Don’t Extend Kids’ School Day; Shorten Parents’ Work Week

February 21, 2020February 21, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Budget, capitalism, Chicago, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Democrat, Education, Grit, history, Homework, John Podesta, Labor, Learning, New Zealand, Obama, Parents, Philosophy, Politics, Poverty, privatization, Republican, School Funding, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, Taxation, Teachers, union busting, Unions 32 hour work week, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Center for American Progress, Democrats, developmentally appropriate, health, Henry Ford, John Maynard Keynes, John Podesta, labor, Longer School Day, Max Weber, neoliberal, parents, Politics, productivity, public schools, Puritan work ethic, Republican, Students, Vicki Abeles

It’s rough being the parent of an American school student.

You often leave for work before your kids have even made it to school yet – and you get home long after they’ve returned.

When exactly are you supposed to parent?

Your kids have to get themselves to school. They have to get themselves home. And helping with homework, talking about their days, even setting a good example are all luxuries you have to pay dearly for with an ever-shrinking amount of time.

So what’s the solution?

For those of the think tank persuasion, the answer is more school.

Parents and kids schedules aren’t aligned? Well, align them then. Have kids in class from 9 to 5 just like their parents.

Not only will that make it easier for adults to take them to-and-from school, but it will prepare kids for the rigors of the adult world.

The neoliberal Center for American Progress, for instance, suggests that synching the school and workday would better allow parents to meet their obligations to their children.

This is especially true, they say, for kids in low-income communities where competitive grant programs could fund the initiative while also holding the money hostage unless their schools engage in more test prep as part of their curriculums.

It’s a terrible idea proposed by terrible individuals working for billionaire philanthrocapitalists.

The think tank is run by John Podesta who was chief of staff for President Bill Clinton and manager of President Barack Obama’s transition team – which tells you a lot about Democratic politics of the last several decades.

However, it does hold a kernel of truth.

The school and workday ARE out of step with each other.

This DOES cause problems.

Something SHOULD be done.

But the solution isn’t to lengthen the time kids are required to spend in the classroom. It is solved by reducing the amount of time their parents have to stay at work.

Think about it.

A LONGER SCHOOL DAY WOULD BE HARMFUL TO STUDENTS

Currently, most children attend school for six to seven hours a day.

If school started earlier or was in session later, we’d be forcing many kids to put in as much as 12-hour days – especially when you factor in transportation and after-school activities.

Students in rural areas or those who live the farthest from school would be the most impacted. Many kids get to school early for breakfast. So if classes began at 9 am, many kids would need to get to school by 8:30 am at the latest – that could mean leaving home by 7:30 am. If the school day ended at 5 pm, these same kids wouldn’t get home until 6 to 7 pm or later.

This would not lead to better academic performance or well adjusted kids. It would result in exhausted and burned out students. Some – perhaps many – would probably cut out after-school activities which would hurt their social, emotional and physical development.

Moreover, kids need time – free time – to discover who they are. They need time to spend with friends, build relationships and enjoy themselves.

They shouldn’t be forced to be adults before they are developmentally ready to do so.

And it’s not just me who says so. Youth advocate Vicki Abeles is sounding the alarm against the idea of a longer school day, too. Abeles, who authored Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, and Underestimated Generation, wrote in The New York Times:

“Many of our children are already stretched to unhealthy breaking points, loaded down with excessive homework, extracurricular activities and outside tutoring because they’re led to believe high test scores, a slew of Advanced Placement classes and a packed résumé are their ticket to college and success. This has led to an epidemic of anxious, unhealthy, sleep-deprived, burned-out, disengaged, unprepared children — and overwhelmed and discouraged teachers. The key is creating a healthier, more balanced, more engaging and effective school day, not a longer one.”

Moreover, this is not what other high achieving nations do to succeed. Countries like Finland, Singapore, and China have SHORTER school days – not longer ones. They just try to make the most of the class time they have.

In fact, U.S. teachers already spend more time in the classroom with students than their peers in practically every other developed nation, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Maybe instead of listening to think tank fools like Podesta, we should pay attention to educators around the world.

And this is to say nothing of cost.

Nine years ago, it took $10 million to lengthen the day at 50 Chicago schools. Each school got $150,000 just to pay for additional salary to compensate teachers for the extra time. The district projected that it would have cost $84 million to increase the program to all its schools.

But that doesn’t include the cost for additional electricity, maintenance and other utilities which is more difficult to estimate.

Who’s going to pay this extra money? We don’t even adequately fund the time kids spend in class NOW! We’re going to stretch tax revenue even further to increase those hours!?

This is the definition of doing more with less. More time, less quality.

SHORTENING THE ADULT WORK WEEK

It would make far more sense to cut parents’ time at work than to increase children’s time at school.

Adults already work too many hours as it is.

In fact, doing so actually makes adults better at their jobs.

That’s not just conjecture or wish fulfillment. It’s been tried and proven correct.

In 2019, Microsoft conducted an experiment at its offices in Japan where employees had to take every Friday off as a paid vacation day. The result was a boost in productivity of 40 percent.

In 2018, Perpetual Guardian, a New Zealand trustee services firm, did almost the same thing on a trial basis. It had employees work four eight-hour days a week but paid them for five. Once again this resulted in an increase in productivity, but also lower stress levels and higher job satisfaction.

The idea of a 32-hour workweek (instead of the traditional 40) is gaining support. After all, much of our time on the job is wasted.

The average number of truly productive hours in an eight-hour day is two hours and 53 minutes, according to a survey of U.K. office workers. Human beings aren’t robots. We can’t just sit at our desks and work. We have all these pointless meetings, frivolous emails and phone calls, co-worker discussions, disruptions and distractions. Imagine if we didn’t have to waste so much time and could focus on other endeavors after putting in a few effective hours at the office. We could get things done and still have time to live our lives.

The five-day, 40-hour workweek is a relatively new invention. A century ago, it was not uncommon for people to work six ten-hour days with only Sundays off for religious worship. Then Henry Ford started giving his autoworkers more time off to create leisure time – so they might have reason to actually buy the cars they were making. It became common practice throughout the country in 1938 when Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act. The law was meant to improve conditions and pay for manufacturing workers – and it did that. However, that doesn’t mean it was the be all, end all. We should continue the trend to shorten the workweek even further.

In fact, this is what people expected would happen – that work hours would continue to shrink over time.

In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that the working week eventually would be cut to 15 hours. He figured that by 2030, people would have far more leisure time as their material needs were met.

However, the trend changed in the 1970s as Americans started spending more – not less – time at their jobs. This also coincided with the weakening of labor unions, corporate downsizing and demanding more from employees for decreasing wages and benefits.

Now the US and Korea lead the developed world in long workdays. Americans average 1,786 work hours a year, which is 423 more hours than workers in Germany and over 100 hours more than workers in Japan, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

CONCLUSION

These long hours take a toll on our health and well-being.

It’s telling that instead of realizing that adults need fewer hours on the job, policy wonks try to convince us to make our children shoulder the same burden.

It reminds me of Max Weber’s thesis in his seminal “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.” In the book, the sociologist and economist argues that underneath our economic values lies an abiding belief in a Puritan work ethic. The value of work is given a religious and ethical fervor far beyond what it gains us monetarily.

Perhaps we need to take a step back from these unconscious and toxic values to see what is really in the best interests of individuals and families.

It is far past time to shorten the workweek for adults.

That would give us the time we need to be better parents to our children, allow us to be more present and available for them.

It would be far better for families to spend more time together learning and growing than to throw that time down an endless bin of empty industry.

Like this post? I’ve written a book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform,” now available from Garn Press. Ten percent of the proceeds go to the Badass Teachers Association. Check it out!

The Ongoing Study of How and When Teachers Should Praise Students

February 2, 2020 stevenmsinger Accountability, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", discipline, Education, Grit, growth mindset, Learning, literature, Philosophy, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, Schools, Students, Teachers classroom, education, education policy, educators, policy, Politics, praise, Psychology, public schools, reprimand, research, Respect, Students, teachers

Should teachers praise their students?

It’s a simple question with a multiplicity of answers.

A 2020 study published in the journal Educational Psychology concludes that teachers who use praise see a 30% increase in good behavior from their classes.

Meanwhile, reprimands actually increase misbehavior and unwillingness to comply with instruction.

Researches suggest a 3:1 or 4:1 praise-to-reprimand ratio. So for every one reprimand, a teacher should provide three or four positive reinforcements.

Unfortunately, this study flies in the face of previous research.

According to a 2014 study by the Sutton Trust, teachers who give struggling pupils “lavish praise” can make them even less likely to succeed.

Too much praise can “convey a message of low expectations.”

Researchers warned that if failure brings students too much sympathy, they are more likely to associate that approval with underachievement.

Yet it’s fine for educators to express anger at underachievement because it doesn’t create positive associations with performing badly. In fact, it motivates them to try harder.

But another study from 1998 turns this on its head.

This examination found that it wasn’t a matter of praise or reprimand. What was important was the kind of praise being given to children.

In short, researchers concluded that the wrong kind of praise can have disastrous consequences.

If teachers praised the hard work students did on an assignment – even if that work was not completed successfully – it resulted in willingness to work out new approaches in the future.

However, if instead the teacher praised the students ability or achievement, that could result in a tendency to give up when confronted with future failures.

So what are teachers to do?

Frankly, researchers don’t know.

They look at discrete data sets and try to make broad conclusions.

However, when you’re dealing with something as complex as the minds of children, this approach is destined for failure.

There are simply too many variables at play.

And that’s something every classroom teacher with any experience knows in her bones.

Teaching is not like baking a cake. There is no one recipe that will work every time on every student.

Being an educator is an art as much as it is a science.

In my own classroom, I praise my students a lot.

I reprimand, too.

And though I try to focus on effort, I admit to commending students on the results at times.

This year I was tasked with creating a new writing course for 8th graders called “Writing is Fundamental.”

Each day, I give students a writing task – usually focusing on the more creative side – and then I wander from desk to desk observing, answering questions and ultimately reading and commenting on their finished work in real time.

It’s exhausting.

At first, I try to be positive even when the writing isn’t that great. But then as I get to know the students and their abilities, I begin to be more critical and offer ways in which they can – and sometimes must – try to improve.

The results are mixed.

Some students – especially the lowest achievers – tend to respond to praise like a flower does to light. They soak it up and blossom.

I had one student who entered the class so embarrassed about his writing he was literally hiding under the desk and making jokes about how terrible a writer he was.

After just a week, he was working longer than any other student in the class to craft his responses and made sure to share his work with me and sometimes the entire class.

By the end of the semester, he wasn’t going to win any awards, but his writing had improved by leaps and bounds. And his attitude was almost that of a different person.

However, in the same class, there were students who didn’t respond as positively.

One child who was used to taking honors courses was put off by the creative nature of the writing. He preferred to write expository essays and hated the focus on details, figurative language and creativity.

Students were not required to share their work with the class but doing so earned them participation points. So he felt obliged to do so and was extremely upset that – in his own mind – his work didn’t compare favorably with some of his classmates.

Other students more used to having their work evaluated on standardized tests were indignant at my continual pushing them to improve. They knew that what they had written would be good enough on the standardized test, so there was no point working any further to refine their craft.

When it comes to praise, teachers are put in a very difficult position.

We want to help encourage our students but we don’t want that encouragement to ring false.

If all I ever did was tell students what a good job they were doing, they would soon catch on that it was meaningless. Every child can’t win a self esteem prize every day for whatever they do.

However, an amazing piece of work from a student who always does amazing work isn’t as impressive as moderately improved work from a student who has struggled constantly up to this point.

More than writing, I try to teach my students that learning is not about a destination – it’s a journey. And only they can truly decide whether the work they’ve done has value.

I offer advice on how they might revise their work, but it’s often up to them whether they want to keep refining a piece of writing or whether they have done enough for the day.

I’d be lying if I said the relationships I had with students has no baring on this. Many of them want to make me proud of them, but hopefully they get beyond this point.

In a semester course, the relationships are more transient and not as powerful. But in my year-long classes, they’re deeper and more far-reaching.

And that’s really the point that I think this body of research misunderstands.

It’s not praise or reprimands that matter as much as it is relationships.

Students learn from educators they trust. And part of gaining that trust is giving the proper kind of feedback – encouraging but honest, critical but helpful, opinionated but respectful.

Maybe if we trusted classroom teachers more to talk authoritatively about their experiences, we’d know more about the realities of education.

Coming into the classroom occasionally to observe student behavior is extremely shallow when compared to the everyday empiricism of lifelong educators.

Perhaps before we decide whether to praise students or not, we should agree to give classroom teachers their due.

Six Problems with a Growth Mindset in Education

August 12, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Budget, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Data Driven Instruction, Education, Grit, growth mindset, Learning, Philosophy, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, School Funding, Schools, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers classroom, education, Grit, growth, growth mindset, high stakes testing, motivation, pedagogy, Politics, problems, Psychology, schools, standardized testing, teachers

Sometimes the truth is not enough.

Especially if you misunderstand its meaning.

That seems to be the main problem with a growth mindset.

It’s one of the trendiest concepts in education today, and – though it’s based on an authentic insight into how kids learn – it’s been shackled and monetized into an excuse to support a sterile status quo.

The basic idea goes like this: academic ability isn’t something students have or do not have. It’s a skill that gets better depending on how hard they work at it.

And up to that point, it’s correct and valuable.

But when we try to take that insight and weave it into current education policies, it becomes a shadow of itself.

As a middle school language arts teacher, I’m confronted with this most often in the context of standardized test scores.

I am constantly being told not to pay attention to the scores. Instead, I’m told to pay attention to growth – how much this year’s scores have improved from last year’s scores. And the best way to do this, I’m told, is by paradoxically examining the scores in the most minute detail and using them to drive all instruction in the classroom.

To me that seems to misunderstand the essential psychological truth behind a growth mindset.

Instead of focusing on the individuality of real human students, we’re zeroing in on the relics of a fixed mindset – test scores – and relegating the growth mindset to happy talk and platitudes.

B leads to A, and if we really want A, we just need to emphasize B.

To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the idea that learning is a skill that can be strengthened with hard work. I do, however, take issue with how that observation has been used to support the status quo of test-and-punish and strategic disinvestment in public schools. I take issue with the idea that growth is the ONLY factor in student learning and how we are ignoring the multitudinous ways the human mind works and what that means for education.

In short, I think making the growth mindset a magic bullet has ended up shooting us in the foot.

Here are six problems I have with the growth mindset model:

1) It Has Not Been Proven to Make an Appreciable Difference in Student Academic Achievement.

How exactly do you use growth to drive achievement?

You make the concept of growth explicit by teaching it. You actively teach kids this idea that anyone can learn with hard work, and the theory goes that they’ll achieve more.

Does it actually work?

The results have been pretty inconclusive.

It’s been tested numerous times in various ways – some showing success, some showing nothing or even that it hurts learning.

The best success has come from Carol Dweck, a Stanford education professor who’s made a name for herself promoting the growth mindset model in books and TED talks.

Just this month, she co-authored the largest nationwide study concluding that a growth mindset can improve student results.

About 12,500 ninth grade students from 65 public and private schools were given an online training in the concept during the 2015-16 school year.

The study published in the journal Nature concluded that on average lower-achieving students who took the training earned statistically significant higher grades than those who did not.

However, results were “muted” when students were less encouraged to seek challenges – such as when they had fewer resources and support.

Despite this success, Dweck’s peers haven’t been able to reproduce her results.

A large-scale study of 36 schools in the United Kingdom published in July by the Education Endowment Foundation concluded that the impact on students directly receiving this kind of training did not have statistical significance. And when teachers were given the training, there were no gains at all.

In a 2017 study, researchers gave the training to university applicants in the Czech Republic and then compared their results on a scholastic aptitude test. They found that applicants who got the training did slightly worse than those who hadn’t received it at all.

In 2018, two meta-analyses conducted in the US found that claims for the growth mindset may have been overstated, and that there was “little to no effect of mindset interventions on academic achievement for typical students.”

A 2012 review looking at students attitudes toward education in the UK found “no clear evidence of association or sequence between pupils’ attitudes in general and educational outcomes, although there were several studies attempting to provide explanations for the link (if it exists)”.

In short, there is little evidence that any current approaches to turning the growth mindset into a series of practices that increase learning at scale has succeeded.

2) It Doesn’t Fit with Current Education Policies

We live in a fixed mindset world.

That’s how we define academic achievement – test scores, grades, projects, etc.

We tabulate data, compile numbers and information and pretend that draws an accurate picture of students.

It doesn’t.

But the concept that student achievement isn’t one of these things – is, in fact, something changeable with enough effort – runs counter to everything else in this world view.

If data points don’t tell us something essential about students but only their effort, connecting them with high stakes is incredibly unfair.

Moreover, it’s incoherent.

How can you convince a student that test scores, for example, don’t tell us something essential about her when we put so much emphasis on them?

It’s almost impossible for students in today’s schools to keep a belief in a growth mindset when test scores and our attitude toward them confirm their belief in a fixed mindset.

In a world of constant summative testing, analysis and ranking of students, it is nearly impossible to believe in a growth mindset. It’s merely a platitude between the fixed academic targets we demand students hit.

This doesn’t exactly take anything away from the concept, but it shows that it cannot be implemented within our current educational framework.

If we really believed in it, we’d throw away the testing and data-centricity and focus on the students, themselves.

3) It Ignores Student Needs and Resources

When we try to force the growth mindset onto our test-obsessed world, we end up with something very much like grit.

After all, if the only factor students need to succeed is effort, then those who don’t succeed must be responsible for their own failures because they didn’t try hard enough.

And while this is true in some instances, it is not true in all of them.

Effort may be a necessary component of academic success but it is not in itself sufficient. There are other factors that need to be present, too, such as the presence of proper resources and support.

And most – if not all – of these factors are outside of students’ control. They have no say whether they are well fed, live in safe homes, have their emotional needs met. Nor have they any say whether they go to a well-resourced school with a wide curriculum, extracurricular activities, school nurses, tutors, mentors, psychologists and a host of other services.

Putting everything on growth is extremely cruel to students – much like the phenomenon of grit.

Education policy should help raise up struggling students, not continue to support their marginalization through poverty, racism and/or socioeconomic disadvantages.

4) It Can Make Kids Feel Disrespected and Disparaged

No child wants to be remediated.

It makes them feel small, inadequate and broken. And if they’re already feeling that way, it reinforces that helplessness instead of helping.

Context is everything. Well-meaning educators may gather all the students with low test scores in one place to tell them the good news about how they can finally achieve if they put in enough effort. But students may recognize this for what it is and instinctively turn away.

The best way to teach someone is often not to lecture, not to even let on that you’re teaching at all.

David Yeager and Gregory Walton at Stanford claimed in 2011:

“…if adolescents perceive a teacher’s reinforcement of a psychological idea as conveying that they are seen as in need of help, teacher training or an extended workshop could undo the effects of the intervention, not increase its benefits.”

Teachers cannot set themselves up as saviors because that reinforces the idea that students are broken and thus need saved.

I don’t think this is an insurmountable goal, but many growth mindset interventions are planned and conceived by non-teachers. As such, they often walk right into this trap.

5) It is Not Suitable For All Kids

Everyone’s minds don’t work alike.

When you tell some kids that anyone can achieve with enough hard work, it makes them discouraged because they thought that their academic successes marked them as special.

According to a 2017 study published by the American Psychological Association, growth mindset training can backfire especially with high achieving students for exactly this reason.

Hard work just isn’t enough for some students. Their self-esteem relies on the idea that they are good at school because of fixed qualities about themselves.

When we take that belief away, we can damage their self esteem and thus their motivation to do well in school.

The point isn’t that a growth mindset is wrong, but that as an intervention it is not appropriate for all students. In fact, perhaps we shouldn’t be using it as an intervention at all.

6) It Should Not be a Student Intervention. It Should Be a Pedagogical Underpinning for Educators

We’ve got this growth mindset thing all wrong.

It’s not a tool to help students learn. It’s a tool for teachers to better understand their students and thus better help them learn. It’s a tool for administrators, parents and policymakers to better understand what grades and test scores mean.

If you want to teach a student any skill, let’s call it X, you shouldn’t begin by telling them that anyone can learn it with enough effort.

Just teach X. And when you succeed, that will become all the motivation students need to learn the next thing.

Education is an incremental process. Success breeds success just as failure breeds failure.

As every teacher knows, you start small, scaffold your lessons from point A to B to C and make whatever changes you need along the way.

If we really want to help students in this process, we can start by ridding ourselves of the fixed mindset that current education policy is rooted in.

Growth mindset is a psychological observation about how human minds work. It’s not pedagogy. It’s empiricism.

We can use it to help design policy, lessons and assessment. But it has limited value – if any – being taught directly to students.

The growth mindset model has value, but not in the way it has typically been used in our school system.

Instead of providing justification for equitable resources and tearing down the testocracy, it’s been used to gaslight educators into obeying the party line.

It is not a magic cure all, but one factor among many that provides insight into learning.

If we can disentangle it from the profit-driven mire of corporate education, perhaps it can help us achieve an authentic pedagogy that treats every student as an individual and not an economic incentive for billionaires to pocket more tax money.

Who’s Afraid of Public Schools?

March 16, 2019March 16, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, college, Corporate Education "Reform", Donald Trump, Education, Grit, Learning, Parents, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, segregation, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, White Privilege cheating, college, college admissions, College Cheating Scandal, Donald Trump, education, George W. Bush, Operation Varsity Blues, parents, Politics, public schools, schools, Students, teachers

Public schools are the bogeymen of American life.

We so often hear the bedtime story of “Failing Schools” that it’s no wonder some folks will do anything to ensure their kids get in elsewhere.

And let’s be honest. It’s the same impulse behind the latest college admissions cheating scandal.

A group of wealthy – though not too wealthy – parents thought their children should be able to enroll in the most prestigious schools.

So they bribed college admissions officers, cheated on standardized tests or paid coaches or other officials to accept their children as college athletes even if their kids had never played the sport.

We see the same kind of thing everyday in public schools – a confederacy of white parents terrified that their kids might have to go to class with black kids. So they dip into their stock portfolios to pay for enrollment at a private or parochial school.

Or they take advantage of a tax scholarship or school voucher to avoid an institution with low test scores by enrolling in one where students don’t have to take the tests at all.

Or they cross their fingers and enter their kid in a lottery to a charter school praying their precious progeny will escape the horrors of being treated just like everyone else’s kids.

And they call it a meritocracy!

What a joke!

They pretend that their children have earned special treatment.

WRONG.

No child deserves favoritism – paradoxically – because all children do!

There are really two important but related points here:

1) The children of the privileged don’t deserve a better education than anyone else’s.

2) Children who come from wealthy families (and or from privileged social circumstances) don’t do anything to distinguish themselves from the underprivileged.

But these nouveau riche parents tried to bribe the way forward for their kids anyway even though to do so they had to launder the money through a fake “charity.” They didn’t care that doing so would earn them a tax deduction and thus result in even less money for the underprivileged. They didn’t care about the underlying inequalities in the system. No. They only wanted their children to remain in the class of America’s chosen few.

And the best way to do that is with cold, hard cash.

America doesn’t run on Dunkin. It runs on greenbacks. Dinero. Swag. Bling. The prosperity doctrine made physical, quantifiable and mean.

No one really denies that there are two Americas anymore. We just lie to ourselves about how you get placed in one or the other.

And that lie is called excellence, quality, worth – the ultimate in class war gaslighting.

It’s a deception that this scandal has shattered to pieces.

The privileged don’t earn their privilege. It’s not something they possess on the basis of intelligence or hard work shown through test scores. They don’t have it because of drive, determination or grit – once again shown through test scores. They have it based on wealth – the kind of wealth that buys time and resources to either pass the tests or bribe the gatekeepers to change the scores.

Think about it.

George W. Bush got into Yale and Harvard and graduated with a 2.35 GP A. Why? Not because he had the grades and demonstrated his worth. He was a legacy. Like at least one third of all admissions to Ivy League schools, he got in purely because he had family who graduated from there.

You think Donald Trump threatened the College Board not to release his grades because they were all A’s!?

According to one account, his scores were merely “respectable.” Yet he still dropped out of the prestigious Fordham University and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania after two years based on family connections and the reputation of his father, Fred Trump, one of the wealthiest businessmen in New York at the time.

Moreover, his kids, Don Jr. and Ivanka, were both enrolled at Penn around the same time as their father made hefty contributions. They began classes in 1996 and 2000, respectively, just as the university and its private Manhattan clubhouse received more than $1.4 million in pledged donations from Trump, the school newspaper reported.

This is not merit. This has nothing to do with what these people deserve. It is money – a pure transaction, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

The only thing that separates what the Trumps and the Bushes did with this latest scandal – the so-called Operation Varsity Blues – is the amount of wealth involved.
If you’re super rich, you can get away with it. If you’re just rich, you’d better not get caught.

And if you’re poor or middle class, you’d better stay in your lane.

But there shouldn’t be any lanes on this highway. Or at least they should only be in place to maximize fairness and student success.

We sneer at the idea of Affirmative Action but only because it’s directed at people of color. No one says anything about the real Affirmative Action that’s been in place since before our country even began – the system of reciprocity and privilege keeping wealthy white families in positions of power like Lords and Ladies while the rest of us serfs scramble for their leavings.

All children deserve the same opportunities to succeed. All children deserve the chance to get an excellent education. All children should attend a first class school filled with highly educated and experienced teachers who can draw on plenty of resources, wide curriculum, tutoring, counseling and support.

And the only way we’ll ever achieve that is through a robust system of public schools.

I’m not saying they’re perfect. In many neighborhoods, they’ve been sabotaged and surgically dismantled, but that’s a problem with an easy solution. Invest in public schools!

Because the stated purpose of public education, the reason it exists at all, is equity.
The alternatives – private and charter schools – are essentially unequal. That’s their raison d’être – to create a market that justifies their existence.

In order for charter and private schools to be a thing, there must be schools that don’t otherwise meet students’ needs. There must be an unreasonable demand that schools indoctrinate students into parents’ religious beliefs. There must be schools that aren’t as well funded or that have to meet ridiculous federal and state mandates.

The result is a two-tiered system. Schools for the haves and for the have-nots.
It’s an apparatus that perverts the public to make room for the private.

In the public system, students are segregated into communities based on race and class and then their community schools are funded based on what their parents can afford. The rich shower their children with the best of everything. The poor do what they can.

Then the federal government pretends to hold everyone “accountable” by forcing students to take standardized tests that merely recreate the economic and racial disparities already present in their districts and neighborhoods. In turn, this provides the justification for charter and voucher schools that further erode public school budgets and increases the downward spiral of disinvestment.

Meanwhile, few notice how the equity built into authentic public schools gets left behind by those enrolling in privatized alternatives. No more open meetings. No more elected school boards. No more public comment or even a voice in how the money is spent.

So long as there are two Americas, the fear of being in the wrong one will motivate the privileged to cheat and steal their way to the top. They will horde resources and wealth for themselves and their children while denying it to others.

It is a self-perpetuating system – a loop that we’re all caught in.
We must break the chain. We must recognize our common humanity and stop the zero sum game.

And perhaps the best way to begin is by supporting authentic public schools and not privatization.

We have been taught to fear public education, because it is really our only hope.

A Gadfly’s Dozen: Top 13 Education Articles of 2018 (By Me)

December 27, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Arne Duncan, Badass Teachers Association, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, bloggers, Budget, Censorship, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Democrat, Donald Trump, edtech, Education, Election, Facebook, Grit, immigration, Junk science, Labor, Learning, Media, Obama, Pittsburgh, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Propaganda, Republican, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers 2018, bloggers, blogs, education, Education Bloggers Network, Gadfly on the Wall, New Year, roundup, Top 10, Year End

I’m not going to mince words.

This year, 2018, has been a monster.

We’ve been fighting the dumbest and most corrupt President of our lives – Donald Trump. And we’ve been making progress.

Thanks to the midterm election blue wave in the U.S. House, Trump will finally have a check on his power.

We have more black and brown representatives, more women, more nationalities, ethnicities and faiths in the halls of power than ever before.

Charter schools and vouchers are more unpopular today than at any other point in history. High stakes testing is on the decline. And everywhere you look educators and education activists are being heard and making a difference.

But it’s taken an incredible toll on the activist community.

We have had to be out there fighting this ridiculous crap day-in-day-out 365 days a year.

And even then, we’ve suffered devastating losses – family separations at the border, children dying in detention, an increase in hate crimes and gun deaths, all while climate change runs rapidly out of control.

I wish I felt more hopeful. But as I cast my eyes back on the year that was, I’m struck with a sense of bone-deep despair.

I am confident Trump will go down and he will take so many with him.

But the forces of regression, prejudice and stupidity that forced him upon us don’t appear to be going anywhere.

Behind Donald is another Trump waiting to take his place. And behind him another one – like an infinite set of Russian Matryoshka dolls.

Oh, many of them look more appealing than Donald. They dress better, are more articulate and can remember all the words to the National Anthem. But they are just as committed to serving themselves at our expense.

So with that in mind, I invite you to join me on a brief look back at the year that was.

First, let me thank everyone who bought my book, “Gadfly on the Wall: A Public School Teacher Speaks Out on Racism and Reform” from Garn Press. It was amazing to have finally achieved the dream of being published (in paper with a binding and everything)! I never made anyone’s best seller list, but it was gratifying to have hundreds of copies make it into readers’ hands. I hope people found it helpful (and still do because it’s still out there where better books are sold).

Also, I got to check another item off my bucket list with the invitation to film a TED Talk at Central Connecticut State University. My topic was “The Plot to Destroy Public Education.” It’s been viewed almost 1,000 times. I invite you to watch it here.

As to the blog, itself, I’ve been writing now for four and a half years. This year, I’ve had more than 211,000 hits. To be honest, that’s quite a drop. In 2017, I had 366,000 hits. But I’m hearing about similar dips all over the blogosphere. Facebook changed its algorithm this year making it much harder for people to see the work of amateurs like me. Zuckerberg’s multi-billion dollar corporation doesn’t refuse to spread the written word – it just charges a fee that I can’t afford. Moreover, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) repealed Net Neutrality at about this time last year making things even more dodgy.

However, on the plus side, the blog is up to more than 1,429,000 hits total! That’s pretty good for a publication that’s only been around since July 2014. And it doesn’t count all the readers I get from articles reposted on the Badass Teachers Association Blog, Huffington Post, Commondreams.org, the LA Progressive, Alternet, BillMoyers.com or other sites.

In addition, about 500 more people followed me this year for a total of 13,361.

That should do it for an overview.

One final item before I get to the look back. I’m making a slight change this year to how I do things. Instead of publishing two separate articles – a Top 10 list and a List of Honorable Mentions – I’m combing the two into this one.

I’ll begin with three pieces that didn’t necessarily get the number of hits I thought they were worth. Then I’ll count down my 10 most popular pieces of 2018.

So without further ado, here’s what’s kept Gadfly buzzing this year:

Honorable Mentions

13) The Necessity and Importance of Teachers

Published: June 29

Views: 520

Description: There’s an increasing (unspoken) insistence that schools do away with teachers and replace them with technology, apps, algorithms and other edtech marvels with more strings attached than your standard marionette. This is my attempt to prove how and why real, live teachers are important.

Fun Fact: How sad this article was and remains necessary.

12) There is Virtually No Difference Between Nonprofit and For-Profit Charter Schools

Published: Sept. 7

Views: 1,464

Description: You often hear privatization cheerleaders defend charter schools by making a distinction between the good ones and the bad ones. This usually just means those that are for-profit and those that are not-for-profit. But in this article, I show that this distinction is bogus.

Fun Fact: This may be one of the most important facts you can share with someone who’s had a big gulp of the charter school Kool-aide.

11) Top 10 Reasons You Can’t Fairly Evaluate Teachers on Student Test Scores

Published: Aug. 6

Views: 1,552

Description: Policy makers don’t talk about it as much these days, but there are still plenty of laws on the books requiring states to evaluate teachers on student test scores. It’s called VAM or Value Added Measures. Here’s why it’s totally unfair.

Fun Fact: I’m not sure if anyone else has ever put together all these arguments against VAM. Hopefully, it can serve as a good go-to article when a corporate shill starts rhapsodizing on the benefits of this farce.

Top 10 by Popularity

10) Grit is Sh!t – It’s Just an Excuse to do Nothing for Struggling Students

Published: Nov. 8

Views: 3,102

Description: Ask a Common Core propagandizer why their canned academic standards haven’t resulted in an increase in test scores and you’ll get this whooper: ‘It’s the students’ fault. They need more grit.’ Here’s why that’s a steaming pile of something that rhymes with grit.

Fun Fact: Some folks hated this article simply because of my potty mouth. But a whole lot of people were as fed up with this particular suit of the Emperor’s new clothes as I am.

9) Twenty-One Reasons People Hate, Hate, HATE Betsy DeVos

Published: March 12

Views: 3,824

Description: During Betsy Devos’ 60 Minutes interview, the billionaire heiress turned Education Secretary just couldn’t figure out why people hated her so much. It thought I’d send her a clue – or 21.

Fun Fact: The biggest criticism I got on this article was that I stopped at only 21 reasons. I should have gone on – but then I might still be writing…

8) The Best Charter School Cannot Hold a Candle to the Worst Public School

Published: May 26

Views: 3,929

Description: A question I often get is this: Why do you think Charter Schools are always a bad thing? Here is my answer.

Fun Fact: This article shocked a lot of progressives who backed Obama and Clinton. But it had to be said. Democracy is always better than tyranny just as public schools are always better than charter schools.

7) Few Kids in the World Can Pass America’s Common Core Tests, According to New Study

Published: Jan 23 $chinese-children-crush-americans-in-math-thanks-to-a-mindset-americans-only-display-in-one-place-sports$

Views: 5,061

Description: If all students the world over had to pass America’s Common Core tests, they wouldn’t be able to do it. You’d think that would have implications for how we assess learning in the USA. But nope. Standardized tests are big business. Wouldn’t want to kill that cash cow just because we’re hurting our children, now would we?

Fun Fact: This should have been a bigger story, but we already rewrote our federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, which enshrines standardized testing in most states. So nothing can be done until it comes up for another revision in a few years where lawmakers will again drag their feet and somehow rediscover their love of standardized testing all over again!

6) When You Mistreat Teachers, Beware the Unintended Lessons for Students

Published: Jan 10

Views: 7.048

Description: A Louisiana school resource officer threw a school teacher to the ground and arrested her for asking a question at a school board meeting. This was my analysis of what such actions were teaching students.

Fun Fact: A Lafayette judge ruled 10 months later that the school board violated Louisiana’s open meetings law and had to negate the pay raise for the superintendent that the teacher was asking about.

5) The Six Biggest Problems with Data-Driven Instruction

Published: Sept 25

Views: 7,525

Description: A lot of folks in education think that everything in our schools should be data driven. Here’s why they’re wrong. It should be data-informed but student driven.

Fun Fact: A lot of educators, parents and students were as sick of hearing about “date-driven” instruction as I was. Feel free to use this article on the next fool who brings out this stale chestnut.

4) Teacher Autonomy – An Often Ignored Victim of High Stakes Testing

Published: Oct 12

Views: 11.405

Description: Standardized testing is terrible in so many ways. It hurts students. It hurts schools. But we often forget how it stops teachers from effectively doing their jobs.

Fun Fact: This one brought a lot of memories to educators – memories of how things are supposed to be and how they’ve changed for the worst. We need to continue asking questions about the purpose of education and how our school policies are betraying that purpose.

3) Billionaire Heiress Lashes Out at Unions Because Her Fortune Didn’t Buy Election

Published: Nov 30

Views: 11,723

Description: Poor Betsy. She and her family spent a lot of money on this election on regressive candidates who had no intention of working in your best interest. And many of them lost!

Fun Fact: Wouldn’t it be great if everyone got one vote? Wouldn’t it be great if money couldn’t buy elections?

2) Five Reasons to Vote NO on the Allegheny County Children’s Fund

Published: Oct 18

Views: 18,593

Description: In the Pittsburgh area, we were asked to vote on a referendum to increase spending on children. It sounded like a great idea until you looked at the details. It was just a power grab by the forces of privatization.

Fun Fact: The referendum lost by about as many votes as this article received. I can’t prove my writing changed anyone’s mind, but it was hugely popular here in the ‘Burgh. I’d see people passing around printed copies at council meetings. It was reposted everywhere. I feel like this one made a real difference and helped us stop a bad law. Too bad it couldn’t help us enact a good one.

African Immigrants Excel Academically. Why Don’t African Americans?

Published: June 6

Views: 20,022

Description: I start with a basic fact about native born African Americans vs. foreign born African Immigrants. Then I try to account for the difference.

Fun Fact: This seems like an important question to me. But it was a controversial one. Some folks were furious I even asked the question. But more people were interested in this piece than anything else I wrote all year.

Gadfly’s Other Year End Round Ups

This wasn’t the first year I’ve done a countdown of the year’s greatest hits. I usually write one counting down my most popular articles (like the one you just read from 2018) and one listing articles that I thought deserved a second look. Here are all my end of the year articles since I began this crazy journey in 2014:

2017:

What’s the Buzz? A Crown of Gadflies! Top 10 Articles (by Me) in 2017

Hidden Gadfly – Top 5 Stories (By Me) You May Have Missed in 2017

2016

Worse Than Fake News – Ignored News. Top 5 Education Stories You May Have Missed in 2016

Goodbye, 2016, and Good Riddance – Top 10 Blog Post by Me From a Crappy Year

2015

Gadfly’s Choice – Top 5 Blogs (By Me) You May Have Missed from 2015

Who’s Your Favorite Gadfly? Top 10 Blog Posts (By Me) That Enlightened, Entertained and Enraged in 2015

2014

Off the Beaten Gadfly – the Best Education Blog Pieces You Never Read in 2014

Grit is Sh!t – It’s Just an Excuse to do Nothing for Struggling Students

November 8, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, capitalism, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, G.E.R.M., Grit, Learning, Parents, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, Propaganda, School Funding, school segregation, Schools, segregation, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers academic tenacity, Angela Duckworth, blame the victim, bootstraps, Carol Dweck, education, Grit, growth mindset, NAEP, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), PISA, school funding, schools, standardized testing, teachers, test-based accountability

Let’s say you’re out in public and you see a crying child alone in the street.

What would you do?

Would you run up to her and help? Or would you just shrug, mutter some derisive comment about the brat and walk on?

Our public school policymakers want us to do the later. In fact, they have a whole pedagogical justification for ignoring the needs of children.

It’s called “academic tenacity,” a “growth mindset” or “grit.”

And it goes something like this:

That child isn’t learning? If she just worked harder, she would.

It’s the political equivalent of “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” applied to the classroom.

And it’s super helpful for politicians reluctant to allocate tax dollars to actually help kids succeed.

The idea and the euphemisms used to describe it were coined by Carol Dweck as early as 1999. It was subsequently popularized by seventh-grade math teacher and psychologist Angela Duckworth.

In the early 2000s, Duckworth realized that IQ wasn’t the only thing separating successful students from those who struggled. There was also the tendency to overcome adversity or not.

Hey, Angela. Darwin called. He wants his Theory of Natural Selection back.

You know Survival of the Fittest was never meant to be prescriptive. As human beings, we’re supposed to be better than mere animals that typically leave the pack’s sick and injured behind to get eaten by predators.

But whatever.

The term “grit,” is defined as a “passion and perseverance for long-term goals,” according to Frontiers in Psychology. And it’s become one of the buzziest of buzzwords in academia.

So much so, that as you’re reading this, standardized test manufacturers are working to develop an assessment to find it in students.

The agencies that administer the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) and the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) are close to including character assessments as a measure of student performance.

Oh goody!

They foresee a brave new world where multiple-choice tests will determine not just the entire scope of human knowledge but character as well!

But what no one wants to admit is that grit is… well… shit.

It’s just an excuse for a society that refuses to help those most in need.

In our world, there are haves and have-nots. But if we stop there, we ignore how and why this situation came to be.

Who places kids into segregated schools? WE DO.

Who allocates funding based largely on parental income? US.

We set kids up to succeed or fail before they even enter the school system with an economy that rewards the already rich and punishes generational poverty.

Yet when anyone suggests offering help to even the playing field – to make things more fair – a plethora of policy wonks wag their fingers and say, “No way! They did it to themselves.”

It’s typical “blame the victim” pathology to say that some kids get all the love, time and resources they need while others can do without — they just need more “grit” and a “growth mindset.”

Life’s tough. Get over it.

That’s easy for YOU to say! Because it’s the have’s who make the rules, it’s the people at the top who are telling the people at the bottom they’re to blame for their own suffering.

So you forget all the ways society has helped you and yours. YOU deserve all the credit for your successes.

But for those people over there, let’s forget all the ways society has refused to help and instead blame THEM for not overcoming the obstacles (we put) in their path.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying effort counts for nothing. But it’s part of a complicated matrix of nature and nurture.

Our environments shape us, but we have some control over what we do with what we’re given.

Yet as a society, we can’t simply ignore our responsibilities toward others and throw it all on the individual.

Good teachers know how to get the best out of their students. We know that most kids – if given a safe, encouraging environment – can succeed.

The key often is to scaffold that success. Give them something to do that they can actually master. Then give them something slightly more challenging.

You teach them that they have the ability to succeed and success becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – and not the opposite.

However, the teacher – and even the school, itself – can only do so much.

As a society, we need to change the environment in which these kids grow up.

We need to fully fund our public schools to meet the needs of all students. That means more funding, services and opportunities for the underserved than for those who already have the best of everything and don’t need to rely as heavily on the school system for support.

We need wraparound services, counseling, tutoring, after school programs, community schools, jobs programs, continuing education for adults and other services to help heal the trauma of growing up poor in America.

But leaving it all to this magical thing called “grit” is just ignoring our responsibilities to our fellow human beings.

When you see someone suffering, you need to help them – not comfort yourself with excuses for ignoring them.

gadflyonthewallblog

"To sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth."

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