I am watching the rain fall on a chill winter's day, and I am thinking.
Yesterday morning I had the joyous opportunity to play with letters and words with kindergarten kids in three different schools in Albemarle County, Virginia.
They showed me how to make a J.
I challenged them with a special "J-word" - Jelloricious.
This was special. Special because, though I am not in Virginia this week, I could join through the contemporary technologies which make the world of these children something unique, and special because, unless you routinely see "school,' "education," and our planet through the eyes of young children, you are in no position to discuss education and educational poverty. The gift these five-year-olds give to me is a gift which makes my work possible.
But yesterday morning I also became aware of the horrible evil playing out in a Connecticut suburb, a place close to the homes of friends, a place close to the homes of dearly loved cousins - not that that matters, really - but a place any of us might find ourselves... as parents or teachers.
A mentally ill young white suburban male - does this sound familiar - who did not get the help he probably needed in school, whose family was spread out too far, whose father spent three hours a day commuting to a job I know was longer than eight hours in length, whose - well, we'll never know most of it but we know it all too well, walked into an elementary school, an elementary school secured with all the silly security systems politicians and media-trained parents demanded after Columbine, and murdered 20 babies, five and six-year-olds, and six of those "lazy, unionized" adults our leaders say work in our schools.
Why? There's no answer. I could tell you about profiling the paranoia which grows in certain isolated minds, about how that morphs into conspiracy, merges with America's peculiar machismo love of heavy weapons, and turns lethal, but that's the stuff of stupid Today Show interviews now. It doesn't matter.
There may be answers in American gun laws. America's leaders are far more interested in arresting 19-year-olds with beer cans than people with assault weaponry - "killing machines" is the only term we can use. (A police academy instructor once told us, "There may be legitimate reasons to own a single shot rifle, but the only purpose of handguns and multi-shot weapons is the murder of humans.") There is a great deal of the mantra of the American right wing in this, "the "right-to-life" ends at birth." We like to pretend, in America, that we are heroes instead of an increasingly frightened population, terrified of our own shadows, so we cling to our guns as a faux masculinity, unwilling to take any necessary steps which might make our children safer.
There may be answers in our health care system as well. As middle class health insurance has been gutted by greedy corporations and moronic state legislators, mental health supports have dropped. As school budgets have been cut so has counseling support. I remember being amazed, when I first went to work in a high school, that we had one social worker for 1800 adolescents. Many football coaches, one social worker. It is only because of Obamacare that this shooter could have even had health insurance as a 20-year-old not in college, and, you know, Obamacare is a socialist plot.
The Twilight Zone - The Bewitching Pool - not every suburban idyll is idyllic
There may be answers in our desires for status. I do not know if I would have spent a great deal of money to live in a place which left me with three hours of commuting each day, and only minutes with my children. I earned very little during the time I had to devote to parenting, but I was there. And I'm glad my son and I watched TV together and ate dinner together almost every night. I'm not trying to make anyone feel guilt here, but I think we might need to examine our priorities, to stop laughing at the Greeks or Irish because they value time home with their families more than money and 3,000 square foot homes on half acre lots. I think we need to decide whether our time is better spent in our adult pursuits or in parenting. I think we need to wonder about living in neighborhoods instead of subdivisions.
President Obama
And there may need to be a rethink about how we act when our kids are in trouble. Do we protect our reputation or do we get help?
But, as I watch today's rain, I guess the biggest question is our priorities as a society. I understand that I, as someone who hates guns - I carried one every day for my job, I'd never do that again - its no big deal for me to give up guns if it makes kids safer, but if guns are your love, your hobby, your passion, would you make that choice? I know every tax dollar I pay "hurts" - but I pay, as Michigan's late great Governor George Romney said, "because its my responsibility." I'd rather pay ten more bucks and have a psychologist in every school. I'd rather pay another ten bucks more and make sure the teenager on the next block over has the access to great mental health services. I'd rather pay more at a store which offers benefits to my retail-employed neighbors than shop at Walmart. I'd rather drive a car built by an American unionized worker because I know they have the salary and benefits they need to take care of their families and have dignity in their lives. And I'd rather do what I do with schools than make a lot of money.
I'm hardly a saint. That's not the point. The point is that from every direction, the White House, the Republicans in Congress, America's governors, the Koch Brothers, even Andrew Cuomo (who, like Mitt Romney, was raised to know better), and especially corporate America, children in our society have been pushed to the back of our priorities list. We worry about taxes, and rights, and unions and socialism, but maybe the first question should be, "what about our children?"
We are hurting right now. Horribly hurting. It is beyond our imaginations. But it will go on and on like this until we choose to make different decisions.
There is nothing a school policy or any school security can do about this. This is a society which needs to ask itself some very deep questions.
Because when I next interact with five-year-olds, I do not want to look at them with fear in my heart. I do not want to do that.
President Obama baffles me. He is clearly an incredibly intelligent guy, for the most part he believes in what I might call, "the right things," he's highly educated, and the child of incredibly educated, curious parents, he has lived in a variety of places which should have given him a global perspective...
And yet...
Listen, Barack Obama isn't amoral like Mitt Romney or immoral like Newt Gingrich or a potential Taliban leader like Rick Santorum or even a guy totally confused about the meaning of "society" like Ron Paul, but he appears, as I've thought about it, to lack anything resembling empathy.
"At a time when other countries are doubling down
on education, tight budgets have forced States to lay off thousands of
teachers. We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a
classroom by over $250,000. A great teacher can offer an escape from
poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance. Every person in
this chamber can point to a teacher who changed the trajectory of their
lives. Most teachers work tirelessly, with modest pay, sometimes
digging into their own pocket for school supplies - just to make a
difference.
"Teachers matter. So instead of
bashing them, or defending the status quo, let's offer schools a deal.
Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the
best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with
creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace
teachers who just aren't helping kids learn.
"We
also know that when students aren't allowed to walk away from their
education, more of them walk the stage to get their diploma. So tonight,
I call on every State to require that all students stay in high school
until they graduate or turn eighteen.
"When
kids do graduate, the most daunting challenge can be the cost of
college. At a time when Americans owe more in tuition debt than credit
card debt, this Congress needs to stop the interest rates on student
loans from doubling in July. Extend the tuition tax credit we started
that saves middle-class families thousands of dollars. And give more
young people the chance to earn their way through college by doubling
the number of work-study jobs in the next five years.
"Of
course, it's not enough for us to increase student aid. We can't just
keep subsidizing skyrocketing tuition; we'll run out of money. States
also need to do their part, by making higher education a higher priority
in their budgets. And colleges and universities have to do their part
by working to keep costs down. Recently, I spoke with a group of college
presidents who've done just that. Some schools re-design courses to
help students finish more quickly. Some use better technology. The point
is, it's possible. So let me put colleges and universities on notice:
If you can't stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from
taxpayers will go down. Higher education can't be a luxury - it's an
economic imperative that every family in America should be able to
afford.
"Let's also remember that hundreds of
thousands of talented, hardworking students in this country face another
challenge: The fact that they aren't yet American citizens. Many were
brought here as small children, are American through and through, yet
they live every day with the threat of deportation. Others came more
recently, to study business and science and engineering, but as soon as
they get their degree, we send them home to invent new products and
create new jobs somewhere else
"That doesn't make sense."
OK, now, piece by piece:
It is clear that Barack Obama cannot be bothered to do the math when the impact is on people unlike his family.
The Big Mac Effect - and - its the teachers' fault: "We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a
classroom by over $250,000. A great teacher can offer an escape from
poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance." This is the Horatio Alger nonsense peddled by the American right for years. There is nothing wrong with our schools, if only those lazy, unionized teachers were better... poverty would disappear. First, the President bases his claim on a suspect study which does indeed suggest that a "great" teacher (that is, one who raises test scores) might raise the weekly earnings of an impoverished student by almost enough to buy a Big Mac each week.
It is surprising, in light of all the publicity, that the differences
produced by the high value-added teachers are relatively small. Baker
shows that the income gains are only about $250 a year over a 40-year
working span for each of the students.
As [Rutgers University Professor Bruce] Baker writes: "One of the big quotes in the New York Times article is: 'Replacing a poor teacher with an average one would raise a
single classroom's lifetime earnings by about $266,000, the economists
estimate.' This comes straight from the research paper. BUT ... let's
break that down. It's a whole classroom of kids. Let's say ... for
rounding purposes, 26.6 kids if this is a large urban district like NYC.
Let's say we're talking about earning careers from age 25 to 65 or
about 40 years. So, $266,000/26.6 = $10,000 lifetime additional earnings
per individual. Hmmm ... no longer catchy headline stuff. Now, per
year? $10,000/40 = $250. Yep, about $250 per year."
Obama's disregard for the facts when it comes to escaping poverty is only one example in this one quote of his empathy and understanding problem. "A great teacher can offer an escape from
poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance," which, obviously, implies that the reason we have so many people in poverty right now is that we don't have many great teachers. Take that all you fools who waste your days with our children. Now, yes, to be honest, we don't have great teachers everywhere, just as we don't have great people everywhere in any job - even President - and I'm the first person to criticize bad teaching, but, Mr. Obama, teachers are not the cause of poverty.
"The nation - or at least its politicians, its pundits and its
billionaires - has made this debate about labor (read unions) by
atomizing this debate down to the teacher level. And while there is room
for conversation there, it misses the larger picture. Our schools are
structurally dysfunctional places which, therefore, makes teaching and
learning much harder than it needs to be, so that teachers -- and
students -- have to succeed despite the system, rather than because of
it.
"As long as high school students have to travel to eight different
classes where eight different teachers talk about grading / standards /
learning in eight different ways, students will spend far too much
trying to figure out the adults instead of figuring out the work. When
that happens, too many students will fall through the cracks and fail.
If we built schools where there was a common language of teaching and
learning and common systems and structures so that kind people of good
faith can bring their ideas and creativity and passion to bear within
those systems and structures and help kids learn, we will find that more
teachers can be the kind of exemplary teachers that Mr. Kristof wants.
"As long as there is little to no time in the high school schedule for
teachers and students to see and celebrate each other's shared humanity,
too many students will feel that school is something that is done to
them, that teachers care more about their subjects than they do about
the kids. As long as teachers have 120-150 kids on their course roster,
and there is little continuity year to year so that relationships cannot
be maintained, too many students will be on their own when they
struggle. If we build schools where teachers and students have time to
relate to one another as people - if we create pathways for students and
teachers to know each other over time, so that every child knows they
have an adult advocate in their school, we make schools more human --
and more humane - for all who inhabit them.
"Let's stop falling victim to the soft thinking that just finding more
"great teachers" and getting rid of all the bad ones is the way to
reform education and start asking ourselves - "How do we create schools
that make it easier for all students and teachers to shine?"'
"None discussed the need to address the growing funding gap between rich and poor school districts,
and the resulting lack of equitable opportunities for disadvantaged
kids to achieve the same goals as every other child in Michigan. Of
course not, since that would not be self-serving panning to their
respective constituencies.
"It’s ironic that the legislature and governor would tout the term “best practices” while at the same time they employ some of the worst practices in public school funding. Purposely ignoring the needs of disadvantaged students,
who by the way are expected to achieve the same goals as students from
more affluent areas, is not what I or any person of intelligence would
consider to be a best practice."
Simply put, Mr. President, perhaps if you and our national leaders start to do your job regarding our children, great teachers will be able to do their job, and, I'll bet, a whole lot more teachers will look "great."
The Hypocrite - or - why does Barack Obama think we're stupid?:"Teachers matter. So instead of
bashing them, or defending the status quo, let's offer schools a deal.
Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the
best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with
creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace
teachers who just aren't helping kids learn." Really? Why would this man assume that we are all "that dumb." Does he think we have not been watching the work of his Department of Education since 2009? The mandates, the requirements, the curriculum written by Pearson and friends. Obama and those governing the American states have denied us the resources children need in order to cut Mitt Romney's tax bill. Teacher pay has been slashed in many places, class sizes have grown, budgets shrunk, meanwhile, do anything Arne Duncan and his Ministry of Re-education doesn't like, and you'll be labeled a failure.
Edu-Incarceration - or, why would anyone stay in an Arne Duncan school if it wasn't the law:"So tonight,
I call on every State to require that all students stay in high school
until they graduate or turn eighteen." Well, there's the answer. Our schools have become miserable dungeons of worksheets and tests under the Obama Administration, and many are deciding to Walk Out, so the solution lies in one more giant step toward criminalizing adolescence. We can't be bothered to create better schools, but we sure can lock the kids in.
Yes, I know the President, the son of two PhD students and a private school student who is now a private school parent, cannot comprehend children not being in school. It is simply beyond his rather inflexible grasp, but he ought to at least know that coercion is not the answer. "The president’s proposal is therefore merely the latest example of our
tendency to craft policies that address the symptom, and ignore the
root. And that’s not change I can believe in," says Sam Chaltain in the Washington Post. Mr. Clueless about university costs:"So let me put colleges and universities on notice:
If you can't stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from
taxpayers will go down." This is tough for an Ivy League graduate, I know, and to make it all funnier, good ol' Justin Hamilton, Arne Duncan's Press Secretary - @EDPressSec - DMed during the speech to insist that I was wrong - that universities were spending more than ever,1 but those in Washington might want to know that the actual cost of running public universities has been going down. Those who have been on public campuses during this administration have seen budgets - yes Mr. President and Little Justin - that's the total cost of running the institutions slashed.
Here's why tuition has gone up boys. These "State Universities" which were once strongly supported by their governments don't get that kind of support anymore. "In the 1970s, the state covered three-fourths of university costs and the rest was covered by tuition. Now it’s almost reversed– state
funding provides one-quarter and the rest is tuition," says Michael Boulus, executive director of the Presidents Council, State
Universities of Michigan, with, "funding for higher education has been
reduced by [an additional] 15 percent for 2012... higher education has lost a billion dollars in state aid
over the past decade, amounting to cuts of more than $2,000 per student."
Yes, we need lower costs Mr. President, but the way to do that is not to threaten our universities as you threaten Iran. Not all of us can - or even want to - go to the places you were educated and taught.
You know Mr. President, there were probably parts of your speech which I might have approved of. I surely, for example, appreciate the difference between you and Mr. Romney et al on the automotive industry. I favor, unlike Republicans, people paying reasonable taxes. I wish work were taxed less and sitting at home living off unearned money was taxed more...
But it isn't just that I work in education which makes me so angry about your complete lack of empathy, your complete lack of understanding regarding our children and our schools. I am angry because you are leading an assault on our future, and you are doing it simply because you will not open your eyes.
I expect better from you Mr. President. I really do.
- Ira Socol 1 - "You don't have your facts straight (though that's not new). Sticker price and net price have skyrocketed." from @EDPressSec around 10:00 pm on January 24, 2012
Facebook began in the toxic social environment of the Ivy League... The Social Network as a ranking system, if I win, you lose
Mark Zuckerberg isn't really an evil guy, as I think the film The Social Network made quite clear. He is simply a guy without the social skills which would allow him to understand the impact of his work. I don't just say that because I watched the film, I know people who know Mark, surely who knew Mark growing up. He is a great success in many things, but has always been a total failure with humanity, which makes it unfortunate that he created a tool with so much impact on humanity. Ah well, that is simply not a rare thing. Mitt Romney, who seems about to be chosen by the Republican Party to run for president of the United States seems completely unaware of what a human is, despite growing up with a remarkably humane father. Our leaders, whether from the privileged economic background of David Cameron or the privileged intellectual background of Barack Obama, all seem to struggle with this. We know this, the exceptions who can actually communicate in two directions with other humans, whether Robert Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, or Tony Blair, stand out in shocking contrast against their "peers."
One of the things which comes with this lack of humanity in our leadership is a belief in human competition which is wholly at odds with actual human experience - when that competition has not been aggressively trained in to people. Most humans do not really compete in their family groups, their "tribes," their "clans," or even their workplaces. Most people try to cooperate, to build things together, to move forward together. "[T]here are theoretical reasons to suppose that mentalizing demands of cooperation and competition differ in some aspects,"says an fMRI study from 2004, "In case of competition, the opponent’s upcoming behavior is less predictable than in the case of cooperation in which there is a clear expectation for the behavior of the other agent. Research ... demonstrated that one’s own actions are facilitated when actions of the other are at the disposal of the self. This is the case in the cooperation trials, but exactly the opposite during the competition trials."
In other words, though both competition and cooperation are "natural," cooperation is not just more efficient for humans - "In accordance with evidence from evolutionary psychology as well as from developmental psychology, we argue that cooperation is a socially rewarding process ... these arguments are consistent with the hypothesis that executive functions evolved to serve social planning in primates and, in humans, are applied to both physical world and the social realm" - but that we see with less prediction - we see more clearly and innovatively - in cooperative mode than in competitive mode.
Cooperation is not something foreign to the human race.
I'm certain that Mitt Romney once knew why Mormons chose the beehive as Utah's symbol, but life in the culture of Harvard and Bain Capital stripped that knowledge away.
Richerson, Boyd and Henrich (2002) call this the "tribal social instincts hypothesis," "Humans are prone to cooperate," they say, "even with strangers," yet, the enculturalization is key to these behaviors, "The elegant studies by Richard Nisbett’s group show how people’s affective and cognitive styles become intimately entwined with their social institutions. Because such complex traditions are so deeply ingrained, they are slow both to emerge and to decay. ... The slow rate of institutional change means that different populations experiencing the same environment and using the same technology often have quite different institutions."
Mark Zuckerberg, like most of our leadership, grew up in the rather anti-human confines of the wealthy, Wall Street obsessed, suburb. In these places where the institutions of the culture have embraced selfishness and competition in all things as a "good." Though, yes, "Human societies represent a spectacular outlier with respect to all other animal species because they are based on large-scale cooperation among genetically unrelated individuals" (Fehr and Fischbacher 2004), the social norming those authors describe seem to overwhelm the natural, creating places in which competition, in every single thing, is trained in from birth. My kid's Apgar score is higher than your kids, and onward and upward to 5,000 square foot homes for four people and Mercedes-Benz station wagons in the driveway, and $5,000 commercial ranges in kitchens that are turned on twice a year, and SAT test tutors and paid preparers for those Harvard applications.
In that world, as the Zuckerberg character in Aaron Sorkin's film makes clear in the first scene, being in one of the most prestigious fraternities of the most prestigious university in the nation is simply not enough, because it is not the "most of the most." Now Zuckerberg has neurological issues (I'm pretty sure) which make this especially difficult for him, but no matter the brain wiring, the world of Harvard and Harvard-like places is built on this essential set of what might be called personality disorders. A "zero-sum" world in which your success is only possible through the (relative) failure of those around you.
"It is a revolutionary world we live in. Governments repress their
people; and millions are trapped in poverty while the nation grows
rich; and wealth is lavished on armaments.For the fortunate among us, there is the temptation to
follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial
success so grandly spread before those who enjoy the privilege of
education. But that is not the road history has marked for us. The future does not belong to those who are content with
today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike.
Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason and courage
in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of American
society." - Robert Francis Kennedy, 1968
We need a different kind of leadership in education. "The future does not belong to those who are content with
today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike." We need a believe in our shared capabilities as people. And it has to begin with a radically different conception of our educational social networks. We need a concept of social networking where we are not comparing schools, teachers, and students in ways little different than Mark Zuckerberg's FaceMash.
Because I simply do not want schools to compete (the goal of the profiteers of "ed reform"), teachers to compete (the goal of Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Michael Gove, and many of America's Governors), or students to compete (the goal of way, way too many adults in schools and around children), I want them to succeed in their own ways, in their own time, and mostly, cooperatively. I want them all working together, helping each other...
• Might this student do better in your school? This student with that teacher? These three students if working together?
• What can this school learn from that school? How can this teacher help that teacher? What can this student learn from that student?
FaceMash: Which school is hotter?
Not competing, not ranking, not rating, but doing something much more directly human... helping each other.
We don't really want schools fighting over the "easy to educate" students, or teachers refusing to help other teachers escape that "bottom 5%," or students refusing to help each other do better, do we? And if we do, what are we suggesting? About ourselves, about society, even about our businesses?
Now comes the hard part, rethinking our own positions. Because if step eleven of Changing Gears 2012 is going to be "un-competing" in our social networking, we need to begin with our own behaviors. We do a lot of things which, often unintentionally, send the wrong messages, and those messages not only impact our students, they impact ourselves.
I've had my fights with online colleagues/friends I respect over stuff like the EduBlog Awards, and I know they "recognize" many people, but determining quality by letting people organize "vote for me" campaigns is the essence of building competition into something in which competition serves no positive purpose. And I'm troubled when people beg for more followers on Twitter (or friends on Facebook, or...). That's competition based in the most meaningless count, quantity where you don't even know what you are counting (bots, multiple accounts from one person). (I tend the other direction, I remember blocking new followers when I approached 500 followers, for whatever reason "500" seemed like a lot, and I wondered if "a lot" of followers would change the way I was communicating.) I'm troubled when people quote stats about number of readers of blogs too often. And I know I don't want to be that person people ask for help most often.
Perhaps I'm strange, but I always think that being at the top - in this (especially American) work - encourages you to worry about staying at the top instead of encouraging you to do what you need to do. One issue. The second - and far more important issue is this - when you rank you are turning to artificial and external motivators to replace your own heart and soul. You are no longer trying to be the best you can be, you have given away your own internal measures for some flimsy badge which represents someone else's ideas.
A top retailer, 1972. Fighting to be on top doesn't always work.
The change, among smart businesspeople, was apparent in late 2008-early 2009 when Ford joined the rush to Washington to get help for, yes, General Motors and Chrysler. Ford put considerable muscle, and took a lot of absurd abuse from Republicans, behind efforts to not just keep their competitors in business, but to reduce their debts far below those of Ford's. Why? Ford knew that their supplier chain needed healthy customers beyond themselves. Ford also knew that a health industry would be good for the country, and Ford knew that a full-scale depression spinning out from the nation's center wouldn't do much for its sales. Plus Ford knows that a healthy multiplayer industry is good for everyone. The Big Three in the US, Volkwagen, BMW, Daimler in Germany, Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Mitsubishi in Japan.
It was also apparent in Google's recent conversations about Mozilla: "So it's very easy to see why Google would be willing to fund Mozilla:
Like Google, Mozilla is clearly committed to the betterment of the web,
and they're spending their resources to make a great, open-source web
browser. Chrome is not all things to all people; Firefox is an
important product because it can be a different product with different
design decisions and serve different users well. Mozilla's commitment
to advancing the web is why I was hired at Google explicitly to work on Firefox
before we built Chrome: Google was interested enough in seeing Firefox
succeed to commit engineering resources to it, and we only shifted to
building Chrome when we thought we might be able to cause even greater
increases in the rate at which the web advanced. It's not hard to
understand the roots of this strategy. Google succeeds (and makes
money) when the web succeeds and people use it more to do everything
they need to do. Because of this Chrome doesn't need to be a
Microsoft Office, a direct money-maker, nor does it even need to
directly feed users to Google. Just making the web more capable is
enough."
So, the world's biggest companies know something educational reformers, and our political leaders, can't quite figure out. I know Ford would like to sell more cars in the US than General Motors, but that kind of win is not their goal. And Google, which could dominate many things, chooses not to.
The Nash Equilibrium: It is not all about competition "Adam Smith, is wrong"
Mark Zuckerberg doesn't understand that, which is why Facebook will always be about rankings and superiorities. More friends, more messages, more writings on the wall. Even Barack Obama, doesn't fully understand this, he wants America to be triumphant - whatever that may mean - in education. But we look around our schools and we see so many differing talents, so many differing personalities, so many differing skillsets, and we know that we'll always be better together.
I don't want FaceMash or SchoolMash or Students-in-MathMash. I sure do not want algorithms which will artificially rate people. I don't want counts of followers or popularity contest awards, and I don't want kids accorded an "honor" because they got one more answer right on some multiple choice test than another. I don't want teachers rated on test scores or graduation rates, and I don't want schools rated those ways either. We've tried that for generations. It sucks for just about everybody.
So let's try something different. Let's join together, in all of our learning spaces, with as little hierarchy as we overtrained animals can muster. Maybe we'll discover something.
On July 18, 2011 US President Barack Obama found a few hours in his busy schedule to host an "education summit" to which no educators and no students were invited. Twelve days later, with the professor who led his administration's education transition team joining a huge throng of teachers, parents, students, and educational researchers in Lafayette Park across the street from where he lives and works, Barack Obama could not find an hour to sit down with those who live and work in America's schools. He could not find ten minutes to walk outside.
Why does the American President think it is more important to talk to the CEO of America OnLine about schools than America's teachers?
I do not think Barack Obama is an evil guy. Oh sure, we all pretended he was a lot more than the Chicago Machine Democrat he is, because we really wanted to believe. But no one is really surprised that he has not closed Guantanamo Bay or gotten the US out of Afghanistan - at best the US Democratic Party is somewhere to the right of David Cameron and far to the right of Angela Merkle, and the last time it was not, we thought Bobby Kennedy was going to be the next President.
Education though, education is a surprise. No one who watched the 2008 campaign could have really imagined that Obama was interested in education, or in reducing the impact of poverty of America's kids, but no one really thought he would be worse on these issues than George W. Bush either. And yet...
Obama began his administration by appointing his basketball playing buddy, Arne Duncan, to the position of Secretary of Education. Duncan, who has never worked in a school, but only been paid private industry-type salaries to tell public schools what to do, had accomplished essentially nothing as "CEO" of the Chicago Public Schools. In fact, the only student statistic to rise during his tenure was violent student deaths. This rise was a direct result of Duncan's "reform" policies. To "raise scores" Duncan would kick poor kids out of their neighborhood schools and replace those students with "whiter" kids. This forced tens of thousands of Chicago's poorest children to cross dangerous gangland boundaries every morning and afternoon. Too many didn't make it.
Now, Duncan's press secretary, Justin Hamilton, gets very upset if I bring the above up, which is odd, because Justin and Arne love statistics. But, well... I suppose I understand.
What I don't understand is Obama handing education in America over to this guy, no matter how good his jump shot is. Cronyism is all well and good, but it might have been nice if Obama had worried about our kids education as much as he worried about the education of his own. And if he hadn't bothered with that in December 2008, perhaps he might have looked out his window and had a moment of rethink in the three years hence.
"Darling-Hammond’s research, teaching, and policy work focus on issues of school restructuring, teacher quality and educational equity--and she knows as much about them as anyone in the country. These issues are central to any effort to create schools that really work.
"Still, when it came time to pick an education secretary, there appeared to be a campaign against her. She was falsely accused of supporting the status quo and blindly aligning with teachers unions.
"Whatever his reasons, Obama tapped Duncan, the superintendent of Chicago schools, who supported key elements of No Child Left Behind during his tenure there. As education secretary, he has disappointed many people who had hoped Obama would end the era of high-stakes standardized testing and punitive measures for schools that don’t meet artificial goals.
"Darling-Hammond’s book gives us an idea of where we could have been headed if she were in charge of the country's education policy."
Yet therein lies the problem. Barack Obama is not an evil guy, but he is not a guy who really cares either. Watching Obama on poverty, yes, but especially on education, one is forced to realize that all his community organizing, all his time in rough neighborhoods in New York and Chicago, were the kind of resume preparation all too common in the Teach for America cohort, rather than a genuine, Bobby Kennedy style, interest in discovering the "other America."
So, if giving education over to Wall Street turns on the spigots of campaign contributions, that is more important to him than the students who fill our classrooms. He doesn't actually wish these kids harm, not at all, he just doesn't perceive the lives of our children as a very important thing in his life.
Which is why he sat in the White House today, hoping John Boehner would call, rather than picking up his Blackberry, and walking outside.
In the 1990s there was a joke going around that President Clinton was "one Ritalin pill a day away from being a great President," and maybe that was true.
And in the 1970s, Jimmy Carter seemed to be keeping track of a million things at once...
And I thought of this while fighting with Justin Hamilton who tweets as @EDPressSec about the Department of Education's plan to strip away alternative testing from Special Education students.
The guess is that President Obama neither knows about this nor is interested
This is a huge issue, one which the Department of Education's Press Secretary refused to discuss.* It is huge because forcing special needs students to take inappropriate tests is abusive. And because the goal would seem to be - based on other actions of US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan - to be to force ever more public schools into being listed as "failures" by the national government. That, in turn, seems a political move designed to enrich certain Obama fundraisers who have invested heavily in privatized education.
But one of my Twitter pals noted something quite important: "likelihood of this issue having risen to Obama's attention? Probably zero, though...."
And yes, President Obama, for all his brilliance, for all his education, is a highly traditional learner and thinker. A straight-line, one issue at a time guy. And this week, for clear reasons, he is focused on Osama bin Laden and Pakistan and Al Qaeda. Just as in his first two years in office he focused first on the economy, then on health care.
Is that the kind of leadership this century needs? Or should "ADHD" and that much-questioned "multitasking" be a required part of 21st Century leadership descriptions?
This question, unlike the two things at the top of this post, is not a joke. It is a vital query into both leadership and education. For President Obama, the child of two very brilliant, but two very traditionally trained learners (one via US system, one via British system), seems the quintessential "industrial age" learner and leader. And we need to consider that, and wonder if that is working for us.
This is not to suggest that leaders should not delegate authority or utilize the incredible power of community cognition and collective intelligence, but in order to harness the power of those things a leader must see as much as possible, all the time - what David Packard called, "management by walking around."
"Why should you bother to get up off your ass and regularly tour the building, the warehouse, the delivery and shipping area? Aren’t you too busy? But that’s the danger: not knowing what is going on in all areas of your business can see you too busy managing the wrong things: you become a “Busy Fool”. You should, as often as you can and without indulging in irritating micro-management-style techniques, step over the filters and barriers that stand between you and the people on the ground. Your direct reports will often not want to tell you certain things at certain times. They will often deliver news in a certain way. Go and find out for yourself: see reality without the sugar-coating." - Colm McCormack
This isn't just a post-war Silicon Valley idea, this is classic "natural" human learning, and "natural" human leadership, rooted in human evolution.
As Peter Gray of Boston College recently wrote, early human hunter-gatherer learning fed a non-linear, widely-focused, very open learning structure, which created leaders who probably saw the world in much more connected terms than any "scientifically-trained" scholar of today:
"Hunter-gatherer children were the freest human children ever to have walked the earth. Hunter-gathers believed that children learn through their own, self-directed, self-initiated play and exploration, so they allowed their children unlimited time for such activities. In a survey of hunter-gatherer researchers that I helped to conduct some years ago, all said that the children in the group that they had studied were free to explore on their own, without adult guidance, essentially from dawn to dusk every day. They were allowed such freedom beginning at about age 4 (the age at which, according to hunter-gathers, children "have sense" and do not need to be watched regularly by adults) on into their mid to late teenage years, when they began to take on adult responsibilities. By providing children with food and other subsistence needs, and by not burdening them with many chores, hunter-gatherer adults allowed their children ample time to educate themselves."
This kind of open education form, which when you think of it, might closely parallel what a rebellious Bill Clinton or a farm-raised Jimmy Carter experienced growing up, seems to produce a very different learning and leadership style than the highly formalized educations of young George W. Bush or Barack Obama.
"What kind of mother was she? At least where her son was concerned, she was never without a workbook. She placed a great emphasis on manners; from an early age, Barack Obama was exquisitely polite. Into him Ann [Dunham Obama] Soetoro drilled a sense of duty to the world, the importance of hard work, the need to give back." "Most of all she stressed—by example as much as anything else—the value of education. It determined the geography of Obama’s early years. His mother typed and corrected his homework. From his memoir, we know about the 5 a.m. study sessions."
This is formalized, linear, "education as work," training, and it sunk in, creating in the current US President an extremely formalized, careful, single-focused learning and leading strategy. It is thus not, as I have sometimes charged, that "Obama doesn't care about children or education," rather, as my friend suggested, it is that the needs of children in America and the education system simply do not reach him - he has handed them off to a basketball-buddy-subordinate, and these issues are not in his current curriculum. Even when he goes to a school, he usually sees nothing because his "5 a.m. study sessions" have been about something else, and even when he answers an honest school question honestly, his current curriculum has not trained him to compare his human thoughts with his scientific policies.
It is as if Henry V wouldn't bother to observe the winds at Agincourt because that was someone else's job. It is as if Henry V didn't bother to worry about the morale of his soldiers at Agincourt because they "know their jobs."
This does not mean that President Obama makes bad decisions, clearly, deeply focused choices such as the stimulus plan and the raid on Osama demonstrate a high-quality of decision-making. Rather, it is that President Obama makes too few decisions. His mother never let him learn to choose to study or not, or where, or how. His very traditional private schools never allowed him to choose where to sit, or whether to go to class. He learned that learning came from books or carefully constructed experiences. One suspects that he never really learned to look around in wonder.
Though yes, unlike his presidential predecessor, he did learn to ask questions, he learned to ask academic questions, the kinds of questions which have answers, not the big open questions of childhood - the kind of questions which only create more questions.
David Russell wrote a piece on how American Neo-Liberalism was the cause of America's viciously anti-child "education reform" movement, and I cannot argue with that, but perhaps the bigger issue is why this nonsense is so accepted... and I'm here to suggest that it is suggested because it offers a 'certainty of answers' to our 'rationally trained scientific managers' such as America's President. If you never actually see or hear students or teachers, if you never actually gaze around yourself without preconception, then you turn to a subordinate like Arne Duncan and want one sentence assurances that you are doing the right things.
But I'm not really writing about global educational policy here, or about Barack Obama. I'm writing a question: what kind of learning, what kind of leadership, is your school, is your classroom, training your students for?
"The most important and general way by which hunter-gatherer adults helped their children learn was by providing an always supportive, always trustful environment. To educate themselves, children need to feel emotionally secure and confident. By trusting children to know what is best for themselves and by making that trust apparent, adult hunter-gatherers provided the conditions that all children need, if they are to feel confident about taking control of their own lives and learning. Because all adult members of the band cared about and provided for the emotional and physical needs of all of the children, and because it was a cultural taboo ever to deliberately hurt a child, the children grew up feeling that others were trustworthy, which is a prerequisite for becoming trustworthy oneself. In such an environment, children's instincts for self-education flourish. That is as true today as it ever was.
"The secure child, raised in a setting where others are loving, trusting, and nonjudgmental, and where the tools and examples needed for education are available but not forced upon anyone, vigorously and joyfully undertakes the natural childhood task of self-education. Unfortunately, in our schools, we replace security with anxiety as the foundation for learning, and we keep children so busy doing what they are told to do that self-education becomes essentially impossible. In schools we "teach" in ways that subvert children's natural instincts to learn and that replace trust and security with distrust and anxiety." - Peter Gray
Last week Anthony Cody, teacher and blogger, did something The New York Times couldn't be bothered to do... he reported intelligently on a fascinating moment in education in America.
"... we have piled on a lot of standardized tests on our kids. Now, there's nothing wrong with a standardized test being given occasionally just to give a baseline of where kids are at.
"Malia and Sasha, my two daughters, they just recently took a standardized test. But it wasn't a high-stakes test. It wasn't a test where they had to panic. I mean, they didn't even really know that they were going to take it ahead of time. They didn't study for it, they just went ahead and took it. And it was a tool to diagnose where they were strong, where they were weak, and what the teachers needed to emphasize.
"Too often what we've been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools. And so what we've said is let's find a test that everybody agrees makes sense; let's apply it in a less pressured-packed atmosphere; let's figure out whether we have to do it every year or whether we can do it maybe every several years; and let's make sure that that's not the only way we're judging whether a school is doing well.
"Because there are other criteria: What's the attendance rate? How are young people performing in terms of basic competency on projects? There are other ways of us measuring whether students are doing well or not."
Then he blasted the results of everything US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has done in his 'educational career'...
"So what I want to do is—one thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching to the test. Because then you're not learning about the world; you're not learning about different cultures, you're not learning about science, you're not learning about math. All you're learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and the little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test. And that's not going to make education interesting to you. And young people do well in stuff that they're interested in. They're not going to do as well if it's boring."
Cody asked the US Department of Education to explain. These days we get to do that, and Twitter's @EDPressSec, who is really a guy named Justin Hamilton, was forced into dialogue.
And things began to go badly from there. First, it took the young Mr. Hamilton almost 36 hours to come up with why the President agreed with his Secretary of Education. Then, the answers, well, they were worthy of the Nixon White House.
"Switching to measuring student growth--as opposed to using tests just to measure absolute levels of proficiency--may result in an increase in the frequency of tests. But that does not mean that students will face more high-stakes standardized tests."
No, of course not, no one will think that federally-mandated tests, on which school administrator and teachers jobs and income depend, will be considered high stakes Justin.
As Cody asks, in a question Mr. Hamilton has not yet been able to answer, "Many of the core elements of Race to the Top and the Blueprint are related to test scores. Department of Ed policy calls for the linking of teacher evaluations and pay to student test scores. The Blueprint calls for tracking of student test scores of teachers according to the place they were prepared. We still have the threat of reconstitution hanging over the bottom tier of schools, attended exclusively by children in poverty. All based on test scores. The President described the tests that Sasha and Malia took as "low stakes." All these changes RAISE the stakes on the tests, for teachers and schools. How does this move us towards the "less pressure-packed environment" the President is advocating"
The perils of choosing your cabinet from your basketball buddies
But really, this reveals a lot more about Duncan and Obama than just the fact that they've never actually discussed education policy. As in the legendary US Army quote about Vietnam, "We had to destroy the village to save it," the Obama/Duncan argument regarding "low-stakes tests which determine teachers' lives" suggests a fundamental disregard for the humanness of American teachers and students.
The US thought of Vietnam as a place to stop communism, not a place where real people lived. Thus bombings and the burnings of villages were OK. Obama (by default, because he has outsourced education policy to his buddy) and Duncan (by design) think of education as a place to score political points with Republicans and rich hedge fund donors, not as a place where real people live and work. Thus tests and humiliations and firings and ruining children's lives are all OK.
The strategies are equally flawed. US policy in Vietnam actually strengthened the appeal of communism throughout Asia, Africa, South America - even Europe and North America - in the 1960s and 1970s. And we know exactly what Republicans and the Democrats for Education Reform did for Obama in the 2010 elections. Perhaps if he had gotten the NEA and AFT thinking positively about his administration and had gotten them out to vote... Ah well, the White House has often been a place where intelligence goes to die. The isolation created by American paranoia really eliminates the possibility of good governance.
Allow me to try to explain testing to our President, to our Secretary of Education, even to Mr. Hamilton. Perhaps, if their educations had been a bit more robust, been a bit more connected to 'most people,' they'd understand why they sound ridiculous.
I am not against assessment. We assess ourselves, and those around us, constantly. I think of my days coaching football (soccer). I watched every player, I knew what worked for them, I knew what didn't. I knew what natural gifts they possessed, I knew what learned skills they had, and because I knew my athletes, I knew where each wanted to go. Still, no player ever got a grade from me. Every player played in every game unless hurt or sitting out for game discipline reasons. What my assessment did was help the player and I develop a map of where the player was is various facets of the game, and of where they wanted to be. Then my job as coach was to help them find paths between those starting and finishing points.
That's assessment. Teachers, those much maligned, overpaid, underworked teachers of your speeches, do that every day. But let us remember, that is not comparative assessment. It does not tell you that player (a) is "better" than player (b), and it can not help you compare team (a) to team (b) or coach (a) to coach (b). It is simply a way of helping people reach their potential.
Something happens though when you introduce the fiction of "standards" into this assessment process.
"When you assess something, you are forced to assume that a linear scale of values can be applied to it. Otherwise no assessment is possible. Every person who says of something that it is good or bad or a bit better than yesterday is declaring that a points system exists; that you can, in a reasonably clear and obvious fashion, set some sort of a number against an achievement.
"But never at any time has a code of practice been laid down for the awarding of points. No offense intended to anyone. Never at any time in the history of the world has anyone-for anything ever so slightly more complicated than the straightforward play of a ball or a 400-meter race-been able to come up with a code of practice that could be learned and followed by several different people, in such a way that they would all arrive at the same mark. Never at any time have they been able to agree on a method for determining when one drawing, one meal, one sentence, one insult, the picking of one lock, one blow, one patriotic song, one Danish essay, one playground, one frog, or one interview is good or bad or better or worse than another." - Peter Høeg Borderliners
That "something" is the linear scale of "standards." Standards:
"Standards" - as applied in educational evaluations - are all of numbers 1, 3, and 6. They are a subjective measure of quality. Their purpose is comparative. They are usually "agreed upon" by those dominating a culture and/or imposed by a ruling elite (is that different?).
I often meet with young people from 'non-Anglo" cultures who are in transition from secondary education to universities. Almost all of them are nailed on the language testing for freshman. They are told that their way of explaining things, of telling stories, is "circular," is not "straightforward." They are told that the organization of their writing is "wrong." And they are, laughingly, told this by college English departments which place Irish fiction in "Brit Lit" courses - meaning - that the people evaluating these students completely ignore culture's role in literature.
"Standards" can not possibly be anything but political. You don't have to worship at the shrine of great colonialists as E.D. Hirsch Jr. and Robert Pondiscio do to still - by applying standards - be imposing your belief system, your culture, and your religion on those being measured.
I'll go back to Borderliners, because in this passage, in which Høeg's character is describing a question on an IQ test, best illustrates this...
"A letter came from her. It was not in her own words, it was a quote straight out of Binet-Simon. She must have learned it by heart, just by reading it. "There was once a grasshopper, who had sung merrily all summer long. Now it was winter and he was starving. So he went to see some ants who lived nearby and asked them to lend him some of the stores they had laid up for the winter. `What have you been doing all summer?' they asked. `I have sung day and night,' replied the grasshopper. 'Ah, so you have sung,' said the ants. `Well, now you can dance.'
"Beneath this she had written: "What is the moral?"
"It was so deep. It showed how she had figured out that this was a problem from the "fourteen years" level and that I must have had it. She had, therefore, used what I had written to her and discovered the system behind Binet-Simon.
"At the time when I had been given this story, I had come close to answering that the moral was ants were not helpful. But this would not have fitted in very well with the other problems. Instead I had sensed Hessen, and then I had said the moral was that one must seize the moment."
Of course, if one were raised as a Catholic, or a socialist, the answer is indeed, "ants were not helpful." In cultures non-Anglo, non-capitalist, you have a human moral responsibility to help. So this IQ test question is not at all about "intelligence" but about conformity to Calvinist Capitalistthought.
But it isn't just that, everything which gets standardized, from what you know about the American Revolution to how you form a sentence is a both a cultural construct and a method of limiting future change. There is a reason why US schools teach Hemingway but not Dos Passos. Dos Passos not only questions why the US was in World War I, he questions everything from sentence structure to spelling, and neither E.D. Hirsch nor Arne Duncan wants him in your schools. There is a reason why US schools teach about Ticonderoga but not the 11,000+ prisoners of war murdered by the British in Wallabout Bay, Brooklyn (a murder four times the size of 9/11). Learning about the latter might endanger US love of the British. (Evacuation Day was celebrated with the burning of British flags in New York every year through 1916, before being squelched by the Wilson government.)
There is a reason American children are taught that reading is an individual thing (see how Protestants worship), that arithmetic is taught before math concepts (the goal was to fail most children), why it is considered important to be on time for class (your children are being prepped for shift work in factories). There is a reason spelling is considered important when it was not previously (Theodore Roosevelt asserted that enforcing traditional spelling was certain to deprive most children of literacy). There is a reason the five-paragraph essay is taught in schools (it enforces a specific form of thinking).
And so, when we test any of this - any of our curriculum - we are making a political statement, enforcing a political code. Every application of comparative assessment compares a wide range of children to, maybe Barack Obama's daughters, or maybe E.D. Hirsch's grandchildren, with all the cultural baggage included. The less your child's life has been like either of those gold-plated cohorts, the higher the likelihood that you will fail and be consigned to capitalism's required underclass.
Obama, the privileged child of doctoral students doesn't understand this because he focused on other issues in his life. Arne Duncan, who I think does understand this, works for his friends and benefactors, whose children "win" when most others fail. Justin Hamilton, well, he's just doing public relations. He works for his boss.
But their ignorance or evil intent (whichever) does not hide the fact. Education is, by nature, political. Standardized education is overtly political. Comparative assessment is cruelly political. Testing is a form of cultural and psychological child abuse.
Despite all the nonsense you hear and read on television, in mainstream newspapers and magazines, even in "research," there are not many things in education "proven" to make a difference.
Charter school management doesn't. KIPP doesn't. Teach for America doesn't. Most reading programs (Success for All, Reading Recovery, etc) don't. Being non-union doesn't. Merit Pay doesn't. Broad trained administrators don't. Gates financed principals don't. "Better" testing doesn't. If you honestly look at every bit of research you'll see that even the best arguments for any of these make no difference at all for 95% of kids.
But a few things do work. And, despite all the talk, we know these work. Smaller class sizes. Co-teaching. Multiage programs. Individualizable technology. Great pre-school experiences which offer playtime and stories rather than explicit academics. Reducing poverty. Better family health care. Improved teacher education. Despite Daniel Willingham's essentially irrelevant research, catering to children's learning styles and preferences.
And something else... one of the few federal initiatives of the past two decades to demonstrate real success in making schools better learning environments and improving children's live: The National Writing Project. This is the project President Obama wants to "zero out" in next year's federal budget.
Unlike many who will blog this weekend in an attempt to get President Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress to continue funding for this project, I have never been involved with NWP in any way. I've never helped build the project, or worked with the teacher support programs, or implemented NWP strategies as a K-12 teacher... All I've done is see the results.
The National Writing Project is much larger, and much more effective, than its title suggests. And in any given year its impact is 100 times, 1,000 times the positive effect on children of all Arne Duncan's highly funded, political-donor connected initiatives in Race-to-the-Top and I3 grants combined.
Because what the National Writing Project does is help teachers re-think practices in ways which turn children into better communicators - better writers, better readers, better storytellers, better information shares, better information consumers. And those skills are the heart of advancing achievement and opportunity. And study after study has documented the real differences this little program makes.
Why does a writing program have this kind of impact? Because, in order to write well, you must build all the component skills, from "reading" (text intake and comprehension), to listening (aural intake and comprehension), to careful and creative seeing, to vocabulary and descriptive skills, to research capabilities, to crap detecting, to empathic skills, to performance ability. Writing is all that, and learning to work well with writing inspires and motivates, and perhaps most importantly, gives voice to students across the widest range of diversities.
I don't need to say much more. Read the blogs from teachers who have watched their students benefit. Read the research. Do a quick look at the NWP site. Understand the absurd budgeting decisions the U.S. President and his congressional pals are making - " It costs $25.6 million and it reaches 130,000 teachers and more than 1.4 million students in over 3,000 districts." (Teach for America this year will spend $189 million this year - not including teacher salaries and benefits which are paid for by the involved school districts - on 4,500 untrained teachers, in comparison, reaching - but not improving the lives of, perhaps 115,000 students. Federal contribution to that exceeds $45 million - direct grants, Americorps, I3.)
So, call your congressional members. Call the White House. Email them. Jam their Twitter accounts. Go stand outside their homes.
Saving the National Writing Project is a tiny thing in a massive budget battle which will re-define America, probably much for the worse. But if we can win this tiny battle, we might save a bit of hope for the future.
thought.
