What Do We Do About Increased Student Violence and Misbehavior?

Anecdotally, we know something is happening. We see more stories like this one from Bettendorf, Iowa, about a middle schools that is descending into chaos because students are "out of control." We see more "trending" stories treating student disruption as an oncoming issue. And if you talk to teachers, you hear stories. You hear phrases like "I've never seen it so bad." We even have some attempts to try to collect some hard data on what exactly is happening.

Most every seems to sense, anecdotally, that something is happening, and it's not good. 

But--and I cannot stress this enough--the most useful response to this particular moment is not to automatically reach for the script for our favorite analysis of good guys and bad guys. In the few months, I've seen all of the following proposed as the root the current wave of behavior issues.

* After two+ years of pandemic pause, students have lost much of the skill of Doing School, including the part about functioning socially in a group of other small humans.

* The general atmosphere of hostility toward public schools and the teachers who work there has now percolated down and is manifesting itself in students' disrespectful behavior.

* Too much Restorative Justice.

* Too much Restorative Justice implemented badly. 

* Too little Restorative Justice.

* The pandemic has generated unprecedented trauma in young humans and they are now bringing that trauma to school with them.

* Teachers are big babies who get upset over every little thing kids do.

* Teachers are big fascist whose desire to control students is finally being justly thwarted.

* Parents won't let their children suffer the appropriate consequences of bad behavior and demand that administrators do the same.

* Permissive progressive policies.

* Repressive ed reform policies.

* Administrators are so scared of parents with lawyers that they won't draw any line anywhere.

And of course...

*Blah blah blah blah kids these days.

In most cases, what I'm seeing is people pulling out there pre-existing "This is what's causing trouble in education right now..." and slapping it onto the student behavior issue. That strikes me as a big mistake. Here are the things I believe are useful and true about this issue.

* Most of the problems are both complex and local. Therefor, there will not be a single solution that can be applied on any sort of scale. What works in East Egg this year may not work in West Egg--or in East Egg two years from now.

* Talk to--and listen to-- the students. They may not be loaded with deep insights about the human condition, but they are the ones closest to the problems. 

* Talk to-- and listen to-- staff. They are also right there on the ground where it's all happening.

* School climate is complex. If leaders are not taking deliberate steps to shape it in positive directions, it will drift wherever the winds take it, and in case you haven't noticed, the weather is pretty rough right now.

Maintaining a positive school climate is always a challenge, an attempt to hit a moving target from fifty yards with a feather in a snowstorm. It almost always requires a balance between extremes, and yet it is the extremes that somehow end up dominating too many of these conversations. Maintaining a safe and functional school requires firm, well-maintained boundaries, but keeping students (and staff) crushed under the administrative thumb is not good. 

Mostly what this moment needs is the people in charge to ask, seriously, "What is going on here?" with a willingness to look for the answer and not just confirmation of their favorite policy ideas. This kind of disorder in schools certainly isn't helping hold on to teachers, and it's not good for students at all. Anecdotally, we need school leaders to get a handle on this. 

OK: Wasting Pandemic Relief Funds

Oklahoma is one of several states where the administration thought that federal pandemic relief funds would be perfect to fund their dream of a school voucher program. But things didn't turn out so well.

Governor Kevin Stitt grabbed the $18 million of Governor's Emergency Education Relief Funds and set up some voucher programs with the goal to "just get the money to the families."

Stitt's newly-appointed education chief Ryan Walters (currently running to be elected to the post) had a bright idea-- get the Florida company Class Wallet. That's what the company does-- administers the distribution of money through voucher and neo-voucher programs. Heck--right now they're running a banner on their site trumpeting "Seeking a Solution for Emergency Relief Programs?" So Class Wallet got the job-- without even having to bid. 

Walters was a busy guy (including sending textbook companies letters warning them not to try to sneak any of that CRT stuff into Oklahoma), but he still had time to record a video entitled "How to Launch a Scholarship Program in 4 Weeks with Min Staffing Requirements," which appears on the Class Wallet channel. Yay, marketing.

Turns out Walters might have wanted to spend a week or two more on the project. $10 million went to private school vouchers because of course it did. The remaining $8 million went...well, many places, via ClassWallet's Bridge the Gap program.

Oklahoma Watch ("Impact journalism in the public interest") and The Frontier did some digging and found that GEER funds were used to buy things like Christmas trees, gaming consoles, electric fireplaces, and outdoor grills. About $191,000 in federal relief funds were used to buy 548 TVs. In all, about a half a million was spent on non-school related goods.

Walters had been plenty enthusiastic about privatizing the operation of the voucher program:

“We didn’t have the government agency personnel with the background experience to do this and, quite frankly, we felt like there could be a more efficient way to do this outside our government agencies,” Walters said.

But ClassWallet has been clear that they have no intention of seeing the undercarriage of this particular bus. 

“As a software contractor, ClassWallet had neither responsibility for, nor authority to exercise programmatic decision making with respect to the program or its associated federal funds and did not have responsibility for grant compliance,” company spokesman Henry Feintuch said in a statement.

As the Norman Transcript Editorial Board reports:

While $8 million of the money was meant to fund education resources for individual students, Walters did not set any limits or guidelines on how families could use the money — when ClassWallet asked for his thoughts on limitations, Walters gave “blanket approval” to any item a family wanted to purchase through approved vendors.

And while Governor Stitt wouldn't agree to an interview with Oklahoma Watch, his spokeswoman Carly Atchison did offer this in a written statement:

During the COVID pandemic, Governor Stitt had a duty to get federal relief funds to students and families in Oklahoma as quickly as possible and he accomplished just that.

Well, yes. He could also have dumped the money in piles in various school parking lots. That would have been quick, too. 

And he wasn't all that successful. The program shut down a day early "after federal investigators and attorneys for the state discovered the company was operating on an expired contract with almost no government supervision" and Oklahoma returned $2.9 million unspent relief dollars to the feds. 

Oklahoma Watch's full report deserves your attention, and reporters Jennifer Palmer, Clifton Adcock, and Reese Gorman your support and thanks.

Meanwhile, Democrats have called for Walters to resign, which isn't happening. He still has Stitt's support. Says Atchison, "Secretary Walters is doing a great job fighting for parents’ right to be in charge of their child’s education and advocating for funding students, not government-controlled systems." Bridge the Gap was supposed to be a proof of concept demonstration of the awesomeness of vouchers, and it certainly was a program without any government controls in place. But if the dream is a voucher system that lets families spend taxpayer dollars to buy a class Pac-man console, maybe Stitt and Walters should dream a little better. 

ICYMI: Covid's Still A Thing Edition (5/15)

It has been a week at the institute. My grown son passed out while driving himself to work and tried to take out a telephone pole with his car; he's fine (the car, not so much) but the ensuing ER testing revealed that he's covid-positive. My daughter-in-law, too. So be careful out there, folks. Meanwhile, the Chief Marital Officer is in Kansas City for a family event, so it's party time for me and the board of directors. 

But we've still got some readings for you from the week. 

Four New Teachers

EdWeek presents interviews with four fresh-out-the-rapper teachers, and it's encouraging for a change.

Homeschooling and the Christian Right

MSNBC's Anthea Butler takes a look at the religious right's battle with public education, all the way up through Kirk Cameron's latest shot.

This Year

The indispensable Mercedes Schneider reflects on the last school year. Because, damn.

Middle School is becoming the new High School and it's ridiculous

Melissa Fenton is a middle school mom blogging at Grown and Flown, and she's like to point out that middle school has gotten a little nuts.

Now this is how you recruit

In Chalkbeat, a story about how four teachers ended up working for their old principal.

Black teachers speak on mass exodus from schools

From Defender, a look at how Black teachers are doing right now.

Public school needs to be better at transparency

Steven Singer points out that while much of the transparency assault on schools is not well-intentioned, schools could do a lot to help their cause.

Is teaching in charter schools different?

Larry Cuban looks at a study that discovers (surprise) that charter instruction is just recycling old public school pedagogy.

Ed Tech's false promises

This story is from India, but it's still a good look at what happens when education becomes a commodity and the ed tech sector is just one more sales group.

Meanwhile, over at Forbes.com, I looked at a report on teachers of color in PA-- specifically, how manny districts don't employ any.

The Domestic Supply of Meat Widgets

In the midst of the general alarm and dismay over the leaked SCOTUS reversal of Roe, attention has been rightly drawn to one particularly alarming footnote in which Justice Alito quotes a CDC reference to the "domestic supply of infants." As Dahlia Lithwick argues, this has echoes of chattel slavery, but that's not the only thing it has echoes of.

Back in 2013, I highlighted one sentence from the Gates Foundation website. Written by Allen Golston, it was part of a piece intended to whip up business support for Common Core, and it was strikingly bad:

Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools, so it’s a natural alliance.

That is a spectacular amount of wrong to pack into a single sentence. Businesses do not "consume" the live humans who come out of our education system, and those humans are not the "output" of schools. But this view of schools--that they are factories whose purpose is to manufacture meat widgets for corporate use--just keeps cropping up. 

Here's Rex Tillerson (also stumping for the Core) back in 2014, being quoted in a Fortune article by Peter Elkind.

But Tillerson articulates his view in a fashion unlikely to resonate with the average parent. “I’m not sure public schools understand that we’re their customer—that we, the business community, are your customer,” said Tillerson during the panel discussion. “What they don’t understand is they are producing a product at the end of that high school graduation.”

The Exxon CEO didn’t hesitate to extend his analogy. “Now is that product in a form that we, the customer, can use it? Or is it defective, and we’re not interested?” American schools, Tillerson declared, “have got to step up the performance level—or they’re basically turning out defective products that have no future. Unfortunately, the defective products are human beings. So it’s really serious. It’s tragic. But that’s where we find ourselves today.”

The list goes on and on. The Florida Chamber of Commerce. Every person suggesting that colleges should be evaluated on how much their grads make aka how much corporations are willing to spend to get the skills that meat widgets acquired in their higher education. Earlier this very month, Virginia's Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera (a choice-loving reformster who used to run the Data Quality Campaign, a reformy data mining operation) said that her top goal is preparing students for jobs.

"Preparing students for jobs" absolutely, positively belongs on a list of educational goals, but when it's your main goal, that means you think education is there to serve the needs of business. Your measure of curriculum value is "Will somebody pay you for having this skill or piece of knowledge?" It's the same philosophy underlying value-added measures, the whole idea of which is to measure the value added to students as if they are pieces of sheet metal. Value to whom, exactly? To future employers, of course. 

And don't forget the kinds of proposals that occasionally surface in which Grand Widget Inc says it wants the local school to create a program that will produce 100 Widget Alignment Specialists per year; mind you, they only plant to hire 15, but they want a pool to choose from. Those other 85 students who have been trained for a singular job they won't get? Tough luck for them. Not Grand Widget Inc's problem.

For certain folks in this country, there has always been a pre-occupation with treating labor as a commodity, with an emphasis on finding a cheap source ("cheap" including the idea that you don't have to spend a lot of money training it). They view schools (at least certain public schools, the kind that Those Peoples' Children attend) as a source of human capital, meat widgets that can provide the labor they're looking for. 

There's a whole sub-genre of ed reforms that they find appealing. Cradle to career data tracking, including SEL info (like, how compliant with authority is this student)--maybe put it on that blockchain thingy. With micro-credentials! So that corporate bosses can just plug in the specifications for the meat widgets they want, and the System will spit out the candidates. 

Given all this, why wouldn't they also view gestation and birth as one more step in the supply chain of meat widgets, the initial creation of human capital. Lithwick's argument is that the 14th Amendment was written specifically to protect the humanity of a family against the demands of those who would view such families as a supply of meat widgets and who wanted to ignore the humanity of the people involved so that they could be treated strictly as a source of labor.

It is an attitude that has always and forever bumped up against the idea of public education's promise to serve the students, rather than the businesses that wish to "consume" them. It's a thin, cramped, meager view of education. Instead of helping students become their best selves, and figure out what it means to be fully human in the world, this is just meat widget training. 

Shmoozing with the reformster big-wigs

Whitney Tilson is a representative of a certain type of reformster.

Tilson is a walking Great Story-- his parents are educators who met while serving in the Peace Corps. Tilson's father earned a doctorate in education at Stanford, which adds the story-worthy detail that young Whitney was a participant in Stanford's famous marshmallow experiment. That's an apt biographical detail. The original interpretation of the experiment was essentially that some children are better than others because they have the right character traits. More recent follow-up research suggests that a bigger lesson is that it's a hell of a lot easier to show desired character traits when you live in a stable environment.

Tilson became a big name in the world of value investing, and he has used his gabillions to fuel the charter school world. He's a big backer of KIPP, TFA and DFER. He is nominally a liberal Democrat, but he has no love for teachers and some pretty clear dislike for their unions.

Well, he's not just a backer of Democrats for Education Reform--he's a founder who made a certain tactical decision to put the D in DFER.  Leonie Haimson has a great quote from the film version of Tilson's magnum opus about ed reform, "A Right Denied," and it's a dream of mine that every time somebody searches for DFER on line, this quote comes up.

“The real problem, politically, was not the Republican party, it was the Democratic party. So it dawned on us, over the course of six months or a year, that it had to be an inside job. The main obstacle to education reform was moving the Democratic party, and it had to be Democrats who did it, it had to be an inside job. So that was the thesis behind the organization. And the name – and the name was critical – we get a lot of flack for the name. You know, “Why are you Democrats for education reform? That’s very exclusionary. I mean, certainly there are Republicans in favor of education reform.” And we said, “We agree.” In fact, our natural allies, in many cases, are Republicans on this crusade, but the problem is not Republicans. We don’t need to convert the Republican party to our point of view…”

In public, Tilson has liked to portray himself and his very rich friends as scrappy underdogs, fighting against Entrenched Powers, characterizing this group of exceptionally wealthy and well-connected folks as "outmanned, outspent, and outgunned," which sounds inspirational albeit unrelated to any reality I'm familiar with. 

If you subscribe to Tilson's chatty newsletter, you get a window into how all this works for a globe-trotting wealthy hedge fundie. Most recently Tilson updated us on his trip to the Robin Hood gala, an annual event at which rich folks in NYC come give some money to a foundation run by hedge fundie John Paul Tudor, a charter school-loving supporter of outfits like the Relay Faux Graduate School of Education. In Tilson's account, you get a feel for how interconnected all these folks are:

I ran into many ed reform warriors including Robin Hood co-founder David Saltzman, his roommate at Brown eons ago, Norman Atkins (co-founder of North Star Academy in Newark and the Relay Graduate School of Education), Emily Kim (whose Zeta schools are expanding from five to eight this fall), and Brett Peiser, the CEO of Uncommon Schools.

I also chatted with Mike Bloomberg and thanked him for his incredible long-term support of charter schools.

Susan and I were seated at the CNN table, where I ran into an old friend, Marcus Mabry, who played an important role in the launch of Teach for America.

In the fall of 1989 and a team of six of us, led by Wendy Kopp, including Dan Oscar and Kim Smith, were recruiting campus representatives who, the next spring, would help us recruit the 500 inaugural corps members.

But nobody had ever heard of Teach for America, so we needed a high-profile article in a major publication, so I called Marcus, who had been my sister’s Resident Advisor at Stanford. He was at Newsweek and, long story short, wrote a full-page article that came out in the fall of 1989 that helped put TFA on the map.

Just all good ol' buds. I regret to inform you that John Legend is also a long-time Robin Hood board member and Whitney Tilson BFF..

I'm not saying this is inherently evil and naughty. I am saying that some days there seems to be a high degree of insular clubbiness among certain sectors of the education amateur reform world.

Musicians Aren't Hatched

Nobody had a bigger impact on the trajectory of my life than Miss Gause.

She was my fifth and sixth grade music teacher. She was not, it should be said, the kind of teacher who had a warm, fuzzy lifelong Mr. Chipsian teaching career, and she made some dubious choices (like the three and a half hour music program she put on one year). But she did not let the boys sitting in the back being too cool for singing simply drone-mumble away, but confronted us in sometimes-agonizing moments of demanding that we actually listen to the pitch and try to match it. The year before her arrival, I took the usual music aptitude test used to screen students for an instrument and flunked. The next year, I qualified. 

Every high school program produces some future music teacher and professional musicians, but my high school band director Ed Frye fostered not only pros but people like me--people who would never be professionals, but who would always follow music as an avocation. I've played in bands, worked in community theater, led a church choir. Most of the significant relationships in my life came via music. 

So we're clear here. I was an English teacher, but I'm a huge proponent of arts and music education.

We have a weird, dichotomous relationship with music in this country. On the one hand, we consider it a necessity. We'll shell out money for streaming services, require a sound system in our cars, and readily embrace each new advance of technology that allows us to include more music in our personal bubble. Some of us pay big bucks to hear music live. And we expect music to enrich everything else--television, movies, gaming, advertising, every public and private occasion. Most of us do not go a day without it; many of us don't even go a waking hour without it.

And yet, we continue to treat music education as some sort of extra, like a lace doily to set under a piece of cake, and not the cake itself. It is always treated as expendable, as something that's not so necessary. Sometimes the cutting is truly non-sensical. I've heard more than one tale of a district that doesn't want to hurt its high school marching band program, so they cut back on elementary programs instead, as if marching band members will somehow just magically appear from the ether.

That's just our society's attitude writ small--we like music, so we like musicians, but we don't really understand where they come from. They just sort of appear, people who have been struck by musical lightning, or maybe hatched at the musician hatchery. 

This belief that musicians just sort of appear manifests in many ways, including the notion held by many that musicians should just sort of work for free, and that we should have the benefit of what they create without actually paying for it. It also manifests in the belief that music education isn't really necessary--the people who are "born" musicians will just somehow hatch anyway, and the people who were born to be music consumers can pick all that up by listening to the radio or spotify or whatever. 

Every other field that is fundamental to human existence-- language use, understanding the makeup and operation of the world, the stories of how we got here-- is deemed essential for inclusion in education, but somehow music--the soundtrack, heart and soul of everything else--somehow that is considered a frill, an extra.

I reject the notion that music programs should be defended because they improve student performance in other areas. Music has huge, incalculable value of its own and should not be viewed as a second-class educational citizen. Music connects and lifts us, speaking to part of what makes us human. Music programs give back to their communities forever. Look around you--every local music group, from bands to church choirs to community theater, is filled with people who are the product of school music programs. 

My school district is preparing to cut a music teacher position; the previous teacher last year lost her battle with a long term illness, and they plan to not fill the position (the shrink-through-attrition trick is a favorite; when I retired, I wasn't replaced which means I guess that I was either irreplaceable or unnecessary). Remaining staff will be stretched to fill the gaps, and students will get less. As someone deeply invested in local music and who has two children entering the system this fall, I think this plan stinks. 

Musical is integral to the human experience; therefor, it is integral to education. Don't let anyone tell you differently. A school without a full music education program is as incomplete as a school without a library or a science lab. 

Can We Finally Have The Necessary Debate About Charter Schools

Charter school advocates are pushing back hard against proposed rules changes in a federal charter school grant program. Having failed to make any headway during the public comment period for the proposed rule changes, they are now lobbying Congress hard to overrule the administration. 

It's important to remember that the rules under discussion are not rules actually governing charter schools, but rules about how new charters can score points when trying to grab a federal grant-- a single source of funding in a multi-source world. 

Still, this is important for a variety of reasons, but especially because it's the closest we've ever come to having the necessary conversation about what charter schools are supposed to be. 

Are charter schools public schools, or private businesses?

The pitch has always been that charter schools are public schools, that they are "laboratories of education" that would enrich the entire "education ecosystem." But that promise has existed beside the reality that charters have conducted themselves largely like businesses, holding onto their "proprietary information" and opening and closing for reasons that have more to do with business decisions than concern about the local education ecosystem.

The proposed rule changes highlight this dichotomy. To increase their chances of getting a chunk of grant money from the federal Charter School Program (CSP), new charter schools would have to do the following. 

Refuse to use a for-profit to run the school. This closes an old charter loophole; almost everyone says "Yeah, for profit charters are a bad idea" and virtually every state forbids it, but many states still allow a non-profit school to be owned and/or operated by a for profit business, which is clearly a violation of the spirit and intent of the rule. Charter advocates are not trying to push back on this point, either because they don't disagree or because they recognize it's not a winning argument.

Build and maintain a connection to the community. This includes doing a needs assessment in the area from which the school would draw students. The rules point out that "teachers, parents, and community leaders have expressed concerns about not being included as active participants in charter school decision-making." So the new rules say charters can score points through regular engagement with the community as well as regular engagement with current and former educators, reflecting the original idea that charters could be used by teachers to move outside the box. Charter advocates have tried to portray this as very limiting, saying that it would keep schools from starting in "saturated" markets. 

Collaborate with public schools in the community. To score points, the charter would have to develop at least one point of collaboration with a public school. Exactly the sort of positive relationship that the laboratories of education promised would benefit the education ecosystem. Instead, charter advocates are arguing that they should not be required to give up trade secrets to the competition 

“That’s like getting Walmart to promise to partner with the five and dime down the street,” says the Washington Post editorial board.

“This is like letting General Motors veto where Honda can sell cars,” says Robert Maranto in The National Review.

Address diversity. New charters should match the match the demographics of their community, putting an end to white flight charters. Advocates say it also interferes with charters that intend to set up charters that focus on, say, Black students, and have tried hard to make the story that the Biden administration is trying to deny charter opportunities for Black and Brown students, which is an interesting PR spin on what is essentially an anti-segregation rule.

The thread running through all of these rules and all of the objections to them is the question of charter school functional identity. Is a charter a public school or a private business?

The charter advocate arguments against the rules change all boil down to "This hampers our ability to function freely as a business in the marketplace."

In some cases, it's obvious. The "Walmart doesn't collaborate with other stores" argument is framed with charter schools as a commercial enterprise. But the objections to needs assessment also reject the notion of charter schools as public schools. Think of it this way; if your local school district announced they wanted to open an additional school building in the district without doing any needs assessment or community outreach, the taxpayers would revolt over such a thoughtless spending of their money (and in fact that exact scenario has played out in some public districts). The assertion by charter advocates here is that they should not have to do any of that, that they should be able to set up shop wherever they feel it makes sense or they think they could get a slice of the market.

The diversity issue is also a business issue. One of the fundamental parts of a business plan is deciding which slice of the market you intend to target, as opposed to public schools, which are expected to find ways to accommodate whatever students fall within their community. 

I don't believe that business is inherently evil. But business operations and public institutions like education and health care have fundamentally different values, different ways of deciding what is a good idea, different factors they weigh when making decisions, even different decisions that they make (public schools do not ordinarily weigh whether or not they should stay open another year). 

Those two sets of values cannot be combined to run one institution. Modern charter schools have tried to have it both ways, but they can't. They are either public schools or businesses, and in their opposition to these rule changes, they've come down hard on the side of being businesses.

This is not a surprise. Much of modern ed reform has been about trying to graft business values and practices onto the world of education. What has made the whole process particularly ungainly and contentious is that this has been done without ever really having a national conversation about it. We've been living through an attempt to change the very nature of public education in this country, but we have never had a real national conversation about it or ever asking people if they really want to replace the promise of public education with the business of business.

It might well be a conversation worth having, and there are valid good-faith arguments that can be made on either side (though I know what side I find more convincing), but the debate over these rule changes are one more example of our American habit of having a conversation about things other than what we're really having a conversation about, particular, this time, the charter advocates who are tossing out every argument except "Come on! These rules really get in the way of operating our charter businesses!"