Hillary's Teacher PAC

Unions and reformers CAN agree on a lot. Hillary will show leadership and bring both sides together for our kids. http://t.co/41YlnV3Aec

— America's Teachers (@americateachers) April 1, 2015

With that first tweet, America's Teachers PAC made its twitter debut.

The PAC has a lovely website that launched just at the end of May and gives a clearer picture of what Hillary's-- well, no, of course this is the vision of the good folks at America's Teachers PAC who are I am sure following the rules that require them to be a separate entity from Clinton.

For one thing, they refer repeatedly to "our network of teachers-- reform and union." So right off the bat, we get their view of how the 'sides" of the education debates parse-- it's the reformers versus the unions. So there's one thing they don't get about current education issues-- that the reform side is a complicated web of entities including folks like the Center for American Progress, a reformster group with close ties to Hillary, and that "the union" doesn't even begin to describe the network of folks standing up for public education (that, in fact, the national unions are both late and lukewarm in their opposition to the reformster movement). But they repeatedly define these as the two "factions"-- reformers and unions.

The PAC lists talking points educational ideas to which it is committed.

1. Universal pre-school
2. Two free years of community college
3. Increased teacher pay and flex work options
4. Access to high quality schools for all communities
5. Full-service community schools

#4 opens with this familiar reformy dog whistle: "No child should be trapped in a failing school. Families should have alternatives if their neighborhood school is consistently underperforming." So, choice and charters. One more thing Hillary America's Teachers PAC gets wrong.

You find the same list on their LinkedIN page created on April 6 by Naveed Amalfard.

Amalfard is a math teacher in DC public schools, and he's been at that job for one whole year. He was previously at Emory in the economics department, held a summer job with McKinsey, was founder and CEO of Readers Beyond Borders for four years (You can watch him talk about it here). Can you guess how he ended up in a classroom? That's right-- Amalfard is a Teacher for America temp.

The America's Teacher blog used to open with a post from Amalfard:

I'm Naveed, an 11th grade statistics teacher in Washington, DC. I started America's Teachers as a grassroots Super PAC to bring together teachers, parents, and students to advocate for better public schools. Teaching in a high-poverty school has given me some insight into some of the web of challenges facing struggling students. I've developed a real appreciation for the depth and breadth of the educational crisis in our country.

Oh my goodness. One whole year and he gets the whole of the educational crisis. Once again, the Onion takes a back seat to reality.

You can't read that post on America's Teachers PAC website (where, actually, they neglect to call themselves a PAC); you have to find a cached copy. Now the website is pretty thoroughly scrubbed clean of any references to actual individuals, which seems like a bad choice since it gives the group the appearance of just one more shadowy collection of back room dark money deal makers.

We do know they've recruited the usual assortment of well-scrubbed college types. This recruiting post from the GW Democrats asks for fellows to join the America's Teachers PAC. The fellowship last twelve weeks-- the first half for training in "volunteer recruitment and management, event planning, and digital organizing." The second half will be putting these skills to work to make Hillary the next President. "Fellows will be integrated into the PAC and well-supported by its leadership. Each fellow will be responsible for specific workstreams." Operations will be base primarily in DC.

As to who that leadership might be...? Well, that's not entirely clear. A few of us asked the @AmericaTeachers twitter account who their backers are, but there was no answer (and given the nature of twitter, I don't find that particularly nefarious). I've emailed that question to the group (americasteachers@gmail.com), but I'm thinking a hashtag like #whoareyourdonors? might be useful many times before this election cycle's done. 

Meanwhile, if you missed Almafard at the Ready for Hillary PAC fundraiser in Virginia, you can catch the Teach for America--er, I mean, the America's Teachers facebook page (36 likes so far) or follow the twitter account which so far has chosen to amplify Clinton, Arne Duncan, Randi Weingarten, KIPP, TFA, and the US Department of Education.

This may represent a field test for a new non-position on public education. "We know we may not agree with each other on the other things (Common Core, standardized testing, etc.), and that’s okay. Rather than endlessly fume over all the things that divide us, both sides are holding their fire. Both sides are coming together on the education issues we do agree on." I'm not impressed. Do not punch me repeatedly in the face while saying, "Well, we may not agree on whether or not I should stop punching you in the face, but let's focus on what we can agree on, like donuts and pretty flowers."

Look, I have no patience for Hillary Haters who insist she is behind so many conspiracies that the Iluminati call her for advice. But if you think that a Clinton administration would change the current direction of education policy one gnat's whisker, if you think that a Clinton administration would not continue the program of profiteering and privatization, if you think that a Clinton administration would stand up for public education any more than Bush or Obama-- then you see something that I surely do not. But in the meantime, please tell us, @AmericaTeachers-- who are your donors?

Drive

The competitive impulse is often the ONLY drive for success.

So wrote reader Foreverman (side note: not only is there a PhD somewhere in a study of self-naming behavior on the internet, but what, I wonder, would happen if we had all of our students choose classroom names?) in a response to my post about defending music education. He has plenty of company, folks who are sure that the only reason the human race isn't still riding in buggies and living in caves is because, competition!

Me? I'm not so sure. I think a case could be made that competition isn't the drive for success often -- in fact, it's probably rarely the drive for success. Cue the video that everyone on the internet has seen at least once and which I have linked to roughly a zillion times:




Dan Pink's talk is one more reminder that many of the things we're sure we know seem absolutely right until somebody makes us think about it. And Pink, unlike certain bloggers, has science on his side. You should watch this. Here are some of my favorite moments.

We are not as easily manipulable and predictable as you would think.

This is bad news for all educational approaches that assume that humans are basically vending machines-- put in the right change, press a button, a can of Dr. Pepper comes out.

The MIT study

Performed by economists and funded by the Federal Reserve. Stack-ranking performers so that you can give bonuses to the winners and ignore the losers-- that works only as long as you're talking about simple mechanical tasks, tasks where you just follow the steps. But if there were any cognitive skills at all, a larger reward led to poorer performance.

This has been replicated over and over, from MIT to rural India by scientists in many different disciplines.

This sort of stack ranking (hit the top step, win a prize) would be the epitome of competition. But it doesn't work. It also explains, in a backwards way, why schools can so easily drift into a dumbed-down position-- because when we give students simple mechanical procedural tasks and offer rewards, they do well. They are successful and we feel successful. But when we start trying to get them to do cognitive work-- well, if we have nothing to use for motivation but competition for the best rewards, we get worse results, and we all feel like failures. It's no wonder that schools may drift back to doing what works-- offering students rewards (grades) for doing simple tasks.

Three Factors Lead to Better Performance (and Personal Satisfaction)

The factors are autonomy, mastery and purpose.

Autonomy has been steadily stripped away from teaching, and it has never exactly been the hallmark of the Life of a Student. So there's one thing that we don't always have going for us in schools. And competition doesn't put it back. In fact, when competition is implemented in a very narrow manner, like, say, let's all compete to get students to get good grades on these tests, or let's all compete to get the most students to buy our marketing, we're making schools worse, not better.

Compliance is the opposite of autonomy. But all of ed reform is organized about making schools comply.

Mastery is about getting good at doing things, and this may be where competition has a place, because competition against other people with mastery is a good way to measure just how well you've mastered the skill. The best measures of mastery are not necessarily external, which is why so many people are happy to pursue their hobbies and avocations in private on their own time. But there's no question that some people like to measure their mastery against others. This is where competition can make sense.

Purpose is where competition can be the most corrosive and toxic. If the purpose is to win, to beat the other guy, to get the most money, you end up doing bad things. How many many many many MANY examples do we have of individuals and corporations whose only purpose was winning, and so they were willing to do anything to win, and they did, and it was bad. Enron, the banksters that sank the economy, the guys who are currently running my dad's old company into the ground-- these are all people who competed just to win without any better sense of purpose than that.

A company that competes to be the most money-making car company will (and did, for those of us who remember the seventies) make crappy cars. Companies that compete to turn the most profit by finding the cheapest, most screw-over-able workers, do not make the world a better place.

I believe that some advocates of competition say, "Competition really fuels greatness" when they mean "Competition tempered by a sense of ethics and a decent regard for human beings and the community fuels excellence." I believe they do not understand that the various charter frauds and scandals that we've seen over the last decade are not aberrations, but the result of people who say "Competing to win is good" and that's all end everything that they mean.

People imagine, say, a race, in which there's a track and officials and of course some behavior that is Not Allowed. But in modern corporate competition the push is always to get the government to back off and hire fewer referees and make fewer rules and after a certain point, we find people running down the track swinging clubs at the competition while sneaking scooters into their own lane.

So no

Success and excellence are not the result of simple competition any more than a great marriage is the result just of kissing. There are lots of ways to win a competition that have nothing at all to do with being the best-- and if you only care about winning, and not about being the best, you will not stumble upon excellence. And if you can't tell the difference between being the winner and being the best, then you have no business entering the race at all.

Threading the Testing Needle

At A Teacher's Evolving Mind, teacher Nate Bowling thoughtfully turns over the education issues. In his post, "On Having One's Cake and Eating It Too, Part I" he makes a valiant attempt to thread the needle between the pro-test and anti-test factions of the education world. I don't think he quite succeeds, but his conversation with himself is worth the read.

Who is this guy?

On his website, the Washington state educator neatly sums up one of the central challenges of the current ed reform landscape:


Teachers of color face a dilemma: we know--more than anyone, the urgent need for change--we get that the status-quo screws our kids. But at the same time we also see a reform movement that "has all the answers" and doesn't want or value our experience and insights from working with marginalized communities.

Bowling is a founding member of Teachers United (recipient of many Gates $$), flies the #educolor flag (a mark of one of the most valuable networks of educators of color, including many strong public ed advocates), and won the Milken Educator Award (from the foundation set up by former junk bond king, convicted felon, and current reformster Michael Milken ). Yes, he's in a video accepting a big check from Milken while Sen. Patty Murray looks on proudly (well, as evangelist D. L. Moody supposedly said upon being challenged about accepting the "devil's money" from a reprobate, "The devil's had it long enough. It's time to give it to God.")

In other words, this appears to be a man who is comfortable not simply handing his brain over to any particular faction in the edu-debates.

Threading the needle

I should probably have picked another image, as this will result in threading the needle through the cake which Bowling is contemplating both having and eating. His starting point is recognizing that he sees merit on both sides.


He believes that there is too much testing, and as any working teacher can, he provides concrete examples of how ridiculous the testing takeover of school function can become. But he also believes in the need for annual testing of all children.

Having my cake: NCLB is a poorly written law that has created havoc within public education and created punitive systems that stigmatize, rather than help schools, educators and students--especially those in high poverty communities.

Eating it too: testing as mandated by NCLB shines a bright light on the gaps that exists between various populations in our public school system. It has especially highlighted how poorly black students are being served by the system and we simply can’t go backward on that.

But he then moves on to make, if not a straw man, a man wearing a thick straw suit.

There are many educators out there who pride themselves on being “anti-testing”. They wear buttons, it’s in their social media bios, they make shirts, lots and lots of shirts. I do not count myself among their ranks. Far too often the unstated premise of their proclamations comes across (to me) as “because of circumstances outside of my control, poverty, instability, lack of home support, etc., my students can’t do it.”

I don't know if I would proudly claim "anti-testing" as part of my basic identity, and I always keep my sloganeering and my fashion sense (such as it is) separate. But I'm definitely anti-standardized test, and I do not match his straw bedecked man in (at least) two respects:

1) My primary opposition to the Big Standardized Test is that it is not just a huge sucker of time and money, but a huge sucker of time and money that gives nothing back in return. The BS Tests are lousy, yielding no data except data telling us how well students do on the tests. As many researchers have shown, we could save all the money and time and simply assign schools scores based on socio-economic and demographic factors and be almost as accurate as the BS Tests. The tests don't provide teachers or parents with useful, actionable information about my students. It's not that the tests or unfair or that circumstances outside of anyone's control means some students can't do it-- it's that the IT is not anything worth doing.


2) Since the BS Tests don't really measure real educational achievement, to help any students do "it" (get a good score), we have to take time and resources away from providing a real education. That means the worse students do on the test, the more likely it is to lead to their getting less quality education, not more. And there is not a speck of data to suggest that having super PARCC scores opens doors for anybody, anywhere.

More disagreements

My disagreement with Bowling can fit into this Complete The Sentence puzzle' From Bowling's piece--

I am not naive about class: obviously the children of lawyers and programmers are going to have a leg up on my students when it comes to testing and life outcomes, but that makes it all the more important that I help my student...

I would finish this sentence any number of ways: ...become excellent readers.  ...develop excellent writing skills.  ...learn to be excellent collaborators. ...learn to leverage all available resources to their greatest advantage. ...learn how to play The School Game as smoothly as possible. ...learn how to be awesome with a level of confidence that makes them believe they can conquer the world. ...become fluent and confident and unapologetic in expressing their unique personal voices.

Bowling finishes it ...prepare to take the assessments.  He offers that as an alternative to accepting the narrative of "poor kids can't," and I won't pretend for a moment that such a narrative doesn't exist out there. But "think poor kids must fail" or "get ready to take a standardized test" are not the only two options. They can't be, because they both suck mightily. 
  
Bowling says that we need system-wide data to close "the Achievement/Opportunity (whatever we're calling it now) Gap." But there's a reason that terminology is unclear-- because we don't want to call the gap what it is, which is a test score gap. And closing the test score gap is no more a useful gap to focus on than the pants pockets gap or the good haircut gap. 

Bowling also says that he only objects to the way that testing has warped and twisted schooling, but that's inevitable. For the tests to generate data, students and teachers must be forced to take them seriously, which means high stakes (particularly for those folks who want the data specifically in order to close schools and fire teachers), and high stakes mean intense focus and that means twisting and warping.

Bowling ends with examples of the data collection all around us-- fitbits (me too, but Bowling is a more determined walker than I) and battery charge readouts and weight. But those data are actual numbers corresponding to real things. My fitbit doesn't try to tell me how much I've walked today by counting the hairs on my wrist; it also doesn't use my step count to deduce my height, weight, blood pressure and show size. It only measures what it measures. And BS Tests only measure how many times the student selected a response that the test manufacturer wanted her to. That's supposed to be a proxy of achievement; I don't believe it's anything remotely like an accurate proxy.

Bottom Line 

I appreciate Bowling's thoughtful approach to the questions. And we folks on the pro public ed side of the reformy debates would do well to remember that we still need answers to the question of how the needs of poor students can best be met. Bowling is concerned that removing the current system leaves us with nothing to act on; I believe it is providing us nothing to act on now, and wasting our time and resources to boot. How to thread the needle and still get to eat our cake is a problem that still needs to be solved.

You can find Bowling's next post in this series here.

Nevada Abandons Public Education

Nevada has made its bid for a gold medal in the race to the bottom of the barrel for public education. The state's GOP legislature, with help from Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education (a name that belongs in Orwellian annals right next to "Peacekeeper Missile"), has created an all-state voucher system.

This is the full deal. No foot-in-the-door program for poor, disabled, or trapped-in-failing-school students. Next fall every single student in Nevada gets a taxpayer-funded voucher to spend at the school whose marketing most appeals to that student's parents.

The backers of the bill are as delighted as they are divorced from reality. Here's bill sponsor Senator Scott Hammond, quoted in the Washington Post:

Nothing works better than competition.

This statement belongs in the annals of baseless expressions of faith, right next to "I'm sure that he'll leave his wife soon" or "Everything should be fine now that the government guy is here to help us" or "Go ahead and hand me that basket of vipers; I'm sure God will protect me."

In point of fact, not only do many things work better than competition, but competition doesn't really work all that well. And competition certainly does not work well when we're talking about providing an important public service to all people-- not just the ones who win the competition. It's true that when it comes to winning the race or getting the VP job or convincing that hot human to marry you, there can be only one. But what does that have to do with public education? Does Senator Hammond believe there should only be one great school in Nevada and only some students should get to succeed?

There are so many ways in which competition does not belong in public education. Building is a better metaphor than racing. Competition doesn't even foster traditional conservative values. The free market often resists quality rather than fostering it. The market doesn't know what to do with "losers." Charter school competition does not create pressure for excellence. Market competition creates perverse incentives to game the system, and tends to put the wrong people in charge. Choice twists the product in an involuntary market. Voucher system disenfranchise the taxpayers, literally creating taxation without representation and pitting taxpayers against parents. The whole inefficient system depends on lies and fantasies for financing. And if you think competition fosters excellence, just go take a look at your cable tv. Or take a look at how it has worked out in the college market. Finally, don't forget that time that Dr. Raymond of CREDO (charter and choice fans par excellence) declared that the free market doesn't work in education.

Like many school choice programs, Nevada's will actually be a school's choice program. The vouchers will provide poor students with a whopping $5,700. Want to go to Shiny Rich Prep Academy, high-poverty students? So sorry. It turns out your voucher just doesn't quite bring in enough money. Are you a student with issues, problems, or a disability? Sorry-- it's too hard to make money educating you, so we're going to find some means of making you go away.

Though it should be noted-- in one potential windfall for families that aren't all that into the whole edumacation thing, the voucher can be spent on home school supplies.

All of you who can't get into a Really Nice School? You are all welcome to go back to a public school. You know-- the public school that had to cut pretty much everything because it lost a ton of money to vouchers. Have a great time, you reject, but take comfort in knowing that the voucher program made it possible for rich families who were going to send their kids to SRPA anyway to have a bit more money to finance that trip to Paris this summer.

Of course, no piece about FEE's devotion to helping states screw over poor students would be complete without a quote from the reformsters own Dolores Umbridge:

“This is the wave of the future,” said Levesque, whose foundation helped Nevada legislators draft the measure while its nonprofit sister organization, Excel National, lobbied to get it passed. “In all aspects of our [meaning we deserving wealthy folks] life, we look for ways to customize and give individuals [who are the right kind of people] more control over their path and destiny [while freeing them from any requirement to help Those People]. . . . This is a fundamental shift in how we make decisions about education [in the sense that we are allowing the Right People more choice and taking choices and resources away from Those People who really don't deserve them].”

I edited her quote slightly to make sure her meaning was a little more clear.

Nevada was already well-positioned for the Race to the Bottom prize, consistently ranking among the bottom ten states for education funding. With this bold step, they have insured that even that little bit of money will be spent in the most in efficient, wasteful manner possible. Not only will they be duplicating services (can you run two households with the same money it takes to run one?), but by draining funds away from public schools, they can guarantee that those public schools will struggle with fewer resources than ever.

This is not out of character for Nevada. Las Vegas has long been notorious as a place where folks want their tourist industry to be well staffed with lots of cheap labor, but they don't want those workers to be able to actually live in Vegas. Many would prefer that workers simply vanish after they punch out. We want Those People to be in the casinos, serving us drinks, showing skin, and looking happy-- but we don't want Those People to live in our shiny city. While what happens in Vegas is supposed to stay in Vegas, those who make it happen are not.

Levesque is correct in one respect-- this really is a fundamental shift in how Nevada handles public education, in the sense that this is Nevada throwing up its hands and saying, "Screw it. We're not even going to pretend to try to provide a quality public education for all children in the state."

Can We Rebuild Social Capital?

I often disagree with his answers, but Mike Petrilli frequently asks excellent questions.

In the recent National Review, Petrilli is spinning off Robert Putnam's latest book about America's children and discussing the idea of social capital. The problem is simple, and clear:"the fundamental reality of life for many children growing up in poverty in America today is the extremely low level of 'social capital' of their families, communities, and schools."

The problem with any deliberate attempt to build social capital, as Petrilli correctly notes, is that nobody has any idea how to do it. Petrilli accuses Putnam of suggesting that we throw money at the problem. Well, I haven't read the book yet (it's on the summer reading list), so I can't judge whether Petrilli's summation is correct or not.

But Petrilli himself offers three strategies for addressing the issue. And as is often the case, while he raises some interesting and worthwhile questions, his line of inquiry is derailed by his mission of selling charters and choice.

1. Invite poor children into schools with social capital to spare.

No, I don't think so. Social capital is about feeling supported, connected, and at home in your own community. You cannot feel at home in your own community by going to somebody else's community.

Schools contribute to social capital by belonging to the community, by being an outgrowth of the community which has significant role in running those schools. Inviting students into schools that are not in their community, that do not belong to those students and their families-- I don't think that gets you anything. Social capital finds expression in schools through things like evening gatherings at the school by people from the community. It depends on students and families who are tied through many, many links-- neighbors, families, friends. It depends on things as simple as a student who helps another student on homework by just stopping over at the house for a few minutes. These are things that don't happen when the students attend the same school, but live a huge distance apart.

Making a new student from another community a co-owner in a school is extraordinarily different. But anything less leaves the new student as simply a guest, and guests don't get to use the social capital of a community.

2. Build on the social capital that does exist in poor communities.

The basic idea here is solid. Putrnam's grim picture aside, poor communities still have institutions and groups that provide social capital, connectedness, support. I agree with Petrilli here, at least for about one paragraph. Then a promising idea veers off into shilling for charters and choice. 

Education reformers should look for ways to nurture existing social capital and help it grow. Community-based charter schools are one way; so (again) is private-school choice.

Churches, service organizations (in my neck of the woods, think volunteer fire departments), and social groups (think Elks) are all community-based groups that add to social capital. Unfortunately, as Putnam noted in Bowling Alone, those sorts of groups are all in trouble. 

 

One of the fundamental problems of social capital and these groups is a steady dispersing of the people in the community. People spend too much time spreading out to come together. Spreading them out more, so that their children are all in different schools and no longer know each other-- I don't see how that helps. Social capital is about connection.

 

3. Build social capital by creating new schools.

Exactly where does a high-poverty community come up with the money to build a new school? The answer, he acknowledges, is for charter operators to come in from outside and create a new school from scratch. He also acknowledges that it's an "open question" whether such schools create any new social capital. 

 

I would also ask if it's really more inexpensive and efficient to spend the resources needed to start a new school from scratch than it is to invest those resources in the school that already exists. Particularly since with few exceptions, that new school is created to accommodate only some of the students in the community. If the community ends up financing two separate but unequal schools, that's not a financial improvement, and it is not creating social capital.

Do we actually care?

In the midst of these three points, Petrilli posits that growing social capital and growing academic achievement (aka test scores) are two different goals that are not always compatible, and we should not sacrifice test scores on the altar of social capital.

On this point I think Petrilli is dead wrong. There is not a lick of evidence that high test scores are connected to later success in life. On the other hand, there's plenty of evidence that social capital does, in fact, have a bearing on later success in life. High test scores are not a useful measure of anything, and they are not a worthwhile goal for schools or communities. 

 

Petrilli's is doubtful that lefty solutions that involve trying to fix poverty by giving poor people money are likely to help, and that many social services simply deliver some basic services without building social capital, and in this, I think he might have a point.

And it occurs to me, reading Petrilli's piece, that I live in a place that actually has a good history of social capital, both in the building and the losing. I'm going to be posting about that in the days ahead because I think social capital conversation is one worth having, and definitely one worth having as more than a way to spin charters and choice. Sorry to leave you with a "to be continued..." but school is ending and I've got time on my hands.

Shame

Too much modern ed reformy stuff is built on a foundation of shame.

We are to shame the students. Put up data walls with student names so that the laggards will be held up to the world for all to see how slack and inadequate they are. Their shame at being labeled failures in front of their peers, their teachers, the janitorial staff, and strangers wandering in off the street-- that shaming will drive them to develop some grit and up their game. We build entire schools around the idea that we will shame students for every single infraction.

We are to shame the teachers. Rate and rank staff. Even publish them in the paper. Display their suckiness to all the world. Once they have been publicly shamed, they will finally get their students' test scores up.

We are to shame the schools. Let's grade them, so that those nasty D and F schools can be shamed into finally Doing Something.

The shame program fails for two reasons.




First, it assumes that every layer of education is hampered by people who know how to do more excellent work, but they just don't bother. Those eight-year-olds who can't pass the reading test yet? They're just slacking because they don't feel like trying to learn anything. Or maybe it's their teacher, who went into teaching because she doesn't really care whether students learn or not.

Everybody is just holding out, the reasoning goes. So we just need to give them a shock to the system to get them to fork over the goods (that they have had all along).

But the even-bigger issue here is the idea that shame is an effective motivator.

Shame makes people small, weak, unconfident, broken. Shame is a great motivator if you want to strip away a person's confidence or independence. That's not what we're trying to do in school.
You cannot shame people into excellence. You can not make them stronger by making them feel weak. You do not help them stand up by knocking them down.

Management By Shame is not a winning idea, not just because it's wrong to stomp on people, but because it just doesn't work. It's like withholding meals from a child to make her stronger, or running a child's clothing through a shredder to make him dress more fashionably, or like throwing people in debtor's prison to make them pay their debts.

It is deliberately trying to create a deficit in the very qualities (strength, independence, confidence) that the person needs to success. Sure, there are people who will respond to shaming by fighting back, by taking the shame as a challenge; those are people fortunate enough to have a surplus of the necessary qualities. But that is not all people; I don't believe it's most people or even many people.

The fact that some people can take a psychic beat-down does not mean it's a good idea. Some people can bench press hundreds of pounds, but that does not mean we should drop an anvil on everyone. Shame is a lousy motivator. We have known that since the days that somebody walked into a classroom and said, "Yeah, I don't think sending a kid into the corner to wear a dunce cap really helps."

It's also interesting to notice who deserves to be shamed and who does not. We rush to shame students, teachers and schools, and yet reformsters never propose that we shame the legislatures that don't adequately fund the school or the corporate chieftains who strip-mine education for profits.
If we are serious about improving education, we will stop trying to beat people down instead of trying to lift them up. The culture of a school should be all about supporting and strengthening everyone. That doesn't mean we ignore mistakes and misdeeds. But we need a better response, a better plan, than punishment and shame.

Originally posted at  View from the Cheap Seats

Stop "Defending" Music

Today I ran across one more xeroxed handout touting the test-taking benefits of music education, defending music as a great tool for raising test scores and making students smarter. It was just one more example among many of the "keep music because it helps with other things" pieces out there.

I really wish people would stop "defending" music education like this.

I get that music programs are under intense pressure, that all across America they are sitting hunched over with one nervous eye on a hooded figure stalking the halls with a big budgetary ax. Music programs are watching administrators race by, frantically chasing test scores and ignoring music in schools. So it may seem like a natural step to go running after the testing crowd hollering, "Hey, I can help with that, too."

Don't. Just don't.

First of all, it's a tactical error. If your state gets swept up in the winds of test dumpage and suddenly tests are not driving your school, what will you say to the ax guy (because, tests or not, the ax guy is not going away any time soon)? If your big selling point for your program has been that it's actually test prep with a horn, you've made yourself dependent on the future of testing. That's a bad horse on which to bet the farm.

Second, it's just sad. And it's extra sad to hear it come from music teachers. Just as sad as if I started telling everyone that reading Shakespeare is a great idea only because it helps with math class.

There are so many reasons for music education. Soooooooo many. And "it helps with testing" or "makes you do better in other classes" belong near the bottom of that list. Here are just a few items that should be further up the list.

Music is universal. It's a gabillion dollar industry, and it is omnipresent. How many hours in a row do you ever go without listening to music? Everywhere you go, everything you watch-- music. Always music. We are surrounded in it, bathe in it, soak in it. Why would we not want to know more about something constantly present in our lives? Would you want to live in a world without music? Then why would you want to have a school without music?

Listening to music is profoundly human. It lets us touch and understand some of our most complicated feelings. It helps us know who we are, what we want, how to be ourselves in the world. And because we live in an age of vast musical riches from both past and present, we all have access to exactly the music that suits our personality and mood. Music makes the fingers we can use to reach into our own hearts.

Making music is even more so. With all that music can do just for us as listeners, why would we not want to unlock the secrets of expressing ourselves through it? We human beings are driven to make music as surely as we are driven to speak, to touch, to come closer to other humans. Why would we not want to give students the chance to learn how to express themselves in this manner?

Music is freakin' magical. In forty-some years I have never gotten over it-- you take some seemingly random marks on a page, you blow air through a carefully constructed tube, and what comes out the other side is a sound that can convey things that words cannot. And you just blow air through a tube. Or pull on a string. Or whack something. And while we can do a million random things with a million random objects, somehow, when we just blow some air through a tube, we create sounds that can move other human beings, can reach right into our brains and our hearts. That is freakin' magical.

Music connects us to other humans in amazing ways. I have played in concert bands, a couple of jazz bands, and pit orchestras; I have directed church choirs and community musical theater. It is both indescribable and enormously compelling to see the many ways in which humans making music come together and connect to each other. I imagine the experience of playing team sports is something similar. You are part of something-- something bigger than yourself and more than the sum of the parts. I can't think of any other school subject that so completely fosters cooperation, collaboration, and connection between students. Students learn to help and mentor each other, support each other, lift each other up, and come together into something glorious and way, way cool.

In music, everyone's a winner. In sports, when two teams try their hardest and give everything they've got, there's just one winner. When a group of bands or choirs give their all, everybody wins. Regrettably, the growth of musical "competitions" has led to many programs that have forgotten this-- but music is the opposite of a zero-sum game. The better some folks do, the better everybody does. In music, you can pursue excellence and awesomeness without having to worry that you might get beat or defeated or humiliated. Everybody can be awesome.

Music programs give back to communities forever. See that big list of community music groups I've worked with? I am not in a large community, but all those groups exist, and they can all exist because every single person in them came through a school music program. Your community band, your church choir, your local theater-- all those groups that enrich the cultural life of your community are the result of school music programs.

Music programs can be a huge source of pride for school and community. Just like a football team, a band or choir can draw a crowd of fans who take great pride in the traditions and accomplishments of the groups. And if you're not getting your program out in front of the public to help build that following and support, you're messing up.

My high school band director is a hell of a guy, and he absolutely altered the trajectory of my life. When people talk about him, they often talk about all the music teachers and professional musicians that came out of his program, but I think his greatest success was all the students like me who went on to do something else, but whose lives have always been enriched by music.

Music is awesome. It's human. It's universal. It's big business precisely because it is something that everybody wants.

Music does not need to make excuses for itself, as if it had no intrinsic worth. It does not have to dress itself up in test-taking robes or mathematical masks. It has deep, powerful human value, and all of us who love it should be saying so, over and over and over again.

Do not defend a music program because it's good for other things. That's like defending kissing because it gives you stronger lip muscles for eating soup neatly. Defend it because music is awesome in ways that no other field is awesome. Defend it because it is music, and that's all the reason it needs. As Emerson wrote, "Beauty is its own excuse for being." A school without music is less whole, less human, less valuable, less complete. Stand up for music as itself, and stop making excuses.