Maintaining Classroom Discipline (1947)

God bless the internet. Here's a little 13 minute instructional film from 1947 for teachers about how to maintain discipline in a classroom. Watching it, you notice some things that are clearly from another place and time, as well as casual sexism and an all-white batch of students. 

But after you get past the old-timey yuks, it's notable that some of the message still holds up. In particular, the notion that respect is a better classroom glue than fear, and that treating students like low-life scum doesn't work nearly as well as treating them like actual human beings. The relevance of that lesson is, sadly, driven home by the comments section, which mostly focuses on how the movie students are so much better than Kids These Days. 

I would hope that if there's anything different in the country today, it's that it is once again okay to be kind, and that the solution to problems is not to simply overpower those who oppose you.

It is one of the basic lessons of human interaction that one can find playing out in a classroom--trying to wield your authority like a club creates more problems than it solves, and open contempt for the people you work with is a terrible approach for virtually anything at all, from running a classroom to leading a country. Today seems like a fine day to draw a breath, roll some tightness out of your shoulders, and embrace your kinder nature.

Oh, That Poem

I am not a huge fan of pomp; I recognize the need to mark occasions, especially occasions of great change. There's really only one thing I want to carry away from today, and I'm embedding it here so that I can always find it. Amanda Gorman's presentation of her own poem was simply perfect. 

 

 "There's always light, if only we're brave enough to see it, if only we're brave enough to be it."

 Yeah, I'll take that.

Here's one good profile of the youngest poet to ever speak at an inauguration. There will be plenty, I'm sure. There will also be plenty of folks telling you what she said, but it's the 21st century, and if there was ever a moment that you should simply see and feel and absorb for yourself, this is it.

What Donald Trump Means To Me

I have followed Trump's career for decades. As anyone who has been paying attention knows, and as some folks insist on being shocked and surprised to discover on a regular basis, he really is that bad, and has always been that bad. I cannot think of a single human virtue that the man has ever displayed, and he is not even particularly good at many of the human vices that he wields like a toddler with a twisted light saber. He is a shambling mountain of human awfulness. The closest thing to an excuse that might be offered in his defense may also be simply the capper of his awfulness--unlike other odious politicians like Mitch McConnell or Mike Pence, he is incapable of being any better. 

He has always been that bad. In writing, conversation, casual discussion, Trump has always been my go-to example of the personification of the worst in humans.

So nothing in his Presidency has shocked or surprised me. In fact, I've sometimes lost patience with people who clutch their pearls and declare, "Oh my goodness! How could he do such a thing?!" Likewise, the repeated insistence that "this time he's pivoting to a new style" and "this time he's made the mistake that will really sink him" have gotten no sympathy from me. If you are doing such a bad job of paying attention, you deserve to be alternately surprised and disappointed, because one of the human vices that Trump enacts poorly is guile and sneakiness. This is what his worshippers call his "tell it like it is" quality-- he tells you he's going to punch you in the face, and then while you're engaged in a huge debate about whether or not he really means that, he punches you in the face. 

But Trump has mattered to me personally. Trump has been an ongoing challenge to my conception of a just universe and the decency of human nature. Yes, I'm all snark and crankiness here, but I'm a fundamentally optimistic person, a believer in the value of humans, a believer in the human spirit's ability to rise and advance, a believer that people, mostly, try to do what's right as they understand it. Sure, sometimes people get stuck because of fear or comfort. Sometimes life breaks them and it's hard for them to come back from it. Sometimes we screw up and we carry the consequences on our backs (some more quietly than others) like weighty, decomposing carcasses. We are a mix of strong and weak, good and bad, fear and courage. Sometimes bad things happen to good people, but we have the tools and the opportunity to make it better. But when good things happen to bad people...?

Trump activates the human desire to see a comeuppance, but of course he has never in his life experienced such a thing. He's barely ever suffered consequences. But as humans, because it's reinforced either by our consumed narratives or our human nature, we want to see more than consequences. We want a comeuppance. We don't just want the bad guy to lose--we want him to show that face, that shocked awareness that he's been beaten, that sad realization that he's in trouble, even hear a shamefaced admission of guilt. We want to see not just that he's lost, but that he knows it. 

We're never getting that from Trump. I've watched for years to see if he was capable of such a thing, but as with all narcissists, it's just not in his tool box. His opponents are never going to get that satisfaction. And his allies are always just a step behind.

Trump's a toxic person who spreads poison wherever he walks. One of the great Trumpian mysteries is why, for decades, people have walked smilingly into this buzzsaw of a man. You would think that nobody would ever, for instance, agree to work for him without being paid up front. But Trump has that kind of feral charm that gets people thinking, "Yes, he's an amoral thug, but he will never stab ME in the back, because he and I have a real bond." Congratulations, Rudy Guiliani, on all that pro bono work you've been doing. 

And the racism and the misogyny, which metastasize in both unusual and pure form, because I'm not sure that anybody else is actually real to Trump, who lives in a world in which anyone who's not directly attached to him is an Other. But boy has that emboldened and empowered folks who hate Others of their own.

Does that mean there's no justice for Trump? Well, I've long believed that the biggest punishment for being Trump is that he has to be Trump. Here's a man who gets no joy from anything, who has no love of music or art, who spends his whole life trying to scratch the phantom itch that lives within the gaping open chasm inside him. Here's a man who managed to become the President of the United States, and he's still unhappy, perpetually pissed off, and still cut off from love, companionship, respect, connections of any real sort with other human beings. It's easy to say, "Boy, I'd love to have his money" (or at the illusion of money that he's built), but if you had to give up every pleasant aspect of your life, everything that gives you joy? That's the deal. The man suffers every day of his life, exerts all of his energy into erecting a shield between himself and reality. He will die miserable and alone, and he won't even realize that his life didn't have to be like that.

Trump would be a pitiable figure if he did not exert such a toxic force on the world around him. He ruins people, strips them of money and honor, and as someone who embodies the worst in humanity, instinctively calls out to those same qualities in others. He is not, by any means, the only awful person to occupy the office, but he comes along at a time in which the office has unprecedented power and reach. And he has not injected new evils or failings into our political system; he's simply stripped them of artifice, not because he's noble and honest, but because he's clumsy and because a consequence-free lifetime has taught him that the artifice is pointless and simply blunts the power that you want to exercise. It's not "polite" to say the quiet parts out loud? Who gives a shit? 

I've wrestled my whole life with the concept of evil. I believe in God; Satan, not so much. I just don't see much bad in the world that can't be explained by foolishness and fear. I believe that almost all people act as they believe they are supposed to, that they arrange to bring into their own lives what they believe they deserve. I believe that, almost all the time, when you think someone is doing what they do because they are evil and/or stupid, that means you are failing to understand what the world looks like through their eyes. That doesn't mean they're any less destructive or dangerous or deserving of being stopped;  just that you don't understand where they're coming from (which, with dangerous and destructive people, can be useful to see). Even when they are, in the final analysis, simply stupid and evil, it's useful to understand how they see the world. Maybe especially when they're stupid and evil.

The Trump presidency, and the 2020 vote, expanded the challenge. I get transactional politics--"I'll put up with his bullshit because he'll load up the courts with lots of anti-abortion judges." I don't agree with the goals, but I understand it. But I was surprised by other things. I was surprised by the speed with which the Republican Party tossed principle and country for some party power. And like many Americans, I was shocked and surprised and disheartened by how many neighbors and friends and people I have generally loved and respected have stuck with him to the very end, have gone all in on devotion to an authoritarian leader who, it turns out, was pretty much correct when he said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support from his base. That has been rough to take. 

Trump, it turns out, is a window into the abyss. He's the picture of lawlessness (it's only a rule if someone can actually force him to follow it and it turns out that mostly they can't, because civilization). He's the avatar of a great mountain of frustration and anger. And he's the personification of the human urge to be lead by a totalitarian god-emperor. None of this is pretty, but it's good for us to see it, to understand however briefly the thin membrane between us and that abyss. It is easy to imagine that the structures and mores and understandings that make up civilized life are so strong, so resilient, that individuals can abuse and kick and twist them for personal desires, that we can beat the system to get our own gain without any fear that the system will actually be hurt. We can steal a brick out of the foundation of society, we think, and the building will still stand, and our abdication of our responsibility and debt to the larger community that preserves us--well, that won't really hurt anything. Will it?

I can't hate Trump. He is what he is, what he's been his whole life, broken and twisted and empty and certain that he lives in a world that is all hostile, all the time. As I said, if he weren't so destructive and dangerous, he'd be pitiable. I'm far angrier at the elected figures and thought leaders and political operatives who know better and help him light the molotov cocktail anyway, because they think they'll get something out of it or just because they want to watch the world burn. It may be the teacher in me, but plain old ignorance doesn't bother me nearly as much as willful ignorance, the deliberate choice to turn away from understanding. That's what I find inexcusable, and Trump has been awash in a sea of it. I hate that.

So tomorrow he leaves the White House worse than he found it, defending the Big Lie till the end, a lie that I suspect is destined to live on just like the lies surrounding the defeat of the traitors of the Confederacy. The Trump flag will keep flying here and there just as the confederate flag does. And the giant churning machine that has learned how to churn profit and power out of Trumpism will keep on doing so, eternally to punch you in the face if you identify Dear Leader as the lying feral grifter he has always been. 

Thirty, forty years ago I started using Trump as placeholder in writing, a specific placeholder for "worst kind of human being." Today, that's still what he means to me, but he's enlarged my understanding of just how much damage a giant toxic creature such a man can be, how he can empower truly terrible people with evil intent, how he can destabilize a community, how he can warp people's very sense of right and wrong. More than that, how imagining any human being is some sort of icon of transcendent greatness simply opens to the door to bad, foolish things. 

And what did he, Trump, personally get out of this peak of his infamy? Some money, a bunch of people sucking up to him, some trappings of power, some undivided attention--and none of  it made him feel any better, even though, paradoxically, the loss of it will make him feel worse. All those people devoted to him because his anger somehow seems to rhyme with their own, and yet somehow the warmth of human connection and support escapes him. All this wreckage, for nothing.

Tomorrow Trump leaves the office, but he won't disappear quietly, nor will the millions of Americans conned into believing the election was stolen, nor the leaders who thought overthrowing an election would be fun. I look forward to having a boring guy in the White House, but I am anxious about seeing what the country is going to look like. Too many illusions shattered, too many dark things have shown their face. Walk carefully while we wait to see how strong the earth is beneath our feet. 

The 1776 Commission On Authentic Education

The 1776 Commission released their thing today, and pardon my French, Mom, but holy shit is it bad. You knew it was going to bad. It's really bad. You probably didn't know that Progressivism is on the same Challenges to American Principles list with slavery and fascism. Slavery, by the way, is addressed primarily through a massive whataboutism. 45 pages, and every one of them is filled with horrific, racist, dumb, awful awfulness (okay, pages 2 and 4 are blank). 43 pages of awful (without any footnotes or endnotes or citations or bibliography in sight for this work of ultimate scholarship). I don't have the time at the moment to pick apart all of it (I'll link to it, but you really shouldn't read it on a full stomach, and empty stomach, or at the end of a hard day).

I will note that the report came out remarkably quickly--the members of the commission were announced on December 18, which gave them a month, and a month full of holidays like that. It's almost as if someone had already pretty much written the report ahead of time (or, it turns out, as if someone had simply cut and pasted big chunks of it). 

At any rate, I'm going to focus on just one section, because it articulates so very clearly how terribly, dangerously wrong these folks are about education.

In Appendix IV: Teaching Americans About Their Country, after the section on the misuse of history, after the section about the decline of education (late 1800s, with the rise of progressivism), we arrive on page 37 at "What Is Authentic Education." This is the part I want to look at:

"There is no question that the one crucial purpose of education is to equip individuals with the knowledge and skills they need to provide for themselves and their families." Yes, never forget that education is about making yourself a more useful meat widget so that important people will be willing to give you some money in exchange for your meat widgetry.

But the section also acknowledges "the broader and deeper education called liberal education." And here comes a truly astonishing paragraph:

Education liberates human beings in the true sense—liberation from ignorance and confusion, from prejudice and delusion, and from untamed passions and fanciful hopes that degrade and destroy us as civilized persons. It helps us see the world clearly and honestly. In revealing human nature, it reveals what is right and good for human beings: authentic education is not "value-neutral" but includes moral education that explains the standards for right and wrong.

Holy shit. Liberation from ignorance and confusion, because there is just one Right and True way to see things in this world, and true freedom comes when you no longer have to waste a single moment even considering that some other point of view. People become "self-reliant and respionsible" because once you know the One True Answer, you fall right in step with the other True Believers.

But there's more.

Students should be taught that we are all "equal members of one national community," which would play a lot better had the report thingy not said elsewhere "The assertion that 'all men are created equal' must be properly understood. It does not mean that all human beings are equal in wisdom, courage, or any other virtues and talents that God and nature distribute unevenly among the human race." Just that nature doesn't naturally create castes.

Now hang on. The thing reasserts that all human's unique talents and characters should be respected and valued, and that the fact that "equality and liberty belong by nature to every human being" is the moral basis of "civic friendship, economic opportunity, citizenship and religious freedom." 

This education respects the students' "thirst for the truth. It is unafraid both to focus on the contributions made by the exceptional few, or acknowledge those that are less powerful, less fortunate, weaker, or marginalized." By embracing equality, we can better embrace inequality? And then we can "patiently address the ways injustice can be corrected." 

"Patiently" is important because we need that as an alternative to the Bad Way:

Rather than learning to hate one’s country or the world for its inevitable wrongs, the well-educated student learns to appreciate and cherish the oases of civilization: solid family structures and local communities; effective, representative, and limited government; the rule of law and the security of civil rights and private property; a love of the natural world and the arts; good character and religious faith.

Because embracing all of that let's us use the proper approach to educate citizens:

In the American context, an essential purpose of this honest approach is to encourage citizens to embrace and cultivate love of country. 

Don't get upset. Don't get mad. Don't be distracted by those little blips that will happen, donchaknow, here and there. Just hold on to the true values, the One Right View, and burrow into these things that, hey, you might not actually get to experience yourself, but if you don't, that's probably because you're one of those people who has not yet been properly assimilated into the One True View and it's your own damn fault for being an unpatriotic little bitch. 

It's like someone managed to take the 1950s version of squeaky clean white American life and mash it up with 1950s style Soviet Commie borg-style mind-melding. No critical thinking here. This is "education" that rejects pluralism, inquiry, actual thought and scholarship, while simultaneously nodding at and minimizing injustice, asserting that victims of such injustice should stay calm and love their country because it includes people who have the right values (and the right personal circumstances). 

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and may the Biden administration swiftly drop this damned thing into the deepest circular file in DC. 

A Really Bad Anti-Public School Analogy

You know I love a good analogy. I spent four decades trying to help people understand one thing by connecting it to some other thing. So I love a good analogy. 

This is not a good analogy.

Nick Freitas is an army vet and Virginia politician, who served in the house of delegates before making a couple of unsuccessful runs for the US Congress (both House and Senate). In his bid for national office, he was backed by folks Rand Paul and Mike Lee, the Club for Growth, and Freedomworks. He has been writing for the ultra-right Daily Wire, where he usually sticks to war and the evils of communism. But this week, he decided to stick his oar into education waters with "We Wouldn't Let Government Control Our Grocery Stores. Why Do We Let Them Control Our Schools?" Transparency requires that I link to the article so you can check my work if you're so inclined, but I'm going to ask you to resist giving this thing any more clicks than you can help. So here's the link.

There are so many things wrong here. But it's worth poking through this pile because it's representative of how the anti-gummint school crowd views the issues.

Freitas opens by reducing the many debates about school to two sides--one side all for "choice and freedom" and  the other side "insists that improved education can only be achieved through strict government control of schools." Well, no, not really. It's not clear what exactly he means by "government control" or "strict," but a lot of straw is going to fly before he's done. We have locally elected school boards, which is government, but their control is not particularly strict in most case. We have oversight on the state and federal level, which is where most of the rules and regulations that he might be upset about come from, but if we were going to have strict control from that level, we'd have lefties arguing to end local school boards and just put schools under direct control of the state or federal government, but the only people I know making anything like those arguments are conservatives. Without traveling too far down this rabbit hole, I'm just going to say that the debate has far more than the two sides he has described, and, in fact, at least one of the sides he has described doesn't really exist.

Anyway, his whole point is to skip over a rehash of old arguments so that we can try his thought experiment.

Rather than rehashing the same old arguments, let us instead engage in a thought exercise regarding government’s involvement in another important aspect of our lives — access to food and nutrition — and see if we can draw some relevant parallels. After all, while access to education is important, it can be argued that access to food is just as important — if not more so. With that in mind, what would happen if we put the government in charge of grocery stores?

We're in trouble already, because public education doesn't provide "access" to education, but rather sets out to provide education to every single child in the US. But lets move on.

For whatever reason, Freitas sets his experiment in the Depression, and asks us to imagine what would happen if "the government decided to set up thousands of grocery stores across the country." He posits that you would suddenly be unable to shop at the store of your choice, but would be assigned a grocery store based on your address. Further, he imagines a government-proscribed "scientific" approach to shopping, and you would be forced to buy according to government recommendations. And you'd have to lobby the government for change, but of course, money talks. Also, of course, the workers at these stores would not be rewarded for excellence, but just seniority. 

So that's the straw man he set up. Let me count the ways.

First, while his "controlled by the government" is a bit vague, grocery stores highlight some of the ways in which government regulation is useful. We shop in grocery stores with a high level of confidence that the food we buy will not poison us and that the store itself meets certain safety standards--"scientific" ones, at that. 

But more importantly, the world of grocery stores provides an excellent demonstration of why a market-based privatized education system is a lousy idea. Freitas is selling freedom and choice and decrying his imaginary government grocery store for imposing choices on citizens, but the marketplace imposes its own choices every day. You can only shop at the grocery stores that are available in your area, and you can only buy the things those stores choose to stock. Now, if you live in a wealthy community, that may be great--you may have a choice of several stores with a vast variety of products to choose from. But the market doesn't provide that for everyone. There are towns in the West where you have to drive 5, 10, 15 miles over to the next town to get groceries. 

And in the US, there is such a thing as a food desert, a community or area that lacks access to affordable or nutritious food. In 2010, the US Department of Agriculture "reported that 23.5 million people in the U.S. live in "food deserts", meaning that they live more than one mile from a supermarket in urban or suburban areas and more than 10 miles from a supermarket in rural areas." Note that one mile to shop for groceries is only "close" if you have a car. 

Bottom line-- the free market world of grocery stores does not provide a cornucopia of choice to all citizens in the country. It provides very fine arrays of choice to communities that are wealthy, and a lousy range of choices--or no choices at all--to communities that aren't. I've made this point roughly a gazillion times now--the "free market" is a wonderful thing, but it's a lousy match for public education because the market is mostly good at picking winners and losers, not just among the businesses, but among customers. Every single functional business model requires businesses to decide which customers they are going to make no attempt to serve, because it won't be worth their time and money to do so. That is not compatible with a mission to provide education for every child.

Public education already has trouble meeting that promise, precisely to the degree that its funding has been infected through the housing market. And the notion that we have government controlled schools that are tightly controlled and carefully managed by some central education planning group is itself absurd. What we have is a bunch of nesting dolls (I know--they're Russian!! Gasp!!) each trying to assert control over the system in an endless tug of war, so that every teacher in a classroom is required to serve a hundred different masters. 

The rest of his argument is the same old anti-public school baloney. The fake "vote with their feet" argument. The "evil unions run everything" argument (always news to the actual evil unions). The "teachers would be free to be rewarded for their expertise" argument, which closely parallels the idea that a rising fast food industry increased pay levels for chefs. Mostly it's the "we must take back control," with very little exploration of what exactly the writer means by "we."

Donors Choose Monday: Small Things

I have been trying to make a regular weekly attempt to give some small support to teachers on Donors Choose, a platform that allows teachers to solicit support for projects in their classroom. Not all schools allow their teachers to participate, and I wish there was a better way to find teachers who deserve a hand, but we work with what we've got.

Sometimes the asks are really small, simple things. The kinds of things that you'd hope school districts would fund themselves, but you already know how that goes. But I'm a big believer that small differences are what really move the needle in this world, especially from the perspective of the students who are getting the help.

So I have some small things for your consideration this week.

In Mount Airy, NC, Mrs. Fletcher is looking for bookmarks for her littles at Franklin Elementary School. It's not a big ask, but it struck a chord-- I remember how much I liked a really cool bookmark to stick in a book I was reading (it is possible that I have not outgrown this). 

In Friendswood, TX, Ms. Gardner is looking for some help funding her cache of classroom treats and prizes for good work. As with many Donors Choose asks, you may be thinking, "Well, hell, all the teachers in the world self-fund their classroom prize store, and I agree. So let Ms. Gardner be a reminder and an inspiration, and help provide some teacher you know with some classroom rewards. And if you don't know a teacher who could use that, then help Ms. Gardner.

Also, I am shocked--okay, not shocked exactly, but disturbed--to see how many teachers are on Donors Choose asking for hand sanitizer, masks, basic PPE. I'm not going to put any of them up, but I am going to suggest that you could easily grab some extra of these items the next time you're shopping, and drop them off at a school near you. Should the school already be providing such things? Absolutely. But the need is still there. My old district stopped buying facial tissue a few decades ago, and many parents got in the habit of just sending a box into school with their child every so often. An absolute godsend.

ICYMI: Well, Nothing Blew Up This Week Edition (1/17)

Did we just get through a whole week without anything more than whingings based on the willful misunderstanding of the First Amendment and admittedly horrifying details from last week's insurrection? I feel like maybe we're having the equivalent of when someone screams in your ears and then stops but your ears still keep ringing. Or maybe my brain has just reached an overload stage and something horrible happened this week, again, and I've simply blocked it out. If that's the case, you can disillusion me in the comments (I'd rather have truth than comfort).

At any rate, I have some stuff for you. And I promise you something beautiful and encouraging at the bottom of the page.

A Look At The Biden Education Team

Thomas Ultican runs us through all the players in the Biden education sector. A thorough look. 

State Disinvestment after Great Recession  

This is not beautiful. The Education Law Center crunched some numbers, and they figure that post-2008 states underfunded public education to the tune o0f about $600 billion. This article has a link to the full report, if you're feeling tough enough to read it. 

Education Still Top Issue in Arizona   

Arizona is getting more interesting all the time--solid red, except for the people they elect lately. And still screwing over public education even as surveys like this indicate that the voters want something else.

Private school vouchers back on state legislative agenda  

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution writes about how Georgia is back to pushing school vouchers, an oft-defeated proposal, but we're going to give it another try because Covid.

Well, That's a Special Kind of Dumb  

As long as we're touring states, let's check in with Dad Gone Wild to see what Gov. Lee is up to with silly education bills in Tennessee.

Use of CARES funding by cyber charter schools in question  

In Pennsylvania, The Citizens' Voice is wondering how cyber-charters managed to play the double dip game with relief funds yet again. They're public schools! They're private businesses! They're whatever will get them a check.

School Finance Indicators Database  

"Often imitated but never duplicated," courtesy of the Albert Shanker Institute and Rutgers Graduate School of Education, it's a big mountain of curated and collected data about school funding. 

Why Billions in Food Aid Hasn't Gotten To Needy Families  

Anya Kamanetz at NPR looks at how red tape is keeping so many students and their families hungry

These Textbooks In Thousands of K-12 Schools Echo Trump's Talking Points  

Okay, it's Huffington Post, so the headline's a little clickbaity. But it's Rebecca Klein, who specializes in the many ways that school choice has been used to finance schools of Christianist nationalism and assorted anti-science baloney.

Why doesn't increasing knowledge improve reading achievement [sic]?

Shanahan on literacy, and the actual question he's asking is "why doesn't increased knowledge raise reading test scores?" The resulting article has a subtext contrasting the goals of  "raising test scores" and "building a better life."

Books of 2020

Nancy Flanagan has her list of big books from last year. If you're looking for something to pick up...

Grendel should not have rampaged through our capitol, but slaying him will only further divide the clans

Lit nerd political humor from McSweeney's

And I promised you something encouraging. This is from last spring, but I missed it at the time. It's a music video written and produced by a student and her friend, involving students from across eleven states. There are references to "September" which make it a little bittersweet (ah, how young and hopeful we all were last spring), but it's still a great piece of work.

Make the World Better from EL Education on Vimeo.