What Is The Actual Purpose of Social and Emotional Learning

I'm increasingly convinced that one of the reasons social and emotional learning (SEL) is such a matter of contention in education (and it has been, every time it has been it has been brought up under one guise or another) is that it requires us to look at the places where education bumps up against the really big questions-- what is the purpose of education? why are we here? what is our purpose? what is the meaning of life? That stuff.

SEL advocates generally back away from that, and it leads to discussions of SEL that are ridiculous. 

Here's CASEL, the big mac daddy of the SEL biz, listing the benefits of SEL, in order: academic outcomes and improved behaviors, long-term improvement in academics and conduct problems, 11;1 return on investment, reduce poverty (as in the poverty of individuals as in you'll make more money), improves life outcomes (eg not being on waiting list for public housing).

Lots of folks like to cite a research finding that SEL "improves achievement by an average of 11 percentile points, which is an odd thing to tout; since percentiles are rankings, if everybody received this benefit, nobody would receive this benefit. 

Even when research is more well-balanced, many folks writing about that research tend to focus on things like how SEL will "have long-term academic benefits on students' reading and vocabulary" and that it might "assist in closing achievement gaps." 

You may be asking what the heck I'm rattling on about. Aren't these all good things? And sure, they are. But there seems to be a huge disconnect here. 

Imagine, for instance, that we are discussing health. In fact, discussing the spread of Covid-19 through the population. Now imagine someone saying, "It's important that students remain healthy because good health raises test scores. Also, they can get a better job if they're healthy." I mean, that's not wrong, but are those really the reasons that we would prefer our children to be physically healthy? 

The implication, all too often, is that the point of having socially and emotionally healthy students is so that test scores will go up and they will be better employees, and I have to believe that human beings have a higher purpose than generating test scores and being a useful meat widget for some corporate enterprise. Too much of the SEL pitch ends up sounding like folks who are trying to make a utilitarian case for being happy and healthy, as if being happy and healthy couldn't possibly serve a purpose--or BE a purpose--on their own. No, I'm not going to argue that making yourself happy is your highest calling exactly, but that leads us into a rather long, deep discussion which we don't have room for here, but my point is that we're not even trying to have that discussion. Instead, we keep discussing SEL as a product that dovetails nicely with other products. That being a happy, healthy person of good character are only valuable because they make that person more useful to the folks in charge.

Here's a research project in Education Next, touting SEL and presenting a bit of a mix. It's a study of a collection of self-surveys of ninth graders in Chicago, and like any veteran high school teacher, my eyebrows went up at the ninth grader part, because when it comes to self-reporting social and emotional learning--well, they chose it because it's a transitional year of schooling and the point at which students are "most vulnerable to becoming off-track for high school graduation "due to too few credits.

This study looked at various schools and developed SEL "value-added" scores, which is an abomination because "I want my child to be happy and have a good character because it will make them more valuable" is not something any teacher or parent should say ever. Also, the researchers took the time to figure out that their made up SEL score was a better "predictor" of "behaviors that promote future success" than good old test based value-added baloney scores. So while there is much about this report that raises my hackles, I will give them this--they make a case for a way to expand the notion of a "good school" beyond "one with good test scores and high bogus VAM numbers." 

Their choice of "impacts" to look for include the usual bad cluster. On the one hand, I can almost see "impact on social well-being" as a worthy thing to look for. Chicago apparently muddies all this water by loading talking about both a social well-being index and a work habits index, with the latter focused exclusively on "useful meat widget" items like grit and academic effort.

The study finds that their SEL VAM work as well as test-based VAM in predicting test scores. They apply the word "intriguingly" here; I'm more inclined to note that this finding screams that both VAMs are the result of some other factor entirely.

There's a big fat chart entitles "High Schools That Promote Social-Emotional Development Also Improve Student Achievement" which of course just means that these schools have higher test scores. They also tie SEL to "long-term outcomes" by which they mean high school graduation and enrolling in college, as if socially and emotionally healthy people will, of course, go to college. 

Look, I am a big believer in the importance of SEL, just as I'm a big believer that every teacher ever has included SEL in their classroom intentionally or not because it can't be avoided (unless you, say, replace the teacher with a computer algorithm, but again, that's another conversation). I think it's hugely important. I think 95% of the "this teacher changed my life" stories in the world are primarily about SEL rather than actual content. 

But all that said, I hugely leery of attempts to quantify and formalize SEL in schools, especially when so much of what is being done is framed by the notion that SEL is important because it will raise test scores and get you a better job, as if becoming a healthy, happy, decent human being was not a worthwhile goal all by itself. 

Let me just append a poem here, from that great American SEL guy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, on being asked what the point of a flower might be:

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals fallen in the pool
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being;
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask; I never knew;
But in my simple ignorance suppose
The self-same power that brought me there, brought you.

ICYMI: Here Comes Thanksgiving Edition

 Well, the holiday certainly feels heavily weighted this year, doesn't it. Will people get together? Will people die because they couldn't bear not to see Grampa cut the turkey? And how hard will it be for some folks to think of something to be thankful for? Yes, this is going to be a fun week.

In the meantime, here are some things to read. 

Public Schools. Public.

Nancy Flanagan makes a great plea for the value and preservation of public education. One more example of why I want to be her when I grow up.

Business Terms Used To Privatize Schools

Nancy Bailey with a very useful glossary of some business-speak that has been used to shape the conversation about public schools.

Digital Shock Doctrine   

Alex Gutentag at The Bellows looks at the pandemic digital boom in Californian and what it shows about the face of digital austerity. (Spoiler alert--it's not pretty).

Ed Tech Spending Rampaging in North Carolina   

Thomas Ultican takes a look at all the digital cashing in going on in NC. (Spoiler alert--it's not pretty).

Betsy DeVos Legacy (Civil Rights)

We're kind of drowning in these pieces, but as I've argued before, Betsy isn't going away, and it's a good idea to understand just who she is and what she wants. Rebecca Klein's entry into the genre is at HuffPost, and it's a good one.

How will DeVos be remembered?

Okay, one more of these. This time it's Cory Turner at NPR with a not-bad take on the DeVos legacy.

After four years of DeVos, what a Biden presidency will mean  

I try to stay away from most of these murky crystal ball pieces, but this is Joy Resmovits returning to the ed beat in the Seattle Times, so it's worth a look.

Cheating detection companies made millions during pandemic. Now students are fighting back.

At the Washington Pst, Drew Harwell takes a look at the new battles between surveillance companies and the students they're spying on (badly).

Why applications are plummeting at Florida universities

Akil Bello joins the gang at Forbes.com education with a story about how Florida is testing its own hjigher ed system into oblivion.

Study Challenges Use Of Test Scores To Gauge Teacher Effectiveness   

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution brings us yet one more study showing that VAM is junk. SWhat a surprise! Still, a nice addition to the file.

Canceling Student Loan Debt; Just Do It   

John Warner at Inside Higher Ed makes the case for canceling college debt.

Are Test Score Gaps Growing?   

Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat looks at the inability of researchers to agree on an answer to the question. You know that my answer is "Why should we care?" But it's still striking that we really don't know.

Stuck In It Until I Die   

Hechinger Reports has a sobering report about another side of college debt--Parent Plus loans are crushing folks who thought that sending their kids to college was the right thing to do. Wish someone had shown me this article a couple decades ago.

White female teacher bias shown in research   

Turns out that a lot of white lady teachers have some race-based bias problems. Hechinger Reports again. Some discouraging research results.

100 online shops to try instead of Amazon    

From the Sunshine Guerrilla blog, a look at alternatives to stuffing Jeff Bezos' pockets even more full of money.

Another Rich Guy Wants To Fix Education

 Joel Greenblatt is a hedge fund guy from NYC who, like many hedge fund guys, has it All Figured Out and occasionally writes books to share his insights with rest of us.

Of course, that includes education. It was Greenblatt and fellow Rich Guy John Petry who recruited Eva Moskowitz to take their little charter school, Harlem Success Academy, and turn it into the Success Academy juggernaut. They even came up with some creative means of paying her huge compensation.

Greenblatt's new book of wisdominess resulted in an interview with Michael Cannivet, a "markets" contributor at Forbes.com in which he explains the various topics he writes about ("I thought I could bring a fresh perspective to certain issues I care about"), and one, of course, is education.

In discussing his book of "common sense," Greenblatt includes some standard bromides, like "The biggest factor that unleashes upward mobility is education" which is a good example of conventional wisdom that isn't actually rooted in facts (I'm no Raj Chetty fan, but he has tackled the issue of mobility pretty effectively). Also, college grads earn more than high school diploma folks "so we've got to do better," and while the interview doesn't get into details, I'm guessing he doesn't mean "we need to unrig the system so that people on the bottom are better paid." 

But when it comes to education, there are lots of things that Greenblatt doesn't know. His idea is workaround solutions. He illustrates this with a riddle-- How do you beat Tiger Woods? Don't play him at golf.-- which is a pretty clever idea unless your whole point is to become a better golfer. I mean, this is a glib answer to the question "why is educational reform difficult," but I'm not entirely sure what it's supposed to mean. Education is hard, so do something other than educate students? 

But his idea is to do a "roundabout" when encountering certain roadblocks.

For instance, we know certain things do improve educational standards, like some of the best charter schools. I was one of the co-founders of Success Academy run by Eva Moskowitz. The results for the 20,000 kids in that program are phenomenal. As a group, their test scores exceed even the wealthiest districts. That’s a really good sign, because it says that with the right kind of supports, these kids can compete at the highest levels.

Well, no. Greenblatt surely must have read Robert Pondiscio's book about SA, but he may need to read it again, because it shows pretty clearly that one of SA's biggest secrets is creaming for families that are highly motivated and willing to comply with the charter's demands. Also, it's not clear which test scores he's referring to, because the Academy's students do well on the test they're prepped for, but tend to bomb all other exams. The few students who finally emerge from the heavy-attrition program actually haven't competed very well at the highest levels at all. Success Academy has accomplished some things with some students, but it's not the simple picture that Greenblatt draws here.

But Greenblatt is going on to note that charter schools serve a limited number of students, and the public schools have so much money, "it creates a maze of entrenched interests." That old argument. So Greenblatt wants to "an end-around the current system" and his idea is alternative certification.

He seems to mean some combo of competency based education and microcredentials, where you get little badges indicating you've proven you possess Skill X, having picked Skill X from a list of things that corporations want in hirees. The goal, as with many such systems, is to replace the public education system with a system for manufacturing worker bees and meat widgets made to corporate specs:

The best way to kickstart alternative certification would be getting top companies onboard. Major firms like JPMorgan, Amazon, and Google could help create more opportunities for high paying jobs by simply making public new hiring criteria they will use in lieu of a college degree to screen candidates for high paying jobs. They can come up with whatever certificates, courses or tests make the most sense for them and the positions they aim to fill.

And if you think I'm excessively snarky with my "manufacture meat widgets to specs" description, here's how Greenblatt responds to the question of how much this would cost government:

It wouldn’t cost the Federal government anything, because once a “buyer” is established for the people taking the certification tests or for those passing certain courses or receiving specified certificates, a natural ecosystem would begin to grow. Things like tutoring services and online resources would emerge and the network effects would snowball.

The free market would make it work. Of course, just like Success Academy, it would leave behind everybody who wasn't a good fit for this meat widget marketplace. But he's sure it would work, just like in that book by Clay Christensen, the disruptive innovation guy. 

There's more about other topics in a similar hedge fundie vein (social security should be replaced with individual accounts). There may be more subtlety and nuance to his education ideas, but he doesn't need my money and I don't want his book. There needs to be some sort of special name for Rich Guy Dunning-Kruger, where someone doesn't know what he doesn't know, doesn't feel the need to learn, and still gets to throw money around and write books like he's an expert. Greenblatt's a special case because his connection to Success Academy has given him the chance to learn a lot of useful things about education and apparently he just hasn't. That's unfortunate, particularly if he decides to launch another project. 

Teaching Bad Test Prep Writing For Fun And Profit

This is the sort of thing that the Big Standardized Test has brought us--Top Score Writing.

TSW is the brain child and property of Lisa Collum, who bills herself as mompreneur. Collum graduated from Florida Atlantic University about 16 years ago and went to work in 2004 as a writing teacher in a Palm Beach County School District Title I school and the Florida Virtual School . She became concerned that the school didn't have a writing curriculum for her to implement, and she had trouble finding one, so she created lessons. So far that makes her exactly like the vast majority of teachers.

But then she turned it into a business. She turned that business into some other businesses, too-she bought a private school (Coastal Middle and High School). By 2012, she had left the classroom and was running her million-dollar business full time. She wants other women to know that they can have it all.

It's a heck of a story, for sure, and I'm glad that it stars someone who actually trained for and worked in a classroom. Her inspirational video says that you don't have to have business knowledge--just an idea you're passionate about. 

So what idea has made Collum successful? The aim of Top Score Writing is right there in the name. This is a program with a single, focused aim--to get students a high score on the writing portions of the Big Standardized Test.

To its credit, it doesn't really pretend to be about anything else. It doesn't promise that students will actually be better writers, but trumpets repeatedly and loudly that it will raise test scores. It is "certified" to increase test scores! It claims to be in five states and hundreds of schools. It is "trusted by" several Florida school districts, the Charter Schools of Excellence, PC Academy. It's Lexile Certified. It is "backed by data and research," by which they seem to mean a white paper written by Interactive Educational Systems Design (IESD), a company that "specializes in research to support product development and marketing," which means, I presume, that you can hire them to back up whatever claims you've made for your edu-product.

You can look at samples of their stuff, so I pulled up some high school materials. Top Score appears to teach a template that students learn to use, built by plugging in selected terms from the prompt or reading selection. Pick out key words, pick out some supporting details, crank out a five paragraph essay. It's formulaic and dull, not at all like actually teaching students to write. Just filling in a more complex fill-in-the-blank exercise. The sure sign that a writing program is terrible for actual writing is if it's designed in such a way that every student should end up with essentially the same essay; this does that. Scholastic mad libs, no actual thought about the subject required, and certainly no injecting of the writer's own thoughts or ideas. 

Which is the depressing part of this. I don't think Collum is selling snake oil; I believe that her product does exactly what it says it will do. Raise test scores. 

Because mompreneur Collum is doing what all good preneurs do--she's meeting a need. This particular need has been created by the manufacture and promotion of the Big Standardized Test, and she has sailed over the first hurdle which is where so many teachers stumble--trying to somehow act as if teaching writing for real and teaching writing for the BS Test are the same thing. Collum's focus is on what the market wants--higher test scores. God bless her for her clarity of vision.

Many districts have one version or another of the same thing. In my old district, one of my colleagues taught three simple rules for the writing portion of the state test--

1) Use some big words, even if you aren't sure you're using them correctly.

2) Fill up the page, even if you have to repeat yourself.

3) Turn the prompt into your first paragraph. 

It raised writing scores dramatically. And then we went back to teaching them how to actually write.

Top Score Writing shouldn't exist. The fact that it exists is a sign of how badly the BS Test has hurt education in this country. As I said, I'm not mad at Collum--the testocrats created a market for bad writing instruction, and somebody was going to make money meeting it. Why not an elementary school teacher in Palm Beach? But the education world would be a better place if outfits like Top Score Writing never existed because there was no market for them. Dreadful testing of writing leads to dreadful instruction of dreadful writing. The sooner it stops, the better. Federal, state, local, classroom authorities--I don't care who stops it, but it needs to stop.

Things like Top Score Writing are the epitome of everything wrong with test-centric education. This is the great ouroboros of instruction--teaching students a very particular skill that they will never use for any purpose except to take the test for which they have learned this very particular skill. It has no use except to feed itself and generate numbers that have no meaning except to indicate how well the great worm has digested its own tail. 

FL: Bullying, Vouchers, And More Baloney

When it comes to school choice, Florida (state motto: "We'll abolish public education any day now") is the place to be. With an array of anti-public education public officials, a non-functioning Democratic party, and the a long history of legislative baloney, it's no wonder that this is Betsy DeVos's idea of how a state is supposed to get things done.

But even for Florida, the anti-bullying Hope Scholarship is an impressive feat. Max Eden at the Manhattan Institute (a generally reform-friendly thinky tank) has just written up a report on how the Hope Scholarship is going. The answer is, "Meh, not so great yet."

Such a pretty, lousy place

First, you have to appreciate how the Hope Scholarship works, because it is the most clever school choice dodge I've seen. A student alleges bullying, abuse or violence. The principal investigates and provides a written report. The parents then have a range of options, including moving their child to another school in the district, a public school out of the district, a charter school, or get Hope Scholarship funds to attend a private school. Eagle-eyed readers might think I just skipped a step, but I didn't. Let Eden explain:

Notably, the parent need not be dissatisfied with the remedy proposed by the school district for the incident to qualify. Indeed, the school district need not even conclude that the alleged incident occurred. An allegation is sufficient to render a student eligible for a Hope Scholarship.

The standard line on Hope Scholarships is that they are available to "students who have been subjected to bullying" but in fact, they are available to any student who alleges they have been bullied. It is the lowest bar ever for getting a voucher--just say the words, "I've ben bullied."

The financing is also creative. Hope Scholarships were meant to be another version of tax credit scholarships-- contribute to the program, get a tax credit. But Florida is already loaded with such programs, so for this one, anyone buying or registering a car in Florida gets a chance at a $105 sales tax credit by contributing to the program (which is described again as one that provides a chance for a student who was "subjected to an incidence of violence or bullying" to get into a private school).

Eden's account of the genesis of this program is refreshingly straightforward:

The Hope Scholarship program was not enacted in response to grassroots pressure or lobbyists. It was driven primarily by a handful of committed Republican state legislators, especially former House Speaker (and current state commissioner of education) Richard Corcoran, Representative Byron Donalds, and State Senator Manny Diaz. According to Jared Ochs, a former legislative aide to Corcoran who now serves as director of legislative affairs for the Florida Department of Education, there was never much suspense about whether this bill would pass. Corcoran “had a strong group of members” who “believe in his vision,” Ochs notes. “Traditionally, the Florida House of Representatives has been controlled by Republicans who have been absolute warriors for parental choice.”

William Mattox of the James Madison Institute's J. Stanley Marshall Center for Education Options, tells legislators in other states that this kind of program can serve as a great "beachhead" for for getting a school choice foot in the door.

Ochs tells a story about the Speaker of the House (Corcoran, at the time) getting lots of e-mails from parents about bullying (because when you're concerned about your child being bullied in school, you naturally call your legislature's speaker of the house). In that story, Corcoran and staff go looking for a solution to bullying, and landed on school choice. Although this next part of the story rings a bit more true:

According to Mattox, Representative Donalds had hoped to leave his mark in the legislature by pioneering a new school choice program. Together, Donalds, Corcoran, and their staffs outlined a proposal and announced it at a press conference on October 11, 2017.

Byron Donalds, you may recall, is the husband of Erika Donalds, who used to be a New York investment banker, then rode the Tea Party train to a position as an education insider and anti-public ed advocate in Florida. So maybe this is one of those "when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" moments, or maybe it was always about making a "mark" as a school choice guy, and bullying seemed like a handy excuse/cover story. 

Eden provides an account of the arguments raised for and against the program. Against included the notion that creating an escape hatch for bullied kids doesn't really do anything about bullying in the school, a problem that the Southern Poverty Law Center rep pointed out we know how to address. Rich Templin of the AFL-CIO pointed out that the program sets up a framework for universal vouchers and further dismantling of public ed, which of course it does. Patrick Gibbons of Step Up For Students, the outfit that administers these vouchers in Florida, noted that since they were first come, first served, the "scholarships" could run out from use by students with "very light cause," leaving students with larger issues stranded. An amendment was actually introduced to require school district verification of the student complaint, but Donalds, Corcoran and Diaz were not having that. The bill became law in March of 2018.

Corcoran's office had figured about 100,000 Florida students were being bullied. The state expected about 7,300 students to sign up for Hope Scholarships in the fall of 2018. Instead, initial enrollment was 60 students. By February of 2020, the number was up to 371.

Eden considers three possible reasons that Hope Scholarships have landed with such a thud.

One theory is that school districts are keeping Hope Scholarships a secret. Eden finds that the majority of parents in the program were duly informed and experienced no challenges in the application process.

Another theory is that the threshhold at which a student will actually change schools is higher than the policy-makers guessed. 

Finally, there are so many choice programs in Florida, it's entirely possible that bullied students have already used another program as an avenue of escape. This strikes me as likely--Florida has served up so many school choice programs that at this point they are competing with each other. 

It is also possible that much of the PR for Hope Scholarships has focused on what it claims to be--a scholarship program for students who have been bullied--instead of what it actually is--a scholarship program for anybody at all as long as they are willing to allege that they've been bullied. Will business pick up once the word gets out?

Who knows, because in Florida there is always one more possibility, which is that the "market" for school choice programs may well be saturated, and everyone who wants to get into a privately own-and-operated school is mostly already there.

Nor does Eden address the other side of this issue--a voucher for a private school only helps if the private school is willing to accept you. But if, as is too often the case, the student is being bullied because they're an LGBTQ student, there are plenty of vouchers schools in Florida that will not accept that student, voucher or not. 

Given the testimonials Eden includes, there's no doubt that some non-zero number of students have been able to get into safer environments via this program. That does not offset the problem that a program like this does absolutely nothing to stem bullying in schools; in fact, it is hard not to imagine bullies becoming emboldened by the discovery that they can in fact drive a student right out of their school. 

Bullying in schools is a complicated and difficult problem that deserves attention and care. Hope Scholarships are not an honest attempt to solve that problem, but just one more way for Florida's politicians to further undermine public education in the state. 

You can read the whole report here.

College Debt Sucks

I passed a milestone a couple of months back--I paid off the last of my children's college loans.

I went to college back in the 70s. My entire undergrad education cost about $16K. I could have paid for some of it with the proceeds of my summer job, but my parents covered the costs and that allowed me to save for grad school and to start out on my feet. Lots of my friends from high school worked their way through college and started out life largely debt free; it wasn't that hard a trick to pull off in those long-ago days.

But by the time my older children had graduated from high school in the 00s, the world had changed. Paying for college with summer job proceeds was not remotely feasible. Meanwhile, college costs had gone berserk. My children worked summers and, some years, during the school year. Our deal was that I would pay college costs, and they would cover their own living expenses (their mother kicked in as well). 

Simply procuring and managing the loans was trouble enough. Sometimes it was like when you apply for your first home loan, and the bank treats you like you're a twelve-year old delinquent borrowing money to buy cases of beer. Bad beer. Other times it was simply confusing, as when the loans were sold from one handler to another resulting in a complete change of account numbers and payment amounts. And the phone calls from loan consolidators! Like many college-adjacent industries, these folks try so hard to suggest they are official government entities trying to do you a favor or help you comply with rules you didn't know existed. I can't begin to imagine how many young college students are hoodwinked by this stuff. 

I had advantages as an adult. For instance, I knew better than to pay just the minimum if I could manage more. I had a real job and real income. For over a decade, most of my income went to paying off those loans. That was fine, and I never regretted it for a minute, but I would keep wondering--how do people in their early twenties possibly do this? 

I know the answer-- I've heard the answer from plenty of former students. They don't, really. I can't count the number of stories I've heard of folks who shovel income into debt payments, only to see the principal slowly balloon and grow. Meanwhile, what about buying a house, or starting a family. What about starting in your chosen career if the entry level is actually taking an unpaid internship in an expensive-to-live-in big city? 

When I say college debt sucks, I don't just mean it's a lousy thing--I mean it sucks the resources, the choices, out of your life like a thirsty vampire accountant. 

"Well, then, don't take out debt you can't afford," say the folks situated in comfortable homes enjoying lifestyles made possible by a parental safety net. And there's some sense to that, except for a couple of issues. One is the trick of predicting what debt you'll be able to afford, particularly if you are 19 years old and have no debt experience and no real income experience and no real living on your own experience (spoiler alert: the loan issuers won't be much help here).

The other issue is, of course, that we bombard students with the message that if they don't get a college degree they will end up eating cat food off a hot plate while living in a van down by the river. We do this even as some folks are trying to dumb down the idea of college from a full, rounded education to just higher level vocational training. We do this even as the field is clogged with predatory for profits that simply want to use students as a means of collecting federal grants and loans, students' futures be damned.

We promise that college will pay for itself, that the path to economic survival lies through college.

This is the big argument in favor of cancelling college debt--we've scammed millions of students who are now collapsing under debt. If you want to be more practical, then go for the argument that cancelling college debt would instantly redirect a mountain of money into the economy instead of into loan companies. 

But can we please please please end the never-dying pieces of advice (in evidence yet again on Twitter yesterday) that if student debtors would just stop eating out and splurging on avocado toast, they could totally get out from under their debt next week. "Just do it like me," suggest of comfortably upper middle class folks well-supported by their parents. "You lazy kids these days," scold a bunch of oldsters who went to college when a year of education cost $1,000. "Just give up your dreams, use your magic crystal ball to predict which professions will pay well in ten years, and go to school for one of those," say folks who never gave up a thing in their lives. One of the most infuriating things about the whole issue is the number of people who literally have no idea what they are talking about. 

I'm a child of privilege, and I did my best to pass that privilege on to my own children, and as people in their early thirties in 2020 they still face a challenge or two. I can't really imagine what my kids would have done if they hadn't had parental backing, though I've heard enough tales from former students to have a pretty good idea. The system is messed up and if we imagine that higher ed is about a ladder up for young people--well, for too many it has turned out to be exactly the opposite. 

Music and the Death of Shared Spaces

I play in a town band (or at least, I do in years without pandemics) that has been around since 1856. I've dug into the history (actually wrote a book about it) which has just extended my lifelong interest in popular music and culture, and if you trace all of that history, I think you can see how we ended up where we are, both politically and in the education world.

As the 19th century turned into the 20th, music was almost exclusively a rare, shared experience. You could only listen to music that was live. If you had a piano and someone who could play it, maybe you could listen at home (a hit song was one that sold lots of sheet music), but for anything more complex, you had to wait for a band or orchestra performance. As an audience member you had zero control of what you listened to, nor could you pick the where or when. 

Pre-1920, the majority of Americans lived in small towns, so entertainment resources were limited. The period of 1880-1920 was the peak for town bands--if you wanted live music, you got some folks together and sis it yourself. There were parallels. In our area, for instance, there was a single amusement park, a destination park owned and run by the trolley company. On major holidays, everyone was there--all the towns, all the members of the family. Opportunities were few, and technology didn't favor personally choosing, so everyone shared the few chances over which they had little control or choice.

In the 1920s, things change. Our local amusement park died, killed by the automobile, a piece of technology that let people decide when and where they wanted to go. Meanwhile, recorded music finally become commercially viable. Suddenly, you can buy a pressed recording of a song that you like and listen to it any time you want in the comfort of your own home. 

The next few decades gave us improved record technology and better automobiles, which expanded personal control and choice. They also saw the rise of radio, which pulled in the opposite direction--you could only listen to what was being broadcast and only when it was being broadcast. Likewise, going to the movies meant moving into shared spaces on a schedule out of your own control.

The trend for the century has been overwhelmingly toward personal choice and control and away from shared spaces. I think, for instance, of the band bus--the transportation for high school bands traveling to away games. When I was just starting out as a student, music on the bus was simply whatever the driver could pick up on the radio--you got what you got. Then some buses had cassette players, and students could have what they could collectively agree upon (and chaperones would allow). By the time I had been an assistant band director for a few years, students had Walkmans, and instead of a boisterous shared space, students separated into smaller, self-contained spaces. Ipods accelerated the change--now you aren't even bound by the sequence of songs on the tape, but can instantly shift to whatever you want to hear at this particular moment. 

That trend has been mirrored across the culture. You can watch what you want when and where you want to watch it. You can go online and build a personal bubble, and even though some companies have tried to create large shared spaces, some folks are now threatening to leave for spaces like Parler, where they only have to share space with like-minded people. 

100 years ago, most folks in this country spent most of their time in shared spaces. When we talk about how schools of those earlier times taught people to be citizens, we're talking about helping young people learn to occupy shared spaces with other people. Private, unshared space was a luxury, a sign that you had entered a higher class--a private office, a private school, a home designed to preserve your privacy. 

Now here we are today, able to control, curate, schedule, design so much of our environment. We listen to what we want when we want to. We watch what we want when we want to. If we have enough money, we move to a neighborhood that's populated with the kind of people we want to live with.

We treat everything as a consumer transaction. Health care. Education. Heck, churches in some cases. We expect to have control and choice, to extend that personal control over our lives. 

Increasingly, as a sort of subliminal hum, comes the message that shared spaces are for poor people, people who can't do better. And because we are all consumers, and every time we spend money it's a transaction in which we expect to control what we get, there's an awful lot of tension about paying taxes to maintain shared spaces that are used primarily by Those People (And Not Us). 

So "let me choose a carefully curated school that will teach my child exactly what I want them to learn and nothing else" becomes a driving force in education reform. Education is a consumer good--you "buy" it in order to get yourself more advantages in curating the rest of your personal, private space life (including your job and your income). And everything about schools that seems like a shared space needs to be excised, cut away. "You aren't giving me the exact services I want, and my child is having to spend time with Those Peoples' Children, so just give me my money back and let me go shop on my own." The education of society's children in a shared space that prepares them for living in a world of shared spaces--that's no longer a desirable thing for some folks.

The pandemic has really ramped up the issues of the death of shared space. Who is an essential worker? A person who makes it possible for you to curate your life in your private space. And because we're not used to living in shared spaces, well, I want to pick and choose my personal response to the virus, based on what works for me. And other people can just choose what works best for them. That's fair, right? Just don't start telling me that the choices I make affect other peoples' choices. Liberty, man!

In iPod world, we pay for every piece of our carefully curated private space. Shared spaces are carved up into pieces for the customers, and people who can't afford to curate a vast private space just have to make do with the leftover (steadily shrinking) public spaces. When it comes to school, some folks are trying to market this process as choice for everyone. 

It's every person for him- or her-self, and just over the horizon, a vision of a society that is not so much a society as a country of people living their private personal lives, sharing nothing and celebrating the "liberty" that allows them to never think about anyone else. When Thoreau wrote about everyone marching to the beat of their own drum, I don't think this is exactly what he had in mind.