The Big Lies (Part Four)

Just about everything I see or hear in the "Main Stream Media" about education seems to be a lie to me. All of the political rhetoric around education, seems the same, deliberate falsehoods and words designed to hide real intentions. After Part One  Part Two  Part Three here is part four...

Parents are the customers in education

Parents are the customers for schools. That's the charter school argument. Parents are the customers and get to make the choices.

Business is the customer for schools. That's the Andrew Carnegie/Bill Gates argument. Business is the customer and it is the job of schools to create the kind of employees businesses want.

Society is the customer for schools. That's the social conservatives' argument. The purpose of education is to uncritically reproduce the society we have.

The State of Utah is deeply concerned with schools teaching "democracy."

Who is the customer in education? How you answer this question pretty much determines what kinds of schools you will create, and how you will judge and treat students.

Parents will not like this, but if you believe that parents are the customer you embrace the idea the children are parental property, to be pushed forward or held back at the whim of the adults who "own" them.

I think about this every time a KIPP school opens, or a charter, requiring specific knowledge and actions on the part of parents. I think of this every time a teacher tells me, "his parents won't let him use the internet." I think of this every time I see the difference in IEP meetings when parents are wealthy and powerful vs. poor and uneducated.

Parents are, and can be, an incredibly effective advocate system for kids, but parental resources vary so greatly, that any "parent-based" system inevitably becomes socially reproductive - that is, parents with power and knowledge get what their kids needs, and their kids succeed. Parents without don't get what their kids need, and their kids fail.

So parent-based systems reward the haves. They have choices because they have funds, knowledge, transportation, the ability to even home school. And the have-nots are punished. Those children have parents without access to information, without access to transportation (and thus charter choice), without access to their own successful educations as a support system.

What about business? Bill Gates wants trained employees. That, I suppose, is reasonable. But Gates is part of a long line of American industrialists who view the purpose of education as being to provide the American industry of the moment, prepared, compliant laborers. The problem with this, in a rapidly changing world, is that even if we thought it was our societal goal to enrich Microsoft, if we prepare workers for Microsoft now (a fine place to work from all that I understand, by the way), who will be preparing people to work on what's coming next?

The reason I ask is that we've spent the past 100 years preparing people to work for Andrew Carnegie's steel company, and perhaps in the offices of the New York Life Insurance Company on Madison Square. And now we're all kind of pissed about that, with Barack Obama insisting that if we don't train Microsoft employees, China will beat America to the moon.

The first question to be asked is, why do corporations, which do everything they can do to avoid paying taxes to support schools, get to make the decisions for our children?

We still run schools designed to prepare workers for
the best jobs of 1910

The second question to be asked is, do businesses have any idea of what their future needs will be? Punch card operators? Typists? Mainframe computer maintenance? This is not a knock on vocational education, which I think is an excellent option when done well - see, say, Automotive and Aviation High Schools in New York City (let us not dwell on the absurdity of Automotive High being concerned with SAT prep - that is the idiocy of NCLB, the Obama Administration, and Mike Bloomberg).  But it is a challenge as to the effectiveness of our business leaders at judging what is coming next. Not to mention the third question...

If our schools are designed to produce workers, how is this different from a feudal society?

As for society, well, society pays for education. Society has a compelling interest in education, but if we want to avoid becoming Brave New World, society cannot be the "customer" in education either. If it is we guarantee social reproduction, and we limit personal freedom.

'"My good boy!" The Director wheeled sharply round on him. "Can't you see? Can't you see?" He raised a hand; his expression was solemn. "Bokanovsky's Process is one of the major instruments of social stability!"
"Major instruments of social stability.
"Standard men and women; in uniform batches. The whole of a small factory staffed with the products of a single bokanovskified egg.
'"Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!" The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. "You really know where you are. For the first time in history." He quoted the planetary motto. "Community, Identity, Stability." Grand words. "If we could bokanovskify indefinitely the whole problem would be solved."
"Solved by standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons. Millions of identical twins. The principle of mass production at last applied to biology.
'"But, alas," the Director shook his head, "we can't bokanovskify indefinitely.'- Aldous Huxley

So, to me, the customer in education will always be the student. The student who has an individuality separate from his or her parents. The student whose future should not be dependent on his or her parents wealth or resources. The student who has rights as an individual human, to make decisions on their own - to learn to make decisions on their own. The students whose future doesn't belong to Microsoft or Google or Toyota.

This is why I believe in neighborhood public schools, accessible to all, with student-centered choice.

Education will solve poverty

If you are hungry, you are focusing on being hungry, not on learning. If you are worried about being evicted from your home, you are focused on fear, not on learning. If your parent is worried about feeding you, they are probably not helping you learn about the world. If your parent is exhausted by working two full time jobs, they are probably not helping you learn about the world.

In order to take the intellectual risks necessary for real learning, humans need to be comfortable. Yes, you can teach a few rote skills through fear and intimidation, but you will never create understanding and new possibilities that way.

So poverty is the enemy of learning in every way. Poverty is fear. Poverty is discomfort. Poverty is pain. And all those emotions take over the brain, and prevent higher level thinking.

We know this.

So education cannot solve poverty. Solving poverty, however, can do much to fix education.

That is not to say that schools cannot help. Schools - at their best - provide safe places for kids at risk, they provide food for kids who are hungry - they work really hard to give kids the things they need. And all that makes a big difference...

But it cannot equalize opportunity.

So we, in education do everything that we can, but until our societies, particularly American society, decides that children matter, we'll be fighting an uphill battle.

And deciding that children matter means having Universal Health Insurance focused on preventative care. It means having a true living wage, not a minimum wage, so that forty hours of work makes a family economically safe. It means having mandatory paid vacation time so parents have time with children, and mandatory paid parental leave for when schools need parent involvement or kids are sick. It means having reasonable housing support, unemployment insurance, and welfare programs so that children due not become unsafe when bankers screw up. And it means funding community safety programs and law enforcement so that children do not die because a foolish schools superintendent forces them to walk between gang neighborhoods.

City College of New York, diverse, and completely free
1847-1976

We might add in strong, massive, support for public libraries, community centers, and other neighborhood resources. Because it is absolutely true that the moment and place of America's greatest social mobility - New York City from 1900 to 1960 - combined a vast public health system with a vast public housing system, strong minimum wage laws, free university tuitions (1847-1976), great libraries in every neighborhood, and a highly affordable 24-hour transit system which made expenses such as car ownership unnecessary.

It is these systems which, in European nations, have shifted societies toward equity, and made their educational systems much more effective at equalizing opportunity.

And until America stops being anti-child and anti-family, our problems in education remain tough to solve.

You can change educational results without fundamentally changing the system

This is the biggest lie of all. Without undoing the structure which is designed to fail most students, we won't get the change in results we want.

Age-based grades ensure that students who are "different" in any way fall behind and cannot catch up. Age-based grades also create disability - if you are not "on grade level" you are, first "behind," and then, "retarded."

The competitive educational environment created by the giving of grades divides students into winners and losers, preserving failure as our number one result.

Dividing content into discrete classes, separated by bells, assures that Passion-Based Learning cannot take hold, leaving most students bored.

All the nonsense bandied about by the Obama-Duncan-Gates-Rhee-Kopp crowd - changing managers, changing teachers, changing standards, changing examinations - leave the system exactly as it is. A system which we all know doesn't work because it attempts to manufacture human beings.

Perhaps you don't agree with me that this group of reformers wants education to fail, but you have to admit that they are doing nothing to stop it from failing.

- Ira Socol

The Parent Trap

On Saturday I went to use the Therapy Pool at our community aquatic center. The 90 degree Fahrenheit water lets me exercise my recovering leg for much longer than I can possibly do on "dry land," and this is a crucial part of the healing process.

The Therapy Pool has a separate "Special Needs" Locker (Changing) Room. A unisex space with private changing areas with showers, benches, lots of grab bars. For the most part people move in and out of these spaces as quickly and efficiently as their various limitations allow.

However, the Special Needs Locker Room is also utilized by another group, parents with children who choose not to use the large general Men's and Women's changing rooms. I can understand this - considering the generally unhealthy American attitudes toward nudity - most of these users are parents with children not of their gender: Dads with girls, Moms with boys - and they are afraid to either, let the children out of their site long enough to put on a bathing suit, or to allow them to glimpse naked adults. I'm not judging here. Americans are taught to be afraid of many things, and these are two of those things.

But there is something I will judge. If parents are choosing to use a facility supposedly reserved for people other than themselves, they ought to be demonstrating respect for others to their children.

So, on Saturday, as I witnessed mother after mother hustling their kiddies in to the private changing spaces as people with crutches and canes and walkers waited, I wondered what these parents were teaching. As I watched 8, 10, 12-year-old, perfectly healthy girls tie up the one accessible locker room toilet, I wondered what these parents were teaching. As I saw mother after mother smile as their children ran through a narrow corridor mostly used by injured senior citizens, I wondered what these parents were teaching.

This was not a case of class-based lack of social education on the part of the parents - at least not in my observation. Lower income community children tend to come unaccompanied, or have no problem with shared changing facilities. The parents I was watching all appeared middle and upper middle class. All were white. All, probably, as educated as it gets here, in "the second happiest place in America."

Then, finished, I crutched my way outside, where I noticed that a brand new Volkswagen Passat was parked blocking the curb cut in a "no parking" area. It had been there when I entered. I paused, crutches are still very difficult, and as I paused, a mother and her teenage son came out, carrying packages from a party (there are "party rooms" in the facility), to the Passat. "We probably shouldn't have left it here the whole time," the boy said. "It's a loading zone," the mother told him, "and nobody knows how long we've been loading or unloading." One more mom, one more lesson.

At a CIES2010 session last week in Chicago the Inclusive Education Special Interest Group met and listened to four presentations. One was about attempts to improve teacher training for inclusion in Northern Ireland. Another was about changing social attitudes on inclusion in Namibia. The third, about encouraging the study of inclusion in Germany. And the fourth on inclusion and society in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. They were great presentations.

Yet, if there was a common thread in these, it was not attitudes toward "disability," but rather the ways in which parents limit the opportunities for, and growth of, their children.

In Northern Ireland the progress being made on societal unification of all the children of that "place" (any other political descriptor is fraught with challenges for one "side" or the other), is constantly threatened by parental attitudes when the children go home after school. Parents, 90% of them, choose segregated schools for their children - in a possible glimpse of the American future if the Duncan/Obama charter school push succeeds - and parents resist, strongly, changes in the education system.

In Namibia a parent of a "disabled" child, who is also a teacher, won't send her child to school, or even take him to the store, for fear of social embarrassment.

In Germany, long held beliefs in separate education for those with "special needs" have parents of those students resisting inclusion.

In certain Middle Eastern societies parents will not "invest" in "disabled" children who seem unlikely to become potential supporters of the family, and so will not bring them to school.

The problem with allowing parents to make choices

Despite having been a charter school parent, and a very happy charter school parent, I have a problem with the concept of charter schools in the United States. And my problem is this - charters offer parents school choice, but they rob children of school choice.

The theory of parental choice is based in the very old notion that "parents know what is best for their children" - which sounds benign, but is actually an extension of the idea that children "belong" to their parents, that children are property. Americans basically view children this way (in everything but the abortion debate - only there do a sizable portion of Americans see offspring as independent entities, but only until birth). Americans will argue that parents must be in control of discipline, of what media children are exposed to, of whether children should be vaccinated, or should receive medical care. The view - even if we take the benign reading of this - is that parental judgment almost always trumps the judgment of society, or surely, of professionals.

But maybe that is not true. Almost ten percent of American parents, for example, risk their children's health because they believe fairy tales about vaccines causing Autism. More than that cripple their children's intellectual development by blocking their access to real science education. More still risk their children's sexual health by blocking access to information critical to any human who reaches puberty.

Hundreds of thousands of American parents overstress their children in bizarre pursuits of stuff like university athletic scholarships, or force them into "college application building" schedules so frantic kids become suicidal, less they have to receive a "less than Ivy" education.

And then, on perhaps a low-priority but still essential level, are the mothers I met Saturday.

Disastrous parental behaviors cross every socio-economic divide. They hurt kids of every type, from every neighborhood.

OK, wait...

Before this goes any further... I know there are lots of great parents out there, and - for the record - I am not proposing kibbutz-like societal child-rearing, though that seems to have been fairly successful. I just want to question the "parent-centric" arguments of a certain type of charter school advocate.

I have met three types of charter school advocates. The first, and the ones whose side I am on (to be honest in regards to my motivations), are educational theorists who wish to test out new ideas not yet in the educational mainstream. My child went to charters created by educators like this. On Twitter, @COCharterXaminr falls into this category - these people are creating significant alternate models. They oppose for profit charters, they are not "anti-public school," and rarely do they sound, "anti-teacher."

The second group are the free market pirates. As with everything else society ("government") does together for mutual benefit, they oppose public education because they are not sufficiently profiting from it (you'd think textbook markups would be enough, but...). So they plan to destroy public education so that they can charge everyone for it more effectively, and create new profit centers. They mouth the nonsensical mantras of "competition" (New York City used to have competing fire departments, it doesn't always work well in public services) and "choice" ("I choose the bad hospital!") and hustle 2006 Wall Street solutions, like merit pay based on illusory short term results ('test scores"). These are the same folks who sell your kids $30 Abercrombie T-shirts. And because they do that, they have the money to buy many politicians.

The third group is more difficult to discuss, and I don't want to dismiss or demean, but I think of them as "the colonized." These are people from traditionally out-of-power groups who have decided to fully "play the game" of their oppressors. They tend to wear the charter school ideology around their necks the way certain Nigerians and Indians and other "citizens of the Empire" in the early 20th Century donned British powdered wigs and joined the colonial governments.

It is tough to argue with much of what they say: They are looking to "save kids now." To open "real opportunities." To build "within the realities we have." And to argue with this is to engage in that oldest of battles among the colonized - do we achieve freedom and power on "their" terms, or "ours." Do we want our children to grow up as -and this will depend on the argument you are making - Brits and citizens of the world/Second-class Brits or to grow up as Nigerians, Indians, South Africans, Irish, Israelis/poor separatists in a global economy.

As with most great issues, the answers are not clear cut, not "black and white," as they say. We want our identities, we want freedom and possibility based in our culture, and yet, yes, we also live and work in a world designed and controlled by the powerful.

So when people like @dropoutnation argue for charters and vouchers as their "answer," it is not just a matter of being co-opted. They have convinced themselves that this is the only logical solution in the world they see now. And I can argue for greater faith in the future, for greater faith in diverse communities, but altering someone's fundamental world view is tough.

Social Reproduction

Thus, I will say this - even if you believe that "choice" is the way to go, you are giving choice to the wrong people.

The common characteristics that I find in what I describe as "the best schools" (see primary and secondary), that is, schools which "work" for the broadest range of students, is student choice. These are schools which help students discover their path, not their parents' path. These are schools which are willing to help students find success even if their parents are incapable, or destructive, or just uninterested.

Parent choice - the concept of charters and vouchers - is socially reproductive from the start. Charter schools really object if they are criticized for "cherry picking" students, but the fact is, the only students who attend those schools are those with parents who are capable and informed enough to make the choice, interested enough to make the choice, and, in most places, economically and physically able to make the choice (due to transportation issues, etc).  This means that even if charters are not "cherry picking" students (though most "for profits" are doing just that), they are, by their very nature, "cherry picking" parents.

Which means they are abandoning the neediest children. Which means, to me, that those in that "third group" of charter advocates are selling out huge parts of their constituencies in exchange for success of their elites.

This was common enough in the British Empire that the American Corporate Empire seeks to re-create. There were Irish who converted to Anglicanism, and Indians who joined the British Army, and, of course, many colonials who dressed their children like proper little English boys and sent them off to schools which seemed replicas of those outside of central London - parental choice.

But even without that sell-out, parental choice often works against child best interests. Parents pick schools based on status, on homogeneity, on sports, on reputation. The quite broken school systems of Northern Ireland are the result of "parental choice," as are the highly segregated schools of Scotland, as are the nightmares of our school literature - think Dead Poets Society.

All of this leads me to believe in great public schools. And great public schools have student choice. No two classes in the same grade or subject should be anything alike. No common reading lists or classroom management. No common grading system. No common organization. Ideally, even schedules should vary. Only with that kind of choice can students find what they need, not what even the most well-meaning adults find for them.

And great public schools are being made impossible by "choice" advocates, who pull a certain segment of students out of the mix, reducing workable choices for those left behind.

I'm a parent, and I like parents. But I've also known all kinds of parents, and I value children too much to leave all the decisions in parental hands.

- Ira Socol