Schools, Supposedly, Have Caused the Fall of US Religion

The Christian Church has been suffering a steady and rapid decline for a few decades now, a trend noted by many social scientists, and a source of struggle within many churches that are looking for ways to fill newly-emptied pews. You can look at many data sets on the subject. The folks at Pew Research find that there's a stark generational factor; in the Silent Generation and Baby Boomer cohort, those who call themselves Christian are a vast majority (84% and 76% respectively), but only half of Millennials describe themselves as Christian. 

It's a complicated phenomenon, and carries a little existential weight in a country that many folks like to think of as a Christian nation. 

So what's the answer? 

Religion News Service offers ten reasons, including prosperity that distracts people from faith, lack of compelling religious leaders, the end of Sunday as a "protected" church day, and the "wired" world. Many writers point out that US numbers are still higher than European ones. Focus on the Family says it's all okay, because evangelicals are gaining. Ross Douthat at the New York Times kind of agreed, suggesting that it's "lukewarm Christianity" that is declining. Christian Smith, a sociology and religion professor at Notre Dame, pointed at three historical events driving the precipitous post-90s plunge: the end of the Cold War, 9/11, and the political team-up of the GOP and the religious right. Researcher Jean M. Twenge found a sharp drop in religiosity among teens; we might come back to her findings in a moment.

Or maybe we won't bother, because Cameron Hilditch over at the National Review has solved the mystery-- it's those darned public schools. 

We have discussed Hilditch's work before; he's the one who is pissed off that people think of teachers as selfless and calling some schools "public" is just a rhetorical dirty trick. He's a William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism at National Review Institute, a Belfast native, and an Oxford guy. 

His argument here is built partly on the work of Lyman Stone at the American Enterprise Institute, who cranked out a report about this back in April of 2020, Promise and Peril. I'm guessing a lot of folks missed it because in April of 2020, we were pre-occupied with a few other issues. It's loaded with lots of attempts to find a way to measure how religious folks are.

The title "Why American Children Stopped Believing in God" doesn't telegraph much, but the sub-head does--"The time has come for religious parents to take their children back from the state." Hilditch is here both to solve the mystery and to torch some straw persons, and he's neither subtle nor witty about which side he's backing:

Religious conservatives would probably cite the loosening of the country’s morals that began in the ’60s and ’70s. Secular progressives might mutter something about the onward march of “Science” and “Reason” over time.

Get it? Conservatives "cite" and progressives "mutter something." And there's this:

Here our secular progressive might raise his head again, perhaps feeling a bit smug about this finding. “See!”, he says. “Children used to be deprived of education and the life of the mind! They were stuck in the doldrums of ignorance and squalor before the benevolent hand of the state reached down and lifted them up into the world of literacy and critical thought. All that was needed was a little education to free them from hokey superstitions.”

It’s a simple theory, befitting the minds of those who have historically espoused it.

Lord knows I have thrown my share of snark, but the rules of decent snark include 1) an honest attempt to grasp the other person's point and 2) avoiding a devolution into direct insult.

At any rate, Hilditch wants us to understand that religiosity or the lack thereof doesn't particularly correlate to education attainment level, so "enlightenment" doesn't explain it. Here's the answer he finds in Stone:

But the data seem to show that the main driver of secularization in the United States has been the acceleration of government spending on education and government control over the curricular content taught in schools.

 

Or, as he quotes Stone:

Childhood religiosity was heavily affected by government spending on education and, to a lesser degree, government spending on old-age pensions. Thus, while more educated people were not less religious, societies that spent more public money on education were less religious. It is not educational attainment per se that reduces religiosity, but government control of education and, to a lesser extent, government support for retirement.

How to explain the linkage? Hilditch is ready to shine a light:

It’s quite simple, really. Children learn more at school than reading, writing, and arithmetic. They imbibe a whole set of implied assumptions about what’s important in life. By excluding religious instruction from public schools, the government-run education system tacitly teaches students that religious commitments are not a first-order priority in life. Faith in God becomes a sort of optional weekend hobby akin to playing tennis or video games. Christ and Moses are treated by teachers and administrators like weapons or drugs — confiscated upon discovery.

So there's his argument. Let's take a look at why he's wrong.

First, despite the use of words like "drives" and "affected," what Stone is pointing at is correlation, not causation. We could just as easily look at the data and conclude that a loss in religious identification causes a society to spend more money on a government-run education system. Or we could ask an even better question--what third factor is driving both of these changes. We could even ask--and probably should--if the correlation is an illusion. Let me direct you, once again, to one of my favorite websites, Spurious Correlations, where we learn that the US space program causes suicides and Nic Cage movies cause people to drown in pools. 

Next, Stone himself is not quite as certain that "it's quite simple." He gives secular education its own heading as one possible cause. He talks about the "club goods" theory of religiosity--the idea that get a certain set of services as a member of a club--and how other competing providers would undercut church, and offers examples of how Sunday football and Sunday liquor sales lower church attendance. Also, if you have sources of safety and security in times of trial, you are less likely to turn to the church. (Note that these are similar to items on the Religion News list above).

Stone also looks at his own charts and reaches a valuable conclusion:

The story of the secularization of America is not mostly the story of lots of people who were raised religious leaving their religious faith as adults. It is the story of fewer people having a religious upbringing at all.

Stone has a thought about that, but his language, which has been so firm up until this point, now gets very waffly. The source of this secular upbringing "may very well be" in schools. More educational spending by the state "may teach not just math and reading." It "may even alter" parental behavior and the "household environment." So it might maybe be the schools, kind of, via methods that a 60 page paper doesn't take time to explain. Because, really--how exactly would greater government spending on school lead teachers to work harder at inculcating a world view or life orientation. Nor does Stone, who rolls out plenty of charts and graphs and data and research, take the time to explain what exactly "more government spending" means. More total? More per pupil? Nor does he venture a guess at how this school spending would affect parental behavior or the household environment. And that's not the weakest part of his argument:

It is striking that religiosity declines so much between age 12 and 18, before children have left the home. Most likely, instead of a religious school supporting and encouraging religious behavior and instruction, high school becomes a season of secularization.

I spent 39 years working with teens. The notion that anyone in a school, religious or not, is going to indoctrinate them into a particular set of beliefs, religious or not, defies reality. If such a t6hing were possible, every one of my students would have emerged from my class loving reading and writing. Sadly, that did not happen. Anyone who thinks a teenager is likely to say, "You know, that's not what I used to believe, but now that I've heard you say it, I've changed my whole view of the world," has never met a teenager. 

But Hilditch sees schools as irresistible juggernauts of indoctrination, run by--well, let him say it:

College, career, and popularity become the existential targets toward which the arrow of each student’s soul is aimed by bow-wielding commissars across the country. In a context such as this, secularization becomes ineluctable.

My colleagues and I were just bow-wielding commissars (because, you know, evil socialists), and students were just helpless putty in our hands. And this is important too--how did we jump from the idea that more government spending hurts religion to the idea that it's these "commissars." Did we use the money to hire more commissars? Did we spend it on more commissar training? Where is the connection to taxpayer money here?

Anyway, this brings up another problem with Hilditch's vision. It would require a vast conspiracy among millions of compliant teachers. But the figures say that at least 65% of American adults identify as Christian; would that not suggest that at least 65% of school faculty members also identify as Christian, or does he assume that some mechanism in either policy or conspiracy weeds out all the Christian teachers and keeps them out of public schools? A good-sized chunk of teachers voted for Donald Trump in 2016; is that just a cover, or are teachers really not a very homogenous group? Or is his theory that teachers are all locked in place by government policy? Because that's nuts--the government tried really hard to lock everyone into Common Core, and they failed. Is there a super-secret Secular Core that they've successfully implanted?

His conclusion was there at the start--religious families should get their children out of public school. How will this be financed? He admits it will not be cheap and will require "the establishment of charitable private education co-operatives," which could mean tax credit scholarships or it could mean privately funded schools or it could mean that not everybody will get a part of this.

Whatever the case, Hilditch should direct his attention to the Netherlands. Betsy DeVos is a fan of the Netherlands because after decades and decades of political conflict on the issue, the Netherlands basically went full voucher--they fund public secular schools and private religious schools, so there is no country where it's any easier to get your child out of the public schools and into a private religious school with the faith of your preference. 

But here's the thing. The Netherlands appear in Stone's report in Figure 2-- Religious Affiliation over Time in Different Countries. It shows the drop in religiosity in thirteen different countries. All have had precipitous drops, but no country fell farther, faster, sooner than the Netherlands. 

So maybe it's not actually the public schools causing all this.

I said we'd come back to Jean Twenge. She and her co-authors looked at teen religious convictions in a paper published in PLOS ONE, a journal that involved actual peer review. They found that the drop is real, and that it's not a shift (in other words, "religious like in church" didn't change to "Just spiritual, man.")

The paper offers some "possible explanations" that open with this magical sentence-- "This analysis cannot show causation, only correlation..." because that's how real scientists talk. But the authors lean toward individualism as an explanation. First, real commitment to the church means commitment to a larger organization ahead of your own preferences. You also have to go along with what the group believes, and in general submit to a higher authority. In particular, religion "often focuses on concerns outside the self." All of these, they suggest, run counter to individualism. 

It makes a certain sense, and points at what could be a large irony lurking in the midst of Hilditch's article. The rising love of Ayn Rand among conservatives has always been, well, odd, given that Rand believed that religion is for weak suckers and that selfishness is the greatest virtue. Christianity and Randian objectivism are hugely incompatible, but the post-Reagan conservative world loves it some rugged libertarian-flavored individualism. So it would be a special kind of irony if one of the factors dragging down religion in the US is, in fact, exactly the kinds of philosophy regularly promoted in the pages of the National Review.

In the meantime, opponents of public ed are running out of ills to blame on teachers. Stay tuned for the next installment.

ICYMI: Still Shopping Edition (12/13)

 Trying desperately to shop at small local stores, and it's a real challenge right now. And what has to be ordered comes with the special When Will It Actually Arrive suspense. Happy holidays, one and all. In the meantime, some reading....

San Joaquin Valley in the DPE Crosshairs  

Thomas Ultican peels back the layers on yet another assault on public education, this one out in California. Interesting to see how several groups' interests converge on one goal--dismantling public education.

The next education secretary must know about much more than education

I know I've been heavy on the need to get public education expertise in the department of education under Biden, but at Hechinger, Andre Perry makes a good case for other skill sets that the next secretary will need. 

The canary in the coal mine

Reuters takes a look at teacher layoffs in Schenectady, NY, and asks if this is not an ominous sign for what's ahead for public schools. 

The 10 most significant education studies of 2020  

This piece at Edutopia leaves lots of room for debate--are the reading wars over, and is handwriting a key part of learning, and did Fordham really release a study that contradicts some of the ideas behind its beloved Common Core? But it's an interesting conversation piece of a list.

McKinsey and Company use falling behind talk to ramp up school toughness   

Nancy Bailey takes a look at what McKinsey, the 800-pound gorilla of consulting, has to say about the children "falling behind," and what policies they're using the big fear to push.

Visa Ban on Foreign Workers Has Left School With Teacher Shortages

Hey, remember how some school systems were using foreign teachers to fill the spots they couldn't convince US citizens to take? And remember how Trump has been slowly choking off the stream of even legal immigration? Turns out those two things ran into each other. From the Intercept.

Norms, ethics and civility. Plus education.

Nancy Flanagan has an exceptional gift for connecting her own personal experience to larger ideas, and that's on display here. Do we need calls for civility right now--or is something else needed to move past these Trump years?

Schools Are Still Not Like Ubers

Betsy DeVos (who will soon not be a humble servant in the education secretary's office, but will instead be a very rich lady who wants to dismantle public education) likes to compare her vision of education to the same kind of disruption offered by outfits like Uber, a comparison that many folks like to make. I've written before about what a lousy comparison that is, focusing on problems like a business mentality and the problems of automation.

But here's a quick piece by techno-critic Cory Doctorow to remind us that Uber is, at the end, a terrible thing for anybody to want to emulate. Instead, he says, Uber was "a company that was never, ever going to be profitable, which existed solely to launder billions for the Saudi royals."

Doctorow connects Uber to a Saudi plan to diversify and capture monopolies in other sectors as a cushion against future downturns in the oil market. Their plan for Uber was, well...

The S1 – the document that explains how the company plans to be profitable – set two conditions for Uber's profitability.

First, all the public transit in the world had to shut down and be replaced by Uber.

Next, all the drivers had to be replaced by AIs.

Uber recently unloaded its self-driving car division, which, like most self-driving car initiatives, was getting nowhere. (Doctorow reminds us one of my favorite AI auto moments, when developers determined that AI cars would work great as soon as we controlled all human behavior around them.) As he points out, the unloading was not exactly a "sale," because they "invested" $400 mill in the startup taking over the division, which is another way of saying that Uber paid the company to take the AI auto division off their hands.  

Uber survives by being willing to lose money, by breaking the law, and by treating its employees like work-for-hire chattel. I ruled it out as a model for education because it is a business, but it's not even a good business. Even if you pooh-pooh Doctorow's views, Uber is still not a successful business by any definition of the term--it doesn't make money, it doesn't make the world a better place, it doesn't lift up anybody except the few at the top. The New York Times porofile was entitled "How Uber got lost," but it's not clear they were ever on a workable path, ever. Other businesses should not be imitating Uber, and education most certainly should not. 

Mrs. Gates Still Doesn't Get It, Still.

Last week the New York Times decided to offer one more glowing portrait of Melinda Gates, unintentionally underlining the work of rich folk critic Anand Giridharadas and explaining, again, that she doesn't get the problem of Gates riches in education.

She opens with an Emerson quote from her valedictory high school graduation speech about success being the knowledge that one person has breathed easier because you have lived. That quote, writes David Gelles, "is still ringing in her ears." 

“That’s been my definition of success since high school,” she said. “So if I have an extra dollar, or a thousand dollars, or a million dollars, or in my case, which is absurd, a billion dollars to plow back into making the world better for other people, that’s what I’m going to do.”

This is such a Giridharadian quote-- note that she gets her vast wealth is absurd, but her thought is that she should "plow back" the money rather than contemplate, critique, and act to change the system that allowed her top extract that much money in the first place. These are our modern philanthropists--they can grasp that they have a shit ton of money, and even consider that they ought to do something useful for it, but they can't question that they deserve to have it in the first place, that it is, in fact, theirs theirs all theirs. Philanthropy is swell, but philanthropy set up so that they control their money and remain the arbiters of what should and should not be done with it.

The interview focuses primarily on the medical stuff, and there are plenty of reasons to question the Gates involvement in the medical world (here's a good piece to start with). 

Asked about disinformation, she views social media as the culprit, and somehow talks about that without sharing any culpability with technology to enable such baloney spreading. She knows that she and Bill have been the target of conspiracy theories, and she just figures that because people are afraid and "looking to point to somebody or some thing or some institution." She's certainly not wrong, but I note that she doesn't include "vast multinational corporation" on the list, nor suggest there's anything they've done to attract this sort of attention. 

Gelles asks the "does big philanthropy have too much power" question, Here's the first part of her answer:

I think that’s a critique that is well worth listening to and looking at. In our philanthropic work, there isn’t a single thing that we don’t work on in partnership with governments. Because at the end of the day, it is governments that scale things up and that can help the most people. There is a healthy ecosystem that needs to exist between government, philanthropy, the private sector and civil society. And when you get that ecosystem working at its best, no one party in that ecosystem has too much power.

I object here. If your philanthropy can "partner with" a government, as if you're pretty much equals, you have too much power. If you are on an equal scale with government, the private sector, and civil society, you have too much power. And there's another unspoken thought here--modern philanthropists may give up money, but they don't give up power. 

The second half of this answer is where education pops up:

You know, if Bill and I had had more decision-making authority in education, maybe we would’ve gotten farther in the United States. But we haven’t. Some of the things that we piloted or tried got rejected, or didn’t work, and I think there’s a very healthy ecosystem of parents and teachers’ unions and mayors and city councils that make those education decisions. I wish the U.S. school system was better for all kids.

Yikes. I mean, yikes. First of all, it's not "some of the things"-- all of the things that the Gates have tried in education, from small schools to the Common Core, have failed. Yes, they got rejected, in the same way the average person rejects stewed liver covered with toad wart dressing--they were bad. (And lets not forget that sometimes, rather than being rejected, the Gates just walked out on projects in the middle, leaving someone else holding the bag.) And whatever their many problems were, the biggest problem was not that Bill and Melinda Gates didn't have enough power over the system. Note also that her "very healthy ecosystem" includes pretty much everybody. If everyone else had just let the Gates be in charge, it would have been fine! Yikes. After all this time, all this money, and all this failure, she still doesn't understand that when it comes to education, they are amateurs who don't know enough about how education works and who don't bother to talk to actual experts (without checking to make sure they're sympathetic and then handing them a big pile of money first, which tends to blunt the critical faculties --looking at you NEA and AFT). 

She's asked about changing the tax code so that Bill pays more, and she thinks that's a good idea because if you benefit from the system in this country "you have an obligation to give back," and again, that is markedly different from recognizing that you have an obligation to not take so very much in the first place. And she's not done underlining that blind spot. Asked about how she reconciles her enormous privilege with "the acute suffering that so many people are experiencing," she says this:

It’s something I’ve pondered a lot. There’s no explanation how you get to be in this situation of privilege. There’s just none.

Well, yes, there is. Your husband made a bunch of pointed business decisions, and made some financial decisions, and now you're richer than the entire planet. Yes, it took a whole complex network of luck and timing and fortune to tee up your husband's work, but Bill Gates has worked very hard at becoming absurdly wealthy. 

This is the part where that headline about "letting her heart break" comes in. She visits poor people in far away places, hangs out with Mother Theresa, and cries a lot, and then contemplates what the person shares with her and "what I learned and how do I plow that back into the work to try and make the world better." Again with the plowing back.

And look, I get it. She could be spending her days shopping for designer dresses and ordering gold-plated toilets and the Gates Foundation could be spending millions of dollars on garish portraits of Bill to mount in one of his ninety-five country clubs. They could be strikingly evil people shamelessly basking in pools of liquid silver. They could be dumping their money into dopey projects like missions to Mars. I also get that being incredibly wealthy probably has unavoidable effects on how you perceive the world and how your own immediate world treats you. 

Hubris doesn't always come with ugly swagger, and lacking a clue about critical items doesn't always look like bell-gong dopiness. And no matter how rich you are or are not, it's human to want to Do Good Things without making yourself uncomfortable, both physically and emotionally. And sometimes carelessness looks poised and pretty.

But boy would I love to read a Gates profile in which either of them said, "You know, we just realized that we just don't know enough about education to be meddling with it. We have a lot of damage that we've done and need to make up for, and we're sincerely sorry about that. We have learned that we don't know the magic solution to making schools better for all students, and so we're going to step back and get out of the way of the serious professionals who have devoted their entire adult lives to that work. We plan to just shut up and listen to them." 

That would be a fun profile, but I'm not holding my breath. 

OH: Ed Disruptors Want Their Big Test

Aaron Churchill, the Fordham Institution's Ohio research director, popped up in the Columbus Dispatch today as a "guest columnist." It's worth noting that his job is "aimed at strengthening education policy in Ohio," which is of course not the same thing as improving education and certainly not the same thing as supporting public education. Churchill's previous job was program manager at Junior Achievement in Western PA; his college degrees are in History, Exegesis, and Public Policy and Management. 

It helps to understand that Fordham is all in for school choice, that they in fact operate some charter schools in Ohio. Which explains a lot about Churchill's arguments here for making sure that Ohio administers the Big Standardized Test this year. The headline is "Don't cancel K-12 testing when we need data more than ever" and "we" is doing a lot of work here. But as testocrats keep pushing schools to waste precious time and money on testing this year, it's useful to understand what those testophiles are after.

Churchill opens with a quick recap--pandemic, closed schools, big mess, the usual. And in the midst of this, some folks are pushing to waive state assessments again this year. 

"Huge blunder," says Churchill. Analysts predict big learning loss, "yet without state tests nobody can measure the size and scope of the damage. How many Ohio students have been knocked off course — and just how far off course? Which student groups have struggled most? Are the losses widespread or do they vary from community to community?"

This begs the question--who wants to know, and what will they do with the information? It can't be teachers, because they'll have a strong sense of how things are going in their classroom, even their school, long before any spring test. 

"Ohioans," says Churchill, "be left in the dark." More importantly, "state and local policymakers won't be able to effectively target resources in recovery efforts." I have a radical thought about this--state and local policymakers could ask the actual educators working in the schools. But they haven't done so in the past. And they also haven't targeted resources in recovery efforts in the past.

Remember, Ohio is the home of HB 70, a bill that said that if a school's test scores were too low, they would be targeted for extra help and resources--ha, no, just kidding. School districts that had low test scores would be targeted for takeover, turnaround, and the option of charter conversion. The bill has yielded a handful of disasters, and highlights how, once again, test-centered school evaluation ends up not as a signal for leaders to send in the troops and the resources, but as a homing beacon for vultures. It's a fitting policy for the state that earned a reputation as a wild west for charter schools (the massive ECOT scam and scandal is just one example).

Timely state exam data would animate action, and empower leaders and parents with the information they must have to tailor effective interventions.

Well, it won't be particularly "timely" if the test is in the spring. But the inclusion of "parents" here suggests that the "timely intervention" Churchill has in mind is supporting charters and choice. 

He offers some examples. Like tutors. Or local charitable organizations "might seek ways to supply extra support to students." It's entirely possible that a couple of decades of ed reformster nonsense has made me a bit cynical, but this smells like another voucher argument to me. And I can't help noticing that none of Churchill's examples or arguments say anything about getting public schools the resources and support they need to support student learning. 

His final point is that parents deserve "to know where their children stand in respect to state academic standards," and he's not wrong, though there's an argument to be had about how useful those standards really are. Pandemic schools have, in some cases, eased up on some requirements. Whether or not the BS Test provides any useful answers is another topic to debate (spoiler alert: it's not). 

Churchill winds up for his finish by citing a survey given by Ohio Excels, a lobbying group that is largely hostile to public education, so I feel comfortable ignoring any of their survey results.

Churchill pronounces the urge to cancel the BS Tests misguided, because with out it, Ohioans will be flying blind, but that's unlikely. And I'm not disagreeing with Churchill just because I think he mostly wants those test scores to goose the market for school choice and target public schools for further "disruption." Beyond that, we have the issue of students' actual education. This year has already been chopped into bits, with time and education lost to the problems of pandemic learning. Classroom teachers (largely without classrooms) are examining every single thing they choose to do closely, because time is short and precious and if something isn't going to deliver more education to those students. BS Tests, and the test prep necessary to get students through them, will not deliver more education for students.

BS Tests don't educate. Instead, they are the educational equivalent of the manager who demands that you keep providing detailed reports and presentations about the progress of your project, and then wonders why you're not getting the project done faster. Nothing should make it into the pandemic classroom that does not provide educational bang for the buck--and BS Tests require many bucks and provide barely a meek pop for students. Provides great tools for education "disruptors," but for actual students, not so much. We can find better things for students to do with their time this year.

More Important Than Biden's Ed Secretary Pick

There are plenty of reasons to focus attention and concern on President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for Secretary of Education. After all, VP Biden was part of the administration that gave us Arne Duncan as secretary, a choice universally panned by teachers. Public education advocates are hoping that Biden will give us a career educator with the leadership chops to manage a federal department that has been up against the ropes for a few years.

But the department needs more than just a solid secretary at the helm. It needs a mechanism in place that will help it hear teachers.

Education policy discussions in this country suffer from too many loud voices of education amateurs. Yes, the department needs the benefit of people who understand the system in DC, as well as the massive financial business of student loans and grants. The world of higher ed needs to be represented. But the education department also needs to benefit from the insights of actual education experts, the practitioners in the field. Public school teachers. And not just one at the top—lots of them.

The future secretary, whoever she might be, should have ready access to a panel of actual public school teachers. It should be a large, diverse group, including teachers from rural and urban public school districts, teachers of all disciplines and grade levels, teachers of all races. The group should be convened electronically on a regular basis, and should be on call in the event that the department finds itself in need of expertise on a particular issue. Every report and white paper churned out by advocacy groups and think tanks should be run past this panel of people who can answer the question, “Would this really work in the field?”

The department has had teacher “fellows” in the past, just a handful of teachers selected in part to put a teacher face on department ideas. And while recruiting teachers to come physically work in DC has its appeal, that’s an idea for the pre-internet age. There is no reason for the secretary not to have a broad network of practicing public school teachers at her fingertips, accessible by screen, phone and email.

Members of the network should not be screened based on how well they agree with the administration’s preferred ideas. Nor should they be rounded up by way of any one source (e.g. the unions). They should be career educators; nobody who spent two years in a classroom beefing up their resume under Teach For America qualifies.

The department needs to be infused with the voices of the country’s actual education experts—teachers. I hope whoever sits in that office in DC builds that support network. It’s time for the department to rely on real expertise.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

Distance Learning and Compliance Culture

Compliance culture in the classroom has always, always been a problem.

This is the teacher who demands compliance, in fact, grades on compliance. Most folks have a story about That Teacher--the one who wouldn't accept a paper because it was ten minutes late, or who took off a letter grade because the paper had the "wrong" heading on it. 

For some people, compliance is practically the whole point. No Excuses charter schools are founded on the principle that students need to learn to comply with every action in every moment of the school day. Just this weekend, a USA Today op-ed suggested that if students aren't given zeros for late work, that's a failure to hold those students to standards of excellence. 

Students have to learn compliance, the argument goes (though it rarely uses the term "compliance"), because out in the Real World, students will have to learn to meet deadlines and expectations and basically do as they're told promptly and "correctly," and the longer the argument goes, the more you can see that compliance culture is often meant for Those Peoples' children. But it is also true that life involves deadlines and expectations and most of us don't grow up to live in the world of do-as-you-please. Compliance has its place (like on your face, over your mouth and nose, too, please).

The problem with compliance culture in the classroom is that it loses the plot, falls off the track of what te classroom is actually for. If I see a low score for a student's essay, I expect that to mean that the essay was poorly written or argued, not that the student used the wrong size margins and put her heading on the wrong side of the header. If a student fails calculus, I expect that to mean that he couldn't master the skills and knowledge involved in calculus, not that he didn't turn a bunch of assignments and was late to class many days. Tying grades to compliance issues inevitably means punishing some students for things over which they have no control while requiring them to worry more about rule-following than intellectual attainment.

Education is about building relationships. You do not build relationships--at least not healthy ones--by demanding compliance above all else.

Distance learning in particular (and really, ed tech in general) adds more layers of compliance to student work. Students have to use the correct format for a project, then send it through the "correct" channel, just for things to work. Assignments come time-stamped. Students (and their frustrated parents) now have several layers of technology with which they need to comply.

This is no time for teachers and schools to double down on compliance culture. If a student throws up her hands and finally submits an assignment via email instead of through Canvas or the designated Google app, that student deserves credit for perseverance and not a grade penalty for failing to comply. Did the parent finally crack at 2 AM and email a picture of the completed worksheet instead of sending it through the proper channels yesterday? Hallelujah! The assignment was turned in, and you can now do what you meant to do, which is use the worksheet to assess how well the student has grasped the concepts you were trying to teach.

I get that this can become hugely frustrated and labor intensive for teachers as you try to make sure that you've located all the different submissions of a particular assignment from all the various channels through which they arrived. But at some point (maybe many points) you have to take a step back and ask yourself if you are assessing command of the material or rewarding compliance. 

As the stories roll in about the avalanche of failing grades, I have to wonder how much of that failure is a failure to comply with a dizzying new complex of techno-based requirements. 

Sometimes compliance culture is driven by administration, and sometimes by the classroom teacher (though it always requires the teacher's cooperation to function). I accept that some compliance issues have a place in a classroom (I can't easily assess the skills of a student who never hands in an assignment), but compliance culture cannot be the center or foundation of a classroom, and that is triply true under current conditions. Distance learning comes with its own set of hurdles and obstacles, most of them unfamiliar and challenging for many students and their families. In the battle between students and those obstacles, teachers should be backing the students-- not the obstacles. If you are deleting assignments just because students didn't submit them the "correct" way or because they have a late time stamp, you are not demanding excellence--you're just being a jerk. 

Teachers are supposed to be helping students become their best selves while learning how to be fully human in the world. It's about building up people, not programming robots.