The Stolen Lantern

Testing Our Patience

2013-12-04T09:41:00.000-08:00

Back when the latest group of saviors embarked on their mission to rescue education from itself, one of the things we were told was that injecting more and higher stakes tests into the system (anyone remember tests to determine high school graduation, regardless of the student's final GPA?) would produce more rigor and lead us all to that academic nirvana of Total Student Proficiency by 2014. Parents, who were rightly concerned about the quality of education their children received, were sold on the idea that "educational experts" had found the key and it was just a matter of getting around those pesky teacher's unions, and the public school bureaucracies.

Turns out those parents--as my old daddy used to say--bought a pig in a poke. Now here we are knocking on the door of 2014 and we are no closer to 100% proficiency than we were when these educational Harold Hills rolled into town to sell us the academic equivalent of band instruments and uniforms. In fact, if you put any stock in international comparisons, according the the latest PISA results, we've gone backwards.

Teens from Asian nations dominated a global exam given to 15-year-olds, while U.S. students showed little improvement and failed to reach the top 20 in math, science or reading, according to test results released Tuesday. American students scored below the international average in math and about average in science and reading.

Personally, I think a lot of these international comparisons are nothing more than educational beauty contests, but even if you accept that view, the latest makeover given to American schools has not only knocked us out of the running for the crown, we don't even have a shot at Miss Congeniality. No less a testing poobah than Arne Duncan, who never met a test he didn't like, was forced to admit the bloom was off the rose.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan called the results a "picture of educational stagnation."

Now remember, Duncan is the guy who recently said, when confronted by criticism of his testing plans by a group of white suburban moms, that the real problem was the tests were showing the kids weren't as smart as their moms thought they were. In other words, the problem isn't dumb tests, it's dumb kids. So with that attitude in mind, you'd think he could come up with a more positive spin on the results of his apparent efforts to test kids into being smart than "stagnation." And also remember, we're less that a year away from when this latest educational reform was to carry us across the threshold to blissful proficiency.

But never one to let the results get in the way of ideology, Mr. Duncan falls back on the tried and true method of ignoring the issue by stating the obvious as if it were an epiphany that suddenly appeared before him:

"We must invest in early education, raise academic standards, make college affordable, and do more to recruit and retain top-notch educators," Duncan said.

One might ask Mr. Duncan, as the titular top educational expert in the country, why it took so long for him to discover this truth, and as a followup, now that he has discovered it what he intends to do considering Plan A (test the dumb out of those less than brilliant, overly coddled little hellions) has apparently gone down in flames.

Well, we're sure the answer will have something to do with tweaking because the alternative would be for the Secretary, as emperor of education, to realize he's been running around the country naked for the last four years.

And it may not matter anyway because if you look around the landscape, events are moving in a way that indicates the test it 'till in bleeds crowd may be on the road to irrelevancy. To wit:

In Florida

In New York

In New Jersey

In Massachusetts

In New Mexico

In Virginia

If I may borrow my analogy from the civil rights movement (because I believe education is a civil right) these are the people who are refusing to get to the back of the bus, and out of their actions a movement is being born. I think Howard Zinn said it best:

The good things that have been done, the reforms that have been made, the wars that have been stopped, the women's rights that have been won, the racism that has been partly extirpated in society, all of that was not done by government edict, was not done by the three branches of government. It was not done by that structure which we learn about in junior high school, which they say is democracy. It was all done by citizens' movements. And keep in mind that all great movements in the past have risen from small movements, from tiny clusters of people who came together here and there. When a movement is strong enough it doesn't matter who is in the White House; what really matters is what people do, and what people say, and what people demand.

I am excited and encouraged by what's happening in the country now, but at the same time I am saddened and shamed because as we move to reclaim education from the testers and the profit mongers we leave behind an entire generation of children for whom school was a sweatshop of irrelevancy and needless suffering.

Spock v McCoy. Coming To A School Near You

2013-10-30T10:15:00.001-07:00

Full disclosure: I’ve never been a fan of the Common Core. Standards established by corporations and politicians have always raised suspicions in my mind. Even if done with the best of intentions, the educational outcomes valued by business tend to be centered on producing employees that are literate, compliant and able to follow orders. This conflicts with another purpose of education—a higher priority for education in a democratic society in my view—and that is to produce citizens who are literate, independent and who question everything.

As you can see, there’s a built in tension between the outcomes desired by business and those demanded for a just and vibrant democracy, much like the uneasy marriage between Capitalism and Democracy itself. We are, of course, both employees and citizens so the competing claims to educational outcomes both have merit, but lately is seems business outcomes have been taking over more and more of the territory that used to belong to democratic outcomes.

Perhaps this goes back to the struggle between what John Rury in his book Education and Social Change called administrative progressives and pedagogical progressives. Administrative progressives were “more concerned with issues of efficiency and carefully aligning the purposes of schooling with the needs of the economy.” (143). Pedagogical progressives on the other hand, people like John Dewey, were concerned with “making education more responsive to the needs of children and integrating the school more closely with its immediate community.” (ibid).

Unfortunately the administrative progressives won, and that brings me back to the Common Core, which, say whatever else you want about it, is certainly concerned with “efficiency and carefully aligning the purposes of schooling with the needs of the economy.” There are a couple of problems with educational standards based on business premises though, the first of which has to do with the raw material. Businesses produce quality products cheaply because they can rely on consistency of the ingredients, yet there is nothing more inconsistent than a class full of students, all with different levels of talent, motivation, interest, experience, language and backgrounds. To apply an external standard to as heterogeneous a collection of raw material as this and expect to produce a common outcome is ridiculous on its face.

The other problem is with procedure. No one cares how the car feels as it moves along the line and has nuts and bolts attached to it, but children are another matter. When emphasis is moved from the individuals in the class to the process applied to them it becomes dehumanized, sometimes to a critical level, where students become educational input vessels who are quality checked at certain stages along the line and, if deemed acceptable are passed on, and if not are shunted off to the scrap heap—sometimes with their teachers and their schools.

It’s possible at this point that some readers have come to the conclusion that I’m against standards. It seems to me the real argument made by those people is that if you aren’t for my standards you aren’t for any standards, which is simply dumb and I’m not going to address it. What I am for are standards based on a flexible model instead of a rigid one. Standards that don’t come from a manufacturing philosophy, but from one that takes in to account the reality of this human endeavor we call education. Standards that reflect the wisdom in the Confucius saying there are many paths to the same destination.

And who better to guide students than a well-trained, engaged teacher who has the vision to see the destination and the wisdom to help students choose the best path. Currently, teachers are viewed as no more than adult versions of the aforementioned educational input vessels who, if they respond appropriately to the methodology are deemed acceptable, and if not, are shunted off to irrelevancy. In actuality though, teachers—just like students—are a heterogeneous collection of raw material containing myriad mixtures of talent, motivation, interest, experience, language and backgrounds and I suspect the efforts to produce a homogenous teacher profile reflective of the Common Core priorities will meet with the same success as the effort to produce a common student outcome—which is to say not much.

So I see the current push back to the standards by parents, teachers and students as the inevitable outcome of what happens when industrial control inputs are applied to human beings engaged in that very human activity we call educating children. People are funny that way.

Dogs Have Been Telling Us This For Years, And We're Finally Able To Listen

2013-10-08T08:44:00.000-07:00

There is an interesting bit of research coming out of Emory University about dogs and what is really going on inside their heads. Neuroscientist Gregory Berns has been successful in training dogs to tolerate having an M.R.I. and the results are very intriguing, but totally unsurprising to those of us who share our lives with a canine companion.

In dogs, we found that activity in the caudate increased in response to hand signals indicating food. The caudate also activated to the smells of familiar humans. And in preliminary tests, it activated to the return of an owner who had momentarily stepped out of view. Do these findings prove that dogs love us? Not quite. But many of the same things that activate the human caudate, which are associated with positive emotions, also activate the dog caudate. Neuroscientists call this a functional homology, and it may be an indication of canine emotions.

Now there is a scientific underpinning to arguments made by people like Peter Singer and more recently Tom Regan to name just two, plus, as Berns points out these results may have value that goes beyond the scientific in determining the lawful rights of dogs:

I suspect that society is many years away from considering dogs as persons. However, recent rulings by the Supreme Court have included neuroscientific findings that open the door to such a possibility. In two cases, the court ruled that juvenile offenders could not be sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. As part of the rulings, the court cited brain-imaging evidence that the human brain was not mature in adolescence. Although this case has nothing to do with dog sentience, the justices opened the door for neuroscience in the courtroom.

I agree that we are many years away from facing the implication of what science is beginning to show us because to do so would call into question some of the fundamental tenants of western Christian culture, particularly the idea that we have been given “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” (Genesis 1: 24-26). To paraphrase Darth Vader, the hierarchy is strong in this one.

More to the point though, I don’t think the “because they’re like us” premise of Berns', Singer’s, and to a lesser extent Regan’s arguments go far enough. It seems to me the determination of what kinds of rights are given to an animal should not be based on how much they are like us, but the fact that they are. In his book Animal Rights and Moral Philosophy Julian Franklin pushes beyond the arguments of Singer and Regan in particular to a reframing and expansion of Kant’s categorical imperative that provides an ethical argument for the treatment of all sentient creatures. I’m drawn to that argument, but I know the issue is still unsettled philosophically (see J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals).

I would like to make the case for sympathy, which I know is a term in some philosophical disrepute. Luckily I’m not a philosopher so I direct the reader to John Fisher’s Taking Sympathy Seriously: A Defense Of Our Moral Psychology Towards Animals (pdf) for a more extensive discussion. As humans we have the capability for sympathy, but that capability is not limited to other members of our species. Who hasn’t been affected by Sarah Mclachlan’s ASPCA commercials, or stories about the suffering of pets after a natural disaster, or felt that momentary heaviness in the heart when we see an injured animal?

I think there are important implications to the fact that we are able to extend our ability to connect with living creatures beyond our fellow humans, and when, through tradition, or expediency, or denial we ignore that connection we are ignoring a vital part of our nature—the part that tells us we are of this planet, not simply on it.

If Only I’d Known This In Grad School I Wouldn’t Have Had To Read All Those Books

2013-09-18T12:50:00.000-07:00

Stand aside Aristotle. Have a seat Cicero. Isocrates, Gorgias, Bacon, Richards, and the rest of you who spent your lives studying, thinking and writing about the art and science of Rhetoric, chill. We don’t need your services anymore. The psychometricians will take it from here. Not only have they discerned the eternal essence of rhetoric sought by writers from Plato to Kenneth Burke, they have found a way to measure it so now we can finally tell if students are writing well or not. Let's see what they came up with:

Rhetorical Skills

Strategy (16%). Questions in this category test how well you develop a given topic by choosing expressions appropriate to an essay's audience and purpose; judging the effect of adding, revising, or deleting supporting material; and judging the relevance of statements in context.

Organization (15%). Questions in this category test how well you organize ideas and choose effective opening, transitional, and closing sentences.

Style (16%). Questions in this category test how well you select precise and appropriate words and images, maintain the level of style and tone in an essay, manage sentence elements for rhetorical effectiveness, and avoid ambiguous pronoun references, wordiness, and redundancy.

The first thing you may notice is the phrase “questions in this category” which means that we will be measuring how well students write not by asking them to write, but to identify. Robert Pirsig wrote about the educational outcome of this approach:

“As a result of his experiments he concluded that imitation was a real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn’t have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself. That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don’t imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade. “

Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

Another reason this approach makes sense is since the testers have come up with a testable definition of rhetoric that is both scientific and objective, that is free from the subjective biases of previous attempts by people like Walter Ong, or Erasmus it’s only logical that they use an objective test to measure student skills.

Personally, I’m glad the testers have finally put these issues to rest. Take the section on style for example. This issue has been contentious since before the time of Cicero. What constitutes eloquence? What is the correct style? Cicero had his ideas, but Seneca had some very different ideas. For those of you who may not be familiar with this debate, The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, edited by C. J. Rowe, Malcolm Schofield sums it up this way:

[U]like Cicero, who used a leasured, periodic style suitable to the balanced tone of a skeptical academic, Seneca expounded…in a nervous, epigrammatic style suited to the passionate tone of a committed Stoic .

If fact, in one of his writings, Seneca said “style has no fixed standard.” Cicero would disagree and for over 2000 years the battle would go back and forth. As the editors of Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia Of Literature write:

His[Cicero’s] influence on the Latin language was so immense that the subsequent history of prose in not only Latin but European languages up to the 19th century was said to be either a reaction against or a return to his style.

Well, until today that is. So, what have the testers discovered in the last couple of years that philosophers and rhetoricians haven’t been able to discern in the previous 2000?

[S]elect precise and appropriate words and images, maintain the level of style and tone in an essay…

Now, some of you may wonder who gets to define “precise and appropriate” but we say that’s a meaningless quibble because the degree of sophistication and expertise that went into the development of this instrument is such that—for mere teachers of rhetoric anyway—if they had to explain it to us, we wouldn’t understand. Besides, it’s what the testers tell us at the end of their definition that I find most intriguing:

[M]anage sentence elements for rhetorical effectiveness, and avoid ambiguous pronoun references, wordiness, and redundancy.

The sudden jump from general terms like "appropriate" to specifics like "ambiguous pronoun references" has to be significant. Are the testers giving us a clue? Sentence elements and ambiguous pronoun references are usually terms used when discussing grammar. Does good style equal correct grammar? It’s true grammar is the easiest part of writing to measure, but it also means if there are any potential F Scott Fitzgearlds in school now, they aren’t getting out. The manuscript of This Side Of Paradise that Fitzgerald sent to his publisher was full of grammatical and spelling errors (the man spelled disappointed “dissappointed” his whole life for crying out loud). He assumed the publisher would correct them and when they published the first edition cum errors he was completely chagrined.

I guess that’s no big deal though. After all, we’ve already had one F. Scott Fitzgerald. Why would we want an educational system that might encourage another?

The testers also admonish students to avoid “wordiness and redundancy” which, if you think about it is a kind of redundant statement. Perhaps they are trying to teach by example.

But it’s all good as the kids say. Now that we’ve got these thorny issues wrapped up in nice little packages we can get on with the real purpose of school--selecting the best answer to questions like the following:

Which author uses the most precise and appropriate words and images, maintains the level of style and tone in his or her essay, and manages sentence elements for rhetorical effectiveness, avoiding ambiguous pronoun references, wordiness, and redundancy:

A. Thomas Jefferson in “The Declaration Of Independence”

B. Montaigne in “Of The Education Of Children”

C. Linus Pauling in ”How Long Can People Live?”

D. Dave Barry in “A Journey Into My Colon—And Yours”

E. bell hooks in "Ethos, Pathos, And Logos In Keeping Close To Home"

Of Fish, Ducks And Schools

2013-08-28T12:15:00.001-07:00

Time for a little civics lesson. Capitalism is an economic theory. It’s concerned with things like the means of production, cost control and profit. Democracy is a political theory. It’s concerned with things like equality, justice and freedom. Capitalism is great at making affordable, efficient toasters, not so good at creating a just and vibrant society. Democracy can lead to a just and vibrant society, but affordable, efficient toasters…not so much.

In America these two systems live side by side and theoretically Capitalism’s resource exhausting hunger for greater and greater profits at lower and lower costs is mitigated by Democracy’s boundary setting functions, which we commonly call laws. These laws theoretically protect the most vulnerable in our society, both people and resources. They assure fairness in the dealings of capitalistic enterprises and monitor the quality of its products.

Theoretically.

The reality is that you don’t have to look very far in America today to see that the relationship between Capitalism and Democracy is, at best, dysfunctional. From home lending practices to food safety requirements market driven values have invaded and replaced democratic ones, so instead of justice for all we get buyer beware as a national motto.

Democratic values contain a concept called the common good. The common good is what everyone in the society benefits from whether they are directly affected by it or not, like the fire department, which, hopefully, most people will never directly benefit from. To maintain the common good everyone is asked to throw some money into the pot and we call that process taxation. The important thing to remember is that in a democratic society the people get to decide what the common good is, and how important it is to the overall function of the society. This requires a literate and aware citizenry which is why the fundamental democratic common good is education. As Thomas Jefferson said, “Wherever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” Capitalistic values have a common good too, it’s called profit and it’s arrived at by any (hopefully legal) means necessary.

Which brings us to charter schools. On the surface, charter schools are schools in which public money (taxes) is given to private entities (school management companies) but more fundamentally what this means is that schools based on the democratic value of the common good are replaced by schools based on the capitalist value of profit. Democratically based schools attempt to educate all students with an eye towards the development of individual potential. Capitalistic schools value cost containment, operational efficiencies and standardization. Some results of the change in value systems are immediate and unsurprising. There are whole web pages devoted to the scandals and failures of school management companies—some have been accused and/or convicted more than once. These companies have caused students to be discriminated against, schools to close with little or no warning, and money to disappear.

All of which calls into question the central selling point of charter schools which was that being organized like a business, they were in a better position to improve educational outcomes than the “dinosaur” public school system.

So, are they better? We’ve had charter schools since the mid 90’s and according to the most recent study done by CREDO, the Stanford University based research organization, Charter Schools are no better than public schools (pdf):

CMOs on average are not dramatically better than non-CMO schools in terms of their contributions to student learning. The difference in learning compared to the Traditional Public school alternatives for CMOs is -.005 standard deviations in Math and .005 in reading; both these values are statistically significant, but obviously not materially different from the comparison.

Translated from the edu-speak what that means is there are good charter schools and bad charter schools but when you look at them as a whole, not much difference between charter and public. Here’s my question: Where is this promised nirvana of education that was supposed to be brought about by applying free market principles to schools?

We started down this path in the 80’s with the Nation At Risk report which told us our economy was in trouble if we didn’t improve our schools. Then came the boom 90’s, but no one tried to attribute that to the schools. Now the economy is a mess again. Is it the schools? Well, if you accept that Hedge Fund Managers, Bankers and their political enablers all presumably went to school, then yeah, I guess the economic mess is the schools’ fault. Truth is the whole business does it better mantra is code for we’re looking for new markets to exploit. America has never needed business values to make its schools better.

Saying Capitalist values can lead to better schools is like saying because fish can swim, ducks should be able to play violins. Education in a democratic society isn’t about profit—neither making it, nor providing it for others—it’s about seeing that the next generation has the tools to build a better democracy.

Schools that don’t respect democratic values can’t be expected to do a good job educating students in a democratic society, but schools that don’t respect education as a value in itself can’t be expected to do a good job at all.

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other (Sort Of)

2013-08-13T07:18:00.000-07:00

Earlier this summer I got to be part of the beta test team for a MOOC here at the College of Knowledge titled Thinking Like A Writer. It was developed by the Writing Rhetoric and American Cultures Department and as far as I know was their first foray into electronical pedagogtiatin' in a massively multiplayer format.. Our job was to walk through the first assignment and make sure all the pieces worked, the flow made sense and developed in a way that was supportive of the process. The assignment itself was to think about a skill we've developed and to think about how we learned to write and see where it went from there.

It was a good assignment because it had just enough structure at the beginning to support writers initially, but was vague enough at the end to allow for built up momentum to take you wherever it would. It was also nice to write in a group (which I seldom get to do these days) and ping pong ideas and suggestions back and forth in those little instant communities that develop around a common goal and a common interest. Comfortable maybe is a better word. That's good for students writers...well, all writers really. Anyway, a good time was had by all and I was kind of pleased with the results, even though it was just a toss off exercise to test the system. I hope I didn't disappoint my group and without further ado, I present Fred the student writer:

The first thing that comes to mind is learning to ride motocross was a lot more painful than learning to write, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they were painful in different ways--for me anyway. People think learning to ride a motorcycle in the dirt is like learning to ride a bike, and I suppose that’s true—if you learned to ride a bike by being strapped to the seat and pushed down a hill with a 30 degree slope. Then, when you were about halfway down your instructor shouted, “Hey, forgot to tell you how to brake. My bad.”

Learning to write, on the other hand, is injurious only to your mental health. First, of course, are all the rules, many of which I didn’t even know were rules until after I broke them. I’m not talking about spelling and grammar, those two spinster sisters of writing that used to scowl at me from their perch on the classroom bookshelf between Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary and Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. No, I’m talking about the whole point. I mean, thesis, topic sentences, the sacred five paragraphs and the holy 500 words. What’s it all for? It seemed to me purpose of writing was so we would be quiet while our teachers read the paper.

When learning to ride motocross, each lesson has immediate implications. Don’t want crash in that turn? Better learn how to decelerate correctly. Learning to write was much more amorphous, much more diffuse. Want to get a good job some day? Better learn what a summary close is. I never saw the point of the “you’ll thank me for this in twenty years” pedagogy.

However, there comes a point in the acquisition of any new skill when it suddenly makes sense, a sort of eureka moment, and you think “I’ve got this.” That is a very dangerous time.

In motocross it’s called muscle memory when you finally stop thinking about what you are doing and just feel it. That’s when you become one with the bike, and the course. For me that happened on brilliant June day at a place called Red Bud Trails in Buchanan, Michigan. The Red Bud track was a fairly complex one with a lot of hills, twisty terrain, woods and even a small creek. It had been kicking my butt for months, but that day I was on fire. I went through the turns like I was glued to the track. On the straightaways I could feel the front wheel coming off the ground, a sure sign I was a rocket. The trees that lined the track became a green blur as I tore past them.

Now, they say we all have a dual nature which is usually characterized as good and evil—angel and devil if you will, sitting on opposite shoulders, but I think it’s more basic than that. I think our natures are made up of the part that thinks we’re going to live forever and the part that knows we’re going to die. It was probably that latter aspect of my nature that wrested control away from the former long enough to inform me as I sped down the track that mere inches from my body were FREAKIN’ TREES, MAN!

And that’s when I had another eureka moment. I had convinced myself I was an expert at something, but had failed to factor in the price of this new found confidence in the face of the unyielding laws of physics. Additionally, I learned that muscle memory is also about my body carrying a grudge when I treated it disrespectfully.

There comes a point when you feel one with writing as well. When you stop thinking and just feel the piece, a time when the trees become metaphorical, but no less painful. I learned that in my 12^th grade literature class, presided over by one Otto L. Holt Jr. a classical scholar of Jamaican heritage who sometimes became so overwhelmed with the beauty and majesty of the literature he would stand on his desk and “declaim” Homer from memory. Junior (we called him Junior because we were a bunch of incredibly sophisticated and urbane 17 year olds) was diligently trying to teach us to write like the masters, and we were resisting him with equal fervor. It was during the unit on Donne that I decided rhyming was no big deal and attempted to join the pantheon with my own version of Ode To A Flea. As I had been one with my bike that day on the track, now I was one with the muse so I knocked that baby off in about three minutes. On a whim I passed it to Elizabeth Arden with whom I was deeply, passionately, eternally in love that semester. She read it and she laughed…she laughed! And suddenly I knew what writing was for. It was for impressing girls.

The jocularity attracted the attention of Junior who confiscated my effort, glowered his way through it, then ordered me to the front of the class to “perform” my piece. One didn’t simply read out loud in Junior’s class, one “performed” the piece one was assigned. After five or six attempts, during which Junior’s face, as I was to learn in another English class, “could not unfrown itself,” and my classmates became increasingly raucous, he was finally satisfied I had given the piece an appropriate delivery and I was dismissed to the Principal’s office to repeat my performance.

Later, in detention, as I was reflecting on the wide range of responses to my poem, from Elizabeth’s encouraging giggle to the Principal’s stern lecture on the seriousness with which I obviously was not taking my studies, it occurred to me that just as I had overlooked the inviolable laws of physics that day at Red Bud, I had overlooked an important element of writing when I had come to the conclusion that I knew what it was for, and that element was audience. It was at that moment that I became a rhetorician, which in the long run proved to be a much better choice than motocross racer.

Welcome To The Republican Utopia

2013-08-05T11:25:00.002-07:00

There really can’t be much of a question anymore as to the real purpose of educational reform in this country. Despite all the lip service paid to the good of the children and the country’s economic competitiveness it should be apparent, even to those with only passing knowledge of what goes on in America’s public schools, we’ve been conned, lied to, sold a pig in a poke as my father used to say.

Of course there were some people who from the beginning saw through the bafflegab thrown up by supporters of rapacious capitalism looking for new markets. Alfie Kohn for one, Gerald Bracey before he passed away, George Hillocks, Denny Taylor, Elaine Garan, Gerald Coles, all of whom wrote books detailing the real agenda of the corporate pirates who were preparing to pillage education under the auspices of Competitiveness and The Free Market. Even Diane Ravitch, an early supporter of the neoliberal model eventually saw through the dissembling and has since become one of the most vocal critics of education as a commodity.

They were ignored for the most part, marginalized and like the proverbial prophet in his own country, left talking to the wind. Unfortunately for a whole generation of children they were right and the true agenda of the “reformers” is becoming clearer and clearer with each new revelation. A good example of that is right here in Michigan where Highland Park Public Schools were taken over by a state appointed Emergency Manager. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, an Emergency Manager is a person accountable only to the Governor who has the authority to suspend contracts, fire, hire, disband locally elected boards and committees and generally do whatever he or she feels like doing to “fix” the struggling district or municipality. In Highland Park the Emergency Manager’s name is Donald Weatherspoon and here’s how his tenure is going so far.

The emergency manager appointed to oversee the Highland Park School District’s finances denied Tuesday that a large collection of black history books, tapes, film strips and other materials were deliberately discarded into Dumpsters last week from the district’s high school library.

Well, mistakes happen, apologists might say. Incompetence can be found in many districts, but some may wonder what workmen were doing taking books off the shelves in the first place.

The recovered materials will be sorted and those that have historical value, Weatherspoon said, would go to a library or a museum that would agree to keep them. He said none of the materials would be sold. Weatherspoon said the district can’t afford to secure the collection. The Leona Group, the charter management company that began operating schools in the district a year ago, was offered the books. Weatherspoon said they took what they wanted.

You read that correctly. The collection was being given away. This in a district that has been accused of violating students’ right to read as described in state law, and where teaching assistants were ordered to falsify student records. If I may offer a bit of advice to Mr. Weatherspoon: it’s going to be a lot harder to convince people reading scores are improving if there are no books for the students to read.

Defenders of the corporate model of school reform would probably argue that this is an isolated case, confined to a local area and in no way does it reflect the values of the movement as a whole—the so called “bad apple” defense. That may be true, but Mr. Weatherspoon is certainly not the only rotten apple in the bushel, nor is he the biggest.

Two Indianapolis Public Schools might never have been taken over by the state if then-Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett had offered the district the same flexibility he granted a year later to the Christel House Academy charter school. In the case of Christel House, emails unearthed by The Associated Press show Bennett’s staff sprung into action in 2012 when it appeared scores from the recently added grades could sink the highly regarded school’s rating from an A to a C. Ultimately, the high school scores were excluded and the school’s grade remained an A.

Mr. Bennet left Indiana to become superintendent of Florida schools before news of his favoritism became public. He has since been forced to resign. When news of the impropriety reached Governor Mike Pence, he acted immediately.

Gov. Mike Pence said Wednesday he is standing by Indiana’s system of assigning “A-F” grades to schools based on their performance despite reports that the state’s former schools chief worked to change the grading formula to ensure a top GOP donor’s school received an “A.”

Mike Pence—it will come as no surprise—is a Republican. The real tragedy here is the fact that children’s futures are being stolen from them. Because these free market raiders go after the most vulnerable schools, and because those schools tend to be the ones serving the most disadvantaged populations—populations for whom education is even more crucial to upward mobility—an entire class of children is being consigned to economic destitution. Thanks to the greatest income disparity since the gilded age, climbing the economic ladder has become difficult even for those who have access to what remains of the benefits of the middle class. Take those few advantages away and these children become a generation born into poverty and sentenced to die there while the Weatherspoons and the Bennetts and the Pences of the world profit from their suffering. Welcome to the Republican utopia.

Dr. Duncan Misdiagnosis The Patient

2013-07-08T11:32:00.000-07:00

I’ve been watching reruns of the television show House recently. Patients come into Princeton-Plainsboro hospital in varying degrees of ill health. Dr. House prescribes a bunch of tests and treats the patients based on those tests. The patients get worse. More tests, more treatment, more declining patients. This goes on until the last 15 minutes when Dr. House—usually without the benefit of more tests—finally figures out what is really wrong, gives the patients a pill or a shot and voilà! Health restored.

This strikes me as a good metaphor for educational reform. The “patient” has been in poor health—depending on who’s doing the diagnosing—for 10 years, 30 years, or since the particular diagnostician making the claim graduated. Interesting side note: cuneiform tablets from around 3000 BCE have been found in which the writer complains about students’ lack of skills.

Like Doctor House, our educational reformers prescribe a battery of tests, but unlike Doctor House, these tests aren’t supposed to provide information leading to the cure, they’re supposed to be the cure. Strangely, the patient gets sicker. Diagnosis: More testing. The patient declines further, so even more tests are called for.

Well, since this is my analogy I get to play the role of Dr. House and tell you that there is no need for further testing—especially since it seems to be making the patient worse. I know what the disease is, or at least a major component of a multi-faceted, multi-level disease. It’s poverty, and much as I’d like to take credit for that diagnosis, as a profession we’ve known about this disease and its effects on the educational achievement of students for a long time. I did a brief, informal review of the literature on poverty and educational achievement and found research going back into the 70’s that indicated the longer children live in poverty, the lower their educational achievement.

Recently, there was an article that appeared in the Post Tribune about the effects of poverty on school achievement which, for the purposes of my analogy can serve as a description of symptoms for this national disease. Patients suffering from this malady often share the following history:

In a recent report by Cornell University, “The Role of Planning Skills in the Income-Achievement Gap,” researchers used longitudinal data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development to establish a significant link between early childhood poverty and weak math and reading achievement in the primary grades, regardless of IQ.

Previous research has shown that income-related gaps in academic achievement start as early as kindergarten and continue through high school. Those gaps are amplified by low levels of intellectual stimulation and few healthy relationships with adults in the home. But this is the first time the income-achievement gap has been explained with the behavioral measurement of ability to plan efficiently, from such a young age.

Now, I think that even though Dr. House is a medical doctor and not an educational specialist even he could see that kids who suffer from “low levels of intellectual stimulation and few healthy relationships with adults in the home” don’t need more tests to learn better, nor are you going to improve the skills of students who come from an environment “which includes constant high levels of background noise, the overvaluation of entertainment as a respite from the exertions of survival, a strong belief in destiny or fate because choices are in low supply, and polarized thinking in which options are hardly ever examined (again, because so few tend to be available)” by subjecting them to high stakes exams, wouldn’t you agree Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education and head diagnostician for America’s schools?

Today is a great day! I have looked forward to this day for a long time--and so have America's teachers, parents, students, and school leaders. Today is the day that marks the beginning of the development of a new and much-improved generation of assessments for America's schoolchildren. Today marks the start of Assessments 2.0.

Oh. Well, uh…guess the only people getting healthy around here are the ones that own test making companies.

When Is A School Not A School? When It’s A Profit Center

2013-06-27T09:37:00.001-07:00

Privatization \pri·vat·i·za·tion \prī-və-tə-zā-shən\ n: The process by which a public good is dismantled and sold for private gain. See also: commodification.

OK, so that’s not the definition you’ll currently see in your Webster’s, but if the education reformers have their way it soon will be. No matter what direction the so called reform comes from and no matter what level it’s aimed at, all the solutions to what ails education in America today have one thing in common: taking money from public institutions and putting it in private pockets.

Giving up on public schools altogether? Let’s open some privately owned ones—funded with taxpayer’s money of course. Want more accountability? Need more tests. Someone has to produce those tests and score them of course, and for that they’ll want to be paid—handsomely. Oh and by the way, you’ll need to buy some programs linked to those tests so you can prepare students to take them. And don’t forget to buy the latest textbooks that coordinate with the new curriculum.

And the latest iteration: Want to know if a new teacher should be licensed? Don’t ask the university that trained him or her, pay us to decide.

The idea that a handful of college instructors and student teachers in the school of education at the University of Massachusetts could slow the corporatization of public education in America is both quaint and ridiculous. Sixty-seven of the 68 students studying to be teachers at the middle and high school levels at the Amherst campus are protesting a new national licensure procedure being developed by Stanford University with the education company Pearson.

And for those of you who may be naive enough to assume that because Stanford University is involved the resulting process will have a degree of educational validity—fuhgeddaboudit. I’ve been invited to participate those types of “partnerships” and mostly teachers are brought in for cover, and their input, while effusively appreciated, is largely ignored. I was part of the team that created the original state writing assessment here in Michigan. We put together an instrument that we felt reflected best practice in the field. When we weren’t being told our suggestions were too expensive we were being told what we were attempting to measure couldn’t be measured, which brings up an interesting subtext to all this and that is the rather unexamined premise that if it can be measured it has value, along with a coda, if it can’t be measured it doesn’t have value. Might be worth looking into a little more thoroughly, but that’s a post for another time. As for the high stakes writing test here in Michigan, within about five years, almost all of the recommendations we did manage to get through the process had been abandoned.

Want more proof?

Pearson advertises that it is paying scorers $75 per assessment, with work “available seven days a week” for current or retired licensed teachers or administrators.

That’s right teachers, your career has a market value of $75. Puts all those years taking classes, doing internships and student teaching in perspective doesn’t it, knowing that after all that somewhere a person will be paid less than $100 to decide if you're qualified to teach or not.

It is an essential aspect of the commodification of education that teachers be devalued. After all, in order for "educational entrepreneurs" to sell their products a need has to be created--that's just Marketing 101. Since teachers are such an visible part of the process it's only logical that this need be created by convincing the customer that teachers are ineffective, inefficient and may actually be destructive--as least as far as they take money from the kids by wanting things like salaries and benefits. It is also important that the fix for this need come from outside the schools, that's why teacher training has to be attacked as well. After all, if we supported teachers, and the training of teachers, there would be no reason to buy teacher proof curricula; no reason to buy tests from outside vendors, or software programs that take the place of classroom instruction.

On a more fundamental level, this switch from the democratic values that created public education to the priorities of the market economy means the long term goal of education in creating skilled, literate citizens capable of maintaining and improving our democracy has been replaced by the short term, myopic goal of improving the quarterly balance sheet.

In a larger sense, capitalism has become cannibalistic and is devouring the very body that created it, or perhaps it is more accurate to say what used to be a symbiotic relationship between our economic and political structures has become parasitic and what Franklin Roosevelt called the "real safeguard of democracy" (education) is being slowly bled away.

Get Better Teachers With One Weird Trick

2013-06-17T11:16:00.001-07:00

When I was younger I was a sucker for those short cut programs you see advertised all over the place. Learn Chinese in three weeks! Lose ten pounds a week with this five minute workout! Earn thousands from home with this three step plan! Of course the only thing I really learned was I was going to lose some weight in my wallet and someone else was doing all the earning.

Eventually I figured out that if I wanted to take on a complicated task it meant investing real effort, paying attention to my results over a long period of time, perhaps the rest of my life, and adjusting my plan based on my changing goals. In other words, it had to become a part of the way I did things, not just something I paid attention to for a few weeks out of the year.

I mention this because when I look at the latest efforts of our educational betters to identify and measure teacher effectiveness I see the same sort of short cut thinking that used to drain my bank account. Need to determine if teachers are any good? Just give them this test before they graduate. No wait, give their students this test, then use it to evaluate the teachers. Want better schools? Give teachers the educational version of piecework. Hey, it works for manufacturing. The thinking that underlies these programs is the same as those that promise to reduce belly fat with “one weird trick” and that is, if we can just find that one test, or that one measure we can apply it to all teachers everywhere and forever, then all our problems will be solved.

I should mention here that I never learned Chinese, I could stand to lose a few pounds, and I’m not rich.

The National Education Writers Association has an interesting compilation of what current research in the measures du jour say about teacher effectiveness and they aren’t exactly what you might call a slam dunk. Value added your cup of tea?

Value-added models appear to pick up some differences in teacher quality, but they can be influenced by a number of factors, such as the statistical controls selected. They may also be affected by the characteristics of schools and peers. The impact of unmeasured factors in schools, such as principals and choice of curriculum, is less clear.

Not a rousing vote of confidence. What about testing for “content mastery,” or programs that provide “board certification?”

Characteristics such as board certification and content knowledge in math sometimes are linked with student achievement. Still, these factors don’t explain much of the differences in teacher effectiveness overall.

Everyone knows teachers go into the profession for the money, so what if we just paid them more to do a better job?

In the United States, merit pay exclusively focused on rewarding teachers whose students produce gains has not been shown to improve student achievement…

Well, at least we know that it’s teachers who hold the key to student success or failure, right? That’s why we need all these measurements.

Research has shown that the variation in student achievement is predominantly a product of individual and family background characteristics. Of the school factors that have been isolated for study, teachers are probably the most important determinants of how students will perform on standardized tests.

OK, so if we want an educational system that values teachers who teach kids how to take standardized tests, it certainly looks like we’ve found our measures of “teacher effectiveness.” Trouble is, as Matthew Di Carlo, writing at Shankerblog points out:

"[O]nly about 25-40 percent of the top quintile (top 20%) teachers in one year were in the top quintile the next year, while between 20-30 percent of them ended up in the bottom 40%," of which volatility "a very large proportion was due to nothing more than random error."

“Volatility” and “random error.” To borrow a phrase from Prince Hamlet, “Ay, there’s the rub.” Education is a dynamic, complicated slippery little beastie and just when you think you’ve got a handle on her, she goes tumbling off in a wholly unexpected direction leaving you measuring smoke and thinking you know where the fire is. My own opinion is this is because human beings are dynamic, complicated slippery little beasties and when you factor in the type of human being education deals with, namely kids growing up, maturing and changing, well you’ve got basically a Rubic’s cube of “volatility” to solve before you can have any confidence in your measures.

This is why static, universal, external attempts at measurement have failed and will continue to fail. There are no short cuts. If you want effective teachers, you have to start by paying attention to those teachers. You have to support them by first of all listening to them and inviting them to participate in developing meaningful, flexible, appropriately focused measures. That’s hard work. It takes time, commitment and yes, money. Effort in other words, something we’re always telling students they need to have more of. Well, until they grow up and become teacher effectiveness experts at least.

Correlation Is Not Causation: Breed Specific Laws Are Cop Outs

2013-06-04T10:23:00.000-07:00

There are approximately 14 communities around Michigan that ban pit bulls outright and many more that restrict them, or label them "dangerous" or "vicious." Recently Lansing Mayor Virg Benaro announced that residents of his city were "living in fear" of vicious dogs and asked the City Council to draft an ordinance. Apparently, the members of the Council, also residents of Lansing, weren't living in as much fear as the Mayor indicated and they demurred. "Committee Chairwoman Jody Washington said the body was “nowhere near” writing an ordinance and said the committee had no plans to include breed-specific provisions targeting breeds allegedly more prone to violence."

Good. Breed specific legislation follows the same logic as assuming since the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says the Dodge Ram 1500 is rated the most dangerous car made we should pass a law banning pickup trucks, or at least Dodge pickup trucks.

Certainly the safety features built into the truck play a role, just as the size of pit bulls contribute to the fact that where there are incidents, they are more likely to result in serious injury, or even death, meaning we probably wouldn't be having this discussion if drug dealers had opted for Papilons to guard their stash, and rich dilettantes for pit bulls instead of purse dogs as a fashion accessory. Anyway, in the vast majority of cases the person behind the wheel, or on the other end of the leash is a major contributing factor.

If you or I operate our vehicles negligently and cause someone harm, we don't get to blame the car. Even if we have an accident, the headlines will not read "Ford Focus injures three." No one is "living in fear" of a Toyota Camry. On the other hand, it is just as certain that when incidents involving pit bulls are reported the headlines will not read "Violation of leash law leads to injury of three," and instead will contain words like the above mentioned "vicious," or "dangerous."

Now, you may think the analogy breaks down at this point because cars are inanimate objects incapable of independent action, whereas dogs are living creatures, but it's not quite that simple. Just as cars are bound by the laws of physics, dogs are bound by the dictates of their environment and training (or lack thereof). Dogs are not moral philosophers, they will act in very consistent, linear patterns around issues like safe and dangerous, food and not food, pain and pleasure. The fact that they are sentient creatures capable of altering their behavior gives us the opportunity to shape those choices into more socially acceptable patterns, but just as a car can't suddenly decide to fly, a pit bull can't suddenly decide to ruminate over the implications of getting out of the yard if the gate is left open.

In short, we're supposed to be the responsible ones here.

Breed specific laws do have two elements which seem to be primary ingredients in a lot of decisions our politicians make these days though, they are cheap and easy. Cheap and easy, but not smart or effective. As the Lansing City Council heard in testimony:

...[S]uch laws don’t work, opponents said at the committee meeting, noting that even the American Bar Association announced its opposition to breed bans and restrictions because taxpayers often foot the bill for genetic testing to determine dog breeds, and the animal's care and housing while the testing is being completed. Instead, the city should focus on better enforcing its own leash laws, they said. A representative from the 54A District Court noted that the Lansing Police Department wrote only two tickets in 2012 for violations of the city’s leash law.

Thankfully, in this case the Council listened, which is encouraging I guess because it shows that, like pit bulls, legislators are trainable. Apparently the residents of Lansing do not need to "live in fear" of their legislators. Well, maybe except for the mayor because he seems to be a dangerously uninformed, but as long as the Council keeps him on a short leash...

The Past Is Prologue...To Failure

2013-05-30T10:49:00.000-07:00

Here’s something from the Who Could Have Predicted Department:

“Children are getting the message at a very young age that if you pick the right choice between several options you can be successful. That’s not the way to learn, especially creatively. That’s not experimenting or exploring or creating. We’re telling kids that that life is a series of hoops and that they need to start jumping through them very early.”

Gee, it’s almost like if you ramp up the pressure on schools to make their students perform on tests; if you threaten to withdraw funding from schools if their students don’t do well on tests; if you tell teachers and administrators their careers ride on how well their students do on tests, you get schools that make tests the most important thing they do.

This is just an example of something that’s going on all over the country: eviscerating the curriculum to make more room for test prep.

Optimists in the crowd will probably say if you’re going to over emphasize something math and reading are good choices, but I would argue that’s just whistling past the graveyard.

See, students aren’t being taught more math to deepen their understanding of mathematical concepts. They aren’t having reading emphasized to increase their comprehension skills, or to develop an appreciation for reading. They are being prepared for tests, standardized tests that value a certain kind of thought: shallow. As the quote indicates, the kind of thinking that focuses on the “correct” answer rather than using reason, or critical thinking skills to develop deep understanding, or what we in the field like to refer to as “learning.” The National Assessment of Educational Progress (the Nation’s Report Card people) figured that out years ago, back when the nation was “at risk”:

As the National Assessment of Educational Progress found: Only 5 to 10 percent of (high school) students can move beyond initial readings of a test; most seem genuinely puzzled at requests to explain or defend their points of view. The NAEP assessors explained that current methods of teaching and testing reading require short responses and lower level cognitive thinking, resulting in an emphasis on shallow and superficial opinions at the expense of reasoned and disciplined thought..., (thus) it is not surprising that students fail to develop more comprehensive thinking and analytic skills (NAEP, 1981). (qtd in Darling Hammond 1993. 77:18)

What this means essentially is that students mentioned in the article, and to a lesser degree students all over the country aren’t being educated as much as they’re being trained. Trained to perform on the test.

This is a “reform” technique that has more in common with 19^th century definitions of literacy than those of the 21^st. At the beginning of World War I the mark of basic literacy was the ability to sign your own name. By the start of the Second World War, the military needed soldiers who could read and understand sophisticated manuals in order to be able to operate and maintain more complex weapons systems, and thus the measure of basic literacy became connected to reading level.

When Sputnik set off the space race the call went out to schools to produce students who could solve complex technical and scientific problems and the definition of a literate person took another leap. Today the Internet brings the world to our fingertips and with it a new phrase has entered the lexicon: Information overload. Experts at the Cisco company estimate that shortly there will be 667 exabytes annually flowing around the Internet. An exabyte is one billion billion bytes. Every minute 35 hours of video is uploaded to the web. Every minute 460 new users come on to the Internet and every day almost 58,000 new websites go active.

Yet, into this maelstrom of information, this chaos of competing, conflicting and contradictory ideas, we are sending students whose school experience has more in common with an age when education was more about memorizing and reciting Bible verses than surviving the digital deluge.

Art and Music are usually the first victims of a test prep driven curriculum, but by removing them we may be giving up far more than we get. A study in the Boston area found that art classes develop:

[V]isual-spatial abilities, reflection, self-criticism, and the willingness to experiment and learn from mistakes. All are important to numerous careers, but are widely ignored by today's standardized tests.

And music, it turns out, may be even more valuable, even to test prep driven schools because studies show:

[M]usic training - specifically piano instruction - can dramatically enhance children’s spatial-temporal reasoning skills, the skills crucial for greater success in subjects like math and science.

It seems all our “reforms” have moved us back to where schools were when John Dewey wrote:

Education means the creation of a discerning mind, a mind that prefers not to dupe itself, or to be the dupe of others…[It means] the habit of suspended judgment, of skepticism, of desire for evidence, of appeal to observation rather than sentiment, discussion rather than bias, inquiry rather than conventionalized idealizations. (Education As Politics, 334)

Would someone please direct me to the section of the Common Core Standards that covers that—especially that part about inquiry rather than conventionalized idealizations.

This Is The Result Of "Relentless Positive Action"

2013-05-16T11:48:00.000-07:00

So Rick Snyder, "One tough nerd" was elected governor of Michigan in 2010 and one of the top items on his agenda was a "reinvention" of the public educational system. OK, so with a republican legislature he's pretty much in position to get what he wants in terms of this "reinvention." Three years in, let's see how he's doing:

Buena Vista Schools close early

Last week, the Buena Vista School District fired all of its teachers and closed its schools because it had run out of money. Because the district accepted money from the state for a program it was no longer providing, the state is withholding the district's school aid for at least three months.

Budget deficit forcing school officials to close Albion High School

The Albion School Board voted last night to close the district’s high school.
Beginning this fall, the mid-Michigan district will only serve students in grades K through eight.

Ann Arbor schools to cut high school busing, charge kids for 7th hour

Parents of Ann Arbor high school children will have to find another way for their ninth- through 12th-graders to get to school come fall, and students interested in taking a seventh-hour course could have to pay up to $500 per semester...

There are two things you need to realize about this situation, one: These schools are canaries in the educational coal mine. Districts all over the state are struggling. There will be more stories like this.

Two: From Snyder's perspective, this is not a bug, it's a feature. The whole direction of his plan from the beginning was to deemphasize brick and mortar public schools and replace them with privately run online schools. Privately run, but funded with public money that is. In fact, Buena Vista, Albion and Ann Arbor are indications that his plan if anything, is working too well. The public schools are disintegrating before the privately run infrastructure is fully in place.

Of course Governor Snyder isn't totally to blame for this--or perhaps from his perspective we should say he doesn't deserve all the credit. Bad decisions and incompetence are rampant from the school board level on up, but his spineless leadership coupled with the Republican legislature's animus toward public schools, or more specifically public school teachers, has created an environment in which all of the destructive forces, whether they be economic, or ideological can flourish while support for and commitment to the ideal of public education in a democratic society withers.

And while the slowly--or in some cases not so slowly--carcass of public education in Michigan is picked clean by the greedy and the opportunistic, children are having their future stolen from them. In a truly enlightened society this would be a crime of the first order. Instead it's just another group of entrepreneurs taking advantage of a business opportunity.

The shame is on all of us.

Simple Solutions To Complex Problems

2013-05-08T11:49:00.000-07:00

I just got done watching Bill Gates' TED Talk on improving education titled "Teachers Need Real Feedback" and my first question was why do we assume that because a person is rich they are also smart? OK, maybe Mr. Gates is smart when it comes to computer operating systems, well if you don't count Windows ME, but that doesn't make him any more knowledgeable than anyone else when it comes to other fields of endeavor like, say education.

But lack of expertise never stopped anyone with the wherewithal to buy access from inflicting their opinions on the rest of us, so here comes Mr. Gates who starts his talk by inferring that the feedback teachers get from their students isn't "real," that the only feedback that counts as "real" is apparently that which they get from their administrators which consists solely of the word "satisfactory," which he, correctly, believes is unsatisfactory.

Now, anyone who has been within a couple of parsecs of an operating American school these days will probably instantly recognize a couple of problems with Mr. Gates' premise, as the one thing teachers are not suffering from is a shortage of feedback. Books, materials, institutional support, sure, but feedback, no way.

I noticed another problem with Mr. Gates' argument as well and that is his use of PISA test results as a basis of comparison. He points out, rightly, that American students placed 15th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math. The inference here is that American students don't achieve levels of competence as advanced as their international peers, but when you ask educators of high placing countries how they do it, their answer generally has little to do with a concern about achievement. For example, Finland consistently ranks at or near the top of PISA results, and when asked for an explanation, Dr Pasi Sahlberg, General Director of the Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation, Finland and previously Senior Education Specialist with the World Bank as well as the Director of the Centre for School Development, Helsinki, said, “We have systematically focused on equity and equality in our education system, and not so much on excellence and achievement like many other countries have done.”

In fact, analysis of the PISA results in 2006 found that "less than 10% of the variation in student performance was explained by student background in five of the seven countries with the highest mean science scores of above 530 points. PISA demonstrates that equity and performance are highly related."

Well, these little tidbits appear lost on Mr. Gates who goes on to explain the teacher feedback system in Shanghai, the highest performer on the latest tests. He talked about how new teachers there are exposed to experienced teachers on an almost daily basis through observation, weekly study groups, and a network of shared exchanges, conversations and interdepartmental communication. Admittedly, that sounds to me like a good deal. New teachers are immediately and completely submerged in the conversation of their profession and constantly and consistently exposed to a range of techniques, expertise and support. So how does Mr. Gates propose to transfer this system to America? Let's make a video!

Next we are whisked off to a secondary classroom in what appears to be a racially monochromatic suburb somewhere in the wilds of Iowa where we meet English teacher Sarah Brown Wessling who video tapes herself in class, then uses the tapes to self critique. Not bad as far as it goes, but it seems to be missing that whole sharing thing the teachers in Shanghai are getting.

Mr. Gates' solution to the collaboration problem is to put a camera in every teacher's classroom across the county, although he does admit that some teachers may find this a bit disconcerting. No matter because, as he says, if you need to improve the way you teach fractions, "you should be able to watch a video of the best person in the world teaching fractions."

Well, yes and no, Mr. Gates. If I'm teaching in south Chicago, where I'm worried about if the heat will work through the winter, or if my students will make it home safely--that is if they have a home to go to--watching Ms. Wessling walk her kids through a peer editing exercise on their iPads isn't likely to teach me the lesson you seem to think it will.

To put it another way, when I was younger I wanted to be a professional baseball player. Al Kaline was my hero and every time there was a game on TV there I was, glued to the set watching his every move. Long story short, it didn't make me a better fielder, or a better hitter. Actually, it occurred to me later, after it became obvious I wasn't going to be a professional baseball player, that all of those hours I spent sitting in front of the television watching games might have been better spent out practicing. Further, I would suspect that one of the reasons the program in Shanghai is successful is that those teachers have built a community through collaboration, interaction and trust and that is more fundamental to their success than their ability to watch each other.

See, Mr. Gates, improving educational outcomes is a challenge that requires solutions, not a solution. While technology can play a part in those solutions, it cannot create the diverse communities of committed teachers who must take their students where they are and attempt to move them forward.

Varmits In The Pantry

2013-04-29T10:59:00.000-07:00

Here in Michigan Governor Snyder has been meeting to plan out the future of public education (in secret up until a few days ago) with a group of 20 some individuals, most of whom were not educators. The group apparently called themselves the Skunk Works, an allusion to Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs which was born in June of 1943 and brought to life aeronautical innovations like the P38 Lightening, the F-104 Starfighter, the SR-71 Blackbird, the F-117 Nighthawk and the F-22 Raptor, to name a few. As you may imagine, their work was conducted in secret as well.

Developing strategic and tactical military hardware though, is not the same as improving public education, so I would like to suggested another, more natural allusion for this group and that is Mephitis mephitis, or the common striped skunk, often referred to as a polecat because quite frankly what Snyder is doing stinks. Commenting on the nature of the polecat, Mark Twain once observed:

From the beginning of time the polecats have quite honestly and naively regarded themselves as representing in the animal kingdom what the rose represents in the vegetable kingdom. This is because they do not examine.

Because they do not examine. Nor do these Michigan skunks want to be examined because they are busily at work driving the last nail of commodification in the casket that will house public education. It will then be buried in a grave of bafflespeak about innovation and high achievement over which will be placed a tombstone that reads "Here Lies Public Schools. Many Sacrifice For The Profit Of Few."

Of course in a state where even the Superintendent of Public Instruction can say, in public, with a straight face, "Education for education’s sake is silly" it shouldn't surprise anyone that the resource Thomas Jefferson looked to "for ameliorating the condition, promoting the virtue, and advancing the happiness of man," should be turned into an ATM machine for the connected few. Writing in the Detroit News, Dale Hansen describes the true motives of this Skunk Works precisely:

“Skunk works” was the code name give to secret meetings between the governor and a group of 20 individuals...Not surprisingly, the skunk works project aims to take more money away from public schools and funnel it to private organizations using what smacks of a voucher program.

For a little bit of historical perspective, the last time even a modified voucher proposal was brought before Michigan voters (in 2000) it was turned down by 68% of those casting ballots.

You can see the need for secrecy.

If we could just call an intermission to this little school improvement Kabuki for a moment and look at the facts, it is clear we know what the primary cause of low school performance is. We've known it for over forty years. Mr. Hansen again:

Ironically it is the very capitalism that Republicans hold up as the answer to our lagging test scores that is the problem. Data shows that the biggest problem with education is poverty. If you do an apples to apples comparison using test results from American schools with 10 percent or less impoverished students, the U.S. comes out on top. In schools with a 10-25 percent of the student body living below the poverty line the U.S. is third best in the world.

But poverty is about what people don't have. What's driving this bunch of skunks is about what schools do have, namely money, and they want it. In Governor Snyder's defense though, he doesn't seem concerned about poverty in any regard, not just among school children, so in this he is at least being consistent.

The Lockheed Martin Skunk Works was secret as a matter of national security. I would argue that public schools are also a matter of national security and clandestine groups plotting secretly to dismantle and sell them piece by piece are not different in design from terrorist cells, for they also plot the downfall of the nation. The fact that Snyder's group wants to do it with an accounting ledger rather than a bomb is only a difference of degree.

Civil disobedience was not the problem. The greatest danger was civil obedience*

2013-04-22T11:33:00.001-07:00

Democracies are famously bad at coping with change. My own theory is that when you allow citizens to have a voice you set up the potential for a much more responsive government that is closer to the lives of people, yet the institutions created by that very government have a vested interest in the status quo because the status quo conserves their power and as Michel Foucault tells us, institutions have as strong an instinct for self preservation as individuals do. So right off the bat democracies have a built in contradiction, on the one hand valuing the voice of the people, who live close to the unpredictable fires of modernity, while on the other resisting that voice in order to maintain institutional privilege and control.

The Senate's failure to pass even a weak form of gun control legislation in spite of overwhelming support among the public is but the latest example of this inherent democratic contradiction at work. In an earlier time of governmental deafness Howard Zinn asked what is to be done when a representative government stops being representative. His answer crystalized the solution to this political design flaw:

The good things that have been done, the reforms that have been made, the wars that have been stopped, the women's rights that have been won, the racism that has been partly extirpated in society, all of that was not done by government edict, was not done by the three branches of government. It was not done by that structure which we learn about in junior high school, which they say is democracy. It was all done by citizens' movements. And keep in mind that all great movements in the past have risen from small movements, from tiny clusters of people who came together here and there. When a movement is strong enough it doesn't matter who is in the White House; what really matters is what people do, and what people say, and what people demand.

I might quibble a bit with Dr. Zinn here and say that it is government edict that puts the period on the sentence started by citizen discourse, as in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for example, but essentially he is correct. Change in a democracy must make its way from the distant fringes of society to the center of power, a long, arduous and in no way certain journey.

Which brings me to the point of all this, and that is the increasingly loud and numerous voices being raised against the corporatization of public schools. While there have always been those who have warned about the movement from public education to privilege education, their voices were mostly drowned out by the educational-industrial complex. Now however there appears to be a chrous growing. Some examples:

Republicans, of all people, have come out against the Common Core, calling it “an inappropriate overreach to standardize and control” education.

People are beginning to notice that Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee, once the Emperor and Empress of educational change, have no clothes.

Parents and students are beginning to organize a resistance.

Legislatures are revisiting their assumptions about the efficacy of one size fits all.

So how far along the road from radical idea to institutional policy have we come? I'm not sure. These roads are not straight and they don't always go directly to their destination, plus this situation is a little different because neoliberal forces drove us from a more traditional idea of what public education in a democratic society was and we're trying to get that back.

Still, it's hard not to see that something is changing and a movement is growing. That's the promising news. The reality is that we're still a long way from where we need to be, and quite probably have lost an entire generation of children to the industrialization of education, a mistake for which the price will take years to determine, and even longer to pay.

*Howard Zinn (paraphrased)

Thomas Jefferson Versus The Three Spined Stickleback

2013-04-10T09:48:00.000-07:00

I've been trying to figure out why it's suddenly become acceptable amongst our political ruling class (mostly republicans) and their 1% overlords to publicly utter the most vile, bigoted, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic and generally misanthropic of comments as if they were common salutations. It is so common and so widespread of a practice it has spawned a new rhetorical device to close the process: the non-apology apology.

Of course I realize there has long been a babbling brook of bile just under the surface, mostly on right wing talk radio, but for it to suddenly go mainstream and be, if not accepted by substantial portions of society, at least tolerated, and to be reported by the media with the same lack of shock and disgust as the weather, is both surprising and a little disheartening.

In my more optimistic moments I like to think of this era of incivility and vicious personal attacks we've entered as an extinction burst. That's a term psychologists use when a behavior in general decline suddenly increases in frequency for a short period before eventually dying out.

Other times I think the fire hose of venom spewing from certain of our fellow citizens is but another example of the growing callousness of the 21st century American social order. From local politicians like Illinois' Joe Walsh, who accused his opponent Tammy Duckworth of not being a "true hero" even though she had lost both her legs in Iraq, to Mitt Romney's 47% comment, callousness seems to run up and down the political totem. Now it is acceptable for state legislatures to seriously consider taking food away from poor children who don't do well in school; to mull over the benefits of requiring criminal background checks for anyone requesting public assistance; and to subject women to painful and unnecessary medical procedures for having the temerity of thinking their bodies belong to them. And callousness is not confined to the state level as witnessed by Congress failing to be moved by the bloody massacre of innocent children, instead holding steadfast to their commitment to the rights of certain citizens to easily purchase weapons designed for war. Even president Obama, a nominal democrat with all that historically entails, desires to take his exacto-knife to the frayed remains of the social safety net.

Of course, the fact that America has been mostly at war for the last 60 years might have something to do with it. Sociologists find that prolonged war affects everyone, whether they be directly involved in the brutal undertaking, or indirectly associated, it can have the socially detrimental effect of increasing jingoistic feelings while decreasing personal sensitivity to the necessary everyday demands of community.

Then I read that Americans are the most charitable people on the planet, giving more of their time and money to altruistic causes than any other country. This makes me think of another term. It's one biologists use, called speciation. It is the process by which a sub group becomes isolated from the parent colony and over time develops into an entirely new species. It's not hard to see elements of speciation in American society today. Almost everywhere you look you see people isolating themselves into exclusive groups, from the 1% to the Tea party.

Speciation may have been good for the three spined stickleback, but for a democratic society based on commonalities and operating through compromise and consensus, not so much. So do we get to keep our democracy, or will it evolve into something unrecognizable by those who came before us? Hard to say. Truth is, democracies are never done, they are always works in progress, always evolving. Just ask the people who now live in states allowing gay marriage. The real challenge comes in determining the difference between building on, and tearing down.

EAA: Eminent Domain For Public Schools

2013-04-02T04:56:00.000-07:00

In a 2005 book titled The Fox In The Henhouse, authors Si Kahn and Elizabeth Minnich detailed how private, for profit interests move against publicly owned institutions. One of their primary strategies is called disinvestment which means--usually through the cooperation of complacent legislatures--pulling public money out of the institution until it can no longer operate without relying on private funds, or it collapses and is taken over completely.

Here in Michigan we have seen the state steadily fall through the rankings of support for public schools coming in at 31st last year according to a study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. And it doesn't look like things are going to change any time soon as the state reduced funding by 4.4% between FY 2011 and FY2012. This reduction of support has pushed schools into partnerships with private, for profit businesses, and hence the rise of exclusive contracts with beverage companies and privatization of things like janitorial and food services. And while this was going on the legislature took the limit off the number of charter schools that could be opened forcing public schools to divert scarce resources to advertising because competition in the market place makes everything better.

Apparently the piecemeal dismantling of the public school system wasn't fast enough for some and the Synder administration created the Education Achievement Authority, an innocuous enough sounding name for an organization that, under the guise of student improvement, essentially privatizes entire school districts in one fell swoop, disenfranchising elected school boards and replacing them with a Chancellor, in this case a fellow named John Covington, ex superintendent of Kansas City schools who comes with a fair amount of baggage and some ethical questions.

It probably won't surprise you the the EAA set up shop in the Detroit area, taking over 15 schools in poor and minority areas of the city. Certainly those schools were hurting and those children under served, but it wasn't because the state had failed to provide an outsider with the power to suspend democracy, abrogate contracts and just generally remove people's ability to participate in the education of their sons and daughters. Now there are Bills in the legislature to take the EAA idea statewide in order to, as one article put it:

...[A]llow new forms of schools, expand on-line options and expand opportunities for for-profit ventures – all of which makes many within traditional K-12 public schools nervous.

It should make all of us nervous. I titled this post Eminent Domain For Public Schools because that's essentially what it is, local public schools being taken by the state and their operation delegated to third parties--third parties whose concern is not education as a public good, but as a profit center.

Children long ago became the target of corporations. Channel One invaded classrooms back in 1989 bringing advertising right into the school house. According to Michael Sandel, writing in What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits Of The Market in 1983 Companies spent $100 million on advertising to children. By 2005 that had grown to $16.8 billion. The EAA is just consolidating the market.

There are problems when education is taken out of the realm of public good and turned into a commodity though, and Sandel lists several of them in his book, not the least of which is that when children grow up in a system that has profit as the highest determinant of value; a system that rates a person's worth on his or her ability to contribute to someone's bottom line; they conflate consumer and citizen, replacing democratic values like equality, justice and fairness with market values like standardization, efficiency and profitability.

We are facing that quintessential choice our Civics teachers challenged us with, back when there were Civics classes: As a citizen in a democratic society, what do you want on your tombstone, Here Lies John Smith. He Made A Million, or Here Lies John Smith. He Made A Difference?

By educating children in a system where everything of value can be measured in dollars and cents we are teaching them there is no such thing as a legacy, no need to think about the future beyond the next profit and loss statement, and certainly no need to concern themselves with those who are less well off.

This is not the value system that brought us the Civil Rights Act, or helped end the war in Vietnam, it's the value system that brought us Citizens United and Voter ID laws aimed at disenfranchising minorities.

Greyhound Racing: A Brutal Industry That Traps Dogs And People

2013-03-29T08:09:00.000-07:00

People who support greyhound racing often complain that those opposed to their "sport" are operating from a view that is out of date. They point to the explosion of adoption programs as proof that the wholesale abuse and cruelty greyhounds once suffered are things of the past. While it is true the number of groups involved in the rescue of racing greyhounds has grown as knowledge about their plight has become more widespread, contemporary instances of mistreatment are still not hard to find (see here, here and here for example).

Breeders and trainers will exclaim that they care deeply for their dogs, have not seen instances of abject callousness and ill treatment in their experience, and even when it does occur, it's the result of "bad apples." They take this anecdotal approach to defending their industry because isolating and disconnecting individual acts from the value system of the organization as a whole enables them to avoid confronting what can euphemistically be called negative outcomes that the institutionally mandated commodification of a living creature requires.

Scholars who study the the structure and operation of institutions have found that even in organizations designed to do great harm there will be individuals who appear to act in ways that go against the system. Thus, there were individual guards who gave food or cigarettes to inmates of Nazi death camps, or certain slave owners who were generous with their slaves. Yet they still participated in an endeavor that resulted in wholesale suffering and death across entire races of people.

George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both owned slaves, and by all accounts treated them well, but that didn't stop them from understanding that the institution of slavery was at best problematic. Washington wrote, "I can only say that there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery." Jefferson echoed those thoughts when he wrote, "The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state." Yet his uneasiness with the institution of which he was a part didn't stop Jefferson from treating slaves as objects as the case of Sally Hemming illustrates.

Breeders will say that they care very much for the dogs they breed and trainers will say that they care very much for the dogs they race, and that may very well be true, but it's more like the care that causes a person to wash and wax the car on a sunny weekend and get the oil changed regularly than the care you and I feel for the bony ball of fur curled up on the couch.

Breeders care about producing the most profitable product so they put effort and time into doing that, but when the sale comes, even though they may feel a slight twinge of regret, the transaction is completed because that was the institutional reason for bringing the dog into this world in the first place. Trainers care about producing the fastest most profitable dog and put time and effort into doing that, but when that dog no longer finishes in the money, they may do everything in their power to connect it with a reputable adoption group, but the dog must go because it no longer has an institutional purpose.

Dogs who are injured and killed in this system become collateral damage, unfortunate, but an acceptable cost of doing business. Certainly trainers feel sadness when a promising dog suffers a career ending injury or is killed while racing, but it is not the same kind of devastation you or I feel at the loss of a beloved family member. It can't be, or they wouldn't be able to fill that now empty cage with another dog.

As long as the institution of greyhound racing exists the needless deaths, injury and general misuse of greyhounds will continue because that is what the industry requires, and while those within racing may feel regret, or even sadness because of it, their continued participation will guarantee that it goes on, much as the institution of slavery outlived Washington and Jefferson, despite their personal opinions.

For more information about rescued racing greyhounds looking for homes, go here. If you don't know about the plight of racing greyhounds go here.

By Way Of Introduction

2013-03-28T06:51:00.001-07:00

Welcome to Stolen Lantern. The title comes from a quote by Edgar A. Shoaff who was riffing off the famous story of Diogenes' search for an honest man. The full quote is "a cynic is a person searching for an honest man with a stolen lantern." You'll find it in a collection of quotes put together by Dr. Lawrence Peter (the Peter Principle guy) titled Peter's Quotations: Ideas For Our Time. Shoaff himself was apparently an author of small repute who died in 1993.

I like statements like that. You enter into the writer's thought with an "I got this," and soon you find yourself deep in a maze of possibilities. The cynic is dishonest, yet seeks honesty. Why? What is the relationship between truth and cynicism? What is the attraction? Soon a simple aphorism becomes a koan of sorts, reminding us that the more we think we know, the less we actually know, and doubt rather than certainty is our boon companion as we shuffle about this mortal coil.

So, making a virtue of necessity I plan to explore uncertainty, because if you don't know where you're going at least you can enjoy the trip. Reader(s) coming over from Ironicus will find this blog a little more focused and a little less irreverent. By focus I mean most posts will probably deal with two central issues: education and animal rights, both abiding themes in my life, and by less irreverent I mean not so much pointing and laughing and a little more explaining and suggesting.

I plan to keep Ironicus active for a while for when I feel the need to point and laugh, because sometimes when confronted with the cold, heartless depth of cruelty that is greyhound racing, or the arrogant ignorance of some of my fellow citizens, that's all I can do, and all they deserve.

Once again, welcome. As you can see the blog is still under construction. Join up if you wish, tell your friends, or warn your friends, or scratch your head and say, I just don't know.