Student Suicide

I knew it was a growing issue. I didn't know it was this bad.

Between 2007 and 2014 the suicide rate for children aged 10-14 doubled. Doubled. That's according to the Center for Disease Control. If you want to put that in perspective, the rate of death by auto accident has been dropping steadily since 1999 (the beginning of the charted data), cut by more than half. In 2014, the suicide rate climbed above the death by car accident rate (homicide was lower than both, and steadily dropping). The suicide rate had held steady with a slight dip up until 2007.

I don't know why; I suspect nobody does. More fragile kids? Tougher, more unkind world? Something to do with the internet? If you tell me that Kids These Days need more grit, I swear I will reach through the internet and slap you. Just this week we had the news of an eleven year old girl who had survived freaking cancer committing suicide over bullying. And NPR has been running a series for a month entitled "A Silent Epidemic: The Mental Health Crisis in Our Schools"

There are people paying attention. In Pennsylvania, we have mandatory suicide prevention training for teachers-- all it amounts to is a run-through-it-yourself on-line slide show with a concluding quiz, but it still gets some hard information to us, which is no small thing. Mental health issues and suicide are issues that everyone has "heard something" about, and often that is bunk. And I can tell you that hoping that instincts and folk wisdom will just kick in when the moment comes-- well, that's a bad plan.

I teach in a small town school system that sits at the heart of a rural area. When you look up "All-American classic small town life" in the dictionary, you find a picture of my town. And I've been getting intermittent training about this issue for four decades, since one of our staff members' children took his own life. I've watched an old friend go through the heartbreak with the loss of his son. And not long enough ago that I can easily set it aside, one of my former yearbook editors came home for Christmas break to the family home situated on the river. They found her footprints leading out across the ice to the water; they found her body downriver many weeks later. Her parents are good, successful people. She was smart, capable, loving, goodhearted. My yearbook students, before they leave senior year, paint a block in the wall of the yearbook room. I see her block every day that I go to work.

It is easy for those of us who deal with students to think that all the drama and fraughtitude and angstiness is SOP. Life is tough and hard and has lots of sharp edges that bruise tender shins, but hey, it's always been that way and always will be and these kids will grow out of it, get over it, and be just fine. And for the majority that is still true. But not for all of them. Again, I am not prepared to say whether life has become harder to deal with or if they are less able to deal. But something has changed, and those of us who work with students have to believe that, and act accordingly.

NPR included a list of six myths, six "pointers" for dealing with this stuff as teachers offered by David Jobes, the head of Catholic University's Suicide Prevention Lab. They are kind of standard issue, much like what we get in our "training," but they are worth repeating here. Hell, they're worth repeating everywhere. Here are some things to remember.

1) Be direct. People are often afraid to talk directly about suicide, as if saying it out loud is like calling Betelgeuse. Experts say no-- just come out with it. Jobes suggests something as simple as "Sounds like you're really down, have you thought about taking your life?"

2) Depression and suicide do not go together like love and marriage. The majority of depressed people don't commit suicide. By Jobes's count, maybe half the people who commit suicide are depressed. Other mental health issues can be a factor. Or not.

3) We can prevent suicides. This is hard to think about; nobody wants the deceased student's friends telling themselves it's their fault. It isn't. There can be other signs like increased stress, insomnia, withdrawal. It's tricky, because all the signs can also occur without being signs of suicidal thoughts, however if we look at the full picture, we can sometimes see what's coming. If we pay attention and get involved, we can make a difference because--

4) Suicides do not always take place in an impulsive moment. It takes time for issues to build up that much pressure, and that can be followed by time to plan and prepare and, sometimes, drop hints like crazy about what the student has planned. They fantasize about it, collect information, drop hints to friends, make mention in class writings. They will generally not talk to parents, but to others-- they often indicate what they have in mind.

5) We've now got suicides on the books by children as young as five, and it breaks my heart just to type that, but like many problems that are overlooked, one of the issues is that we don't believe what we're seeing even as we are looking directly at. If a small child is setting off signals and you're telling yourself, "Well, it just can't be because it just can't-- not with a kid that young." Well, apparently, tragically, gut-wrenchingly, it can be.

6) Afterwards, your school needs small groups to talk and share, not a big auditorium assembly lecture.

There are many guidelines out there, and plenty of trained professionals, so get help when you need it. This is one of those issues that really shouldn't be part of a teacher's job, but we're the ones who are there, with the students, and that makes it our job. Read up on this stuff. And then just pray that the day never comes in your career that you need to know any of it.

Where the Free Market Fails

Donald Trump has proposed that we just get rid of Obamacare and replace it with free market forces. This is as original as any of his policy ideas (i.e. not at all), but it's still a bad idea because health care is like education in that the freemarket cannot possibly succeed in accomplishing what we claim to want as a society.

I'll explain in a moment, but first, let me insert my usual disclaimer that "free market" is a suspect term to begin with. At this point in human history, all markets are controlled and manipulated to some degree by the government. "Free market" is just a name for a particular type of government control. The last time there was a truly free market, a pair of humans were trading a shiny rock for a pointy stick somewhere near a cave.

Putting that aside, Trump's idea to leave health care "customers" at the mercy of the free market is nuts for the same reason that letting the free market run loose in the education sector is nuts.

Health care operating strictly on free market means that everyone gets the health care they can personally afford, which means the wealthy get great healthcare, middle class citizens (both of them) get mediocre health care, and the poor get no health care at all. People who are already sick, on whom the health care biz can never hope to make money, will also get no healthcare at all.

Because the one area where the free market will always fail is in the area of providing a good or a service to all citizens.

Milton Friedman said, "The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit." And there's our problem-- because there are some citizens in the country who cannot offer sufficient benefit to a company with something to sell.

It is the fundamental nature of the free market to sort customers into two groups-- those from which my business can benefit, and those from which it can not. Whether I'm making a fast-food burger, a fancy shmancy motorcar, or a pair of stereo speakers, my business plan involves saying, "We can only serve customers who are willing to pay $X.00. Anyone who isn't going to pay that will not be a customer." There is no office in this country where businesspersons are getting together and saying, "Okay, how can we best get this product into the hands of people who cannot meet our minimum price point?" The very closest we get is outfits like the phone companies, where the discussion is along the lines of, "How can we balance losing a little money up front for the promise of bleeding our customers for all the money we can get in the long run." And that's not very close.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. There is absolutely nothing wrong with saying, "Sorry, but if you can't pay the price of a Lexus, you can't have a Lexus."  That's how the system by and large works.

But there is something wrong with a system that says, "Sorry, but you're poor, so you'll just have to die" or, "Sorry, but you're poor, so you'll just have to go to a crappy school."

It is true that there are times-- bad times, disgraceful times-- when our current health care and education systems say exactly that. But there is at least the hope that we and they can do better. But a free market system must mark some people as too poor for the product. It has to. It is absolutely guaranteed that it will.

For a free market system to work, it must figure out which part of the market it can afford to profitably serve. That means it must absolutely also determine which part of the market it is not going to serve.

Imagine if the feds went to Ford Motor Co. and said, "You must get a car sold to every family in America-- and not just a mediocre car, but a good one. Every family."

Or if the feds went to Apple and said, "You must sell every single person in America a new iPhone. You cannot turn down a single customer. Regardless of their financial resources, you must get your current new phone into their hands, without fail."

Or if the feds went to Arby's and said, "You must feed every single American lunch, every single day, no matter what they can afford to pay for, and even if they aren't very excited about eating the food on your menu."

That would be nuts. It would be bad business, and no even semi-smart business leader would tolerate it.

And yet, if you want to talk about free market education or free market health care, that is the gig-- to provide your service to every single American, regardless of what they can afford to pay (or the government can afford to pay on their behalf).

It is the most fundamental part of the mission, and the free market has absolutely no clue about how to do it. On this point, the point of serving every citizen, the free market fails, and for that reason, the free market is uniquely unfit to take on the work of providing health care or education to the country.

Common Core: Victim of Inadequate PR?

We've often heard that poor old Common Core was a swell thing that fell victim to bad implementation. But over at EdSource yesterday, Pat Reilly identified a different culprit.

Messages, backed up with data and brought to life through emotive language, are fundamental to changing minds in the 21st century. Yet too often, education advocacy is stopped in its tracks because critical concepts aren’t delivered with a strong message, leaving them misunderstood at best and politicized at worse.

See where we're headed? Common Core was the victim of poorly done PR.

A phrase meaningless on its own, Common Core became an easy target for misinformation because no one invested resources to determine the best terminology to bring the Common Core’s important purpose to life.

Well, hey. That's just.... not entirely wrong.

Contrast the Core with No Child Left Behind, a combination program title and marketing slogan that encompassed a whole mass of policies and rules under a single roof that was short, pithy, and pre-empted disagreement (Oh, you don't like this. So tell us-- which children exactly do you intend to leave behind?).

But what the heck was Common Core, ever? It was presented as standards, but described (every state will be on the same page) like curricular scope and sequence. It would come hand in hand with tests to show that everyone was on point, right up until the point that tests turned into a kryptonite tar baby and everyone scrambled to claim the tests and the Core were two different things. Maybe, as I speculated years ago, it was an attempt to avoid the NCLB problem of having the whole host of policies hanging in front of the same giant target. "Maybe," said perhaps some policy maven, "if we split up, they won't get all of us."

But Common Core descended like stealth lightning, and after they'd been around a while, a good chunk of the population still had no idea what the hell they were. They became like a new product, marketed as "Stuff." And time only vagued them up worse-- if "Common Core" ever meant anything at all, those days are gone, with the term now being applied to a host of policies and programs that are about different things.

Maybe the problem was always bad communication, bad branding, bad marketing.

Except, no. Reilly tosses in the old charge of letting policy get politicized, but CCSS was birthed in politics, sold tlhrough political channels, and created with political tools. Politics ran in the Core's blood from Day One.

Then there's the New Coke problem. Even great marketing will fail to sell a crappy product, and the Core was and is a crappy product, an ineffective solution to a non-existent problem.

Reilly calls out other over-academic jargonized reformy baloney, like the "achievement gap" which means any number of different things. Reilly compares the problem to a game of telephone, but I'm not sure that's correct. Language is built to illuminate, reveal, communicate, but the power of language is not always used for good. Language can also be used to hide, to obscure, to bury ugly and alarming images behind a veil of blah-de-blah-blah.

Much of the treat of modern reformsterism is a liberal use of language to hide meaning rather than reveal it, to use language to mean its own opposite, like the impassioned pleas to make teachers "free" of union rules that or the repeated insistence that states created the Core in the first place or the deliberate replacement of the phrase "common core" with the more politically safe "college and career ready standards" or the use of "student achievement" when we actually mean "test scores."

In the end, Reilly calls on ed reform folks to use strategic communications, and this is the part where I reveal that Pat Reilly is the CEO of PR & Company, a PR firm that counts education as one of its "specialties."  So this has been one more shaggy dog advertisement. She's really just trying to sell us something, and the Common Core is still failure because everything about it, from its poorly conceived standards to its top-down central planning approach to unilaterally creating a national curriculum-- everything about it was bad news. Bill Gates and others spent million upon million upon million of dollars to package it, brand it, and sell it. And yet both conceptually and in execution, it is still one of the most monumental failures of our age. No amount of PR or strategic communication would ever have changed that.

Is Pre-K A Waste of Time?

There's plenty of research out there wrestling with the eternal question-- does pre-school actually make any difference in the long run?

It's an important question, but it's important to pay attention to exactly how it is being asked, because that little bit of nuance has everything to do with what policymakers think Kindergarten is supposed to look like.

As reported by Brookings, of all places, there's an instructive entry in the pre-K research sweepstakes. This one is from Tennessee, and it says that, no, pre-school doesn't make any difference in the long run. In fact, it might even make things worse.

Dale Farran and Mark Lipsey, professors at Vanderbilt’s the Peabody Research Institute, have been following 1076 small children for several years. Over 700 made it via lottery into pre-school. Through various statistical pairing legerdemain, the researchers were able to allegedly compare the progress of similar pre-K and not pre-K students. Hinted in a 2013 "early look" at the research, and more solidly underlined in 2015 "full release," the pre-schoolers not only lost their edge by the end of first grade, but by third grade were actually lagging behind their non-pre-ed peers.

So what the heck happened? The key, as always, is in what you think qualifies as "doing well" in primary grades.

By the end of second and third grade, control group children did better on academic tests than treatment group children.

Academic tests? Well, there's your problem. If you think that a good pre-K is one that gets those four year olds ready to do well on a standardized reading test, well, I'm tempted to say that you're an idiot, but let's go with that you have a woefully inadequate grasp of developmentally appropriate learning activities for small children.

Since the first advent of Common Core, developed by folks with no experience or understanding of child development and created by a system of backwards scaffolding ("If we want them to bench press 100 pounds in twelfth grade, then we should start with five-year-olds bench pressing fifty pounds and add four more pounds every year"), we have heard a steady chorus of folks explaining that the expectations for small children are bananas, cruel and wrong. But perhaps the argument that reformsters need to hear is that these early academic expectations just don't work, as witnessed by the Tennessee study. In fact, they opposite-of-work, teaching a whole generation of students from the very first day that school sucks and is boring and miserable and, shockingly, it turns out that tiny humans don't really put their whole heart and soul into sucky boring things.

The signs are everywhere. In Dallas, schools are trying "wiggle chairs" and balance balls so that students can fidget around. Helps their concentration and focus, say some teachers. Well, yes. You know what else would help? Recess and play. This is like cutting out school lunch time, noticing that students are distracted because they are starving, and concluding that the solution is to let them suck on rags soaked in salt water.

"Assessing" tiny humans is hard. Look at this description of a tiny human assessment system from Teaching Strategies, a company that markets TS Gold to early childhood teachers.

TS Gold requires early childhood teachers document how students are performing in 66 individual categories, while kindergarten teachers evaluate their students in 31 categories....To document how students are performing on these points, teachers must either upload a photo, a video, and/or enter anecdotal notes. For a kindergarten teacher with a small class (25 students), that is 2,325 pieces of evidence. Once documentation is done, each student also must be scored.

This is reminiscent of AltSchool, a school created by a Silicon Valley wunderkind that depends on near-continuous child surveillance, captured and collated by the magic IT guy behind the curtain.

There are two unexamined assumptions behind all of this foolishness. One is that education for the littles can only count if it is somehow converted to data that adults can feast on, and the other is that getting a head start on academic achievement and test-taking is more important than getting a head start on being a human being.

What is most frightening to me about all of this is that tiny humans do not have the adult compartmentalization skill of separating work or school from the actual world. To tiny humans, school and pre-school are the world, and if we teach them early on that the world is a miserable place filled with drudgery and soul-numbing pointless activities-- well, that doesn't lay much of a foundation for a happy, healthy future, does it.

How many sources and studies would you like to read showing that children need play? Here's the first one that turns up on a google search. Here's an entire website for an entire organization devoted to developmentally appropriate activities for children. It's not like the value of play and running and dirt and any degree of unquantifiable childlike wonder is not already known-- it is known, both in the cold hard scientifically proven way and in the warm mushy whole human heart way.

Universal pre-K continues to be touchy. On the one hand, it is a wide-open field where, unlike the K-12 biz, businesses do not have to sweep aside pre-existing public institutions. Many, many politicians have stepped up for universal pre-K, but then the whole business can take a nasty twist when, as in Massachusetts, citizens decide they would like to tax rich guys in order to pay for the pre-K.

But a debate about pre-school is meaningless without clear statements about what exactly we want to support. A pre-school that is child-centered, developmentally appropriate, and unconcerned about meeting academic benchmarks is an excellent investment and worth providing every tiny human in the US. But a pre-school that is meant to prepare tiny humans for the world of academic-driven, test-centered schooling, or a pre-school that has its success measured in primary grade test scores-- that pre-school really is a waste of time.

Are High Standards Leading To Better Outcomes?

The Collaborative for Student Success was created to help push the Common Core State Standards, and it remains devoted to that goal, proudly announcing "The Results Are In: High Standards Are Leading to Better Outcomes," a headline we can take just about as seriously as a headline from the Ford PR department announcing that the new Ford Taurus Is Awesome!

CSS is an astro-turf advocacy group, a group built with money from the usual suspects to push the Core on the rest of us. The list of funders includes the Broad Foundation, ExxonMobile, the Helmsley Charitable Trust, and, of course, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its website lists it as a project of the New Venture Fund, a group funded by Gates to support the Core "through comprehensive and targeted communications and advocacy." You can check out more connections courtesy of the indispensable Mercedes Schneider, but you get the general gist-- these guys exists only to try to convince us all that the Core are wonderful.

This, of course, does not mean that they cannot possibly say True Things, so while we have to view these Results that are In with a suspicious eye, we can still evaluate their actual merits, if any.

The Results are pretty much meaningless, or possibly alarming. Here's the main claim:

Among third grade students – students whose entire academic careers have been guided by high standards – math scores increased by more than three percentage points.  

Let me rephrase that just a bit.

Among third graders-- students whose entire academic careers have been spent taking and prepping for the Big Standardized Test and who have never known a school that was not organized around testing-- math scores were better than they were for students who only had two, one, or zero years to be prepped and practiced for taking the BS Test.

There. Fixed that for you.

Delaware Governor Jack Markell, New Mexico Secretary of Ed Hanna Skandera, and CSS Executive Director Jim Cowen lined up to try to sell this big, fat nothingburger.

“Success in this economy requires a higher level of training and skill development than ever,” Delaware’s Gov. Jack Markell remarked in a press event on Tuesday...

Note that Markell just reduced the purpose of education to simple job training. Then note that at no point in the press conference do any of these worthies make any meaningful connection between greater skills and higher scores on a standardized test. Are they suggesting that the ability to score well on a standardized math test is a skill that's highly valued in the workplace? Because I'm betting not so much.

The big lie in the headline is the phrase "better outcomes," because there is only one outcome, and that is higher score on a narrow standardized test, an outcome which is largely meaningless. The almost-as-big lie in the headline is that these higher test scores are the result of "higher" standards when the most likely explanation is that students more saturated in test prep and practice tend to score higher on that test.

But the biggest omission in this piece of PR fluffery is an examination of the cost.

So we got third graders to score a few points higher on the test. What did it cost us to do that? Not just financial costs, though I'm sure there were plenty of those. But other costs as well-- how much recess was sacrificed, how many hours of art or music or phys ed or science or play? How much time was spent trying to get small children to stop enjoying themselves and sit down at a desk to learn test-taking skills? How much time was spent instilling a sense of anxiety about the tests so that the students would be more likely to actually try? How much less joyful and interesting were those first years of school, and how big a price will these students pay in the coming years for the new kind of relationships forged with school, in which the main point of school is to get ready for the test so that they can produce the scores that the school needs them to produce? And yes-- all the money spent on new materials and new training and the tests themselves, all the money that couldn't be spent on other things that might have benefited the students.

So we got third graders to score a few points higher on the Big Standardized Test. So what? What proven benefit will that earn them? What other outcomes can be shown to come from that single, small outcome? And what have they sacrificed and lost in pursuit of this tiny, meaningless "victory"?

WA: Buying the Court

When reformsters aren't busy trying to buy seats on school boards or flood a state with outside money to influence charter school legislation, sometimes they turn their money and attention to the courts.

Washington State has been a disappointment to many of its tech billionaires. Bill Gates and his friends had to spend several million dollars on several different tries to get a charter school law passed, and then the state court turned right around and declared that law unconstitutional (something about spending public monies on a private education-flavored business). There was some agitated freaking out and an attempt to do an end run around the ruling. 

But there is of course a simpler solution. Pack the court with judges who are more agreeable. And so  three judges in the Washington Supreme Court face challenges this year (the first such challenge since the 90s).

Center, leftmost, and bald guy with cute tie-- those are the targets

This is not a coincidence. Court critic GOP State Rep Matt Manweller reached out to recruit all three of the candidates running in races, and he had the McCleary decision in mind (that would be the case in which the court ended up fining the legislature for every day it failed to fully fund Washington State schools). Manweller suggested that the court had actually been corrupted by Dirty Union Money. You remember the whole thing about balance of power between branches of government? Here are Manweller's thoughts on how to use politics to bring the court to heel:

How can I bring those nasty unions to heel?*

State Rep. Matt Manweller, R-Ellensburg, said he thinks the mere threat of unseating a justice will make the court think twice about piling on more sanctions in the McCleary case.

Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/politics-government/article81681377.html#storylink=cpy

So here's Chief Justice Barbara Madsen, the author of the 2015 decision that ruled Washington's charter law unconstitutional. She is being opposed by Greg Zempel who doesn't like how capricious and random the court's decisions are. Zempel has been backed by a pile of money from Stand for Children, an Oregon reformster group that has funneled money to his campaign from Connie Ballmer, wife of former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer; Reed Hastings, founder and CEO of Netflix; and Vulcan Inc., owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Vulcan and Ballmer were big financial backers of the charter law that was struck down.

Also facing reformster-backed challenge is Justice Charlie Wiggins (who is nothing if not a snappy dresser). Charteristas must sense a vulnerability because as we come down to the wire, they have pumped almost a million dollars into the campaign of Federal Way Municipal Court Judge Dave Larson. Larson has popped up in the news before, standing up to keep An Inconvenient Truth out of classrooms. Vulcan tossed in $300K and Gates threw in $200K of his own. Meanwhile, one more fly-by-night PAC, Judicial Integrity Washington has dropped $350K on a tv ad smear campaign against Wiggins featuring ads that other members of the legal community likened to the infamous Willie Horton ads used against Dukakis way back in the-- well, shut up, kid. Some of us remember that.

And to round out the trio, Mary Yu is facing a challenge from the Manweller-recruited David DeWolf, a former law professor and fellow at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based thinky tank that has made a name for itself pushing Creationism Intelligent Design with its "Teach the Controversy" program. This race doesn't seem to be getting a ton of coverage or a ton of money; I have a sneaking suspicion that DeWolf is not a serious contender.

So if you are in Washington State, you may want to pay attention to those boring old supreme court justice races, because these three incumbents are being made to pay a price for crossing the charter and reformy crowd. And should they lose the election, public education in Washington State will pay a price as well.

*Yes, that's a real picture of Manweller, from his Twitter account

Welcome to Charter Cafeteria

Welcome to the new Charter Choice Cafeteria! Can I help you?

Wow! It's so clean and shiny here. And is that.... is that steak??

Why yes. We believe that all students should have the chance to eat steak for lunch.

Well, that's great. My usual public cafeteria only has meatloaf every other day, and it's not so good. So I would really love steak for lunch. Can I just--

Just a second. Charter Choice Cafeteria is only open to a few students. You need your Lunchtime Strivers Club Card to eat in here.

Well, how do I get one of those?

Just put in your application for the CCC lottery. You fill out these six forms available between the hours of 9 and 10 at our downtown office. Then submit them at the proper address and later we'll hold a drawing-- you have someone who'll take care of all that for you, right?  Here's a flier.

Um, I guess. You know, nobody on this flier really looks like me. Anyway, do you serve steak every day?

The steak is today's meal. We serve other things the rest of the week that are totally as good as any steak, at least as far as you know. Very steak-like.

Sure. Hey-- that rail seems awfully close to the serving counter. Don't students have a hard time squeezing through there?

We find that some students don't fit easily into the serving line that we have created for our meals here. We find that students with a certain background need that extra guidance; any students who find that they don't fit well in our serving line are certainly free to return to the regular public cafeteria if that's what they think is best.

My buddy just tweeted from that cafeteria. He says that they've stopped serving desert and condiments because they're budget has been cut to fund you guys!

It is shameful how the public cafeteria is not giving all students access to an excellent high-performing meal.

Can I talk to somebody about this?

Our cafeteria manager is located in offices at this number. But they are two time zones away, so make sure you check the time before you call. I'm sure you'll be able to leave a message with their office staff.

But our cafeteria manager is right there. When we want to complain we just holler and she comes out to talk to us.

Oh, we don't allow any of that here. Any students who break any of our rules for decorum and proper obedience are subject to strong and immediate disciplinary action.

So let me get this straight. If I can manage to fill out this application for the lottery and I am lucky enough to be selected and I fit in your serving line and I don't get thrown out for acting uppity then I might get to eat something that sort of resembles steak on some days-- and I can never complain to the management. Otherwise, I just have to go eat at the public cafeteria where they have even less to offer because they also have to pay for everything you're doing over here.

Exactly. Because every student deserves a chance to eat steak.

But just a chance?

Well, sure. You didn't think anyone was going to spend the money to make sure that every single student actually got to eat steak, did you? We can't waste money trying to actually help all students. You get a chance, and a few students actually get steak, or at least something kind of like it. What more do you want?