The September 2015 issue of The Atlantic features a disturbing article by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt entitled “The Coddling of the American Mind.”  Subtitled “How Trigger Warnings Are Hurting Mental Health on Campus,” the authors identify, explore and highlight a current trend in higher education that they believe threatens the mental health of students and the very essence of learning that my generation, at least, would consider fundamental to what college is all about: Intellectual challenge and debate.

They begin their article by talking about microaggressions, a new buzz word on campuses that is resulting in institutional policies to ‘protect’ students from having their feelings hurt.  In an example of a faculty training session at the 10 campuses of the University of California, examples of microaggressions to be avoided included “American is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.”  In drawing a distinction between the past political correctness movement “(avoiding hate speech aimed at marginalized groups)” they suggest this trend is about “emotional well-being” in which the concern is a presumption of “an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm.”

Vindictive Protectiveness Threatens Intellectual Rigor

In attempting to turn campuses into “safe places” by shielding students from any expressions of print or speech that might be upsetting, “this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally.”  They call this “vindictive protectiveness” and their article shows how this movement is threatening the intellectual climate of higher education.

They then offer insights into how this kind of vindictive protectiveness affects students if they spend several years in a climate where the academic community protects them from slights of any kind–a bubble of sheltered protectiveness that would be the envy of  every helicopter parent in America.  But in doing so, it prevents academics from requiring students to learn how to think critically and examine their own beliefs.  The authors suggest this results in “teaching students to think pathologically.”

Tracing the development of this trend, they identify societal changes during my lifetime that have led to creating an expectation among this generation of college students that adults will protect them from all forms of harm–from playgrounds, the foods they eat in school cafeterias, from one another, and from ideas that they might find disagreeable.  And they note that the political polarization in society shows up as increasing hostility toward “ideological opponents,” and this interferes with critical thinking.

“Emotional Reasoning” Replacing Reality and Common Sense

The growing influence and acceptance of emotional reasoning, (“I feel it, therefore it must be true,”) is credited with much of this distorted and destructive thinking.  It might also, in my mind, explain the shallowness of contemporary political debate and the success of politicians and media outlets who gain stature and viewers with claims and reporting that are nothing but innuendo and willful distortion of facts, if not outright lies.  But I digress just a bit.

The authors offer several examples of how far this protectiveness goes.  At a Minnesota university, for example, an event called Hump Day that would have allowed students to pet a camel was canceled because students protested animal cruelty, the money spent, and because it was insensitive to people from the Middle East.  The inspiration for the day likely came from the TV commerical in which a camel walks around an office on Wednesday–something totally devoid of any Middle Eastern context.  This kind of catering to oversensitiveness, in which “I’m offended” becomes “an unbeatable trump card” is showing up again and again on campuses across the nation.

Trigger Warnings Defeat Cognitive Challenges

And the too-frequent requirement on professors to offer “trigger warnings” to students when a reading assignment or lecture might include something offensive is eating into professorial ability to assign content that challenges preconceptions or that deals with contemporary issues or historical truths.  They cite academics who fear complaints from students and warning letters from Deans when they assign material that can be deemed offensive by a student, particularly when they don’t include a trigger warning with the assignment.  For a professor to give an assignment that challenges a student’s preconceptions with an alternate point of view, in such a climate, can result in sanctions on the instructor.

One example I know of in secondary education is how to deal with great pieces of literature that include language that some students or adults feel privileged to complain about.  Hence the study of Tom Sawyer, in which Jim is identified by the n-word, requires a trigger warning in colleges and might be left out of a high school English class.  This American Literature classic is being dropped from syllabi and has also been published in cleansed editions in which language that is today offensive is removed.  This destroys the ability of students to deal with the society Twain writes about–it becomes a children’s story devoid of the impact Twain intended by his carefully crafted language.  And other significant works by authors like James Baldwin or Richard Wright, among others, include language and content that is, at best, controversial and could be interpreted as requiring a trigger warning or elimination from a syllabus.  (I know that my mother would have been shocked at most of Baldwin’s writings.  I’m happy she never read my college assignments or felt entitled to complain to a Dean that I was being emotionally damaged after being intellectually challenged and forced to confront the unfiltered adult world I was about to enter.)

Another literary example (I am, after all, an English Major) is Shakespeare.  If one reads his plays in Shakespearean English, it’s replete with language, innuendo, racial and ethnic references, and story lines with which students today might feel privileged to take offense.  And if one reads Shakespeare translated into modern English, frankly, it loses the depth of color that is his genius.  We usually modernize it for high school students, in part because it masks much of the risque nature of the original, and most high school English teachers gloss over the spicy elements that are still there.  If we ever hear that collegiate English majors are required to skip reading Shakespeare in the original because his words might offend, we should be mightily offended, and those responsible should be hanged, drawn, and quartered in the best of Elizabethan style.

All this brings to mind the workings of various groups in American that seek to clean up American History and make light of, or reinterpret, the impact of European white males who pursued policies that made America great by destroying the lives, cultures and civilizations of those who stood in their way.  How is it that groups feel entitled to whitewash the harsh realities of our history in order to suggest that American Exceptionalism was always a wonderfully positive element of our nation’s past and present?  Yet this happened in states all over the country who protested the proposed new AP American History syllabus, and a compromised version, rewritten to downplay the history I learned in the North in high school and in college, is the result.

Do read this article.  It should upset you at the very least and frighten you if you are an educator faced with this growing collegiate administrative wimpiness.  Up with academic rigor and down with emotional reasoning and vindictive protectiveness.  They are blots on education at every level.

]]> http://k12edtalk.com/2015/10/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/feed/ 0 http://k12edtalk.com/2015/09/humanities-education-isnt-dead-yet/ http://k12edtalk.com/2015/09/humanities-education-isnt-dead-yet/#respond Sat, 12 Sep 2015 06:21:31 +0000 http://k12edtalk.com/?p=588 Continue reading →]]> STEM Education Has Shortcomings

Those of us who graduated with Liberal Arts degrees have been pummeled by those who see STEM coursework as the only ‘legitimate’ higher education course of study.  Led by Arne Duncan and President Obama, we have been subjected to an ongoing push to offer more STEM courses in high schools and push more young people into STEM fields in higher education.  I’m a graduate of Kalamazoo College in Michigan, a high quality liberal arts college that produces a range of high performing folks in the sciences, business, economics, history, philosophy, foreign languages, and more.  It also provides opportunities for most of it’s students to study in locations across all continents, where we see the world through international eyes.  I was transformed by this liberal arts education, and I’m happy to see increasing validation of the humanities in recent articles, including Forbes and FastCompany.

Tech CEO’s Want Liberal Arts Grads

In FastCompany.com, August 28, 2014, Elizabeth Segran reports on multiple conversations with top CEO’s in tech who identify the special attributes that liberal arts grads bring to the workplace.  Quoting Steve Jobs from a 2010 interview, Jobs “famously mused that for technology to be truly brilliant, it must be coupled with artistry. ‘It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough,’ he said. ‘It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the results that make our hearts sing.’ ”

After Segran’s conversations with these CEO’s, with backgrounds in religion, existential philosophy, and East Asian Studies, she writes “… all the humanities-trained tech leaders I spoke with emphasized the importance of understanding their company’s technology inside and out. Once they have this knowledge under their belt, they have the unique ability to translate complex technical processes into clear, simple language—an important skill when dealing with investors and buyers.  She also notes that a third of Fortune 500 CEOs have liberal arts degrees, a fact that is generally overlooked by the STEM pushers.

Forbes Magazine Cover: Liberal Arts as Tech’s Hot Ticket

The August 17, 2015 cover story in Forbes Magazine updates this story line, featuring the cofounder of Slack Technologies, Stewart Butterfield, who holds a BA and MA in Philosophy.  “Studying philosophy taught me two things,” says Butterfield, sitting in his office in San Francisco’s South of Market district, a neighborhood almost entirely dedicated to the cult of coding. “I learned how to write really clearly. I learned how to follow an argument all the way down, which is invaluable in running meetings. And when I studied the history of science, I learned about the ways that everyone believes something is true–like the old notion of some kind of ether in the air propagating gravitational forces–until they realized that it wasn’t true.”

The Forbes article is full of similar reporting on the growing awareness that engineers and coders need the creativity, communication skills, interpersonal connectivity, and divergent thinking that are fundamental to the rounded education that the liberal arts embody.  Their examples of how such skills are being utilized across start-ups nationwide belie the din of liberal arts detractors who think coding is the next great literacy requirement for success,

I’ve always been puzzled by the idea that STEM is the magic bullet for America’s future.  Our society was built by Renaissance men like Thomas Jefferson, who were polymaths in their day.  He was a lawyer, agronomist, musician, scientist, philosopher, author, architect, inventor, and statesman.  True, he was an exceptional individual, but he embodied the notions of today’s liberal arts educational programs.  Let’s remember that as we consider how to keep American education focused on the whole child and on life in a democracy, not simply on narrow skills training to feed emergent corporations and technologies.

The May 6, 2015 Education Week included a few paragraphs of reporting on the just released NAEP results in US history, civics and geography tests of 2014.  These are the first tests since 2010, and show “Nation’s 8th Graders Flatline on NAEP in Social Studies Subjects.”  Should anyone be surprised? As a former Social Studies high school department chair, I’m not surprised, but I am dismayed.

Mandated Tests Don’t Care About Social Studies

In the so-called reform movement, schools have been mandated to test ELA and math, and in practical terms, nothing else matters as much as these ‘core’ subjects. While both are important, and I would argue ELA is the more important of the two (as several of my past blogs have implied) the way testing has driven ELA skills in interpretative directions with passages at increasingly more difficult reading levels per grade, social studies has been pushed to the side in schools everywhere.

Do Common Core Standards Expect Social Studies to be Taught?

One of the implied intended outcomes of CCSS is the additional emphasis on nonfiction reading and critical thinking. That suggests really creative teachers and curriculum developers might well be able to build some ELA CCSS content that uses social studies nonfiction passages to embrace the higher order thinking skills CCSS intends. Having taught both ELA and Social Studies in my career, that can be done. However, in practice, I suspect that most of the ELA materials that embrace nonfiction are not designed to teach the content of history, civics or geography (certainly not geography) to meet CCSS expectations. Being able to read and interpret nonfiction is the end in itself, while the goal of a US history course would be to understand America’s evolution as a democratic nation with all the historical wonders and wrinkles that entails.

Narrowing Curriculum

High schools still usually have relatively clear graduation requirements for US history courses. Many states still expect some version of civics as a separate course or as a part of other social studies requirements. Few expect geography these days. And as one moves back in grade levels to examine what time is spent on these content areas in earlier grades, it’s clear that since the onset of the NCLB requirements, schools have spent less and less time on subjects other than ELA and math. Some underperforming schools and too many charters are ELA and math factories. The first subject losers were anything resembling experiences that foster creativity, like art and music, drama, band and orchestra, because budgets had to focus on providing remediation programs and test preparation to meeting accountability requirements, and students in need of assistance had no time in their schedules anymore to participate in these nonacademic opportunities. It’s only gotten worse in every school where test results and mandated support programs drive the budget and the school schedule.

Suburban Schools Can Still Provide a Whole Child Education

Where poverty is minimal, the penalties that destroy a full curriculum in so many schools are less evident. Many suburban schools continue to offer a rich curriculum even while they see the numbers of children in such programs declining. Middle-class schools still struggle with budget and scheduling issues mandated for low performing students, but have a pool of better performing children with involved  parents who expect and support a rounded school experience. Rich districts rarely face these issues.

Research Shows We’re Doing This All Wrong

Some folks pay attention to research that highlights the benefits of educating the whole child, including providing art and music experiences, or socio-emotional learning experiences, just two examples of areas that consistently are found to help students do better in school, and implicit in life beyond school. Edutopia.org published this revew of Social Emotional Learning Research, for example: http://www.edutopia.org/sel-research-learning-outcomes A web search on what enhances student performance will reveal a range of programs and schools experiences that benefit learning and academic success, few of which are valued by ‘reformers’ who think test-based accountability is the answer to all our woes. Too bad our politicos never learned to read nonfiction educational research.

I read education sites all over the web, and from time to time I find one that really impresses me.  Of course it’s usually because I agree with the writer, and yesterday, while reading the education section of Alternet.org, I rediscovered Peter Greene’s blog at curmudgucation.blogspot.com  I came across it some time ago and was impressed then.  He writes the opinion blog “View From The Cheap Seats” for Education Week, and after reading an entry from his curmudgucation site entitled The Ballast I have become a fan.  He teaches high school English and is active all over the web on multiple sites, and he writes almost every day, often with multiple entries.  I am delighted by his writing style and the prolific body of work I can find that he has produced.

Charters Leave Students Behind

In The Ballast, he delivers a wonderfully inspired angle on charter schools which I will remember and use in my own arguments in favor of public schools.  Noting that some charter schools have risen above their public counterparts, but the reasons are problematic.  “How do these lucky few rise? The charter doesn’t have better teachers. In many cases the charter doesn’t have a single pedagogical technique or instructional program that is a bit different from its public school counterparts. What it has is a concentration of students who are supported, committed, and capable.”

And to get these supported, committed and capable students concentrated in their classrooms, these charters are able to leave other students behind.  The charter students  “are able to rise because the school, like the pilot of a hot air balloon, has shed the ballast, the extra weight that is holding them down.”

This charter school reality has been identified and quantified by many researchers who have studied enrollment and retention policies among charters.  They usually have fewer second language students and fewer students with disabilities, and their cohorts get smaller and smaller as students progress through grade levels.  It’s like Mitt Romney’s self-deportation immigration policy–the students that charters don’t like because they don’t perform simply disappear from the enrollment numbers, leaving those that fit and succeed in place.  These kids are the ‘ballast’ that Greene talks about here–the students that public schools must educate, but which charters are permitted to leave behind.

Charter Attrition Rates Generate Inflated Result

Some of the so-called high performing charters in New York are particularly egregious in this respect, with elementary grades enrolling a few hundred students and cohort graduation numbers of 30-40, all of whom go to college.  Diane Ravitch has highlighted this issue in Beware the Charter Attrition Game from  August of last year.  She lists multiple charters and their attrition rates, which belie the notion that they serve all students.  Greene’s concept of ballast–the students who are filtered out by charters and return to public schools.

That this is a significant problem is highlighted by Greene when he notes [Charters] “dump those students in a public school, but … take the supplies, the resources, the money, and send it on with the students [they] decided are Worth Saving. “

Bravo Peter.  I’m adding Curmudgucation to my own list of blogs worth following.

In 1986, as their website says, a group of Milwaukee area teacher had a vision.  Today, that vision of public education reform, of and for public schools, is embodied online through the Rethinking Schools website and publications.  Their Mission: Rethinking Schools is a nonprofit publisher and advocacy organization dedicated to sustaining and strengthening public education through social justice teaching and education activism. Our magazine, books, and other resources promote equity and racial justice in the classroom. We encourage grassroots efforts in our schools and communities to enhance the learning and well being of our children, and to build broad democratic movements for social and environmental justice.

I have occasionally run across this nonprofit organization through web links in the past, but I’m increasingly drawn to their work and their mission.  And I’m particularly impressed by this recent analysis of two charter school movements in New Jersey, written by Stan Karp, who is currently the Director of the Secondary Reform Project for the New Jersey Education Law Center.  Entitled “A Tale of Two Districts: The Long Reach and Deep Pockets of Corporate Education Reform,” it reviews the political and corporate power that has pushed charter schools in Newark and Montclair, N.J. over the objections of local community members, parents, and teachers.

N.J. Politics Are More Typical of Urban School Reform Than Not

Karp shows that the power politics and intentionally distorted justifications of pushing charters onto Newark and Montclair, one poor and failing, the other more mixed but not a failing district, are more alike than different.  Newark was taken over by the state many years ago, and efforts by local citizens to push back on the closing of schools by politically appointed school leadership demonstrates the arrogance of state officials and Governor Christie.  These state appointees were drawn from the ranks of  charter proponents, and their political clout rises up through the Governor’s office all the way to Arne Duncan (who is in bed with the same pro-charter corporate forces).  Karp shows the powerlessness of the local community to control their educational futures.

And Montclair, Karp writes, suffers the same tone-deaf to community member interests problems as Newark.  Interestingly, several significant noational pro-charter leaders live in Montclair.  I suspect their own children are likely to be enrolled in schools other than Montclair, despite the district’s historical good reputation.

Funding Issues Remain Significant

Karp also mentions the issues of funding for N.J. schools, including the chronic underfunding of Newark and the declining support from the state for Montclair.  (For more details on underfunding in N.J., see the work of ed finance professor Bruce Baker of Rutgers, at his educational blog School Finance 101. He writes frequently on issues of inequitable school finance in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, and has wonderfully details fiscal and test data analyses to demonstrate his arguments.  His work is mentioned by Karp in this analysis.)

Growing Solidarity Among Anti-Charter Advocates?

At the end of his article, Karp suggest “The seeds of solidarity are starting to sprout.”  As we see again and again that underfunded public schools are being held up to scrutiny in order to promote or foster anti-public education reforms, perhaps more public opposition will be a gathering storm that can slow down this arrogant privatization movement.  This article is a good read–full of historical analysis and clearly linking the underlying themes and some of the people involved.  Thank you to Stan Karp and Rethinking Schools!

This week, evidence of growing public opposition to the programs of the New York Stated Education Department, and the meddling of Governor Cuomo, is evident across the state.  Perhaps as many as 15% of parents statewide have had their children refuse to take the ELA tests, and on Long Island, with 120+ districts, it appears 43% of students refused the tests.  And these numbers are before final counts are in.  Now, observers are awaiting the opt-out numbers for Math, which starts shortly.  It could be that numbers for math will be higher.

Media Opinion Pages Starting to be Critical

Media sources, which have generally been low-key on educational issues in New York, are now noticing the disruptive behavior of the public, and editorial comments are beginning to reflect or at least highlight the public opposition.  They are no longer simply accepting the State Education Department’s efforts to down-play the opposition by suggesting the impact is neglible.  It’s not.  Two newspapers are particularly clear so far.  In Albany, Fred LeBrun, who writes for the Albany Times Union, regularly comments on education issues.  His April 18 commentary is “Way out of touch and out of their minds.”

Since this paper doesn’t permit full Internet access without a subscription, here’s a sample of LeBrun’s observations:  “Regardless how many show up for the math tests, what the parents have done so far is as strong a repudiation of national and state public policy as we have seen in a long time. These parents have given a resounding ”no” to the president, our governor, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and an entire ruling cabal of moronic billionaires convinced that public education can only be elevated by punitive measures and the cold imposition of numbers in a database.”

Tisch must step aside

The Journal News, a newspaper serving the Lower Hudson region, posted a call for the resignation of the New York State Board of Regents Chancellor, Meryl Tisch, on August 19.  This article includes several links to additional news about the opt-out movement, and prior editorials on the NY politics of opposition to testing.  They make several points.  The essential issue they identify is the arrogance of Governor Cuomo and State Education Department leaders who thought their reform programs could be forced upon school districts and parents around the state.  They write “But our state leadership has failed to sell its brand of change, and the fallout has been dramatic and potentially debilitating to the entire system. The arrogance of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, former Education Commissioner John King and, yes, Tisch, has alienated too many parents and educators. The people who are responsible for educating our children each day – classroom teachers, principals, administrators, school board members – have railed for years against state policies that drive up local costs but fail to improve instruction.”  This editorial is worth accessing so that you can click to read other relevant links.

Common Core Gets Lost in the Controversy

Governor Cuomo is a strong backer of the Common Core State Standards.  Sadly, he has bought into the notion that they are appropriate means to measure teacher effectiveness, a task they were not designed to do.  He recently pushed through legislation that changes the percent that test results play in teacher evaluation, with little to no input from the State Education Department, which had worked hard with districts to design an evaluation system to meet Federal Race to the Top requirements.  Nor did his effort have input from the public, from educational researchers, or from educators in K-12 schools.  The pressure on school districts to teach to the new Common Core tests will be intensified, and as test results on the new standards are reported, scores will be going down, making schools look bad.

Parents, however, understand far more about their schools than the Governor, and this is reflected in parental confidence in Long Island schools, where the opt-out movement is strongest.  In many school districts, falling test scores do not reflect a decline in district effectiveness–they reflect changes in the difficulty of tests and in testing to Common Core standards before the standards had time to be effectively implemented.

One result is the nation-wide opposition to Common Core standards.  I support them, though I agree the implementation in most states was forced on them too quickly, and the development of instructional materials and retraining of teachers to address the Common Core lags badly almost everywhere.  Parents conflate testing with the  Common Core.  The failure of Common Core might well arise from parental awareness that the way testing has been used in teacher evaluation, due to Federal mandates, is destroying the broad opportunities for children to enjoy art, music, and a range of creative content in all classrooms due to the pressure of producing good English and Math scores.  Teaching to the test is destroying the broad quality of American schools and replacing it with scores in two subjects.  Parents know this is wrong.

It’s truly sad to see these developments, in which politicians are running public education on a corporate model driven by two test scores.  This represents a complete disconnect between educational policy and research on learning and what is being forced on public schools across the nation.

The Horace Mann League of the USA and the National Superintendents Roundtable, a group of district leaders from 30 states, released “The Iceberg Effect, An International Look at Often-Overlooked Educational Indicators” this January. The author, James J Harvey, the Executive Director of the Roundtable, gathered the latest 5 years of data on nine economically similar nations: the USA, Canada, the United Kingdom, China, Finland, Japan, France, Germany, and Italy. The study examined 24 indicators in six areas related to children and education.  A graphic in the executive summary shows an iceberg, and above the water are student and system outcomes, the usual test scores used in international comparisons.  But this study also looks underwater at the rest of the iceberg, where we find support for schools, support for young families, inequity and inequality, and social stress and violence (p. 5 of executive summary.)

Test Results Don’t Measure Educational Success

The summary report’s introduction says: “International assessment results are generally presented as scores, ratings, or rankings, creating what might be called a scoreboard mentality. But thoughtful private and public leaders know instinctively that a range of social, economic, and cultural conditions affect those numbers.”  And a few lines later: “It is a mistake to believe that one number can tell us all we need to know.”

A Wider Balance of Data Makes Better Comparisons

The study grants up to 40 points available in each of the 24 indicators, and ranks the nine nations by indicator. What strikes Harvey is how each nation looks different depending on which indicators are being considered. For example, the US has the least social stress (violence and drug-related deaths, teen births, foreign-born youth, etc.) among the nine, and ranks first in system outcomes overall. Harvey suggests that looking at PISA scores or TIMMS scores alone is not a particularly well-balanced way to think about the success of a nation’s educational programs. There’s more to producing valuable outcomes for schools than numbers.

This is indeed a refreshing reexamination of international measures that suggest societal outcomes that are important in determining the success of a society. It’s clear that for many years, certainly since there has been an increasing emphasis on comparing educational outcomes on international test results, American schools have been hammered by criticism of public schools as failures because our national test scores are not the highest in the world. How refreshing to look at data that is being interpreted to show that our overall outcomes are, in fact, world class.

Key ‘Reformers’ Are Not Objective Educators

The reform movement has been largely funded and driven by an investor class of businessmen that see high numbers (profits, or Return On Equity) as the only measure of success. It’s backed by well-intentioned public figures (Bill Gates, the Waltons, Eli Broad, etc.) who are not trained educators.  What drives these individuals and groups to turn towards education as a field to criticize?

When hedge fund managers look at schools as a manufacturing process and promote the idea that high test scores define success, they have downgraded education from a means to develop citizens to a way to produce a widget to fill a slot in their business model. But increasingly, their business models are not centered on doing good for Americans, but  on making a profit for their company and for themselves, regardless of the impact on society. They are not into development of human capital. They push H1B visa so they can import foreign skilled workers at low wages instead of hiring Americans with the same skills who are under- and unemployed. They don’t want to spend the capital to improve the living conditions and employment opportunities in our inner cities, but they want to blame bad schools and bad teachers for the societal ills of those impoverished communities. They are not problem solvers dedicated to the hard work of improving lives.

I stray, however, from The Iceberg Effect. The full 58 page report, with the data, is a refreshing reminder that test scores do not define a strong society or an effective support system that builds citizens for the future.  Check it out here.

In Why Do Some Schools Feel Like Prison? (Education Week, January 28, 2015), Samina Hadi-Tabassum, an associate professor of education at Dominican University, River Forest, IL, comments that in her 20 years of working of mentoring new teachers in Chicago, she now notices a “cultural shift” among schools that are predominantly African-American. She is distressed by the shift, particularly within the turnaround schools that have been taken over under the reform movement backed by Mayor Emanuel.

Hadi-Tabassum makes particular note of the “eerie silence” in the schools, with lines of children in uniform poses with “fingers pressed against their lips” and eyes front, which, in her mind, “mimic prison lines, and the teachers’ efforts seem focused on ensuring that students do not talk to each other and do not walk outside the line.”

She observes that throughout the school day, obedience is an “immense” focus of the time and energy in these schools. As she visits the schools where her first-year teachers are working, she finds that her interactions with first graders in the cafeteria draws a reproach from a teacher there, who reminds the table there is no talking during lunch.

She reports that one of her first-year teachers was admonished by her principal for having  students come to the board to engage in a literacy activity. The principal told her that 1st graders make too much noise at the board and the activity was not appropriate.

Comparing this to the atmosphere of vocal and enthusiastic, playful students in the majority white school where her own children were enrolled, Hadi-Tabassum mentions that even her teacher students recognize that in a majority white school, such behaviorally rigid conditions would not be found.  She questions why there are such marked differences in what is viewed acceptable between the two schools.

Concerns About Discipline in Reform Education Models  Is Not New

She is not the first to question the rigidity of some of the reform formats that appear to be so common within high minority schools. Critics of such rigid disciplinary formats have gone so far to suggest that the rigidity is a not-too-subtle way to prepare children for the mundane and repetitious formats that are increasingly transforming the working lives of many Americans. Why permit spontaneity when your future will be pulling stock in an Amazon warehouse or putting goods made in China onto shelves in Walmart?  Obedience to authority, according to those hedge fund billionaires who see workers as cogs in their profit machine, prepares today’s minority children for this corporate future, and the most cynical critics of schools that engage and promote these rigid models suggest this might be intentional.  I know that I could not, as a teacher, thrive or survive in such a rigid environment. I think it is detrimental to child development.

In a somewhat similar vein, some have begun to question the way “grit” is being applied in education, suggesting that it is “a racist construct and has harmed low-income students by crowding out a focus on providing children with the supports they deserve and the more flexible educational approach enjoyed by many of their more affluent counterparts.”   (Education Week blog, 1/24/15).  Others defend the concept and suggest that the way the research on grit is being interpreted and then implemented in many schools is a misapplication of the research.

Charter School Discipline Exposed?

Jeff Bryant, writing first in Salon.com, wrote a strong review of charters schools highlighting their discipline practices.  He links to much investigative work of others, including this observation about KIPP schools, where blogger Mike Klonsky “noted the nationwide chain’s practice of using a behavioral technique, called “Slant,” that “instructs students to sit up, listen, ask questions, nod and track the speaker with their eyes.” It’s “military style behavior,” renowned educator Debra Meier remarked on her blog at Education Week.”

Is such strong-arm education what we need in America?  I think not.  Yes, discipline has it’s place, but schools should reflect the developmental interests of all facets of childhood, not simply obedience to authority for it’s own sake.

The Southern Education Foundation published (January, 2015) a report showing that low income students became the majority population in US schools in 2013.  From the report:

“In 40 of the 50 states, low income students comprised no less than 40 percent of all public schoolchildren. In 21 states, children eligible for free or reduced-price lunches were a majority of the students in 2013.

Most of the states with a majority of low income students are found in the South and the West. Thirteen of the 21 states with a majority of low income students in 2013 were located in the South, and six of the other 21 states were in the West.”

This is indeed a startling development, but given the economic disruption cause by the economic downturn of 2008, it isn’t surprising.  Working and middle class families have had virtually no wage growth during the economic recovery, and increasingly conservative state governments (and some ‘moderate’ governments like New York) cut school funding significantly.  Most states have not returned to 2008 funding levels, and many continued to cut funding well after the recovery was significant.

National Center for Education Statistics Shows Continued Drop in Funding

NCES data for 2012 (released in January, 2015) shows that 2012 per pupil funding dropped for a second year.  The Ed Week report link here includes links to data sets and a related report from NCES detailing their findings.  Of note is the comment that charters spend less per pupil, which sounds economically important but totally neglects to point out that personnel costs at charters will, for several years into the future, be lower than public schools due to the nature of charter employees.  They are younger, less experienced, and have fewer (or virtually no) fringe benefits.  With public school personnel costs amounting to 66% of per pupil expenditures, and fringe benefits adding 24%, the ability of charters to spend less per pupil is a function of their lower personnel costs.

Money Matters in Schools

Critics of public schools constantly harp that increased per pupil expenditures don’t improve student performance and that higher local school tax rates decrease property values.  Professor John Mackenzie of the University of Delaware, and a school board member of the Christina schools in Delaware, looked at these questions in are article you can find online: Public School Funding and Performance.  He examined the two claims above, plus the combination of state funds and local school taxes and the combined effect on student performance on SAT scores and NAEP results.  Contrary to the critics, he found a clear positive correlation between funding and test performance.

Incomplete Analyses Show No Increase in Scores With Increased Expenditures

Where prior studies of SAT scores suggested that more money does not produce higher scores, Dr. Mackenzie’s more thorough analysis includes a test participation rate variable that significant changes the results of the analysis.  When test participation rates are included, 80 percent of the difference in SAT 1 verbal and math scores between states can be attributed to per pupil expenditures.  This explodes the myth that money doesn’t count!  Graphically, Figures 3-6 at the end of Mackenzie’s research illustrate multiple significant facts about the positive effect of spending on student performance.  Figure 3 is participation adjusted SAT scores vs. per pupil spending, Figure 4 is per pupil vs. aggregated NAEP scores, Figure 5 is spending vs. disaggregated 4 and 8 NAEP scores, and Figure 6 is property values vs. local school tax rates, where higher property taxes for schools correlate with higher property values, which Mackenzie suggests shows that home ownership and the quality of local schools go hand in hand.

“When Will We Ever Learn?”

Of course, I’m a child of the 60’s and folk music lyrics were a part of my integrated English and social studies middle school teaching repertoire.  So is the wisdom that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics.  The current politicizing of education is replete with poorly designed research critical of public education, too often published by think tanks funded by foundations and donors dedicated to pulling public money into privitized educational programs.  Independent educational researchers who have been against the use of testing to discredit schools and research suggesting money doesn’t matter have been around since the rise of NCLB under the second Bush administration.  But their work was buried under the well-funded attacks on public education that fill an increasingly irresponsible media, where flashy reporting trumps responsible journalism.   Now that public opposition to test-based accountability is rampant across the nation, some of this research is seeing a breaking dawn.  Let’s get back to basing educational policy on research that is free of big money biases.

In a brand new T|H|E| Journal article, I’m reading about an open educational resources initiative involving 11 states and a handful of nonprofit organizations that have been involved in the Common Core and/or in developing classroom content as a part of their educational reform work.  This appears to be brand new, and on the K-12 OER Collaborative site, the group is inviting interested parties to register for a December 3 webinar that will provide details about their RFP process.  They are seeking proposals to meet this goal, from their RFP online description:

The K–12 OER Collaborative seeks proposals to create full-course, high-quality OER supporting K–12 mathematics and English language arts/literacy, aligned with state learning standards. Led by a group of eleven states, the K–12 OER Collaborative initiative is supported with expertise from state content specialists, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), Creative Commons, Lumen Learning, The Learning Accelerator (TLA), Achieve, the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), the State Instructional Materials Review Association (SIMRA), and the Association of State Supervisors of Mathematics (ASSM).

Legitimately Open Source

I’m relatively suspicious of content development work around the CCSS, which I think is reasonable given the vast criticisms of CCSS as an initiative pushed by for-profit publishers and testing companies.  I’ve looked at the participating organizations and I’m relatively pleased to say that this actually seems like a true open-source initiative.  The groups involved actually are giving away their materials, and with only one exception, don’t appear to be run by hedge-fund founders with anti-public school leanings.

We won’t see results for some time.  They are looking for Letters of Intent by January 9, 2015, so they are a long way from having content ready to give away.  But they appear to me to be on the right track — CCSS coursework with classroom formative assessment and instructional feedback for teachers that clues them into next steps to move kids forward.  If this works, the hold on costly course content by publishers might actually be broken at last.  What a dream!

Anti-Federal Interference Forces Have Yet To Speak

Of course, the anti-CCSS and anti-national curriculum forces might well jump on this with all their fury.  Eleven state education departments and associations are in the collaborative, along with the Council of Chief State School Officers and Achieve, who are credited/blamed for the CCSS.  So, to opponents of the CC, this new effort will be seen as another federal take-over and an effort to build a national curriculum.

Personally, I think a national curriculum makes lots of sense, but the chances of even 11 states going so far as to accept and support the implementation of a uniform curriculum seems remote.  The group expects their content to be flexible enough that states and local districts can tweak it to localize it, so there’s hope that the process might escape the political drama that dooms any efforts at national educational initiatives.  Fortunately, with the deep south and Texas unrepresented in the group, there is some hope that decent curriculum can evolve.  Political forces that would water down CCSS to suit state interpretations of sensitive topics might not have great influence on this group.

Time will tell, and this is an initiative that has transformative potential in this reform era.  Let’s hope the reality lives up to these initial goals.