In Which I Have To Take Back Some of the Nice Things I Said About AP Courses
When I last wrote about the AP courses, I praised the looseness of the course design. I should have known better. Alert readers pointed me at the news from AP-land; apparently the looseness is now seen as a design flaw to be fixed.
Some courses, like the Literature and Composition, still sum up the basics in a half-dozen pages. But courses are being redesigned. AP US History is due to roll out new and shiny next fall, and its course summary is now close to 100 pages. Why the added detail?
The redesign of the AP
U.S. History course and exam accomplishes two major goals: it maintains AP U.S.
History's strong alignment with the knowledge and skills taught in introductory
courses at the college level, and also offers teachers the flexibility to focus
on specific historical topics, events, and issues in depth.
Yes, by providing a more specific and detailed course outline, the College Board folks will be giving teachers more flexibility, much like a straightjacket provides more freedom and ignorance is strength. In fact, "the lack of specificity put pressure on many teachers: uncertain about
what the AP Exam would assess, they attempted to cover every detail of
American history."
The AP folks have been working to erase some of that uncertainty for a while now. If you haven't looked under the AP hood in a while, you may not know that for the past five years or so, the College Board has required that all wannabe AP teachers must submit their syllabus for an audit annually. If that seems like a great deal of work, the College Board offers sample annotated syllabi-- in other words, you can now get AP courses in a can. In the case of AP History, it's a nineteen page can.
But if we look under the new extended course framework hood, what do we find? Some conservatives, like the folks at the Heartland Institute, a righty thinky tanky, think we find a newly biased version of history. The framework breaks the course into four areas. Let's look at each:
I. Historical Thinking Skills
These are just what the title implies-- various skills useful in organizing and interpreting historical information, like being able to determine plausible cause and effect linkage. I would be happy to teach this stuff. No problems here.
II. Thematic Learning Objectives
Now it gets dicey. Whether we're talking about the history of the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire or the history of Bob and Ethel's tempestuous dating relationship, we're going to make some judgments about what themes/factors drive the narrative. My college history professor said 19th century European history was all about war, nationalism, class, and...um, something else. (What do you want from me? It was a long time ago!) And that in itself was a judgment.
I was going to get specific here, but there are seven large thematic objectives and each is broken down into several more for a grand total of fifty specific learning objectives, for example:
Analyze how changing religious ideals, Enlightenment beliefs, and republican thought shaped the politics, culture, and society of the colonial era through the early Republic
Fifty of those, so basically one a week. Holy smokes.
III. The Concept Outline
Uh-oh. Here's the part that's going to start to piss people off.
This breaks down the historical periods that teachers are supposed to use, and provides the conclusions that the students are supposed to reach. For instance:
Reinforced by a strong belief in British racial and cultural superiority, the British system enslaved black people in perpetuity, altered African gender and kinship relationships in the colonies, and was one factor that led the British colonists into violent confrontations with native peoples.
This outline is exceptionally specific, and notable for what it does and doesn't include. It favors economic factors, and is not very interested in social or cultural matters. It isn't interested in military history at all-- wars appear briefly but little is said about how they are fought and won. The outline was also clearly not the product of any historians who believe in the Great Man theory of history-- very few individuals appear at all. Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan are barely seen in relation to the historic moments associated with them. The closer we get to modern times, the more evident are the attempts to touch all the properly balanced or politically correct, depending on how you feel about such things. We cover Japanese-American internment camps, but not the national collective actions to support the fight against the Nazis. And if you think God helped make America great, you will not love the new AP version.
I'm not prepared to argue that any of these things absolutely need to be included in a summary of US history. It's very much open to debate, or at least it's open to debate any place other than in an AP History class. In this large section, the AP folks have imposed one specific reading of American history. Here comes the straightjacket of flexibility for AP History teachers.
Speaking of which, the section begins with a nice outline that tells us how much instructional time to devote to each period, and how much of the test will cover the indicated span.
IV. An intro to the test itself. Let's let that be.
This is going to anger some folks on the right (and it should anger the left as well). The same people who think creationism should be taught in science class will object to this outline's omission of America's exceptional God-given role in the world, or the implicit criticism of America in some of the goals. They are wrong. Some things just have no basis in fact and there's no reason for us to teach them in school.
But they will be right about one thing-- they will call this course outline biased, and in that they will be correct. And when studying history, I don't care whether your bias is widely accepted or Crazypants McFringebob-- part of the whole point of doing history is the give-and-take, back-and-forth, argue-and-support of differing viewpoints about exactly what happened, why it happened, why it mattered, and what happened next because of it. Real authentic history is about the never-ending wrestling matches over these questions-- not the learning to accept the answers that a current authority offers.
Beyond that-- remember back at the top when the College Board said that one benefit of this reboot would be more time to study pieces of history in greater depth? Can we talk about the history of coming up with that claim, because it had to have involved being on some historically strong drugs. Who knew that AP would turn into the class where teachers said, "Boy, I'd like to continue this discussion, but it's Tuesday and we have to move on the next unit right now."
Somehow the College Board (now run by our old buddy David Coleman) has taken AP US History from a loose framework for college-level inquiry and deep freewheeling study and exploration to a hog-tied tightly dictated connect-the-dots learn by numbers course.
But teachers can rest easy, knowing that they will now be able to do a better than ever job of prepping students to take the US History AP test.
Saturday, May 24, 2014
When Data Are Not Data
My favorite story of the last week ran in Valerie Strauss's "The Answer Sheet" on the Washington Post site and dealt with Arne Duncan's reaction to the increasingly loud chorus of VAM debunkers.
The research showing VAM as ineffective is piling up. Research by Polikoff and Porter eviscerated, finding no real predictive power and suggesting that what VAM measures is not what we mean when we say "good teaching." That study was particularly telling because it had large piles of Gates dollars piled up behind it.
Perhaps my favorite VAM study was performed by Marianne P. Bitler who showed that VAM predicts a teacher's effect on student test score growth about as well as it predicts the teacher's effect on the student's height.
People who play with this type of statistical analysis have been warning that VAM was not solid for five years now, but now in addition to the professional opinions of people who do this sort of thing for a living, we have actual studies by actual scientists with actual-- what is that stuff called? Oh yeah-- DATA!
Don't we love data now? Isn't the whole foundation of the VAM system the idea that it's cold, hard data, with like numbers and stuff, so we know it has to be right. So wouldn't the US DOE want to make use of all this handy data that's rolling in about VAM? Here's the response that Strauss reports from the DOE:
Including measures of how well students are learning as part of multiple indicators of educator effectiveness is part of a set of long-needed changes that will improve classroom learning for kids. Growth measures are a significant improvement over the system that existed before, which failed to produce useful distinctions in teacher performance. Growth measures — including value-added measures — focus attention on student learning and show progress. While these measures are better than what existed before, educators will continue to improve them, and sharp, critical attention from the research community can help.
Strauss is a real journalist, so she simply reports this quote with little comment. I am not a real journalist, so I can go ahead and say this-- what a load of bullshit.
It is a distilled version of the Reformster narrative. We know (because, you know, we just know) that there are a whole ton of terrible teachers out there. The old evaluation system doesn't show the existence of these gazillion horrible educators, so the old system must not work. We will look for a new system that does work, and we will have proof that it works when it confirms our belief that a huge number of American school teachers suck. VAM may not work any better than tea leaves or reading the bumps on a frog, but it tells us that many teachers suck, and that's good enough for us and certainly an improvement of the old system.
The spokesperson also indicated that the US DOE keeps track of the research.
So bottom line-- Duncan's office knows that VAM is crap. They just don't particularly care. Because data are only data when they say what you want them to say.
The research showing VAM as ineffective is piling up. Research by Polikoff and Porter eviscerated, finding no real predictive power and suggesting that what VAM measures is not what we mean when we say "good teaching." That study was particularly telling because it had large piles of Gates dollars piled up behind it.
Perhaps my favorite VAM study was performed by Marianne P. Bitler who showed that VAM predicts a teacher's effect on student test score growth about as well as it predicts the teacher's effect on the student's height.
People who play with this type of statistical analysis have been warning that VAM was not solid for five years now, but now in addition to the professional opinions of people who do this sort of thing for a living, we have actual studies by actual scientists with actual-- what is that stuff called? Oh yeah-- DATA!
Don't we love data now? Isn't the whole foundation of the VAM system the idea that it's cold, hard data, with like numbers and stuff, so we know it has to be right. So wouldn't the US DOE want to make use of all this handy data that's rolling in about VAM? Here's the response that Strauss reports from the DOE:
Including measures of how well students are learning as part of multiple indicators of educator effectiveness is part of a set of long-needed changes that will improve classroom learning for kids. Growth measures are a significant improvement over the system that existed before, which failed to produce useful distinctions in teacher performance. Growth measures — including value-added measures — focus attention on student learning and show progress. While these measures are better than what existed before, educators will continue to improve them, and sharp, critical attention from the research community can help.
Strauss is a real journalist, so she simply reports this quote with little comment. I am not a real journalist, so I can go ahead and say this-- what a load of bullshit.
It is a distilled version of the Reformster narrative. We know (because, you know, we just know) that there are a whole ton of terrible teachers out there. The old evaluation system doesn't show the existence of these gazillion horrible educators, so the old system must not work. We will look for a new system that does work, and we will have proof that it works when it confirms our belief that a huge number of American school teachers suck. VAM may not work any better than tea leaves or reading the bumps on a frog, but it tells us that many teachers suck, and that's good enough for us and certainly an improvement of the old system.
The spokesperson also indicated that the US DOE keeps track of the research.
So bottom line-- Duncan's office knows that VAM is crap. They just don't particularly care. Because data are only data when they say what you want them to say.
AP A-OK?
The US DOE, among its many promotional and marketing activities, has been pushing hard for AP classes. This week they aimed loud praise noises at the state of Colorado for increasing AP participation in the state. The laudatory article declares success because more students take and pass the AP courses.
But before parents and students get too excited about the spreading and blooming of AP courses, they should remember a few simple facts:
AP Is A Business, Not A Public Service
AP tests are a product of the College Board, the same people who bring you the SAT, and although the name seems to suggest a group of college scholars who gather together on some altruistic mission to guard the gateways of higher education for the Greater Good, the fact is that the College Board is just a business intent on making a buck and keeping its market share (it is also currently run by David Coleman, one of the co-authors of the Common Core).
Every time a teacher goes to a seminar to learn about designing an AP course, the AP folks make money. Every time a school buys AP materials, the AP folks make money. And every time a student takes the AP test, the AP folks make money-- a bunch of money.
It was a great day for these folks when they hopped on the Education Reform Gravy Train and became the Official Education Course Product of Race to the Top. In Pennsylvania, for instance, a school's rating factors in how many AP courses are offered. This is extraordinary, like Ford getting the government to rate school district excellence based on how many Ford school buses they used.
You May Get Absolutely Nothing For Your $$
AP stands for Advanced Placement. The whole point of AP is supposed to be that you take the exam, get a good score, and your college gives you either course credit or a higher placement. In other words, you get to either replace English for Dopes with a higher level course, or you get credit for the course without ever having to take it. The second option is appealing to students; it's not quite so appealing to colleges, because it amounts to giving away free credits. And here's the important point to remember--
What you get, or not, is completely at the discretion of your college or university.
Many schools prefer that you learn things their way. (“We want a Dartmouth education to take place at Dartmout.”) They may not grant AP credit within your major (which is likely to be your strongest AP showing), and they definitely may not be in the mood to give away credits for free. The College Board folks pooh-pooh these sorts of trends, just as they pooh-pooh the plummeting market share of the SAT test and the growing tendency of colleges not to require it, but if you think dropping $90 on the AP test is going to pay off in college, you may be better off buying your kid a nice outfit to wear to the interview.
But before parents and students get too excited about the spreading and blooming of AP courses, they should remember a few simple facts:
AP Is A Business, Not A Public Service
AP tests are a product of the College Board, the same people who bring you the SAT, and although the name seems to suggest a group of college scholars who gather together on some altruistic mission to guard the gateways of higher education for the Greater Good, the fact is that the College Board is just a business intent on making a buck and keeping its market share (it is also currently run by David Coleman, one of the co-authors of the Common Core).
Every time a teacher goes to a seminar to learn about designing an AP course, the AP folks make money. Every time a school buys AP materials, the AP folks make money. And every time a student takes the AP test, the AP folks make money-- a bunch of money.
It was a great day for these folks when they hopped on the Education Reform Gravy Train and became the Official Education Course Product of Race to the Top. In Pennsylvania, for instance, a school's rating factors in how many AP courses are offered. This is extraordinary, like Ford getting the government to rate school district excellence based on how many Ford school buses they used.
You May Get Absolutely Nothing For Your $$
AP stands for Advanced Placement. The whole point of AP is supposed to be that you take the exam, get a good score, and your college gives you either course credit or a higher placement. In other words, you get to either replace English for Dopes with a higher level course, or you get credit for the course without ever having to take it. The second option is appealing to students; it's not quite so appealing to colleges, because it amounts to giving away free credits. And here's the important point to remember--
What you get, or not, is completely at the discretion of your college or university.
Many schools prefer that you learn things their way. (“We want a Dartmouth education to take place at Dartmout.”) They may not grant AP credit within your major (which is likely to be your strongest AP showing), and they definitely may not be in the mood to give away credits for free. The College Board folks pooh-pooh these sorts of trends, just as they pooh-pooh the plummeting market share of the SAT test and the growing tendency of colleges not to require it, but if you think dropping $90 on the AP test is going to pay off in college, you may be better off buying your kid a nice outfit to wear to the interview.
This chart can talk about the students who "qualified for college credit" but it's baloney. Nobody is qualified for college credit until the college offers it. (The chart also provides a quick guide to how huge a financial windfall Race to the Top has provided for the College Board).
Is There No Value?
One of the odd positives in the AP marketing scam is leverage for teachers. Where administration might in the past simple axed any requests for resources by classroom teachers, the AP marketing boondoggle gives teachers a new magic power. "Well, if you want to offer AP Basketweaving," says the teacher, "You are going to have to give us double-lab periods and buy these super-duper books."
AP also has the virtue of being a loose framework. When we "added" our first AP English course, we only had to perform some minor tweakage on the honors program we already had in place. But now, you know, it was AP!!!!!!! (use your super-hero voice) and so it was totally awesome. I used to call AP the alligator on a polo shirt, and little has happened to change my mind. It's savvy marketing, but it comes without handcuffs or a program in a box. I guess it says something about the current state of education that it qualifies as one of the less malignant tumors growing on the heart of schools these days.
[Update: Annnnd I had to take back some of those nice words about the loose framework almost immediately.]
What! Already?
The end of May is always hard. Tests, prom, yearbook distribution, my birthday, and suddenly it's finals and summer vacation. Already? Seriously?
I know there are teachers who count down to the first day of summer vacation like it's Christmas morning. I am not one of those teachers. For me it's more like the countdown of a ticking bomb.
There has never been enough time in the year. When I started teaching, it was my own fault-- I just couldn't find the most efficient rhythm for getting through everything I wanted to teach my students. With every year, I got better, cutting away the chunks of unit that didn't really serve my students well, learning when to lean hard and when to lay back before I burned them out, discovering how to dovetail units and piggyback goals. And I became so much faster at grading, assessing, general paper turnaround.
But at the same time, more has been piled on. Testing and pre-testing and test-prepping began to eat larger and larger chunks of the school year, and no matter how hard I juggled, I had to drop some balls so that I could manage the chainsaws that our Education Leaders were throwing at me. This is part of the gig, one of those parts they don't tell you about in teacher school.
They don't tell you you'll never have enough time to do everything you know you need to do. They don't tell you just how finite are the 180 (or so) days that you have with your students. They don't tell you how summer vacation can be rejuvenating, but also disorienting.
Every June, every teacher loses his job. Most of us know we'll have a new job in the fall, but it will be a slightly different job, working with a different group of people doing work that's similar, but not exactly the same because the conditions and students will be new. My wife is going to wrap up her first full year of first grade, and I know when the day comes that she has to say goodbye to these students she's given her heart to, she's going to cry a bunch. But the job we've just spent nine months on-- it's over.
I'll fill the time. My wife and I will spend time and travel together. I'll play in our community band and do some directing for community theater; these are things I enjoy, but also things that allow me to put something back into a community that pays me. I'll read, and I'll try to figure out some new tricks for making next year's job better than this year's.
I am not complaining. Not a bit. American education's tradition of giving students the summer to help with the family farm is weirdly anachronistic, but the result is a huge blessing and benefit for me and I am grateful for it.
But still-- can't I have one more week? Even a few more days? There are so many things I wanted to do with these guys, and I crammed as much into my 178 days as I could, but -- I need more. And when this job that I've poured myself into stops, it's like setting my foot down expecting a step and finding instead nothing. Yes, I'm a bit frayed right now, but I'm also strengthened by knowing when I get up in the morning I'm heading off to do important work, work that matters, work that allows me to be my own best self. When summer comes, it's hard not to miss that a little.
We live where we are, when we are. We grab whatever is here, now, and we embrace it and live it and try to go all Thoreau on it. My heart goes out to those teachers who are teaching far harder trenches than mine; God bless them with the respite they need.
But for me, this is one of the hardest times of the year. So much to do. So little time.
I know there are teachers who count down to the first day of summer vacation like it's Christmas morning. I am not one of those teachers. For me it's more like the countdown of a ticking bomb.
There has never been enough time in the year. When I started teaching, it was my own fault-- I just couldn't find the most efficient rhythm for getting through everything I wanted to teach my students. With every year, I got better, cutting away the chunks of unit that didn't really serve my students well, learning when to lean hard and when to lay back before I burned them out, discovering how to dovetail units and piggyback goals. And I became so much faster at grading, assessing, general paper turnaround.
But at the same time, more has been piled on. Testing and pre-testing and test-prepping began to eat larger and larger chunks of the school year, and no matter how hard I juggled, I had to drop some balls so that I could manage the chainsaws that our Education Leaders were throwing at me. This is part of the gig, one of those parts they don't tell you about in teacher school.
They don't tell you you'll never have enough time to do everything you know you need to do. They don't tell you just how finite are the 180 (or so) days that you have with your students. They don't tell you how summer vacation can be rejuvenating, but also disorienting.
Every June, every teacher loses his job. Most of us know we'll have a new job in the fall, but it will be a slightly different job, working with a different group of people doing work that's similar, but not exactly the same because the conditions and students will be new. My wife is going to wrap up her first full year of first grade, and I know when the day comes that she has to say goodbye to these students she's given her heart to, she's going to cry a bunch. But the job we've just spent nine months on-- it's over.
I'll fill the time. My wife and I will spend time and travel together. I'll play in our community band and do some directing for community theater; these are things I enjoy, but also things that allow me to put something back into a community that pays me. I'll read, and I'll try to figure out some new tricks for making next year's job better than this year's.
I am not complaining. Not a bit. American education's tradition of giving students the summer to help with the family farm is weirdly anachronistic, but the result is a huge blessing and benefit for me and I am grateful for it.
But still-- can't I have one more week? Even a few more days? There are so many things I wanted to do with these guys, and I crammed as much into my 178 days as I could, but -- I need more. And when this job that I've poured myself into stops, it's like setting my foot down expecting a step and finding instead nothing. Yes, I'm a bit frayed right now, but I'm also strengthened by knowing when I get up in the morning I'm heading off to do important work, work that matters, work that allows me to be my own best self. When summer comes, it's hard not to miss that a little.
We live where we are, when we are. We grab whatever is here, now, and we embrace it and live it and try to go all Thoreau on it. My heart goes out to those teachers who are teaching far harder trenches than mine; God bless them with the respite they need.
But for me, this is one of the hardest times of the year. So much to do. So little time.
Friday, May 23, 2014
Pearls, Triggers, Exonians & Checker
The trigger warnings issue has now reached a massive level of pearl clutching all around.
What's the Issue?
We know that trigger warnings are a thing because the New York Times wrote about them last Sunday. The basic idea seems to be that certain works of literature, classroom subjects, even statues, should come with warning labels attached because they might trigger a traumatic memory or reaction of some sort. Trapped in a classroom and suddenly confronted with a graphic reminder of a traumatic personal experience, a student could suddenly be overwhelmed by panic, fear, discomfort.
On the one hand, there's a certain amount of common sense at play here. When I have a student who is suffering through the difficulty of a recent or imminent death of a loved one, I pay special attention to how any of the 482 death-related literary works that we study might strike that student's particularly raw nerve. I do anything from soften the discussion of the work to prepare the student ahead of time for what's coming. And I am always conscious of the fact that there may be other similarly raw nerves in my classroom that I just don't know about. I don't really do this as a pedagogical choice, but as a human one.
Are Those Crazy Kids Out of Line?
On the other hand, some of the campus pearl clutchers seem a bit overzealous about stamping a warning label on any potentially upsetting content, and there seems to be a rather fuzzy zone between triggering a real personal trauma and just being kind of uncomfortable. I find it hard to imagine, as one advocate suggests, that The Merchant of Venice might trigger a serious episode of panic and distress because of its anti-Semitism (the presence of which is open to some debate anyway).
Fahrenheit 451 (a far more believable and hence scarier dystopic novel than 1984) posits a world of censorship that is not the result of top-down totalitarian mind-control, but instead censorship from the bottom up, caused by people demanding that anything disturbing or upsetting or uncomfortable be whisked away from public view. I think that's a fair comparison here.
But before I get my own pearls twisted up in my knickers, I remind myself that trigger warnings are a thing that some college students are asking for, and college students ask for a lot of things. We periodically hear about these movements sweeping campuses, and then it turns out, not so much. College faculties are not so excited about this idea, and colleges have an oft-effective means of dealing with troublemakers-- give them a diploma and send them away. So I'm not ready to get excited about this yet, and we can probably all calm down and---
No, Wait. Too Late.
The phrase "trigger warning" itself needs a trigger warning, because the term comes from the world of feminism, and you know how feminism gets some people's pearls all clutchified.
Like Chester E. Finn, Jr., currently head honcho at The Fordham Institute. Checker wrote a piece for Politico which has a url-based title of "Will America's College Kids Ever Grow Up" but which is headlined "America's College Kids Are of Mollycoddled Babies." And boy, if "mollycoddled" doesn't evoke some serious pearl-clutching, I don't know what does.
Finn is a smart man, an accomplished and prolific writer, and a conservative guy who often says things I quite agree with. But although he's a mere thirteen years older than I am, in this piece he sounds for all the world like my grandmother.
Poor dears. These are the same kids who would riot in the streets if their colleges asserted any form of in loco parentis when it comes to such old-fashioned concerns as inebriation and fornication. God forbid they should be treated as responsible, independent adults! After all, they’re old enough to vote, to drive, even (though it’s unlikely) to join the army.
Did I say pearl clutching? Finn has grabbed his pearls and is swinging them around, flailing angrily at these damn kids. They go to barely fifteen hours of classes a week. They gorge themselves on copious food options. They dare to protest speakers they disagree with. They use elaborate exercise and recreation facilities. They are awash in political correctness, self-absorption and "spoiled bratism." They are prissy. They are "schizy and spoiled." They will make terrible leaders in the future.
What are we to make of this child of privilege so filled with rage at the children of privilege? When he says that they've been "carefully cushioned from every form of risk, adversity and hardship," what exactly is he gauging that against? Because I am pretty sure that Chester E. Finn, Jr. has not spent a lot of time developing grit out on the mean streets. I don't know-- maybe Harvard was a tough go for Checker. But clearly, young people complaining about things are a huge trigger for him. I mean, seriously-- I've read his stuff before and I have never seen him so angry and ranty. You would think that Kids These Days are the softest, whiniest, most terriblest students ever in the history of ever. Spiro Agnew on his worst day did not dismiss a chunk of young America so completely, and Spiro didn't even go to Harvard.
Surprise Personal Insight
True story. My father is also a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, but he attended as a townie. His wealthy classmates went on to Harvard, but he went on to the University of New Hampshire. My father was the son of a general contractor; Chester Finn, Sr. was a prominent Dayton attorney. My father was the only member of his family to ever attend such a prestigious school; Chester Finn, Jr. is a third generation Exonian. So I guess if anyone had cause to be bitter and cranky about the children of prep school privilege, it would be my father, but he's not. Never has been.
More true story. My folks sent me to Phillips Exeter for a six week summer session. It was one of the great experiences of my life. The library was a gorgeous dream, the theater building the envy of most colleges.
The summer session brought together people from all over; most of us were nicknamed by our home city or state. I learned much. I learned that rich kids don't always have it easy, and poor kids don't always have it hard. I learned that rich is a relative thing.* I learned that when you have people from many backgrounds, it's good to think before you open your mouth because you might trigger someone's anger or hurt without even meaning to.
At the end of the day, the whole trigger notice brouhaha appears to be a bunch of folks just clutching pearls at each other. Am I being too simplistic when I suggest that just being kind and considerate and thoughtful, that just listening to people without scolding them for whatever imagined slights you think they have committed or are about to commit, that just treating each other decently would allow all of us to just put down our pearls and take a break? Because that looks like a path forward to me, even if I never went to Harvard or the University of Phoenix.
*This is my best Phillips Exeter summer school story, and while this piece is already way too long, I never get a chance to tell this one. So here it is a s a footnote; you can skip it all you want.
It was the summer of 1973. We would hang out in the dorm lounge and tell stories about home. We regularly made fun of one foreign kid who kept telling us about his country where every single citizen was rich, and every citizen got a share of the oil money, free health care, free college, free everything. We teased him and accused him of making it all up. He just laughed and said we could believe him or not; he would own us all one day. We had never even heard of his country before; we thought he made the name up, too. The country was Kuwait.
What's the Issue?
We know that trigger warnings are a thing because the New York Times wrote about them last Sunday. The basic idea seems to be that certain works of literature, classroom subjects, even statues, should come with warning labels attached because they might trigger a traumatic memory or reaction of some sort. Trapped in a classroom and suddenly confronted with a graphic reminder of a traumatic personal experience, a student could suddenly be overwhelmed by panic, fear, discomfort.
On the one hand, there's a certain amount of common sense at play here. When I have a student who is suffering through the difficulty of a recent or imminent death of a loved one, I pay special attention to how any of the 482 death-related literary works that we study might strike that student's particularly raw nerve. I do anything from soften the discussion of the work to prepare the student ahead of time for what's coming. And I am always conscious of the fact that there may be other similarly raw nerves in my classroom that I just don't know about. I don't really do this as a pedagogical choice, but as a human one.
Are Those Crazy Kids Out of Line?
On the other hand, some of the campus pearl clutchers seem a bit overzealous about stamping a warning label on any potentially upsetting content, and there seems to be a rather fuzzy zone between triggering a real personal trauma and just being kind of uncomfortable. I find it hard to imagine, as one advocate suggests, that The Merchant of Venice might trigger a serious episode of panic and distress because of its anti-Semitism (the presence of which is open to some debate anyway).
Fahrenheit 451 (a far more believable and hence scarier dystopic novel than 1984) posits a world of censorship that is not the result of top-down totalitarian mind-control, but instead censorship from the bottom up, caused by people demanding that anything disturbing or upsetting or uncomfortable be whisked away from public view. I think that's a fair comparison here.
But before I get my own pearls twisted up in my knickers, I remind myself that trigger warnings are a thing that some college students are asking for, and college students ask for a lot of things. We periodically hear about these movements sweeping campuses, and then it turns out, not so much. College faculties are not so excited about this idea, and colleges have an oft-effective means of dealing with troublemakers-- give them a diploma and send them away. So I'm not ready to get excited about this yet, and we can probably all calm down and---
No, Wait. Too Late.
The phrase "trigger warning" itself needs a trigger warning, because the term comes from the world of feminism, and you know how feminism gets some people's pearls all clutchified.
Like Chester E. Finn, Jr., currently head honcho at The Fordham Institute. Checker wrote a piece for Politico which has a url-based title of "Will America's College Kids Ever Grow Up" but which is headlined "America's College Kids Are of Mollycoddled Babies." And boy, if "mollycoddled" doesn't evoke some serious pearl-clutching, I don't know what does.
Finn is a smart man, an accomplished and prolific writer, and a conservative guy who often says things I quite agree with. But although he's a mere thirteen years older than I am, in this piece he sounds for all the world like my grandmother.
Poor dears. These are the same kids who would riot in the streets if their colleges asserted any form of in loco parentis when it comes to such old-fashioned concerns as inebriation and fornication. God forbid they should be treated as responsible, independent adults! After all, they’re old enough to vote, to drive, even (though it’s unlikely) to join the army.
Did I say pearl clutching? Finn has grabbed his pearls and is swinging them around, flailing angrily at these damn kids. They go to barely fifteen hours of classes a week. They gorge themselves on copious food options. They dare to protest speakers they disagree with. They use elaborate exercise and recreation facilities. They are awash in political correctness, self-absorption and "spoiled bratism." They are prissy. They are "schizy and spoiled." They will make terrible leaders in the future.
What are we to make of this child of privilege so filled with rage at the children of privilege? When he says that they've been "carefully cushioned from every form of risk, adversity and hardship," what exactly is he gauging that against? Because I am pretty sure that Chester E. Finn, Jr. has not spent a lot of time developing grit out on the mean streets. I don't know-- maybe Harvard was a tough go for Checker. But clearly, young people complaining about things are a huge trigger for him. I mean, seriously-- I've read his stuff before and I have never seen him so angry and ranty. You would think that Kids These Days are the softest, whiniest, most terriblest students ever in the history of ever. Spiro Agnew on his worst day did not dismiss a chunk of young America so completely, and Spiro didn't even go to Harvard.
Surprise Personal Insight
True story. My father is also a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, but he attended as a townie. His wealthy classmates went on to Harvard, but he went on to the University of New Hampshire. My father was the son of a general contractor; Chester Finn, Sr. was a prominent Dayton attorney. My father was the only member of his family to ever attend such a prestigious school; Chester Finn, Jr. is a third generation Exonian. So I guess if anyone had cause to be bitter and cranky about the children of prep school privilege, it would be my father, but he's not. Never has been.
More true story. My folks sent me to Phillips Exeter for a six week summer session. It was one of the great experiences of my life. The library was a gorgeous dream, the theater building the envy of most colleges.
The summer session brought together people from all over; most of us were nicknamed by our home city or state. I learned much. I learned that rich kids don't always have it easy, and poor kids don't always have it hard. I learned that rich is a relative thing.* I learned that when you have people from many backgrounds, it's good to think before you open your mouth because you might trigger someone's anger or hurt without even meaning to.
At the end of the day, the whole trigger notice brouhaha appears to be a bunch of folks just clutching pearls at each other. Am I being too simplistic when I suggest that just being kind and considerate and thoughtful, that just listening to people without scolding them for whatever imagined slights you think they have committed or are about to commit, that just treating each other decently would allow all of us to just put down our pearls and take a break? Because that looks like a path forward to me, even if I never went to Harvard or the University of Phoenix.
*This is my best Phillips Exeter summer school story, and while this piece is already way too long, I never get a chance to tell this one. So here it is a s a footnote; you can skip it all you want.
It was the summer of 1973. We would hang out in the dorm lounge and tell stories about home. We regularly made fun of one foreign kid who kept telling us about his country where every single citizen was rich, and every citizen got a share of the oil money, free health care, free college, free everything. We teased him and accused him of making it all up. He just laughed and said we could believe him or not; he would own us all one day. We had never even heard of his country before; we thought he made the name up, too. The country was Kuwait.
Tyranny of the Test
When Michelle Obama spoke up in support of the arts this week, I was not moved. In fact, I was bummed. Because her "defense" of the arts was simply one more sign that we live under the Tyranny of the Test.
The bottom line here is very clear: Arts education isn't something we add on after we've achieved other priorities, like raising test scores and getting kids into college. It's actually critical for achieving those priorities in the first place.
So there you have it. The arts are not in and of themselves important. They're important because they help us with what really matters, and that's raising test scores. So....what? Art and music have no value out in the world outside of school? They are just a tool, a trick to get students "in the seats" so that we can do the real work? If we didn't have the test scores to raise, cutting the arts from education would totally make sense?
Apparently that would make sense in Boston, where the public school system has announced that the History and Social Studies Departments are being eliminated. The school district has been quick to clarify that these departments and areas of study aren't being done away with-- they are "attempting to embed History and Social Studies education" into the "bigger picture."
What that appears to mean is that the departments will be folded into the English Language Arts department, the better to develop laser-like focus on the Test.
Or to put it another way, Boston Schools are taking a step to align the very organization of their instruction to the organization of the Test. Boston is boldly institutionalizing its devotion to Test Prep (you know-- the test prep that is totally not happening any more since we've moved on to Common Core).
This is the tyranny of high stakes testing. This is using a testing instrument to warp and distort the very idea of what it means to be a well-educated person. A well-educated person, it turns out, is one who gets good math and ELA scores on the Test-- nothing else matters. The longer we let this foolishness continue, the more we are going to suffer as a society from our small, cramped narrow vision of what it means to be human. Surely we can aspire to greater things for ourselves and for our children than simply to make good numbers on a bad standardized test.
UPDATE:
Boston schools have either clarified (or backtracked, depending on your level of paranoia) that no combining, deleting or otherwise screwing with the departments will be happening. You can read all about it here. They apologize for communicating poorly and assure us all that The Worst is not happening. So, good news.
The bottom line here is very clear: Arts education isn't something we add on after we've achieved other priorities, like raising test scores and getting kids into college. It's actually critical for achieving those priorities in the first place.
So there you have it. The arts are not in and of themselves important. They're important because they help us with what really matters, and that's raising test scores. So....what? Art and music have no value out in the world outside of school? They are just a tool, a trick to get students "in the seats" so that we can do the real work? If we didn't have the test scores to raise, cutting the arts from education would totally make sense?
Apparently that would make sense in Boston, where the public school system has announced that the History and Social Studies Departments are being eliminated. The school district has been quick to clarify that these departments and areas of study aren't being done away with-- they are "attempting to embed History and Social Studies education" into the "bigger picture."
What that appears to mean is that the departments will be folded into the English Language Arts department, the better to develop laser-like focus on the Test.
Or to put it another way, Boston Schools are taking a step to align the very organization of their instruction to the organization of the Test. Boston is boldly institutionalizing its devotion to Test Prep (you know-- the test prep that is totally not happening any more since we've moved on to Common Core).
This is the tyranny of high stakes testing. This is using a testing instrument to warp and distort the very idea of what it means to be a well-educated person. A well-educated person, it turns out, is one who gets good math and ELA scores on the Test-- nothing else matters. The longer we let this foolishness continue, the more we are going to suffer as a society from our small, cramped narrow vision of what it means to be human. Surely we can aspire to greater things for ourselves and for our children than simply to make good numbers on a bad standardized test.
UPDATE:
Boston schools have either clarified (or backtracked, depending on your level of paranoia) that no combining, deleting or otherwise screwing with the departments will be happening. You can read all about it here. They apologize for communicating poorly and assure us all that The Worst is not happening. So, good news.
Why Students Drop Out
This pooped up on twitter a few days ago
And, because I'm always interested in what Arne has to say, I followed the link. And I think Arne maybe didn't actually read it.
The link goes to a report from Gradnation, a project of the America's Promise Alliance that addresses the problem of students not finishing school. Here's what they found out.
Explaining why young people leave high school is at once quite simple and overwhelmingly complex. Young people’s words often illustrate the interplay among factors like absent parents, the impact of violence close to home, negative peer influences, and a sense of responsibility for others.
Researchers found s cluster of twenty-five factors that influenced decisions about school, including adults, family upheaval, safety, peer influence and becoming a parent. Toxic environments at home were a huge factor, and school was not always found to be a safe alternative.
The researchers also found that a desire for some sort of human connection also drove much of the behavior. Students who left school often cited a failure to find a connection with a caring adult in the school.
Contrary to what grittologists might suggest, researchers found that the young people leaving high school often displayed considerable courage, resilience, persistence and personal agency. They had the toughness; what they lacked was some help and guidance in directing it.
The researchers concluded :
1) Students who leave school are stronger than current conventional wisdom says.
2) Students who leave school often do so because they face huge life challenges that "push school attendance far down their priority list."
3) They find it easier to not attend than to attend, or to start back in again.
4) They emphasize how important connections to parents, peers and other adults matter.
5) Everyone in a young person's life can help.
And the researchers offer these concrete recommendations:
1) Listen
2) Provide at-risk students with extra support
3) Community "navigators" are needed to help students stay in school.
4) Follow the evidence of what works
5) Place young people in central leadership roles to design and implement solutions
I don't know who these folks are (though the website has a nice picture of Colin Powell on it) but the results of this study make sense to me, so it passes that sniff test. I suspect may not be super-rigorous and feels urban-skewed. But here's the thing. This was a recommendation from Arne's own tweet (or Arne's own intern's own tweet-- I still have my doubts). Please notice, Arne, the things it does not say:
It does not suggest that students drop out because school is not rigorous enough.
It does not suggest that teachers are the most important factor in whether or not the student stays.
It does not suggest that a super-duper high stakes testing program would make things better.
And it especially does not say-- in fact says the opposite-- that what these kids need is a swift kick in the pants and a push to develop more grit and persistence.
So I am grateful to Arne for tweeting this link. Now I wish he would read it himself.
To ensure every student graduates HS, 1st we need to understand why some don’t. New Grad Nation report helps explain http://t.co/5xS6f1m2ep
— Arne Duncan (@arneduncan) May 22, 2014
And, because I'm always interested in what Arne has to say, I followed the link. And I think Arne maybe didn't actually read it.
The link goes to a report from Gradnation, a project of the America's Promise Alliance that addresses the problem of students not finishing school. Here's what they found out.
Explaining why young people leave high school is at once quite simple and overwhelmingly complex. Young people’s words often illustrate the interplay among factors like absent parents, the impact of violence close to home, negative peer influences, and a sense of responsibility for others.
Researchers found s cluster of twenty-five factors that influenced decisions about school, including adults, family upheaval, safety, peer influence and becoming a parent. Toxic environments at home were a huge factor, and school was not always found to be a safe alternative.
The researchers also found that a desire for some sort of human connection also drove much of the behavior. Students who left school often cited a failure to find a connection with a caring adult in the school.
Contrary to what grittologists might suggest, researchers found that the young people leaving high school often displayed considerable courage, resilience, persistence and personal agency. They had the toughness; what they lacked was some help and guidance in directing it.
The researchers concluded :
1) Students who leave school are stronger than current conventional wisdom says.
2) Students who leave school often do so because they face huge life challenges that "push school attendance far down their priority list."
3) They find it easier to not attend than to attend, or to start back in again.
4) They emphasize how important connections to parents, peers and other adults matter.
5) Everyone in a young person's life can help.
And the researchers offer these concrete recommendations:
1) Listen
2) Provide at-risk students with extra support
3) Community "navigators" are needed to help students stay in school.
4) Follow the evidence of what works
5) Place young people in central leadership roles to design and implement solutions
I don't know who these folks are (though the website has a nice picture of Colin Powell on it) but the results of this study make sense to me, so it passes that sniff test. I suspect may not be super-rigorous and feels urban-skewed. But here's the thing. This was a recommendation from Arne's own tweet (or Arne's own intern's own tweet-- I still have my doubts). Please notice, Arne, the things it does not say:
It does not suggest that students drop out because school is not rigorous enough.
It does not suggest that teachers are the most important factor in whether or not the student stays.
It does not suggest that a super-duper high stakes testing program would make things better.
And it especially does not say-- in fact says the opposite-- that what these kids need is a swift kick in the pants and a push to develop more grit and persistence.
So I am grateful to Arne for tweeting this link. Now I wish he would read it himself.
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