learn that I can still read entire books.
I've relearned something I learned earlier this summer-- when you are in the ongoing stream of news and reaction and dissection and re-reaction, you lose sight of just how quickly it moves (Chris Christie wants to punch who??). Earlier this summer I absolutely depended on Mercedes Schneider to report on the ESEA rewrite amendments, because I had a new round of rehearsals, a dying refrigerator, and some family business to attend to. In other words, I was having trouble keeping up because I was dealing with the exact sort of everyday stuff that ordinary people deal with. Sometimes it takes all of peoples' time and attention just to live their lives-- we can't be shocked, surprised, or upset that people busy with life didn't take a few hours to read up on the latest eruption in the education policy world (or dozens of hours over the last month to understand the context). This is one of the advantages that the thinky tank guys and the lobbyists and the policy wonks have-- their everyday life IS keeping up with this stuff. For people who have actual lives, it's more of a challenge. Having a network-- and being part of a network-- is critical to the mission of defending public education.
Likewise, I've learned that it can be worth it to take your head out of the unending high-speed swirly that is the education debate to stop and clear your brain a bit and remember what we care about, why we care about it, and what we want to do about it. It's easy to get caught up in the one-damn-thing-after-another of it all.
It's a marathon, not a sprint. Never give up and never surrender. But run too fast, too hard, too much of the time, and you not only run the risk of not finishing, but you lose track of where the finish line even is.
Friday, October 25, 2024
Outing LBGTQ Students
One of the culture panic hills one which some folks want to battle is the issue of schools outing LGBTQ students to their parents. The culture panic crowd is not only in favor of it, but they demand it, and quite a bit of perspective is being lost over the issue.
Take this from a recent Helen Lewis piece for The Atlantic--
Trump said, in an abrupt segue from a bit about fracking. “How about that one? Your child goes to school, and they take your child. It was a he, comes back as a she. And they do it, often without parental consent.”
Lines like this would not succeed without containing at least a kernel of truth. Under the policies of many districts, students can change their pronouns at school and use the bathroom of their chosen gender without their parents’ knowledge. A recent California law prohibits districts from requiring that parents be informed.
A kernel of truth? Letting children pick their pronoun or bathroom is akin to performing what Trump called "brutal" surgery on children.
Parents Defending Education has a whole collection of outrage-stoking stories of schools with policies that allow students to decide whether or not they want information about their status to be shared with their parents.
Here's just one example-- a story from New Hampshire, where a school allowed "radical LGBTQ group" GLSEN (formerly the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Alliance) to run a professional development center.
GLSEN was founded in Massachusetts by two teachers; in 1994 it branched into other states. Their goals have been centered around making schools into "the safe and affirming environment all youth deserve." For the culture panic crowd, GLSEN is a promoter of "gender ideology" aka "acknowledging that LGBTQ persons are, in fact, human beings."
But GLSEN told staff things like this:
Although it may be hard to believe, there are students whose emotional and physical safety were jeopardized when school staff outed them to other students and even family members
And that, we're meant to understand, is self-evidently terrible, a crazy thing to tell teachers.
Except that it's the truth. Here's a graphic taken from a report by the not left-wing Bellwether Partners.
None of these are great, but consider the homelessness statistic-- more than 1 in 4 LGBTQ young persons experience homelessness, and that's going to be mostly due to being thrown out of their home. Also, LGBTQ youths who feel supported at home reported attempting suicide at less than half the rate of those who didn't feel that level of support. And the picture surely hasn't improved since the pandemic pause.
So we need to ask-- what is the point of an out-to-parents requirement, exerted through either local school regulations or state law? What is it that supporters of such regulations want to achieve?
Lots of these folks seem to believe that LGBTQ persons never occur "naturally," that LGBTQ folks are made, not born, through some combination of indoctrination, seduction, and peer pressure. So perhaps the idea is to create more social pressure to just not "choose" to become LGBTQ. This is a technique that has never worked in the history of LGBTQ persons (which coincides with the history of the world).
In some cases, the aim seems to be to assert control over children, as if they are a piece of property belonging to the parents. No, the child does not belong to the school. The child also does not belong to the parents, nor to anyone else, because the child is an actual live human being. It is a normal and natural thing as a parent to worry about the twists and turns your child may go through growing up. As old as stories about changlings, the visceral fear that your beloved child may be mysteriously replaced with some stranger. But "if my child has to tell me they think they're LGBTQ, then I'll be able to make them stop it" is not a winning plan.
But a non-zero number of parents react by trying to overpower their children and forcing them to become the person those parents want them to be. (see also "children going no contact")
Separate from them are the folks who want to overpower other peoples' children, as if government power can be used to force LGBTQ persons into nonexistence.
Supporters argue that these rules are about protecting parental rights, but which rights are we talking about. The right to control your child? No such right exists. The right to erase a child's privacy and step over any and all boundaries? The right to know everything about your child? It's a weird dance that the far right does--when the child is a fetus, its rights are supposed to totally overrule the rights of the parent, but once born, the child loses all rights to the parent.
Whatever folks on the right think mandatory rules will accomplish, the actual results are not hard to predict. Children who feel safe and loved and supported at home will continue to freely share information about themselves with their grownups. Those who don't feel safe at home will quickly understand that they are not safe at school, either. So young people who are at a vulnerable time dealing with difficult questions of identity and their place in the world will be further isolated in world where social media makes teens more vulnerable to all manner of awful stuff.
I have no doubt at all that there are schools and school personnel out there who, in their desire to help, are over the line on these issues. But making wholesale outing of LGBTQ students without any concerns or safeguards for the rights--and safety-- of that student is irresponsible and, sometimes, dangerous. The rules have to treat those LGBTQ persons as real human beings and not faceless threats to a traditional gender orthodoxy. We have to do better.
Thursday, March 23, 2023
Children Are People
During his town hall on education, far-right-light Governor Glenn Youngkin was pressed on various issues of trans children, and in response, he echoed a sentiment that keeps appearing in these parental rights debates (though not always quite so clearly):
Children belong to parents. Not to the state, not to schools, not to bureaucrats, but to parents.
Well, no, Children are human beings, not chattel.
But the humanity of children often seems at question in much of the anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and legislation from culture warriors these days. New Hampshire is yet another state considering legislation that could require school staff to out LGBTQ students to their parents. Meanwhile, the well-funded advocacy group, Parents [sic] Defending [sic] Education [sic] has released a list of 6,000 schools that, they charge, have policies to "hide" trans student status from parents. And the hot new wave in anti-LGBTQ student bills are Birth Name bills, requiring schools and school staff to address students by the names and pronouns on their birth certificates without written parental permission.
What all of this has in common is a disregard for the agency and independence and humanity of the students themselves.
The scenario often darkly hinted at is one in which school staff somehow convince a student that they are LGBTQ, and tell them they had better not tell anyone at home about it.
But the far more likely scenario is one in which a student comes to a trusted school staff member to talk about their identity while begging the staff member not to tell parents. This conversation may occur during the highly charged time when the student is struggling with a new understanding of themself, or it may occur in a more standard school drama context (the girl who asks for advice dealing with her girlfriend but "I can't talk to my folks about this because they would freak").
Anybody who pretends that these moments are easy to navigate and can be handled by a cut and dried set of rules is kidding themselves. Students, especially teens, play with their sense of identity an awful lot, and sometimes it's temporary and sometimes it's not. Students are sometimes terrible judges of what they can expect from parents and sometimes they are excellent judges. Parents are sometimes great at supporting their children's growth into independent adults, and sometimes they are not, at all.
As with many hot button issues, folks are dealing from different premises. If you believe that LGBTQ identities are unnatural, that LGBTQ identities are made, not born, then you will react to news of your own child's LGBTQ identity by wanting to know who made them that way, and schools are the most obvious place to look. If you believe that LGBTQ persons are born, not made, then your main concern will be how to protect and gird them for a world that is often hostile--and that hostility can start at home. We know that LGBTQ children go through a lot. It seems simple enough to want them to go through less, but different premises yield different solutions to the problem ("stop being LGBTQ" versus "put protections for the child in place").
The ideal situation is parents who are loving and supportive of the child, though that situation can be less ideal in states where the parents of LGBTQ persons are stripped of their legal rights to make certain decisions for their children (because parental rights apparently involves only certain parents in some states). A school can't hide any of this information when the child is loving, accepted, and open with their parents.
Put another way, there is no situation in which the school hides information about LGBTQ students from the parents; there are only situations in which the school and the child keep the information from parents.
The school's decision has to be based on two factors. One is the question of possible abuse of the child. Some commenters say, "Well, the law doesn't have to worry about that because the laws already require school staff to report abuse." But that's abuse that has already happened. "We're going to tell your folks, and if they beat you and throw you out, then we'll just report it," is not a great plan. But figuring out what possible abuse may or may not happen is not an exact science.
The other factor is that schools must balance the rights of the parents with the rights of the students. The disturbing part of so many of these laws, so much of this rhetoric, is that the rights of students are absent from the debate. This has become an ugly part of the new idea that schools serve families and not all of the community--the notion that teachers are simply hirelings whose primary purpose if to extend parental reach in exerting their will over their children.
None of this is simple to sort out, and there is no doubt that sometimes schools get it wrong, that staff, well-meaning or not, make some bad judgement calls.
But any solution that treats children as property rather than people is not going to help. Any solution that enshrines parental rights but ignores students' rights and safety is not a real solution. Students are trying to figure out who they are, and they are trying to figure out how their identity is going to affect their relationships with the people around them. The people around them can help by being mindful, thoughtful, and extending grace to the students and to each other.
Sunday, January 19, 2025
Supporting Teachers
How do we help teachers be better?
Robert Pondiscio is fond of pointing out that A) you go into battle with the army you have, not the one you wish you had and B) with around 4 million teachers in the country, many are likely to be just regular human beings and not super-teachers.
He's not wrong. On the national, state, local, and building level, the teacher corps includes some very excellent teachers, some pretty good ones, some average ones, and a small but non-zero number of not very good ones. (My argument remains that it's not a simple bell curve because the majority of people who would be bad at it either never try or give up fairly quickly.)
Policy and reformy folks have tried to deal with this distribution in a number of unproductive manners.
Firing our way to excellence.
A favorite with the technocrat crowd. this was the plan whereby test scores soaked in VAM sauce was going to create hard data that could be used to make hiring and firing decisions (or, in some cases, merit pay decisions). But sure-- if we just fire all the terrible teachers, we'd be left with nothing but the good ones.
There are numerous problems with this, starting with the lack of a valid or reliable way to evaluate teachers. The Big Standardized Test is its own kind of sham, but Value-Added Measures can only dream of someday working their way up to junk science status.
Sardine Superteacher
The flip side of firing to excellence. This idea was to find the super-duper teachers and plunk them in classrooms with a couple hundred students. (There was a time when they also liked the idea of hooking the super-teachers up to computers, but COVID took some of the bloom off the distance learning rose.)
Rendering
Another idea was to take the Highly Effective Teachers and move them to the low-achieving schools. This idea lost traction on the slippery idea that teachers had to be convinced, somehow, to take the different job. More money? Sort of. Send a team to grab them, drop a hood over their head, and throw them in a van? Probably illegal.
All of these have the same problem
It's not just that it's really difficult to quantify how good a particular teacher is. It's that teacher effectiveness is dependent on context and environment. A teacher who's effective with 20 students is not necessarily equally effective with 200. A teacher might be very effective with one type of student and not with another. And despite being the best work at being "professional," sometimes teachers bring their own lives into the classroom. Plus, what are we asking them to teach? I found that I was actually better with multiple preps in a day than just teaching the same thing, but some of my colleagues struggled with that kind of grind. And there's just the influence of time and experience; I taught for 39 years, and I was not the same teacher every one of those years.
On top of that, teaching involves a teacher and a student, and that connection is also variable. Pick any teacher in your local school, one that you are certain is terrible, and I guarantee you that we can find students who will praise that teacher to high heaven. Likewise, pick someone known widely as a wonderful teachers; we can find students who will tell you how awful they are.
I'm not going to argue that judging teacher quality is impossible. I am going to say that it is heavily influenced by context and environment and factors that shift regularly, making it hugely difficult to quantify teacher quality in such a way that the measures can safely and accurately be used to make major decisions about teaching careers.
And even if you could...
What are you going to do? Fire a bunch of teachers and replace them with...? How much more practical is it to take the folks you have and help them be the best they can be. Will there be a non-zero number of non-salvageable teachers who have to be shown the door? Certainly. But can you direct (or re-direct) staff to be better? I think that's not only possible, but necessary.
So how?
We've seen bad ideas about this, as well.
Carrots and sticks and sticks and sticks
There's a whole family of reformy ideas that starts from the premise that teachers know how to get the high-achieving results that policy makers want, but those teachers have been keeping the secrets of Teaching Well locked in their filing cabinets, waiting to be either bribed or threatened into finally unleashing all the awesome.
It's a premise that is both insulting and myopic. The vast majority of teachers are doing the best they can with the tools they have. But some reformsters (looking at you, Arne Duncan) treat teachers like the main obstacle to educating children instead of the people who are actually in classrooms trying to get the work done.
Teachers and their students face a variety of obstacles, but reformsters got into the nasty habit of dismissing these explanations of real hurdles by calling them "excuses" rather than, say, "challenges that maybe we could try helping teachers meet."
De-professionalizing the Profession
For some reformsters, the dream has been the teacher-proof classroom. Set out a curriculum so specific and pre-programed that whoever your teacher is, you just hand them the program, tell them to implement it With Fidelity, and voila!-- an educational program that a trained monkey could implement effectively. Maybe it's scripted. Maybe it's just a day by day, minute by minute guide. Maybe it's a computer program, or a series of videos.
Some reformsters see this as an opportunity to cut personnel costs. Turn teaching into a job that anybody can do, as long as they follow instructions, means that the labor pool is huge and the meat widgets hired for the classroom can be easily (and inexpensively) replaced. These are the folks who are so excited about AI "teachers" that they barely bother to pretend that such a move would foster better teaching.
De-professionalizing teaching is the fast food model of education. But the promise of standardization in a McDonalds is not that you can always get excellent food there, but just the promise that you probably won't get terrible food. People who want excellent food go somewhere else, where the chefs are chefs and not assembly-line food prep meat widgets.
Maybe forcing your less-gifted teachers into a program to implement With Fidelity will improve schools on the bottom end (though I'm not convinced that someone with limited teaching ability can really implement one of these scripted programs effectively). But by stripping teachers of autonomy, you will inevitably hamstring your best teachers. You can argue that their superior teaching skills will allow them to find ways to put their personal spin on the mandatory teacher-proof program, but I'd say you're just arguing that they can still be great to extent that they work around, ignore, and otherwise find ways to escape the mandatory program.
Removing teacher authority may or may not help your mediocre teachers, will hamstring your better teachers, and will make the profession less attractive to people who would be a real asset.
Testocracy
We are already reaping the problems created by a new generation of teachers who have never known anything in school except test-centered prep work. Too many have learned that you check the standards, google for "exercises" aimed at those standards, hand them out, drill them down, and that's supposed to be teaching (Daniel Koretz writes about this in The Testing Charade).
Okay, have you got anything other than complaints?
The job of a school administrator (of any manager) is to create the conditions under which staff can do their best work. Most folks who work in schools already know that teachers are overworked, overstressed, and overburdened with a whole bunch of responsibilities. Many attempts to improve teaching and/or sell new education-flavored products are built around the idea that we could take X off teachers' plates.
The crazy thing about this is that these attempts are all marked by one feature--the people behind them have decided on teachers' behalf what it is that teachers need. Let me suggest a crazy new approach--
Ask the teachers.
I've talked about this before (see "The Seven Most Powerful Words in Education") but not enough since. Just ask staff, "What can I do to help you?"
Now, sometimes this will be tricky, because teachers, as different individual human beings, will want/need different things. And sometimes they will want things admins can't give them. But administrators have to be better. One former colleague of mine pissed off our administration by asking, after being given yet another new responsibility, "What do you want me to stop doing so I have time to do this?" It's a legitimate question, and one that every teacher in that room was thinking, but asking it was Forbidden Not A Team Player naughtiness.
Ask your staff what they need. Don't just jump to "I have decided that what you want is a program to manage grades" or "I have decided that you want PD about apps I'm sure you want to use." Ask.
Provide high quality materials and resources.
But do not mandate how they must be used. Involve staff in the collection or creation of these materials, and revisit the collection annually. There will be eternal debates about which materials are high quality, just like there are eternal debates about what belongs in the canon. These debates are eternal because the answer keeps changing because of the times, the context, the available materials. But the fact that these debates can't be settled conclusively is not a reason to abandon the work of getting the very best materials available to your staff.
Provide structure and scope and sequence, but don't set it in cement.
Your newer teachers should be able to find a useful answer to "What should I be working on next" and your experienced teacher should be comfortable adjusting the scope and sequence to fit the class, and all staff should feel safe adding their own special educational touches.
Flexibility is a local thing
Note that every mandate that comes down from the state or federal government tends to reduce flexibility, particularly since so many of them are wrongheaded variations on "If we make all teachers do X, all students will learn Y," a statement which is always wrong, no matter what you plug in. Policy makers need to ask one simple question-- does the proposed policy provide support or a straightjacket?
Teacher training and peer support
Too many undergraduate teaching programs waste too much time. For secondary teachers, there should be far more emphasis on the content of the subject area they plan to teach. For all teachers, there should be far more support through the student teaching experience, and hefty support should also be present through the first couple of years in the classroom.
Some folks like the mode school model, with professionals working their way up as interns etc etc. Schools don't have to look exactly like that, but supports need to be in place. In most schools, whether a teacher has good support in their first few years depends on random factors like which other teachers have lunch the same shift. That early mentoring needs to be deliberate, intentional, and carefully considered.
Peer support should continue. It should be easy for teachers who work in the same department or who work with the same cohort of students to collaborate and consult. If policy makers want to encourage this, there is one thing they can offer--money. Schools don't build more deliberate mentoring programs because such programs depend on time during the work day which equals money (sometimes there's also a lingering attitude that teachers are only really working when they have students in front of them).
Nothing else-- not PD, not merit pay, not threats, not scripted instruction-- will work to turn a new teacher into a good teacher better than regular support and mentoring by capable colleagues.
Hold teachers accountable
The myth that teachers are all about defending low-achieving teachers is bunk. Second only to parents, nobody is more bothered by a low-quality teacher than the teacher who has to teach those kids the following year. What teachers fear is not accountability, but random irrational bad-faith harassment and mistreatment trying to pass itself off as accountability.
So when a teacher wanders into the weeds, go help them get back. Yes, maybe they won't be helped, but you need to try first because firing just means starting over from scratch (if you can even find somebody). Give them extra-intense mentoring, coaching, daily assistance--whatever you think will get them back on track. But don't just leave them out in the field flailing.
The non-answer answer
There is no one single simple answer to finding and developing good teachers, but we have more than enough experience to know that "Hire some people and hope for the best" is not the winning approach. Provide and surround them with access to top quality materials. Provide them with personal support. Treat them like grownups. Provide a supporting structure that holds them up without choking them off.
If you want a metaphor, here's one I'm sure I've used before.
Let's call teaching the classroom version of playing jazz. To pay jazz, you need a couple of things. For one, you need a solid rhythm section; a solid rhythm section makes everyone else sound better, plus it gives you a foundation on which to play. On that foundation, you have plenty of freedom, but you exercise that freedom within a framework--a best, chord changes, maybe even the basic tune of the song. Ignore the beat and the chords at your peril; you can't just do whatever the hell you want. Find good people to play with, and you will play better. And when you are really good, you can actually bend and defy the framework of beat and chords--but you have to really know what you're doing. It's part inspiration and gut, but it also requires technical skill and control and a good piece of equipment on which to play. Also, some songs are way better to play on than others (depending on who's on the stand tonight), so have a big book to select from. And especially also, you have to pay attention to your audience and where your own playing is in that moment, and adjust accordingly.
I have no idea how many jazz trombone players there are in the US, but if there were 4 million, only a small number would be a Jack Teagarden or a George Brunis or a Gunhild Carling. But given the right tools and the right support, the rest could do a good job. That's teaching.
Sunday, July 6, 2014
There Really Is No Superman
Though personally I always wanted to be part of the Doom Patrol (original flavor, not modern artsy version). But there's no Doom Patrol, either.
There is something very seductive about the superhero ideal, the notion that as soon as X gets on the job, things will finally be okay. Here he (yes, almost always he) comes to save the day.
There are subtler versions of the superhero ideal as well. Maybe we don't expect Our Hero to Save The Day, but we expect to be able to follow him. There's this powerful yearning to be able to sort people into two groups-- People I Can Always Trust and Believe on the one hand and People Who Are Always Wrong on the other. It makes life simple; if Wally McHeroface says "Go left," I can just go ahead an turn left.
I don't believe in the hero, for the same reason I don't believe in the efficacy of centralized national education standards. Because nobody can be right all the time.
First of all, we're human.
I don't mean "Well, we're all human so we all make the occasional mistake." No, I mean "We're all human, so at one time or another we are each going to behave like selfish asshats, like scared monkeys on an fear-fueled adrenaline overdrive that fills our head with so much blind energy that it pushes our brains straight down into our butts."
For as cranky as I am, I'm actually pretty rosey-viewed about humans. I've met just a miniscule number of people that I would call flat out evil or bad. I think lots of people do bad things without actually being terrible human beings.
It's comforting to think that there are lots of terrible evil human beings who are responsible for all the bad things that happen. It's comforting because A) I can take comfort in believing that I'm not one of Those People and B) people can be easily permanently sorted into two groups and then we never have to think about it ever again. Neither A nor B are true, is what I think.
So neither is the corollary true-- that there are people who are just pure good 24/7 and you can always trust them to steer you right without you having to think about it. Also not true, I think.
Collectivism Doesn't Necessarily Help
Believing that you've found a group that you can trust blindly is likewise a fool's errand. Because groups are composed of people, and see above.
The hard part of running a group is figuring out how to manage the outliers. Sometimes the one lone voice in the crowd is the person who has a conscience today. Sometimes he's a raging asshat. One should be listened to; the other should be silenced.
I have some trust for the wisdom of groups because I believe that on any given day, most people know right from wrong, good from bad, dumb from smart. It won't be the exact same people every day, but a firm majority should be on track. But you can mess with the wisdom of groups by trying to control the crowd and shut people up. "We won't talk about that" or "Nobody question Fearless Leader" or "We already know how this vote is supposed to turn out" are all signs that a group is fundamentally flawed.
Which doesn't mean the group is evil and easily dismissed. But you can't safely follow blindly.
Never Stop Thinking and Paying Attention
History is full of these humans. John Wesley founded Methodism, and I have no reason to doubt that he was a man of God with a great understanding of the divine. But if he had married your sister, you probably would have ended up punching him in the nose. But that doesn't mean we shut down the Methodist Church.
We've seen binary thinking before, because all of our heroes did some crappy things. JFK, MLK, Ronald Reagan, Donnie and Marie-- all had their less-than-admirable moments/days/years. It's pointless and impossible to try to categorize them as 100% heroes or unadulterated villains.
Oh, But Then--
Yeah, if you can't just blindly follow your heroes, then you're stuck thinking for yourself. And that's going to be long and hard.
The fundamental approach of the reformsters has been to say, "Look! There's a terrible crisis in education! Follow us, and we will carry you out of this dreadful valley of destruction."
We cannot counter that with, "No, you'll lead us to more destruction. We will follow Our Hero over here and He will quickly lead us out of the valley on the correct path." Because it's the exact same fallacy-- the notion that one heroic person can take the correct bold steps and end all this struggle right now.
Bad News
Let me tell you something neither of us wants to hear. The struggle for US public education, the fight to help children, the push to create more social justice-- it's going to continue for the rest of your life. There are going to be victories and defeats. There are going to be great moments and terrible moments. And then it's going to continue. This is not a sprint. It's a very long marathon. And a crazy marathon at that, one where every runner runs her own path, and nobody else can set the path for you.
Oh, Wait-- That's The Good News!
So, do I have heroes? Sure-- they are people who are pretty serious and wise about most things. But I don't imagine they're perfect. I know other people who are sort of serious and occasionally wise, and some who are hard to take serious and rarely (but not never) wise, and all the other possible permutations. All that means to me is that I have to listen and I have to pay attention. (That includes keeping an eye on myself and seeing if I'm a jerk today or not.)
Which is cool, because life then turns out to be fascinating and varied and way more interesting than a puppet show based on monocolored cut-outs. It's also cool because it allows us to stop focusing on the surprise of discovering that a hero did something stupid or the exertion of defending something Dead Wrong that came from someone On Our Side or the tortured denial of trying to prove that a villain didn't just get something right. It keeps us from organizing our whole lives around simply sorting people out into two groups, and let's us focus on what really matters, whatever that might be.
In the battle for education, we need our sense of outrage, our moral sense, our professional sense. Let's not wait for some sort of hero to emerge, and let's not imagine we can win this by beating a single Evil Mastermind. See, I called this a marathon, but really it's more like trying to move a great, giant sled. We are all stationed at different corners of this massive machine and its harness, and consequently we have lot so different ideas of what the challenge looks like. But if we gather our strength, throw it against the load, and keep pushing, we can move it a little bit every day, and it's in the struggle and the movement and the series of small, important victories that we move forward and that we find our best truest selves. It's in that long hard haul that we win victories for our students and get them one step closer to the lives they deserve.
There is something very seductive about the superhero ideal, the notion that as soon as X gets on the job, things will finally be okay. Here he (yes, almost always he) comes to save the day.
There are subtler versions of the superhero ideal as well. Maybe we don't expect Our Hero to Save The Day, but we expect to be able to follow him. There's this powerful yearning to be able to sort people into two groups-- People I Can Always Trust and Believe on the one hand and People Who Are Always Wrong on the other. It makes life simple; if Wally McHeroface says "Go left," I can just go ahead an turn left.
I don't believe in the hero, for the same reason I don't believe in the efficacy of centralized national education standards. Because nobody can be right all the time.
First of all, we're human.
I don't mean "Well, we're all human so we all make the occasional mistake." No, I mean "We're all human, so at one time or another we are each going to behave like selfish asshats, like scared monkeys on an fear-fueled adrenaline overdrive that fills our head with so much blind energy that it pushes our brains straight down into our butts."
For as cranky as I am, I'm actually pretty rosey-viewed about humans. I've met just a miniscule number of people that I would call flat out evil or bad. I think lots of people do bad things without actually being terrible human beings.
It's comforting to think that there are lots of terrible evil human beings who are responsible for all the bad things that happen. It's comforting because A) I can take comfort in believing that I'm not one of Those People and B) people can be easily permanently sorted into two groups and then we never have to think about it ever again. Neither A nor B are true, is what I think.
So neither is the corollary true-- that there are people who are just pure good 24/7 and you can always trust them to steer you right without you having to think about it. Also not true, I think.
Collectivism Doesn't Necessarily Help
Believing that you've found a group that you can trust blindly is likewise a fool's errand. Because groups are composed of people, and see above.
The hard part of running a group is figuring out how to manage the outliers. Sometimes the one lone voice in the crowd is the person who has a conscience today. Sometimes he's a raging asshat. One should be listened to; the other should be silenced.
I have some trust for the wisdom of groups because I believe that on any given day, most people know right from wrong, good from bad, dumb from smart. It won't be the exact same people every day, but a firm majority should be on track. But you can mess with the wisdom of groups by trying to control the crowd and shut people up. "We won't talk about that" or "Nobody question Fearless Leader" or "We already know how this vote is supposed to turn out" are all signs that a group is fundamentally flawed.
Which doesn't mean the group is evil and easily dismissed. But you can't safely follow blindly.
Never Stop Thinking and Paying Attention
History is full of these humans. John Wesley founded Methodism, and I have no reason to doubt that he was a man of God with a great understanding of the divine. But if he had married your sister, you probably would have ended up punching him in the nose. But that doesn't mean we shut down the Methodist Church.
We've seen binary thinking before, because all of our heroes did some crappy things. JFK, MLK, Ronald Reagan, Donnie and Marie-- all had their less-than-admirable moments/days/years. It's pointless and impossible to try to categorize them as 100% heroes or unadulterated villains.
Oh, But Then--
Yeah, if you can't just blindly follow your heroes, then you're stuck thinking for yourself. And that's going to be long and hard.
The fundamental approach of the reformsters has been to say, "Look! There's a terrible crisis in education! Follow us, and we will carry you out of this dreadful valley of destruction."
We cannot counter that with, "No, you'll lead us to more destruction. We will follow Our Hero over here and He will quickly lead us out of the valley on the correct path." Because it's the exact same fallacy-- the notion that one heroic person can take the correct bold steps and end all this struggle right now.
Bad News
Let me tell you something neither of us wants to hear. The struggle for US public education, the fight to help children, the push to create more social justice-- it's going to continue for the rest of your life. There are going to be victories and defeats. There are going to be great moments and terrible moments. And then it's going to continue. This is not a sprint. It's a very long marathon. And a crazy marathon at that, one where every runner runs her own path, and nobody else can set the path for you.
Oh, Wait-- That's The Good News!
So, do I have heroes? Sure-- they are people who are pretty serious and wise about most things. But I don't imagine they're perfect. I know other people who are sort of serious and occasionally wise, and some who are hard to take serious and rarely (but not never) wise, and all the other possible permutations. All that means to me is that I have to listen and I have to pay attention. (That includes keeping an eye on myself and seeing if I'm a jerk today or not.)
Which is cool, because life then turns out to be fascinating and varied and way more interesting than a puppet show based on monocolored cut-outs. It's also cool because it allows us to stop focusing on the surprise of discovering that a hero did something stupid or the exertion of defending something Dead Wrong that came from someone On Our Side or the tortured denial of trying to prove that a villain didn't just get something right. It keeps us from organizing our whole lives around simply sorting people out into two groups, and let's us focus on what really matters, whatever that might be.
In the battle for education, we need our sense of outrage, our moral sense, our professional sense. Let's not wait for some sort of hero to emerge, and let's not imagine we can win this by beating a single Evil Mastermind. See, I called this a marathon, but really it's more like trying to move a great, giant sled. We are all stationed at different corners of this massive machine and its harness, and consequently we have lot so different ideas of what the challenge looks like. But if we gather our strength, throw it against the load, and keep pushing, we can move it a little bit every day, and it's in the struggle and the movement and the series of small, important victories that we move forward and that we find our best truest selves. It's in that long hard haul that we win victories for our students and get them one step closer to the lives they deserve.
Wednesday, June 7, 2023
Twelve Education Activist Groups (Including Moms For Liberty) Make Southern Poverty Extremist List
The Southern Poverty Law Center has issued its "Year in Hate and Extremism" report for 2022, and some familiar names from the world of "parental rights" are on the list. It's some kind of new world when activism in the public education space can get you this kind of attention.
SPLC frames the rise of these groups as a "reemergence of the attack on inclusive schools" and position the current culture war panic in the long history of such panics.
The attacks following the Brown decision were not the beginning of the so-called parental rights movement, and it certainly was not the end. Going back to the 1920s, the U.S. has witnessed ebbs and flows of white, cisgender, heterosexual groups battling public education.Regardless of the time period, most attacks against public education have been reactionary and rooted in racism, from the fight against integration after Brown v. Board, to the so-called school choice movement, to the latest attacks on inclusive education.
This was not the first or last time claims of government overreach would be used as a protestation by these groups. It has become a common theme in iterations of anti-student inclusion groups over the decades.
SPLC says that 2022 saw the filing of 84 "anti-student inclusion bills"
Moms for Liberty
This is the inclusion that made headlines, and the report gets into some detail with the group's activities, noting "Like the mothers of massive resistance before them, Moms for Liberty is ready to fight tooth and nail to preserve the unseen but understood caste system existing in their public schools and communities."
Moms for America
M4A could have been M4L-- after all, they've been around for almost twenty years without ever getting quite the traction that M4L got within weeks. They do have some star power attached, like Kevin Sorbo's wife and Rebecca Fredrichs. But they don't quite draw the press attention for their full-throated opposition to "CRT". They helped support the Stop The Steal rally on January 6, and they hang out at CPAC. Their last high-profile action was--well, remember the People's Convoy that was going to circle DC and really show somebody something? M4A had a purple truck in that.
Army of Parents
Army of Parents is based in Loudon County, VA, which has been the hot spot for lots of school controversy (that's the place where the bathroom sexual assault was misrepresented as a transgender issue and not handled particularly well by the district). Elicia Brans, a co-founder who was activated by COVID concerns (no masks, open schools), has charged Loudon Love Warriors with threatening her. Co-founder Erin Roselle Poe told The Federalist "We've got to get the evil out of the schools."
Courage is a Habit
Education First Alliance
North Carolina group that set up a whistleblower program to "help fight woke indoctrination." President Sloan Rachmuth is an "entrepreneur-turned-journalist and activist"--she's also a coms professional. Anti-indoctrination, anti-naughty books, anti-trans. Rachmuth also heads Pen and Shield, a nonprofit newsroom.
Education Veritas
"Education NOT Indoctrination." Atlanta-based group opposing "obsession with race, equity over merit, unpatriotic attitudes, hyper-sexualization" in pursuit of "pure, non-political education." Also, "teach history, not hate." Don't want "Anti-white CRT" or "sexual orientation nonsense." They appear to be aimed at private schools in particular. Links to explainers from Prager U. It's not really clear what they've done or who they are.
No Left Turn In Education
Launched by Elena Fishbein, a doctor of social work from Gladwyne, one of the uber-rich Philadelphia suburbs who got upset when her child's school adopted some culturally sensitive programming in the wake of the George Floyd murder. They've been linked to violent school board protests and toxic rhetoric and hollered loudly when the Department of Justice suggested school board opponents might want to tone it down a bit. "Black bigotry towards whites" is a "very real problem," she said. You can see lots more of their rhetoric here.
More from Loudon County. Led by Scott Mineo, Third Way studied the group and found "inflammatory tone" and made up baloney, QAnon style.
Mineo also claimed in the press and on his website that teaching CRT is explicitly “anti-white,” that CRT is “poison,” and that the CRT “lifecycle” is “infiltration, transformation, and indoctrination.”
They were very busy in the election that got Virginia Youngkin as a governor.
Parents Defending Education
Everybody who looks at this outfit finds the same thing-- a group of seasoned right wing political operatives pretending to be a grass roots organization.
Parents Rights In Education
Against "destructive polarization." Concerned about "viewpoint discrimination, comprehensive sexuality education, radical gender ideology" etc. The head honcho is Suzanne Gallagher, a previous chair of the Oregon GOP (who was forced to step down) and "sales and marketing expert." Worried about sexual indoctrination in schools, including the claim that teachers are using porn as a teaching aid.
Purple for Parents Indiana
In Indiana, Purple for Parents is Jennifer McWilliams, a former teachers aid who quit over SEL programming and went on the right wing victim circuit (I have her story here). The Purples started in Arizona as a response to Red for Ed and as an offshoot of a Patriot group. They've also cropped up in North Carolina. Meanwhile, the main group's Facebook page wants you to know that June is "Groomer Awareness Month."
Parents Involved in Education
Founded in 2000 as a South Carolina group, now gone national, this is one of the older groups. Their mission: "to end the U.S. Department of Education and all federal education mandates." ("Parental rights come from God--not the government.) With an advisory board that includes Sandra Stotsky, Joy Pullman, Michelle Malkin, and Christel Swasey, these folks are heavily anti-Common Core. Sheri Few, the head honcho, ran for Congress in 2017 with what The Root called “a series of ads that might be the most racist, homophobic and craziest campaign ever.” She's also a producer of their film, "Truth and Lies in American Education" which is aimed at the more current panics like America and racism, gender stuff, and the fear that public schools are teaching socialism. Agenda 21!! Special appearance by Kevin Sorbo's wife! It's the true story of young mother April Few, who is converted from skepticism about the Big Plot. She is Sheri Few's daughter-in-law.
That's the list.
We could ask why these and not some others (why, in particular, only the Indiana wing of Purple for Parents). There's a wide range here, from well-financed full size groups to what appear to be one or two-person operations, from experienced comms professionals to amateur goofballs.
But they all have a few things in common, like a long twisty path of interlocking connections with each other and other groups. But mostly they all share a powerful desire to recapture schools for parents--but only certain right kinds of parents. And they now each have a spot on the SPLC map.
Purple for Parents Indiana
In Indiana, Purple for Parents is Jennifer McWilliams, a former teachers aid who quit over SEL programming and went on the right wing victim circuit (I have her story here). The Purples started in Arizona as a response to Red for Ed and as an offshoot of a Patriot group. They've also cropped up in North Carolina. Meanwhile, the main group's Facebook page wants you to know that June is "Groomer Awareness Month."
Parents Involved in Education
Founded in 2000 as a South Carolina group, now gone national, this is one of the older groups. Their mission: "to end the U.S. Department of Education and all federal education mandates." ("Parental rights come from God--not the government.) With an advisory board that includes Sandra Stotsky, Joy Pullman, Michelle Malkin, and Christel Swasey, these folks are heavily anti-Common Core. Sheri Few, the head honcho, ran for Congress in 2017 with what The Root called “a series of ads that might be the most racist, homophobic and craziest campaign ever.” She's also a producer of their film, "Truth and Lies in American Education" which is aimed at the more current panics like America and racism, gender stuff, and the fear that public schools are teaching socialism. Agenda 21!! Special appearance by Kevin Sorbo's wife! It's the true story of young mother April Few, who is converted from skepticism about the Big Plot. She is Sheri Few's daughter-in-law.
That's the list.
We could ask why these and not some others (why, in particular, only the Indiana wing of Purple for Parents). There's a wide range here, from well-financed full size groups to what appear to be one or two-person operations, from experienced comms professionals to amateur goofballs.
But they all have a few things in common, like a long twisty path of interlocking connections with each other and other groups. But mostly they all share a powerful desire to recapture schools for parents--but only certain right kinds of parents. And they now each have a spot on the SPLC map.
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