Revisiting Marshmallows (Once Again, Money Matters)

Oh, the Marshmallow Experiment. Some scientists at Stanford thought they had discovered a link between the virtuous characteristics of self-control and deferred gratification and later success. Instead they just demonstrated once again that even fancy scientists can confuse correlation and causation.

In case you slept in that day in Psych 101, here's the basic layout. Put a child and some marshmallows in a room together. Promise the child even more marshmallows if she'll refrain from eating the ones in front of her. Then leave the room. The child's subsequent behavior provides a measure of how much ability the child has to delay gratification. A follow up study released a couple of decades later said, "Look! The delayed gratification kids did well in life!"

Voila! A scientific support for the idea that some children just have a special virtue!

But that was back in the 1970s, and there has been more than enough time for other scientists to say, "Hey, wait a minute." 

One such do-over we've looked at before. A 2012 experiment showed that the child's environment might be more important than any imagined childish virtues. Turns out there' a huge effect related to how well the child thinks they can trust your promise of more marshmallows later.

There is a later study that is also important. It cane out in 2018, but I missed it back then. Tyler Watts (NYU) had doubts, noting that the original study involved just 90 kids, all in the Stanford preschool. Not exactly a large or representative sample. 

So Watts and colleagues restaged the experiment with 900 children who were taken from a broader slice of backgrounds, ethnicity, and parental education.

You will find the results completely non-shocking.

What correlates with the ability to wait for that extra marshmallow? Socio-economic background. 

What correlates with better jobs and earnings later in life? Socio-economic background. 

So once again--the ability to defer gratification is not some special character strength, some inborn virtue that students need to be infused with (either before or after their grit injection). It's just one more sign that growing up comfortably well off makes a difference. Glad we cleared that up.

ICYMI: Board of Directors Birthday Week Edition (6/6)

The Board of Directors turn four this week, if you can believe such a thing. Time flies. In the meantime, here's some reading from this week.

Against Metrics: How Measuring Performance By Numbers Backfires

Not really about education, except that it totally is. One more argument against data-driven lunacy.

Unpacking Nonsense: Knowledge as Commodity

I always feel smarter when I read something from Paul Thomas. As usual, he makes connections between many important ideas, including race, crt, and media literacy.

What HIPAA Isn't

Lots of not-about-education-but-really-it-is material this week, including this handy explainer of what HIPAA really does and doesn't protect.

Our Collective Lesson Plan [On Teachers of Color in This Moment]

Jose Luis Vilson digs deeper into the wave of anti-crt legislation sweeping the country, and what it means for teachers of color.

Stinking Thinking Monetizes Dyslexia

Thomas Ultican takes a look at a bill in California mandating testing for dyslexia. Is any of it supported by research? He has the details.

Know Your State Astroturf Parent/Education Groups

Jeanne Melvin makes a guest appearance at Nancy Bailey's blog to sort out al the new parent activist "grass-roots" groups.

Efficiency is very inefficient

Not really about education but, well, you see the pattern. Cory Doctorow breaking down why we live in a world that praises efficiency, but actual destroys it.

Pittsburgh Media Runs Right Wing Propaganda

Steven Singer looks at how much success the right wing Commonwealth Foundation has had getting Pittsburgh media to treat their baloney like it's real.

Where Communities Go To College

On the Have You Heard podcast, a strong case for learning and teaching close to home.

Inside a bruising battle over a new charter school in Nashville's west side

From Nate Rau at Tennessee Lookout, a look at the trouble that comes when charters want to expand into "markets" where they aren't wanted.

Georgia Board of Education votes to censor American history

George Chidi at The Intercept looks at one more state's efforts to shut down discussion of racism.

More funding shenanigans in Ohio

Jan Resseger has the story of how Ohio's legislature is trying to increase vouchers and privatization while shrinking public ed.

ME: Another Assault On The Church State Wall

Having failed to win popular votes, voucher supporters this year are turning to legislatures and courts to push and expand vouchers, and a lawsuit in Maine is the perfect vehicle for them. 

Maine actually has a voucher-ish law on the books-- if you don't have a high school in your town, then you get tuition paid to a high school elsewhere. Unless, the law says, you want to choose a religious school. 

So here comes the lawsuit. Three families sued the state's commissioner of education over the restriction, using the now-familiar argument that the tuition law  “violates the principle that the government must not discriminate against, or impose legal difficulties on, religious individuals or institutions simply because they are religious.”

As usual, the families are represented by a pair of firms that specialize in this sort of lawsuit. The Institute for Justice specializes in activism, litigation, and legislation; their issues are economic liberty, first amendment, private property and educational [sic] choice. They're a libertarian organization founded by two Reagan-era government guys with a push and seed money from Charles Koch. The other firm is First Liberty Institute, a Christian conservative firm based in Texas. 

When the case was first filed in the summer of 2018, they plaintiffs were hanging their hopes on Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, the 2017 SCOTUS case that ruled the state couldn't withhold a playground paving grant from a church. Since then, we've had Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, which even more explicitly placed the exercise clause over the establishment clause. 

The First Court of Appeals ruled against the three Maine families, upholding Maine's restriction on using public tax dollars to support a private religious institution. The firms families determined to appeal to SCOTUS. 

That was last October. But yesterday, the 2nd Court of Appeals ruled against the state of Vermont, saying that local districts cannot exclude religious schools from its voucher program. This time it's the Alliance Defending Freedom doing the litigating; this is a right-wing religious outfit that just entered the news by defending a teacher suspended for refusing to follow his district's policy on trans students. ADF's spokesperson says of the Vermont decision, “Today the court powerfully affirmed the principle that people of faith deserve equal access to public benefits everyone else gets,” which sticks with the framing that this is about the rights of parents and not the rights of taxpayers. 

So now the Maine lawsuit folks are feeling like they have some wind in their sails and are hoping SCOTUS will hear their appeal. At this point, it seems realistic to assume that SCOTUS will side with the plaintiffs and further wreck the wall between church and state and trample on the establishment clause. 

That will end poorly for everyone. There are only a few possible outcomes of such a decision.

Proliferation of bad and discriminatory schools. We've already seen this in Florida, where taxpayers fund schools that are aggressively anti-LGBTQ+, as well as schools that teach junk instead of science, turning out citizens, employees and voters whose low-information views of the world become a problem for their community. Or perhaps the good Christian taxpayers of your state will find themselves paying taxes to support a Shariah Law High School. Or maybe your state, like Iowa, will even get its own push for a Satanic High School. 

Taxation without representation. Taxpayers will increasingly find themselves funding schools over which they have no say whatsoever. Taxpayers will retain the power to shut off the spigot; will they look at the voucher system they've been stuck with a vote not to fund it?

Regulation. Perhaps the taxpayers will instead demand accountability, a feature that many current voucher bills and laws work hard to explicitly leave out. An uprising of students who have been discriminated against could lead to a spate of laws regulating private religious schools that take public taxpayer dollars. Personally, this doesn't strike me as the most terrible outcome, but I suspect folks in the religious school biz might disagree,

Government oversight of religion. After the Satanic High School opens or some grifter is caught running a fake religious school or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster comes to town, maybe it will be time for a government body to certify whether or not the religious school is a legitimate religion. 

Religious folks do, of course, have a right to set up their own schools to reflect their own value systems. They don't have a right to make everyone else pay for it. And it's particularly odious to make people finance a religion that can only (apparently) fully and freely be expressed by discriminating against those same people. But nobody is saying these folks can't choose a religious school; only that they can't choose it at public expense. 

The First Amendment means that the government shouldn't pick winners and losers in the religious sphere; it doesn't mean that everyone should have to finance all religions no matter what. Here's hoping that SCOTUS does the right thing and just lets this case sit where it is. 

Religious Persecution and/or Freedom

In the least surprising news development yesterday, a Loudon County Public School teacher's suspension has now become a lawsuit.

Phys Ed teacher Tanner Cross went to a school board meeting and voiced his opposition to any proposed policy that called for addressing students with their preferred pronouns. "I will not affirm that a biological boy can be a girl and vice versa because it's against my religion," Loudoun County, Virginia, teacher Byron "Tanner" Cross said. For that, he's been suspended from his district in Virginia.

I am not without a small slice of sympathy for the man; the former union president inside me saw the story and immediately wanted to question the wisdom of suspending a teacher for saying they were going to disobey a policy even before they actually had the chance to actually disobey it. "I'm going to be insubordinate," is not quite the same thing as being insubordinate. Though I suppose the public announcement sort of forced the administration's hand.

At the same time, I have to wonder about his position. This is not the first time that religious objections to transexual humans have cropped up, and I am still searching for the Biblical basis for this. Exactly which part of the Christian faith, which teaching of Jesus, requires people of faith to object to trans folks? Cross (and his attorneys) are trying to hedge bets by suggesting the problem is the lying, that telling anything but the unvarnished truth is unChristian. I'm.... dubious. Cross teaches elementary school; I'd like to be there for the days when he blasts kindergartners for talking about Santa, the Tooth Fairy, or the Easter Bunny, or really, any conversation about movies in which actors pretend to be people who don't really exist. All of those are far more lie-like than calling a person by their preferred pronoun. 

The attorneys (we'll get to them shortly) would like to use this as one more chance to extend the free exercise clause of the First Amendment, a game these folks have been working at for a while. What we keep coming back to is the notion that one can't really fully exercise one's Christian faith unless one is free to discriminate against Certain People. To which I say, if you can't be a fully-exercising Christian without discriminating against someone, you are doing the whole Christian thing wrong. 

Cross's lawyers would disagree. They include Tyson Langhofer and J. Caleb Dalton of Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian advocacy group that was incorporated in 1993 by six right-wing luminaries, including Larry Burkett, Bill Bright, and James Dobson. They are supported by a host of right-wing foundations, including the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation. And they oppose abortion, same-sex marriage, most all LGBTQ+ rights. Their track record is sadly successful; these are the Hobby Lobby lawsuit folks. They have a summer legal training program to get Christian law students whipped up for legal careers; Justice Amy Coney Barrett taught at it.

The group characterizes the district's actions as "unconstitutional" and leans on both the idea that Cross shouldn't have to violate his beliefs (by using pronouns) and also the notion that this is an ideology "that ultimately could harm them." I'm wondering if the same argument could be used by a teacher who wants to thwart the practice of letting armed forces recruiters into schools. 

The suit is a win-win for these folks. Either they can impose more of their own religious beliefs on schools, or they can further break down the whole notion of public education and "government schools." And religious persecution no longer means the persecution of religious folks, but the preservation of their "right" to persecute others.

The Gig Economy Has Issues

Betsy DeVos was probably the most high-profile person to claim, repeatedly, that education just needed its own version of Uber. But the last months or two demonstrate just a few of the problems with the gig economy.

Gig economy is great if you're an employer. It lets you have "employees" without any of the actual responsibilities of being an employer. The gig workers are left to deal with their own issues of income, insurance, and employment stability, while the employer can just wash their hands of the whole thing while congratulating themselves loudly on promoting "freedom." 

This is a dream for some reformsters. Teachers, stripped of unions, serving as gig workers, maybe even hired just to teach a class or three. Privatizers complain about how union rules "restrict" teachers and keep them from being free, though it's never clear what they aren't free to do. But imagine--every teacher a Uber-style actor, who scans the app and sees who would, for instance, like to learn a little calculus today. Meanwhile, the education broker doesn't have to pay for retirement or health care. The model is already out there in a limited format, called Outschool, where teachers can sign up to teach a particular class and hope that students sign on, with the education "provider" operating a website to broker deals. Venture capitalists are already salivating.

But a funny thing has happened coming out of the pandemic (or at least imagining we are coming out of the pandemic). A lot of people have realized that their crappy job is crappy, and they don't want to go back. The classic neo-lib theory is that if all those people just get some education, they can elevate themselves and the whole economy--except that our economy is rigged to feed off of low-wage workers who are too desperate to stop doing the turns-out-they're-essential jobs they're being paid poorly for. 

Except that, at least for a moment, they're bailing. And, surprisingly enough, gig workers do have some freedom. And it is hurting Uber and Lyft. Turns out that even when you keep unions from appearing, workers can still decide, en masse, they don't want to work for you when the job sucks. Uber and Lyft's inability to hang onto their drivers has resulted in an increase in costs for riders, making what was a bit of a luxury item even harder to afford. If you had imagined that Uber would some how democratize taxi service so that everyone could afford it, guess again. 

What Uber does is cut out almost all costs of employing people and transfers that money to the top, making gazillionaires out of the owners and subsistence humans out of the gig workers who make the company function. 

Gig work is swell if you've got a real income elsewhere. Lots of fields are rife with gig work from writing to the musician work that gave this style of labor its name. But it's no way to make a living, and it's not even a particularly good way to provide the service that it's supposed to provide. And still, it's only a good model for education if you plan to be the person at the top of the pyramid, skimming cash from everyone else. 

Being Mortal (And Measuring )

I've been reading the book Being Mortal by Atul Gawande. It's not at all a book about education, except that, like everything that deals with being human, it does.

The book is actually about facing the end of life, mortality, and the ways we handle end-of-life decisions in this country. It's about gerontology, assisted living, and making decisions about hospice care. Gawande is a surgeon, a staff writer for the New Yorker, and a professor at Harvard Medical School, and if you or anyone you know and love is ever going to be old, it's worth a read.

There were many passages that jumped out at me. Here's one from a chapter in which he's talking about the way that old age health care and nursing homes hit the wrong targets in their approach to care. 

Compounding matters, we have no good metric's for a place's success in assisting people to live. By contrast, we have very precise ratings for health and safety. So you can guess what gets the attention of people who run places for the elderly; whether Dad loses weight, skips his medications, or has a fall, not whether he's lonely.

Go back and read just the first sentence. There it is. When dealing with the care of living human beings, the things that matter are really hard, if not impossible, to measure. But because we want a concrete, clear, put-in-a-number measure of success, we just measure what can be measured and convince ourselves that it's important, or a valid proxy for what is important. We might want the measurement for "accountability" or so the authorities can Tell What's Working or because we don't trust our own insight or judgment about knowing success when we see it. True for aging humans placed in care facilities, true for young humans placed in schools.

And then there's this one, which I would very much like to put on a poster and then go back in time to hang on the wall of my classroom.

All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story. That story is ever changing. Over the course of our lives, we may encounter unimaginable difficulties. Our concerns and desires may shift. But whatever happens, we want to retain the freedom to shape our lives in ways consistent with our character and loyalties.

I love the nuance of this so much. This is not the cry for "Liberty" that we here from pseudo-conservatives these days demanding the right to be free from rules or obligations to society or other human beings. Nor does it pretend that we just set our vehicle on one track and follow it straight on no matter what we learn or see or discover or encounter. This is not a demand to live in the land of Do As You Please.

It's a basic human desire--to write our own story (the book was published in 2014, the year before Linn Manuel Miranda built a powerhouse finish to Hamilton by raising the question of "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.") That desire applies to students and teachers both, and it is necessarily wobbly and fuzzy and not in tune with the desire of some to reduce it all to a simple formula, precise and set in concrete. 

Being able to write my own story doesn't mean that I don't face obstacles. rules, requirements, the strictures of institutions and society. But I still write my own story and set my own course as I travel about the seas I didn't create against the weather I didn't ask for. It means that while others may have the power to set the conditions under which I travel through life, they do not control how I respond to those conditions. And that should be true for students getting started in the world as well as older humans approaching the end of life.

Why My Children Are Not Scholars

"Why does calling children scholars make me cringe?" Rosemary Jensen

That's a Facebook post that crossed my feed today, and reminded me that I also find that labeling, a popular feature among the charter crowd, a bit gag-inducing.

Why exactly? It's hard to pin down. After all, it's a relatively harmless term. One who attends school or studies, or an especially learned or erudite person, particularly one who in expert in a particular area. Why not use language that conveys to young humans that we aspire for them to achieve great things?

And yet, I'm still kind of cringy.

Maybe it's that it's a sign of the school trying to pump itself up ("other schools may have mere students, but we teach scholars"). Or maybe it's the attempt to verbally turn young humans into grown-ups with a rhetorical flourish. Why do that? Why try to adultify children before their time? And does that adultification serve, in part, to absolve us of having to meet their more child-appropriate needs?

But I think it might be more than that. "Scholar" sounds like a job. It sounds like a function, and as such, it verbally reduces the breadth and depth of a child's life. "You are not here to live your life," it says. "You are not here to play or socialize or to work out the dailiness of personal relationships. You are here to learn things. That's it." 

There is a lot of this running through reformy ideas, the notion that children have a job to do, and that is to Learn Stuff so that they can Produce Test Scores. It is certainly at the heart of No Excuses schools, predicated on the notion that all the things that distract students from learning are "excuses" and must be stripped away by a laser-like focus on Getting the Job Done. 

This suggestion that students--children--have only one function that matters runs counter to what I believe about education--that it's the business of becoming more fully yourself while learning to be more fully human in the world. 

None of this means I think students and teachers should sit around all day hanging out and talking about their feelings. In the classroom, I was focused on the work, and I expected my students to be as well. But I didn't imagine that the work of my class should be the all-consuming focus of their lives. Some of them may well have grown up to be scholars, but most young humans are still learning too such about themselves and the world to become specialists with a singular focus. 

This may all be overthought hairsplitting. But my ambition for my children and grandchildren is not for them to be pre-teen scholars. Humans, first. Children, second. Students, third and when in school. Scholars some day if that's what they decide they want to do.