Stop Trying to Hide S-E-X From Students in School – They Already Know All About It From the Internet

November 1, 2023November 2, 2023 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Education, Harrisburg, Josh Shapiro, Learning, LGBT, literature, Local Control, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Philosophy, Pittsburgh, Politics, Prejudice, Propaganda, Republican, Schools, Social Justice, student teacher relationship, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, Uncategorized ALEC, Censorship, education, Pennsylvania, Politics, public schools, puritanical, religious fundamentalism, schools, sex, sex education, teachers

“Mr. Singer, do you know what foot finder is?”

“No,” I said to the 5th grade girl in the class where I was substitute teaching.

Her friends and her giggled through an explanation of the Website where people post pictures of their feet for sexual gratification.

***

Several days later, I tried to play a video on ancient Rome for my students, but before it even began the 8th grade class burst into laughter over the station identification.

The video was produced by the British Broadcasting Company. The BBC.

I looked at them in confusion until I heard some of them muttering about “Big Black Cock” – a class of porn video many of them had seen online identified with the same abbreviation.

***

Yesterday I overheard some of the girls in my 7th grade homeroom talking. One girl was saying how she really liked a certain boy but wasn’t sure if she was ready.

I smiled thinking about my first kiss. Then I heard her ask a friend, “Can you get pregnant from swallowing it?”

This is middle school, people.

Most of the kids here already know about sex. They know way more than I did at their age. But what they know is a jumble of images and details without the big picture.

And here come Republicans with a bunch of copycat laws to make sure public schools do nothing to dispel children’s ignorance.

In my home state of Pennsylvania, GOP lawmakers are taking action once again to hide any mention of S-E-X in schools throughout the Commonwealth.

They’re sending Senate Bill 7 to Harrisburg, another piece of legislation pumped out by the American Legislation Exchange Council (ALEC) following in the fundamentalist footsteps of fascist Florida.

The latest bit of dark ages lawmaking would require parent authorization before schools from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia could provide students with materials that contain anything that might be considered sexually explicit.

For kids in kindergarten through 8th grade, this even includes books with depictions of any kind of nudity.

God forbid they saw a wee wee or a va-jay-jay!

Fun fact: did you know that most public school students have genitals?

It’s true.

Many boys have access to a penis anytime they want – in their underwear.

Many girls have access to even naughtier bits.

And don’t even get me started on nipples! Under their shirts, the Devil’s raisins!

Thankfully the GOP legislation only prohibits depictions of these things in books. Kids are still allowed to look at their own bodies.

For now.

The bill passed the Senate in a 29-21 vote nearly along party lines, with only one Democrat supporting the proposal. It faces an uncertain future in the House where Democrats hold a one seat majority and would also require the signature of Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro before becoming law.

A similar measure was passed before Democrats took the House last year but was vetoed by the previous Democratic Governor Tom Wolf.

If the new bill became law, districts would need to go through all books in their libraries and classrooms and list any that contain potentially sexual material. These would be books used in classroom instruction or available in the library that would then require parents to sign an opt-in form to grant permission for their children to access the books.

The bill defines sexually explicit as showing “acts of masturbation, sexual intercourse, sexual bestiality or physical contact with a person’s clothed or unclothed genitals, pubic area, buttocks, or, if the person is a female, breast.”

It is beyond ridiculous.

Not only is it closing the stable door after the horse has bolted, but it’s a transparent attempt to quash any discussion of LGBTQ issues.

What better way to discourage certain lifestyles than to legislate them out of existence?

Schools can provide a safe place to discuss issues kids may be uncomfortable talking about with other adults. Books provide a safe way to mentally grapple with concepts and ideas of the adult world.

For example, in my 7th grade classes, we read “Silent to the Bone” by E.L. Konigsburg. The book is about a middle school age boy who has gone mute after a questionable interaction with an adult.

There’s nothing very graphic in the text, but among other issues it does discuss physical attraction, sexual coercion and an erection.

The book was approved by the school board and has helped foster many productive – if uncomfortable – conversations that help kids put their thoughts on these matters into words.

In my daughter’s school, in 9th grade she read “Speak” by Laurie Halse Anderson. The book is about a high school girl dealing with being raped and the stigma of trying to talk about it.

The text does a marvelous job of getting into the point of view of the girl and the trauma she endures while still being humorous, touching and empowering.

Narratives like these are absolutely vital. They allow kids to relate to issues many of them have not directly experienced (but some have) and find a common language to discuss it. When we censor sex and sexuality and paint all of it as something dirty that can’t be talked about seriously, we do our children a major disservice.

Conservatives complain that talking about these things grooms kids for greater sexual activity, but that’s nonsense. Kids grow into adults many of whom become sexually active. That’s positive and healthy. Meeting that in the safe places of the classroom and books helps kids prepare for adulthood without becoming victimized.

But nothing grooms a victim more than the prohibition against talking about trauma.

Finally, let’s consider the amount of ridiculous extra work this bill demands of schools and teachers. You really expect every educator with a classroom library to go through every book in it looking for anything that someone might consider sexually explicit!? Some people might think a book about a kid with two daddies is sexually explicit. You want teachers to become your perverted morality police!? Please!

I dearly hope this bill has little chance of passing.

It’s just another example of the Republican culture war against reality.

It’s a way of insinuating that public schools are doing things they aren’t.

No school is indoctrinating kids to be sexually active. But kids are coming into contact with sexually explicit material – usually on the Internet – and they have few tools to deal with it.

Taking away public schools’ power to combat this ignorance is the worst way we could respond.

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The Hidden Bias Against Male Teachers

September 30, 2023 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, Child Safety, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, discipline, Education, Labor, Learning, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, school segregation, school violence, Schools, security, small class size, student teacher relationship, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Uncategorized bias, discipline, education, male, Politics, sexism, student discipline, teachers

No one wants to be the disciplinarian.

Not at the expense of being a teacher.

Often you need to do the one so you can do the other. After all, it’s difficult to teach a class that can’t listen or sit or refrain from arguing.

But that’s the role men are often given in the field of public education.

We’re the disciplinarians – especially of male students.

We’re consistently given more students with perceived behavioral issues, with more histories of suspensions, and we’re given less administrative support than female teachers.

It’s not fair at all.

Many of these kids are suffering from poverty, malnutrition and/or trauma. Putting them in a room with a male authority figure cannot solve all of their problems. Yet that’s what happens more often than not.

Male teachers are not seen as teachers first and foremost. We’re the enforcers of school rules. And it’s driving so many of us from the field or discouraging even more from entering it in the first place.

Consider this: teaching is a female dominated field.

According to the National Center for Education statistics, 77% of public school teachers were female and 23 percent were male in 2020–21 – the most recent year for which there is data.

It’s worse at the elementary school level where only about one in ten teachers (11 percent) are male. However, things are not much better at the secondary level where less than 4 out of 10 teachers (36 percent) are male.

And these statistics have remained roughly the same for at least a decade.

It’s not true just in the United States. Around the world men are underrepresented especially in the elementary school education workforce. So much so that a 2017 article in the Economics of Education Review wondered, “Are male teachers headed for extinction? The 50-year decline of male teachers in Australia.”

This has both an academic and social impact on male students who look to male teachers as role models. Without a positive male influence in the classroom, boys tend to see education as distinctly feminine and either out of reach for them or something that they should not even be trying to accomplish. Moreover, male teachers demonstrate ways that men can interact in a nonviolent way especially toward women. Their very presence can promote a new conception of masculinity that is gender equitable and solves problems through reason, agreement and team building.

Not to mention that the idea of male teachers as being primarily disciplinarians has no basis in fact. It is a gender stereotype as much as women being more nurturing and suited to childcare. In the field of education it only sets up expectations that men should be sent more students with behavioral issues and that their natural maleness will somehow bring about a solution.

Such attitudes are harmful to male teachers careers.

After all, too firm a focus on student discipline reduces teachers job satisfaction and the likelihood that educators will stay in the field until retirement.

Student misbehavior is a main source of teacher stress and burnout. When administrators give them fewer honors courses and/or fill their classes with more difficult students, it create a more hostile work environment for them and thus increases turnover.

Even expectations for male teachers’ own behaviors are different. While female teachers can be expected to have a variety of personas, men are expected to be strict, rule followers who will not let students get away with anything – and any deviation from this expectation can result in negative evaluations and lower administrative reviews.

The result is lower job satisfaction. Male teachers can feel frustrated due to so much of their time having to focus on discipline issues and so little of it being able to focus on actual instruction. This is especially true in districts where principals, deans and others do not properly support classroom disciplinary decisions.

When a classroom teacher sends a student to the office after numerous redirections and finds that the student is sent back almost immediately with only a warning, it can be incredibly demoralizing. As if the classroom teacher is incapable of a warning, himself!? Numerous steps have already been taken to correct the behavior before it was sent to the next step for higher order discipline of which the classroom teacher does not have the authority to conduct. When such support is lacking, the classroom teacher feels helpless and alone.

Then there’s the issue of being effective as a teacher. When there’s little time for anything but discipline, much instruction is lost. So many male teachers feel ineffective and are judged as being ineffective because of circumstances beyond their control. They were not set up for success but blamed for the situation they were given. And this results in higher turnover.

Corinne Moss-Racusin, an associate professor of psychology at Skidmore College and lead researcher, said:

“There’s no evidence that men are biologically incapable of doing this work or that men and women are naturally oriented toward different careers. It’s a detriment to society if we keep slotting people into gendered roles and stay the course on gender-segregated career paths, regardless of whether those jobs are traditionally associated with women or men. That’s a powerful way of reinforcing the traditional gender status quo.”

In closing, I must admit this was a hard article for me to write.

Just broaching the subject feels like whining. Black teachers – especially black male teachers – experience the same problem to an even greater degree. And women teachers experience their own types of bias and sexism. However, none of that erases the unfairness male teachers endure often in silence until they’ve had enough and slink away from a career they once cherished like the sun, itself.

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Teach for America Promised to Fix the Teacher Exodus Before Anyone Even Noticed There Was One. Now It’s Choking on Its Own Failure

August 7, 2023August 7, 2023 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, Credibility, Data, Democrat, Education, Labor, Learning, NEA, Pennsylvania, Politics, privatization, Republican, School Choice, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, student teacher relationship, Students, Teach for America, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Uncategorized, union busting, Unions education, Politics, schools, Teach for America, teacher exodus, teacher shortage, teachers, TFA

Teach for America (TFA) was a solution to a problem it helped create.

Educators have been leaving the profession for decades due to poor salary, poor working conditions, heavy expectations and lack of tools or respect.

So Wendy Kopp, when in Princeton, created a program to fast track non-education majors into the classroom where they would teach for a few years and then enter the private sector as “experts” to drive public policy.

These college graduates would take a five week crash course in education and commit to at least two years in the classroom thereby filling any vacant teaching positions.

Surprise! It didn’t work.

In fact, it made things worse. Apparently deprofessionalizing education isn’t an incentive to dive into the field.

That isn’t to say everyone who went through the program became a bad teacher. But the few good and committed educators that did come through the program could have done so even more successfully by graduating with a degree in education.

Now the organization created in 1990 is expecting its lowest enrollment in 15 years. TFA anticipates placing slightly less than 2,000 teachers in schools across the country this fall. That’s two-thirds of the number of first-year teachers TFA placed in schools in fall 2019, and just one-third of the number it sent into the field at its height in 2013.

Apparently fewer people than ever don’t want to train for four to five years to become lifelong teachers – and neither do they want to be lightly trained for a few years as TFA recruits, either – even if that means they can pass themselves off as education experts afterwards and get high paying policy positions at think tanks and government.

On the one hand, this is good news.

Watering down what it means to be a teacher is even less popular than actually being an educator.

On the other hand, we have a major crisis that few people are prepared to handle.

The US is losing teachers at an alarming rate.

After decades of neglect only made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re missing almost a million teachers.

Nationwide, we only have about 3.2 million teachers left!

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 567,000 fewer educators in our public schools today than there were before the pandemic. And that’s on top of already losing 250,000 school employees during the recession of 2008-09 most of whom were never replaced. All while enrollment increased by 800,000 students.

Meanwhile, finding replacements has been difficult. Across the country, an average of one educator is hired for every two jobs available.

Not only are teachers paid 20% less than other college-educated workers with similar experience, but a 2020 survey found that 67% of teachers have or had a second job to make ends meet.

It’s no wonder then that few college students want to enter the profession.

Over the past decade, there’s been a major decline in enrollment in bachelor’s degree programs in education.

Beginning in 2011, enrollment in such programs and new education certifications in Pennsylvania — my home state— started to decline. Today, only about a third as many students are enrolled in teacher prep programs in the Commonwealth as there were 10 years ago. And state records show new certifications are down by two-thirds over that period.

To put that more concretely, a decade ago roughly 20,000 new teachers entered the workforce each year in the Commonwealth, while last year only 6,000 did so, according to the state Department of Education (PDE).

But don’t look to most of the so-called experts to solve the problem. A great deal of them are former TFA recruits!

Through programs like TFA’s Capitol Hill Fellows Program, alumni are placed in full-time, paid staff positions with legislators so they can “gain insights into the legislative process by working in a Congressional office” and work “on projects that impact education and opportunities for youth.”

Why do so many lawmakers hire them? Because they don’t cost anything.

Their salaries are paid in full by TFA through a fund established by Arthur Rock, a California tech billionaire who hands the organization bags of cash to pay these educational aides’ salaries. From 2006 to 2008, alone, Rock – who also sits on TFA’s board – contributed $16.5 million for this purpose.

This isn’t about helping lawmakers understand the issues. It’s about framing the issues to meet the policy initiatives of the elite and wealthy donors.

It’s about selling school privatization, high stakes testing and ed-tech solutions.

As US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) said on a call with Justice Democrats:

“I don’t think people who are taking money from pharmaceutical companies should be drafting health care legislation. I don’t think people who are taking money from oil and gas companies should be drafting our climate legislation.”

I’d like to add the following: people taking money from the testing and school privatization industry shouldn’t be drafting education policy. People who worked as temps in order to give themselves a veneer of credibility should not be treated the same as bona fide experts who dedicate their lives to kids in the classroom.

The whole point of this scam is to serve the needs of the privatization movement.

Investors want to change public education into a cash cow. They want to alter the rules so that corporations running districts as charter or voucher schools can cut services for children and use the extra cash for profits.

And that starts with teachers.

If we allow privatizers to replace well-prepared and trained teachers with lightly trained temps, we can reduce the salaries we pay instructors. We delegitimize the profession. We redefine the job “teacher.” It’s no longer a highly-trained professional. It’s something anyone can do from off the street – thus we can pay poverty wages.

And the savings from cutting salaries can all go into our corporate pockets!

This kind of flim-flam would never be allowed with our present crop of highly trained professionals because many of them belong to labor unions. We have to give them the boot so we can exterminate their unions and thus provide easy pickings for the profiteers.

This helps explain why so many plans to address the teacher exodus are focused almost exclusively on recruiting new hires while completely ignoring the much larger numbers of experienced teachers looking for the exits.

According to the National Education Association (NEA), it is teachers who are quitting that is driving a significant part of the current educator shortage. More teachers quit the job than those who retire, are laid off, are transferred to other locations, go on disability or die. And this has remained true almost every year for the last decade with few exceptions.

To put it another way, you can’t stop a ship from sinking if you don’t plug up the leak first!

But experienced teachers always have been the biggest obstacle to privatizing public schools and expanding standardized testing.

That’s why replacing them with new educators has been one of the highest priorities of corporate education reform.

After all, it’s much harder to try to indoctrinate seasoned educators with propaganda that goes against everything they learned to be true about their students and profession in a lifetime of classroom practice than to encourage those with no practical experience to just drink the Kool-Aid.

So it should come as no surprise that supply side policymakers are using the current teacher exodus as an excuse to remake the profession in their own image.

As Rahm Emanuel, Chief of Staff to President Barack Obama (Later Chicago Mayor) said:

“You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”

If our policymakers really want to solve the problem, we’d spend at least as much time keeping the experienced teachers we have as trying to get new ones to join their ranks.

Research shows that teacher experience matters.

“The common refrain that teaching experience does not matter after the first few years in the classroom is no longer supported by the preponderance of the research,” Tara Kini and Anne Podolsky write in Does Teaching Experience Increase Teacher Effectiveness?

“We find that teaching experience is, on average, positively associated with student achievement gains throughout a teacher’s career.”

Their analysis is based on 30 studies published over the past 15 years and concludes:

1) Experienced teachers on average are more effective in raising student achievement (both test scores and classroom grades) than less experienced ones.

2) Teachers do better as they gain experience. Researchers have long documented that teachers improve dramatically during their first few years on the job. However, teachers make even further gains in subsequent years.

3) Experienced teachers also reduce student absences, encourage students to read for recreational purposes outside of the classroom, serve as mentors for young teachers and help to create and maintain a strong school community.

The road to keeping experienced teachers isn’t exactly mysterious.

First, there must be an increase in salary. Teacher pay must at least be adequate including the expectation that as educators gain experience, their salaries will rise in line with what college graduates earn in comparable professions. This is not happening now.

In addition, something must be done to improve teachers working conditions. Lack of proper support and supportive administrators is one of the main reasons experienced teachers leave a building or the profession.

And perhaps most obviously, politicians have to stop scapegoating educators for all of society’s problems and even for all of the problems of the school system. Teachers don’t get to make policy. They are rarely even allowed a voice, but they are blamed for everything that happens in and around education.

If we want teachers to work with socially disadvantaged students, they must be provided with the institutional supports needed to be effective and steadily advance their skills.

But this requires making education a priority and not a political football.

To do that, you would need to stop bankrolling organizations like TFA.

However, the billionaires funding school privatization and the standardized testing industry would never allow it.

So unlike our public schools, as fewer and fewer applicants come to TFA, there will always be money to keep it afloat.

Those who are causing the teacher exodus will never be the ones to fix it.

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What Can Educators Learn from “Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom”?

July 6, 2023July 6, 2023 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, capitalism, computers, Corporate Education "Reform", edtech, Education, Learning, Local Control, Politics, Schools, Standardized Testing, Student Mobility, student teacher relationship, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, Uncategorized, video games assessment, Classroom Culture, education, Learning Community, Minecraft, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Politics, Sandbox Game, schools, Students, teachers, test-based accountability, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

So there I was, stranded at the bottom of a pit in the depths.

Shadows all around me, puddles of glowing purple gloom everywhere, the burbles of monsters slowly approaching…

No time to climb out – let’s build a hover bike!

And before you know it, I was zooming up and outta there!

Until I ran out of battery and went careening back to the ground. But I was out of the pit!

“The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” is a really great game – even for a nearly 50-year-old public school teacher like me.

As classes dwindled down in June and the summer approached, I noticed some of my students who had finished their work bringing the game in on their portable Nintendo Switch consoles.

Like me, they were enthralled by the level of choice the newly released game presents.

Rarely is there one answer to a problem.

The previous Zelda game in the series, “Breath of the Wild” (2017), threw the doors wide by giving players an open world to explore. No longer did you have to go down a linear path of which dungeons to complete in which order to defeat the bad guy. You could go in whatever direction you wanted, doing almost anything in whatever order you pleased.

The new game takes that even further. “Tears of the Kingdom” gives you three open worlds to explore and offers you the ability to build a wide range of contraptions to create your own solutions to problems.

For example, when I was stuck in that pit, I could have tried to climb out, I could have stood my ground, or I could have built almost anything imaginable that might help.

It’s that kind of increased choice that makes this game special and of particular interest to educators.

After all, this is something many of our students enjoy doing in their free time. The game sold 10 million copies in its first three days, becoming the fastest selling Nintendo game in history. That’s roughly $700 million and growing.

This doesn’t mean edtech companies should rush in to take over. Teachers and public schools are still the best way to educate students.

But the way I see it, if teachers can make learning more intrinsic and exciting, it’s a plus. These are my three major takeaways from the experience:

1) Power of the Sandbox

There are many types of video games.

Some are focused on action – such as shooting down the most enemies. Some focus more on puzzles to solve. Yet others are focused on building things like farms or homes or even civilizations.

Sandbox games are more self-directed. The idea is to create a space where gamers can do pretty much whatever they want. There’s no imposed objective. You’re given simple tools that you can easily see how to manipulate and you’re left to decide how to use them.

It’s based on the metaphor of leaving small children in a sandbox and just letting them play.

The most popular model is the game Minecraft. In it, players are thrust into a world made entirely of blocks that can be combined and recombined to build anything they want. It’s almost like a virtual world of LEGO bricks.

Players build structures like dream homes or space ships. Some tell stories. Some recreate real or imagined structures like the Eiffel Tower or the Death Star from “Star Wars.”

While there are also dungeons you can fight through to get more materials for your creations, the main emphasis seems to be on building.

Minecraft, in itself, is a very popular game and has been so since 2011.

However, “Tears of the Kingdom” takes this a step further by making the sandbox a tool in a world with a specific objective.

Like most Zelda games, you play as a character, Link, who has to save the princess, Zelda, and the kingdom of Hyrule from a bad guy, Gannondorf. The difference is that one of your tools to do that in this game is an ability to combine certain items together into structures.

These aren’t just blocks. They can be as complex as fans or lasers.

You can try to build a flying machine, but you have to make sure the fans or rockets or whether you’re using to propel them are pointing exactly where you want them, don’t consume too much battery, etc.

It takes design, testing, a knowledge of basic physics, etc.

For example, one of my first attempts at a plane kept flipping over. The reason – my fans were placed in opposite directions so that the lift given by one was counteracted by the other. Another device only went straight up. The reason – rockets only provide lift in one direction and quickly give out.

Players can easily get lost in building things. Sometimes that can seem way more interesting than the overall objective of beating the bad guy and winning the game.

However, there are certain game objectives that help you become a better builder – give you longer battery life, etc. So the game rewards you for progressing along each route – the story objective and the sandbox.

It’s a fascinating game loop that may keep this adventure fresh with replayability long after the main objective is complete.

So how does that impact education?

We know students like self-directed learning. If they are at all interested in the subject, giving them the power of following their natural curiosity can lead to amazing results.

This is often used in STEM lessons, where kids are given an objective and various tools and told to try to figure out how to achieve that objective. Who can build the highest tower that won’t fall over? Who can build the fastest race car on this track? Who can build a boat out of cardboard and duct tape that will float longest in a swimming pool? Etc.

However, it can also be done in other disciplines. You might study how the writer Langston Hughes communicates his message in a poem like “Mother to Son” and then ask students to do the same kind of thing in their own poem. You might read several stories and poems by a single author like Edgar Allan Poe and then ask students to find similarities between the author’s work and life.

In each instance, it’s not about just giving students tools and leaving them alone to discover what to do with them. It’s up to the teacher to provide a goal or a direction in which to go. The students take it from there.

The freedom of the sandbox by itself can be thrilling to some students in certain disciplines. But it can also be terrifying. Both aspects are necessary to reach the most students. When learning can be both intrinsic but directed, that’s when students get the greatest results.

We often pretend that students can do just as well without instruction – and there can be marvelous gains by some students in this way. However, teachers are there for a reason. We know the curriculum and many avenues to understanding it. We can point students many ways to understanding that they might not discover on their own.

Games like “Tears of the Kingdom” show the importance of both choice and direction.

2) Importance of a Learning Community

One of the things I was surprised about the most in “Breath of the Wild” and this new Zelda game is the way each created an online gaming community.

In particular with “Tears”, I found several YouTubers who focused on the game and made videos about nearly every aspect of it.

There were walk-throughs of various parts of the game: how to find different armor, defeat bosses and mini-bosses, build the best things, etc. However, there were also videos focused just on individual’s personal experiences with the game and even conjectures on the lore.

It is unclear how some of the elements from the first game impact the second that the developers kept intentionally vague. The community of players stepped in to fill in these gaps with theories that would put the best literary analysis to shame.

For example, the first game was full of Sheika Shrines. In the second game, the shrines were gone from most of the same locations. Instead there were new Zonai shrines in disparate locations. Why the discrepancy? There seems to be a growing consensus that the Sheika shrines were either dismantled by the Hyrulians and/or destroyed by Gannondorf when he reawakened to begin the current upheaval.

All of this really enhances the gaming experience. Not only do you feel less isolated, but you feel validated. You’re part of the act of making meaning out of the whole experience – listening to others, adding to the conversation, etc.

For example, there are certain enemies that just scared the heck out of me – chief among them were Gloom Hands. These are puddles of slime that come out of nowhere and shoot hands out at your character that can squeeze you to death in seconds.

Then I saw several videos where YouTubers explained how Gloom Hands freaked them out, too, (some complete with funny videos of them screaming when being ambushed by these creatures) and how to deal with them.

By watching these videos, I got to be much better at the game than I would have been otherwise. Some vloggers were so calm and reassuring when they said these sorts of creatures were easy to deal with and nothing to panic over that I felt way more confident. Moreover, if I did come across something that gave me trouble, I knew where to turn for help and guidance.

How important this is in the classroom!

Teachers often fill this role, but if we can create a community in the classroom, itself, that is even better. When students can discuss assignments and help each other through obstacles, that is so much better than the teacher being the only person in a position to help.

I try to foster as much discussion as possible in my classes through Socratic Seminars and informal groups. However, if you can get small group work to function while still being focused and productive, you can increase this aspect, too.

It’s all about the classroom you can create. You need shared values, empathy and students who understand how to best interact with each other. It’s easier said than done but a worthy goal for sure.

3) The Danger of Outside Assessment

This may be the most overlooked lesson from games to the classroom.

One of the biggest differences between the gaming and school experience is whether someone is looking over your shoulder or not.

In a video game, the player decides what he or she wants to get out of the experience. Do you want to simply beat the game? Or do you want to 100% it – achieve every goal the programmers put into it.

How long you take and how much you complete is up to you.

Sometimes the gaming community can contribute to this by giving opinions about which goals are worthy of completion, etc. However, whether you have achieved everything you want and the ultimate assessment of such things are really up to the individual.

Things are different in class.

On one level, students are assessed by their teachers. They grade assignments, give tests, etc. However, this is similar to the game, itself. When you fight Gannondorf, the game tells you whether you’ve beaten him and sometimes how well this is accomplished.

For example, there are a few different endings to the game that you can get depending on how well (or completely) you achieved certain objectives.

I think that’s similar to what the classroom teacher does. It’s part of the experience taken in context and (hopefully) well understood by the student.

The difference comes from forces outside the classroom.

Students don’t just achieve grades. They are also subject to standardized tests. These are assessments created out of context of the classroom, graded by hired hands, that are used to determine how well the curriculum has been learned.

They are artificial, biased and politically motivated.

Imagine if after playing a video game someone from the government had to come in and give you a score. Imagine if they made you play another (different) game to determine how well you did on this one. Maybe you feel like you aced “Tears of the Kingdom” but they said you didn’t do so well on “MarioKart” and thus failed the experience.

Outside assessment can kill intrinsic learning. It can make everything extrinsic – will this be on the test? What do I need to pass the test? Etc.

It would poison the video game experience as it poisons the classroom one.

We only allow it because of strange outdated ideas about learning and psychology. We pretend it’s all behaviorism – students given this stimuli should produce this response. We know that’s not how the human mind works, but politics and capitalism refuse to let us move beyond it.

Someone is making money off of this and we can’t disrupt that with real reform.

Perhaps if we looked more closely at how things function in the world of video games, we’d have a better idea of how to change things for the better in the classroom.

To better understand learning, we should look to the whole child – and the whole child’s experience outside of school.

This includes Zelda, Gannondorf and Link.

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Teaching Blind Obedience is Child Abuse

June 15, 2023June 15, 2023 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Child Predators, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Education, history, Homework, Journalism, Learning, Parents, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, Propaganda, Republican, Schools, student teacher relationship, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Uncategorized authentic teaching, authority, child abuse, children, critical thinking, Duggar, Howard Zinn, independence, obedience, obey, parenting, Politics, Psychology, public schools, religious fundamentalism, self-discipline, Stanley Milgram

My daughter is not a little soldier.

She does not jump at my orders.

She can be rude, crude and badly behaved.

But I wouldn’t want her any other way – because the alternative is worse.

The same goes for my middle school students.

If you enter my classroom, you may find some children questioning my assignments.

“Mr. Singer, why can’t we chew gum in class?”

“Mr. Singer, why do you give so much homework?”

“Mr. Singer, why do we have to write a rough draft? Why can’t we just write a final copy?”

But you’ll notice my students almost always call me “Mr. Singer.” The reason is trust and respect.

Over time we’ve formed a relationship with each other where they’ve learned to respect me as their teacher and I have tried to earn that trust by treating them kindly and giving good reason for the things I tell them to do.

They are obedient (for the most part), but not BLINDLY obedient.

That may sound like splitting hairs but it’s one of the most important distinctions in education.

When someone knows WHY they’re doing something, they are an agent – they are responsible for their own actions. They are self-disciplined – not drones acting without thinking solely because they were told to do so.

That is incredibly important.

Think of what blind obedience does to adults.

American historian Howard Zinn famously put it this way:

“Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders… and millions have been killed because of this obedience… Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… [and] the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”

When I was a college undergraduate, I was unsure what to major in and I began my undergraduate work in psychology. Of all the things I learned in those early survey classes before changing course to writing, philosophy and (after a career in journalism) education, the lesson I’ll never forget is the groundbreaking 1961 study by Stanley Milgram, a Yale University psychologist.

Milford famously wondered how many people would willingly comply if a person in a position of authority told university students to deliver a 400-volt electrical shock to another person. His students predicted that no more than 3% of participants would deliver the maximum shocks. However, when he actually conducted the experiment, 65% delivered the maximum shocks.

During the experiment, each subject was asked to press a button that they believed gave increasingly high voltage electric shocks to the student on the other side of a wall if the student gave the wrong answer to a teacher’s questions. It should be noted that the students on the other side of the wall did not actually receive shocks, but the participants BELIEVED that they truly were shocking their fellow students by pressing the button.

Many of the subjects, while believing that the student was actually receiving shocks and hearing their protests and cries for mercy – including complaints of a heart condition – became increasingly agitated and even angry at the experimenter. Yet 36 out of 40 people, in turn, continued to do what they were instructed to do all the way to the end. Even when the student became silent when apparently receiving a shock from a switch labeled “danger: severe shock”, the subject continued based on the instruction that silence is to be read as a wrong answer.

This experiment (which would be highly unethical today) has become a classic in psychology, demonstrating the dangers of obedience.

Milgram wrote in 1974:

“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”

In fact, these experiments were inspired by history – specifically by the Nazi, Adolph Eichmann, who defended himself at the Nuremberg Trials by saying that he was simply following orders when he commanded the deaths of millions of Jews during the Holocaust.

This is what blind obedience gets us – a society of Nazis willing to do anything if told to do so by the proper authorities.

Parents and teachers are in a delicate situation then.

We’re responsible for guiding children into adulthood, and that often does require a measure of obedience. The question is how to get there without stripping away a child’s agency? How to get children to do generally what is necessary for their learning while still leaving their independence intact?

Let’s be honest – schools play an essential role in teaching obedience. It’s a critical life skill that helps children learn to follow rules and directions. Without obedience, adolescents would have difficulty following rules at home, at school, and in society.

One of the ways schools teach obedience is through rules and consequences. When children break rules, they face consequences such as being sent to the principal’s office, getting detention or being suspended. Such consequences help children learn that there are repercussions for their actions.

Schools also teach obedience through modeling. Teachers and administrators try to set good examples for children by obeying rules, themselves. When children see adults following the rules, they are more likely to do so themselves.

Finally, schools teach obedience through positive reinforcement. When children do the right thing, they are rewarded with praise, stickers, or other incentives. This positive reinforcement helps children learn that obedience is a good thing and that it is something that should be rewarded.

However, as children grow older, it is just as vital that teachers and parents not only foster obedience but also critical thinking about that obedience.

When a child questions a rule (and they will question it), we should not instantly meet that questioning with negativity or shock. We should calmly and rationally answer.

We should not get angry at questions, we should welcome them. Questioning should be a part of instruction because as educators and parents we should not want blind obedience. We should want trust and understanding.

As Albert Einstein said, “Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.”

I was reminded of this when watching the recent documentary “Shiny Happy People” about the Duggar family. The brood of religious fundamentalist Christians made their TV debut in 2004, going on to become a household name with their TLC show “19 Kids and Counting,” presenting Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their ever-expanding household as a seemingly “perfect” family.

However, behind the scenes, the family’s theocratic hierarchy led to sexual, emotional, and physical abuse, which was allegedly brushed aside by their church.

In 2015, it was revealed that the Duggars’ eldest son, Josh James, had molested numerous underage girls, including four of his siblings, when he was aged 14 to 15. These revelations led to the cancellation of “19 Kids and Counting.” In 2021, Josh was arrested after police discovered he had been receiving and was in possession of child pornography.

The family belongs to the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), a nondenominational Christian sect that serves as an umbrella organization for several ministries founded by minister Bill Gothard in 1961.

According to the documentary, IBLP teachings require absolute obedience. Authority is distributed in various circles – God being the highest authority, followed by the family’s father, etc. Women are considered to be among the lowest forms of authority. In fact, two of Josh’s sisters who he had abused were even made to go on TV to speak in defense of their abuser.

We hear a lot of propaganda from religious fundamentalists about how public schools groom students into being politically liberal. However, teaching blind obedience is the true grooming. It is setting people up to become victims of anyone who they perceive as having authority over them.

This is what made the Duggar children ready made victims for their own brother. It sets children up to be easily abused, gaslit, fooled and dominated.

And in doing research on this topic, I found many articles defending absolute obedience by reference to the Bible. The idea that authority is a hierarchy and we should simply follow the instructions of those above us in that hierarchy is as rampant as it is perverted.

Any discipline adults give to children should be in service of them eventually becoming independent and self-disciplined. That means being able to make independent choices about their own behavior without prompting from an adult.

There is a difference between being self-disciplined and being obedient.

A self-disciplined child will complete an action, regardless of who is watching. She will do the behavior because it is the right thing to do. In contrast, an obedient child may follow directions to please a parent, to avoid a consequence or to receive a reward. Being obedient is following directions or commands from an adult. It is exhibiting “good behavior” when an adult is present. Meanwhile, having self-discipline is making those choices without the presence or reminders from adults.

It may be tempting to see children marching in line or sitting calmly with their hands in their laps and consider that an ideal. But as children grow, we must learn to tolerate more frequent independence.

In fact, we must do more than tolerate it. We must cherish it.

The opposite is so much worse.

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Student Projects are Better Than Tests

May 24, 2023 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Education, Journals, Labor, Learning, literature, Local Control, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, Schools, Standardized Testing, Student Mobility, student teacher relationship, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Uncategorized A Christmas Carol, assessment, books, education, essays, Performance or portfolio-based assessments, Politics, public schools, reading, Silent to the Bone, student projects, Students, teachers, test scores, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Giver, The Outsiders, To Kill a Mockingbird, Writing

The class was silent.

Students were hunched over their desks writing on paper, looking in books, consulting planners.

I stood among them ready to help but surprised at the change that had overcome them.

Maybe 10 minutes before I had heard groans, complaints and the kind of whining you only get from students at the end of the year.

“Do we have to keep doing work!?”

“Can’t we just watch a movie!?”

“Ms. X- isn’t doing anything with her students!”

And then I dropped the bomb on them.

We had less than 3 weeks left in the school year. We had just finished our last text. In 8th grade that was “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee. In 7th grade it was “Silent to the Bone” by E.L. Konigsburg.

Now was the time for the infamous final project.

Some kids asked me about it at the beginning of the year having heard about it from a brother or sister who had already graduated from my class.

“Mr. Singer,” they’d say, “Is it true you give a 1,000 point project at the end of the year?”

I’d laugh and ask who told them that, or if that sounded credible.

“Do you really think I’d give a 1,000 point project!?” I’d say in my most incredulous voice, and they’d usually laugh along with me.

But some of them still believed it.

That was nearly 9 months ago. Yet it all came flooding back when I passed out the assignment sheet.

In the world of education there are few truths more self-evident than this.

Projects are better than tests.

Just think about it for a minute.

On the one hand you have a project – an extended group of related assignments demonstrating learning and culminating in a product of some sort – a paper, a poster, a movie, a presentation or some mix of these.

On the other hand you have a test – a quick snapshot of skills taken out of context.

Which do you think is the better assessment?

Imagine a musician.

You could have her answers questions about notation, rhythm and theory…. Or you could just have her play music.

Which would best demonstrate that she can play?

It’s the same with other subjects.

Take a test on reading – or actually read.

Take a test on writing – or actually write.

Take a test on math – or actually….

You get the picture.

And so did my students.

I place a huge emphasis on writing in my English Language Arts classes. In 8th grade, my students have already written at least a dozen single paragraph and two multi-paragraph essays. So they’re pretty familiar with the format. I try to get them to internalize it so that it’s almost second nature.

So when the final project comes along, it’s really a culmination of everything we’ve done.

In Harper Lee’s book, there is the symbol of the mockingbird:

“Your father’s right,” she said. “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.”

We already discussed how several characters in the book could count as mockingbirds – Tom Robinson, Atticus Finch, Boo Radley, etc.

So I have students write about mockingbirds in all of the texts we’ve read this year. That includes “The Outsiders” by S. E. Hinton, “The Diary of Anne Frank” and several short stories.

In 7th grade, we’re at a slightly different place.

At the end of the year, students have written nearly as many single paragraph essays but no multi-paragraph ones yet. I use the final project to introduce them to the concept and explain how it’s the culmination of what we’ve done before.

Students write about characters that they like from all the stories we’ve read throughout the year. These would be characters from texts as diverse as the one by Konigsburg, “The Giver” by Lois Lowery, “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens and several short stories.

As projects go, it’s kind of narrow.

In the past, I’ve had students make movies together interviewing various characters from their texts. I’ve had them design posters extolling various aspects of the Civil Rights movement. I’ve had them design graphics explaining the difference between internal and external conflict.

But this is the end of the year – time to keep it simple.

There’s actually a lot of research supporting this kind of assessment.

Two separate studies were published by Lucas Education Research with Michigan State University (MSU), the University of Southern California (USC), and the University of Michigan. Researchers took either high school students or third graders and put them through a Project Based Learning (PBL) curriculum.

The high school experiment conducted by MSU and USC involved 6,000 students in science and humanities from 114 schools about half of which were from low-income households. Students who were taught Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. Government and Politics and AP Environmental Science with a PBL approach outperformed their peers on AP exams by 8 percentage points in the first year and were more likely to earn a passing score of 3 or above, giving them a chance to receive college credit. In the second year, the gap widened to 10 percentage points. One key finding of the study, which included large urban school districts, was that the higher scores were seen among both students of color and those from lower-income households.

The experiment with third-graders produced similar results. Students from a variety of backgrounds in PBL classrooms scored 8 percentage points higher than peers on a state science test. These results held regardless of a student’s reading level.

In some ways, this should be obvious.

When you put assessment in context it is more accurate. When you divorce it from its academic context (as you do with tests) it’s more abstract and less accurate.

The problem is one of time and ease of execution.

Put simply – tests are easy to give and grade. Projects are difficult.

Even designing a good project can take lots of trial and error. Tests are often prepackaged and easy to design – you just have questions clustered around whatever skills you were hoping students would learn.

It is very difficult for teachers to design entire courses with projects at every step of the way. Some might say it isn’t even desirable since such a course would probably not be able to cover as much material as traditional curriculum and it is generally preferable to use different modes of assessment in a single course. Let’s not forget that some students excel at tests and would suffer academically if the only kind of assessments were project based.

My personal philosophy is one of moderation. Use projects when you can and when appropriate – but not always. And if you’re going to test, a teacher created assessment is orders of magnitude more valuable than a standardized one.

And in terms of projects, the best is at the end. What better way to demonstrate the cumulative learning of a course than through a cumulative project?

My students seem to agree.

After the initial anxiety of such a hefty project, my kids in both grades settle down pretty quickly and get to work. I think they find the project comfortable because they’ve been exposed to almost every part of it before. This just brings it all together under one project.

It’s the opposite of learned helplessness. Students already know they can do it. All they have to do is step up and get it done.

That’s also why I make the project worth such a huge amount of points.

I already double points for the last grading period. Doing that and having such a hefty final project sends the message to kids that they can’t slack off now. The work they do in the closing days of school will have an outsized impact on their grade. If kids care at all about that – and most still do in middle school – they’ll make the effort.

It also helps fill the last few days and weeks with a focus on process. Nothing has to be memorized. Nothing is beyond anyone’s ability. We’re going to work together – each student and me – to make sure the final project gets done.

Usually they accomplish it with flying colors.

It’s something they often remember and pass on in legend to their younger siblings who bring it up in hushed tones when they enter my classroom for the first time.

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When Our Students Leave Us

May 4, 2023 stevenmsinger absenteeism, academic freedom, Compassion, Education, growth mindset, history, Labor, Learning, Parents, Philosophy, Politics, Poverty, school violence, Schools, student action, Student Mobility, student teacher relationship, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Uncategorized adolescent, Boy Scouts, Dungeons and Dragons, Eagle Scout, extracurricular, growing up, Herodotus, Politics, Students, success, teachers, teaching

Being a teacher is kind of like being a time traveler.

So much of what you do and say changes those around you, and the effects can shoot off into the distant horizon far beyond your line of sight.

I sometimes wonder what happened to certain students, if they continued to become the people they wanted to be or if time and circumstance caught up to them.

As a public school teacher with more than two decades experience, sometimes the years sneak up on me.

Students whom I remember as little children in middle school desks have grown into adults since they left.

Not that I usually get to see their grown-up faces. Often times their lives never intersect with mine again and I never know what become of them.

But occasionally an invitation, a chance encounter or an article in the local news gives a glimpse of who they are or where they end up.

For example, a few months ago I was invited to a ceremony where one of my former students was being awarded the rank of Eagle Scout. He was getting ready to graduate high school now, and in the picture on the invitation he looked about ready to burst out of his scouting uniform – but he had the same smile, the same glimmer of mischief in the eye.

At first, I wasn’t sure if I should attend – if after four years the student – let’s call him Doug – really wanted me to be there. But then he stopped by my classroom after school one day. He must have remembered that I’d still be there grading papers, rewriting lessons, making myself available if needed.

“Are you going to come to the ceremony, Mr. Singer?” he asked in a way that left no doubt how important this was to him.

I remembered Doug in class. He was always such a prankster. He was the first person to crack a joke – even reciting some classic but inappropriate standup routines as if they were his own. I’d shared with him some old Doctor Demento tapes and we’d had a few laughs.

“I asked Mr. Kimble to come, too, but he said he was busy. He’s dead to me now,” he said with a smirk.

It was a joke, but it struck me hard. Did it still matter to me whether I disappointed this child? The answer came back immediately – it still did.

So I ventured out of the house on the weekend dressed as my weekday self. I sat through the speeches and solemn rites. I listened to his speech and finally understood why he wanted me there.

He wanted me to see how far he’d come – that as dedicated to humor and jollity as he was, Doug could be serious as stone when need be. He had led his fellow scouts in refurbishing a local veterans memorial and showed himself to be a real leader. If he wanted the world to laugh, it was only in service of making it a better place.

Several weeks later I found myself in a similar situation with another former student.

Unlike the scenario with Doug, I wasn’t expecting anything. In fact, it took me a few moments to even recognize the boy through the man he had become.

I was at a local movie theater with a section of my school’s Dungeons and Dragons club. I started the extracurricular club and am lead sponsor. During the week, we get together and play the tabletop role playing game. I try to have them both organize the adventures and play through them. Some kids function as Dungeon Masters and others have characters like warriors, wizards, elves, orcs and dragon-borns.

On this weekend, one of our local families had paid for the group to see the “Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” movie. I was herding the kids together in front of the movie poster to take a picture of the event when this full-grown man walks up to me and says, “Hey! Mr. Singer!”

I squinted at him, but he had a huge grin on his face and seemed happy to see me. Then I noticed that one of my club members was at his waist pulling on his sleeve asking for some popcorn.

We shook hands and he introduced himself as Jamal’s big brother. Then he asked if his brother was good in class or bad like he had been.

That’s when it came together. I saw through the adult and to the kid he had been – a kid pretty similar to his brother Jamal.

It must have been 10 years ago. He had been a diminutive boy in a class of kids who had hit puberty a few months before him. He had been shy and often got picked on. He tried hard on his assignments – at least the ones he turned in.

The adult version chatted with me as his brother went to the concessions stand with the money he had given him. Though he lived a few neighborhoods away these days, he tried his best to come back to the district to look out for his brother.

He didn’t go into many details, but it was obvious he had gone through a lot in the intervening years. He had a limp and smelled of musty pine trees. But he was clearly there for Jamal when no one else was.

Before the movie, there was a preview for a documentary about Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani education advocate and winner of the Noble Peace Prize. Several students, including Jamal, turned to me in my corner in the back and chanted her name because we had talked about her in class.

Jamal’s big brother was still smiling, proud that his little brother knew who this brave woman is before the film had explained it.

If you saw him on the street, you might not think him a success story. He seemed an average person just doing what he could to get by. But I knew (at least some) of the journey he had taken to get there. I knew how hard won his peace was. And I recognized that smile still on his face – so rare when he had been in class but now a permanent feature. I think that is success, too.

But the last former student I want to talk about is Marquis.

He was in one of my first classes. I remember him as a gawky middle schooler with string bean arms and legs below a sullen face.

When I started, if there was one student sent to the office that day – it was him. If there was one kid shouting out a swear word or picking a fight, it was Marquis. This was an angry kid who demanded attention – positive, negative, it didn’t matter.

I used to make badly behaved students stay 15 minutes after school for detention. It’s not something I do so much these days but I was a new teacher then – strict and consumed with reciprocal justice. In fact, students had to WORK during my detentions. No sleeping or even doing homework. They had to copy definitions out of the dictionary for the full time. If they slacked off, I added more time. Some days a 15-minute detention could last an hour, because if I reported that they hadn’t satisfied me, the principal would keep them on the weekend or in a longer detention during the week with an administrator.

I remember Marquis whining and complaining as he copied definitions. He’d spend more time whining than working – but eventually he learned.

Eventually he’d come in, sit up straight in his seat and copy those definitions from start to finish like a machine. He did it so well, his scores on my vocabulary quizzes started to improve. But he still ended up getting detentions – at least twice a week.

One day he finished the definitions and I told him he could go. “Can I stay?” he said.

“What?”

“Can I stay and copy definitions a little longer?”

I almost started to cry – right then and there.

So THAT’S why he always got detentions. He wanted somewhere to go after school. He wanted someone to talk to, someplace safe to wait so he could walk home unmolested by the other kids.

He never got detention again because I told him he could stay with me any day he wanted after school for as long as he wanted. And he did. Sometimes we’d talk. Sometimes he’d do work. It didn’t matter, but his behavior in my class improved.

At the end of the year, when he passed English Language Arts – one of very few classes he managed to get a C or better in that year and the first time he had passed ELA in middle school – I told him how proud I was of him. And he smiled the biggest smile I’ve ever seen.

He continued building on that success, too. He went up to the high school and got better and better grades. He kept out of trouble and became one of those kids everyone seems to know and most people seem to like. He was the kind of kid that every teacher had an anecdote about.

I hadn’t thought about him in some time, but then an item appeared in the local news.

Drive-by Shooting Kills Area Man. It was Marquis.

He had just been walking along the street helping some younger kids to the basketball courts. By all accounts he has straightened up his life, got a college degree and was just starting on a career as a social worker in the same community where he grew up.

It was a shock.

I turned to my files and I saw I still had a folder with his name on it – back when I used to collect such things. Inside were a few old write ups, and pages and pages of vocabulary words in his childish handwriting.

We never know what will happen to the kids in our classrooms.

We never know who will be successful, who will be happy, who will live fulfilling lives.

But we try – we try SO HARD – to give our kids everything we can.

Doug had a straight path, and so far he’s walked it without incident.

Jamal’s brother had a lot of bumps on the road, but he’s still walking it.

And poor Marquis. He walked as far as he could. I wish we could have made for him an easier road – and a longer one.

“Count no man happy until the end is known,” wrote the ancient Greek story-teller Herodotus.

Known as the father of history, he meant that you never know if someone is truly happy until their death, because even a seemingly happy person today could have a tragedy befall them tomorrow taking away everything that made them happy.

I think about that sometimes when considering the fate of my former students.

After more than two decades in the classroom, it seems to me that the quality of the journey is more important than whether it may all disappear tomorrow.

After all, knowing the fate of any of our students wouldn’t really change what we do for them. We’re teachers – will give them our all no matter what.

Because that’s the road we’ve chosen to walk.

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Forgotten Pre-Covid Report Reveals Standardized Testing Weaknesses in PA

April 15, 2023 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, Budget, capitalism, Child Predators, Civil Rights, Congress, Corporate Education "Reform", COVID-19, Credibility, Data, Democrat, Education, Harrisburg, history, Journalism, Junk science, Labor, Learning, Local Control, Media, Opt Out, Parents, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, principals, privatization, Republican, school closings, School Funding, Schools, Standardized Testing, Student Mobility, student teacher relationship, Students, Taxation, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, Toxic Testing, Uncategorized ACT, annual testing, COVID-19, education, ESSA, Fair Test, General Assembly’s Legislative Budget and Finance Committee, high stakes testing, Keystone Exams, NCLB, Opt Out, Pennsylvania, Politics, principals, PSSA, SAT, standardized testing, Standardized Tests in Public Education, teachers, teaching to the test, test makers, Test Prep, test refusal, test scores, test-based accountability, testocracy

The majority of teachers and principals in Pennsylvania hate standardized tests.

An increasing number of parents are refusing to allow their kids to take the tests.

And there may be better alternatives to the state’s Keystone Exams.

These were just some of the key findings of a blockbuster report from June 2019 by the state General Assembly’s Legislative Budget and Finance Committee.

The report, “Standardized Tests in Public Education” was published about 9 months before the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

It effectively got lost in the chaos that followed the global pandemic.

However, now that things are returning to some semblance of normalcy, it seems that bureaucrats from the state Department of Education (PDE) are taking the wrong lessons from the report while the legislature seems to have forgotten it entirely.

The report was conducted because of legislation written by state Sen. Ryan P. Aument (R-Lancaster County). It directed the Legislative Budget and Finance Committee to “study the effectiveness of standardized testing, including the Keystone Exams and SATs, and their use as indicators of student academic achievement, school building performance, and educator effectiveness.”

The key findings are as follows:

1)The majority of principals and teachers disapprove of the state’s standardized tests – both the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) tests given in grades 3-8 and Keystone Exams given in high school. They think these tests are ineffective, expensive and harmful to district curriculum and students.

2) State law allows parents to opt their children out of testing for one reason only – religious grounds. Parents are using this religious exemption in increasing numbers. This puts districts in danger of violating federal participation and accountability standards.

3) It has been suggested that the state allow two additional reasons for parents to opt their children out of testing – philosophical grounds and health concerns. It is unclear whether doing so would increase overall opt outs or not.

4) The federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) passed in 2015 allows the use of the SAT and/or ACT test to take the place of high school standardized testing. It has been suggested the Commonwealth replace the Keystone Exams with these tests. The report finds the ACT and/or SAT would successfully determine college readiness and reduce the overall amount of standardized testing. However, this would not allow other uses of current state tests like evaluating teacher effectiveness and school building performance.This may not matter though because the report also casts doubt on whether the current tests (PSSA and Keystone Exams) do an adequate job of assessing teacher or building performance now or even if student tests can be accurately used to evaluate teachers and schools.

There’s a lot of information here. Let’s look at each finding in turn.

1) PA Educators Hate Standardized Tests

When it comes to the PSSAs, 67% of principals and 76% of teachers said the tests were ineffective indicators of student achievement.

There was slightly more support for the Keystone Exams. This time 45% of principals said the test was an ineffective indicator of student achievement (with 27% saying the tests were effective). Meanwhile, 60% of teachers said the test was ineffective.

Both principals and teachers said their curriculum had been narrowed to prepare students for PSSAs and Keystone Exams. Instead of going into more depth on regular classwork or learning new skills, the focus shifts to teaching to the tests.

Most principals (approximately 80-90%) said that students are taught test-taking skills, and their schools administered practice tests, bench-mark tests, and/or diagnostic tests to prepare students for the PSSA exams. This held for teachers, too, with 81-88% saying they teach test-taking skills and administer practice tests. Principals also said the costs of this additional test prep varied from $200 to more than $100,000.

Taking the tests also eats up valuable class time. Administering the assessments takes between 5.7 to 8 days for each kind of test – the PSSA and the Keystone Exams, according to Principals.

In addition, the report details the cost of giving these tests. In fiscal year 2017-2018, PDE paid $42.17 million for these tests. This is part of a national trend:

“Standardized tests and test preparation have subsequently become big business and that multibillion dollar business continued to grow since the enactment of NCLB and the subsequent enactment of ESSA. According to the Pew Center on the States, annual state spending on standardized tests increased from $423 million before the NCLB (enacted in 2002) to upwards of $1.1 billion in 2008 (to put this in perspective this reflects a 160 percent increase compared to a 19.22 percent increase in inflation during the same time period). A more recent study by the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brooking put the cost at upwards of $1.7 billion in 2011 related to state spending on standardized tests.”

2) Opt Outs on the Rise

Many states allow parents to opt their children out of standardized testing. Some do so in cases of a physical disability, medical reasons, or emergencies. A few allow opt-outs based on religious objection – like Pennsylvania. Some states allow opt-outs for any reason whatsoever.

The religious exemption is not used widespread throughout the state and most schools meet the 95% participation rate required by the federal government. However, use of the religious exemption is definitely on the rise – enough so that the authors of the report find it alarming:

“Meanwhile, as previously indicated in this section, schools throughout the country are experiencing and grappling with an increase in the number of parents seeking to have their children opt-out of standardized testing now that new state assessments have been implemented pursuant to the federal requirements. Pennsylvania is no exception to this trend and is also experiencing an increase in the number of parents utilizing the religious opt-out.”

For the PSSA tests, opt outs increased from 2013-14 to 2016-17. However, total numbers in school year 2017-18 decreased sightly.

Opt outs went from 1,886 to 6,425 to 15,644 to 19,012 to 16,961.

During the same time period for the Keystone Exams, opt outs steadily increased each year but were at lower overall rates.

For the high school test, opt outs went from 382 to 666 to 1,000 to 1,313 to 1,633.

These are vitally important figures because opt out data is rarely tabulated and released to the public. Many media accounts actually state the opposite of the data in this report – in particular that opting out has decreased since Congress passed the ESSA in 2015. Apparently the media got this one wrong.

Though the religious opt-out is the only reason specifically allowed in state Chapter 4 regulations, PDE reports there are five additional ways that students end up not taking the tests:

1) Other Parental Request – parents simply refusing to let their kids participate but not objecting based on specifically religious reasons.

2) No Attempt and No Exclusion Marked – students who are given the test but do not answer enough questions to receive a score.

3) No Test – no test record on file for unknown reasons.

4) Extended Absence – a student missed the testing and make-up window due to absences.

5) Other – does not fit any of the other categories.

Federal law – in particular No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and subsequent reauthorizations of that legislation – requires states to use student participation in standardized testing as a factor in a state’s accountability system. According to the report, any district with less than 95% of students taking the test should be “addressed.”

The report does not go into any further detail about what this means, other than to say that falling under 95% can:

“…ultimately result in a reduced achievement/proficiency measure… If the student participation rate falls below 95 percent, states are required to calculate student achievement/proficiency by dividing the number of students scoring proficiently by no less than 95 percent of the total students (which effectively assigns a score of “0” to all nonparticipants once the participation rate has fallen below 95 percent).”

In effect, the district gets a bad mark on a piece of paper. So what?

Under NCLB, schools with poor performance could receive sanctions like state takeover or lower funding. However, this is extremely unlikely – especially since the passing of ESSA. This newest reauthorization of the law gives states leeway in designing their accountability systems. It leaves the enforcement of this 95% participation rate up to the states, requiring them to develop an accountability plan in the event that a school or district fails to meet this standard.

So a school would only be punished if the state decided to do so. If a state legislature decided to allow parents to opt their children out for any reason at all, they would not have to take any punitive measures. Since the ESSA, the buck stops at the state house door on this one. California, for example, takes note of low participation rates but these rates are not factored into a school’s rating. On the other hand, Florida mandates direct intervention from the state’s Department of Education until participation rates are met.

3) Impact of New Reasons to Opt Out

This is where things get a bit sticky.

The report mentions the idea of expanding the options for opting-out of statewide assessments (e.g., PSSA and Keystone Exams) to include objections based on philosophical grounds or due to health issues.

On the one hand, the authors write “The impact of adding opt-out categories may be minimal.” They don’t know if more people would use the expanded options or if the same numbers who use the religious exemption today might simply divide themselves up among all three options.

The authors worry, however, that new pathways to opt out may increase the total number of people refusing the tests for their children and would reduce Pennsylvania’s participation rate in standardized testing.

This is a particularly troubling paragraph:

“The existence of opt-outs (religious or otherwise) has the potential to negatively impact a state’s participation rates and may potentially impact a state’s [Local Education Agency (LEAs)] and schools achievement/proficiency rate and ultimately the ability of a state to be in compliance with federally required assessments and accountability measures. Furthermore, providing opt-outs and giving parents notice of such has the potential to conflict with the message about the importance of standardized testing. Ultimately placing the state departments of education and local school districts in the potentially awkward position of having to explain why it is important for students to participate in testing (given the federal requirements), while also giving and notifying parents of the opt-out options for their children. In 2015, US Department of Education sent out letters to a dozen states flagging their low participation rates (statewide, or at the district or subgroup level) on the 2014-15 school year assessments and indicated that they needed to create a plan to reduce opt-outs due to low participation rates.”

This seems to be the order of the day at PDE. It’s why earlier this year, school administrators were advised by state officials to crack down on parents opting their children out of standardized tests.

For the first time in 8 years, I, myself, had to jump through several hoops to opt my own daughter out this year when in the past a simple phone call had sufficed.

I was asked to send in a letter, sign a confidentiality statement and go to the school to examine the test before they would excuse my little girl from the tests. It was an unnecessary hassle meant to discourage parents from doing what they thought was right and exercise their rights through state law.

And all of it is based on a cowardly and incomplete understanding of federal law. If Commonwealth schools fall below 95% participation in the test and get a bad mark on a worthless metric, it doest have to matter. No matter how many letters the federal government sends to the state legislature or PDE, the law is clear. The state is in charge here. Our legislature can choose to side with taxpayers, residents, and citizens or with civil servants and strongly worded letters.

4) Replacing the Keystone Exams

There’s not much more to add to this than the initial finding.

The authors of the report say there would be no problem with replacing the Keystone Exams with the ACT or SAT because these national tests would properly assess students’ college and career readiness.

The report is actually pretty shoddy in this regard not really examining the claims of the College Board which makes both tests. The authors just pretty much accepted the College Board’s word wholesale. Nor was their any evaluation of what teachers and principals thought about these tests like there had been for the PSSA and Keystone Exams.

However, the report does make a good point about test reduction. Many students already take the SAT or ACT test, so eliminating the Keystones would reduce the over all amount of tests they had to take.

Also the authors deserve credit for writing about how using student test scores to evaluate teachers and schools is seriously bad practice.

According to the report, 77 percent of principals and 93 percent of teachers said PSSA tests were not effective indicators for teacher evaluations, with similar figures for the Keystone Exams and building performance evaluations.

While everything in the report may not be 100% accurate, it includes important information that should be wider known.

In particular, it matters that the majority of teachers and principals throughout the state disapprove of standardized testing. If we trust our educators at all, we should take steps to reduce or abolish high stakes testing – not continue the same dismal policy that has achieved nothing positive in 20 years of NCLB.

In addition, the report has trustworthy data about opt outs throughout the Commonwealth. Unlike what has been reported in the media, opting out is not on the decline, it is on the rise.

If we value parents and their autonomy to make decisions for their own children, we should at very least expand their ability to refuse the test for their children without having to give anyone a reason. Being parents is reason enough.

The Keystone Exams should be thrown in the trash, because that’s what they are – trash. At very least they should be replaced with the SAT or ACT. Even better to remove any requirement for standardized tests wholesale – and that includes the PSSA.

The ESSA allows states a lot of leeway about how and what accountability system they use. There is no need to worry about some imperial federal power invading Pennsylvania to force our hand with standardized testing. We should call their bluff on this. I’ll bet that if we did so, many other states would do the same.

Standardized testing is another failed education policy. Our legislators would do good to read this report and make up their own minds about it.

Though a few years and disasters have happened since its publication, it doesn’t deserve to be forgotten by the very people who ordered it to be written in the first place.

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Stay Woke, Public School Teachers

March 12, 2023 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, academic freedom, Accountability, antisemitism, capitalism, Censorship, Child Safety, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Credibility, Democrat, Donald Trump, Education, history, Labor, Learning, literature, Local Control, Media, Parents, Philosophy, Politics, Prejudice, privatization, Racism, Republican, school vouchers, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, student teacher relationship, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Uncategorized #LetTeachersTeach, A+ Schools, academic freedom, backlash, Black feminism, Civil Rights, critical race theory, critical thinking, education, feminism, freedom, history, human rights, intersectionality, lgbtq, Politics, queer theory, woke, woke-ness

“I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there – best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”
–Lead Belly “Scottsboro Boys”

How can you understand a problem if you are not allowed to name it?

How can you fight injustice if you are forbidden from learning its history and connection to the present moment?

These questions are at the heart of a well-financed war against a simple term – woke-ness.

Since the summer of 2020, oligarchs and their tools in the United States have been waging a disinformation campaign against that term – especially as it pertains to our schools.

Chiding, nagging, insinuating – you hear it constantly, usually with a sneer and wagging finger, but what does it really mean?

To hear certain governors, state legislators and TV pundits talk, you’d think it was the worst thing in the world. But it’s not that at all.

In its simplest form, being woke is just being alert to racial prejudice and discrimination.

That’s all – just knowing that these things exist and trying to recognize them when present.

I’m not sure what’s so controversial about that. If we all agree racism is bad, why is it undesirable to acknowledge it exists when it’s demonstrably there?

More specifically, being woke means focusing on intersectionality – how issues of race, class and gender overlap and interrelate with each other. It means practicing critical race theory – not the made up dog whistle conservatives use to describe anything they don’t like being taught in school, but the study of how racial bias is inherent in many Western social and legal systems. It means using the lens of Black feminism, queer theory and others to address structural inequality.

Again, why is that a bad thing? If we agree that prejudice is bad, we should want to avoid it in every way possible, and these are the primary tools that enable us to do so.

Our society is not new. We have history to show us how we got here and how these issues have most successfully been addressed in the past.

But these Regressives demand we ignore it all.

Shouldn’t we protect hard-fought advances in human rights? Shouldn’t we continue to strive for social justice and the ability of every citizen to freely participate in our democracy – especially in our public schools?

Of course we should!

But leaders of the backlash will disagree.

Like in so many other areas of our culture, they have stolen the term “woke-ness” and tried to co-opt it into another invented grievance. For people who deride their political opponents as being too fragile and unable to handle reality, they certainly find a million things to cry about on their 24-hour news networks to keep their base angry and engaged all the time.

They have attacked librarians, spied on and harassed teachers, banned books and weaponized the law to forbid certain ideas from our schools and public spheres.

They have targeted and demonized antiracist work. They have tried to discredit the concepts that Black women and LGBTQ people have created to explain and improve the inequitable conditions of their lives.

And the reason is crystal clear – they oppose that work.

They oppose anti-racism. They oppose the rights of Black women and LGBTQ people to better treatment.

They are against everyone but a perceived white, male, heteronormative majority that doesn’t even really exist.

They call their political opponents extremist. They call them groomers. They call them prejudiced and racist.

But it is Regressives’ anti-woke agenda that is really all of those things.

For them, up is down and circles are squares.

As public school teachers, being woke is not a choice. It is a responsibility.

For we are the keepers of history, science and culture.

Who will teach the true history that for more than 400 years in excess of 15 million men, women and children were the victims of the transatlantic slave trade? Who will teach the true history of the fight against human bondage and the struggle for equal rights? Who will teach about women’s fight for suffrage, equal pay, and reproductive freedom? Who will teach about the struggle of the individual to affirm their own gender identity and sexual expression?

We, teachers, must help students understand what happened, what’s happening and why. And to do so we must protect concepts that emerged from decades of struggle against all forms of domination.

It must be us.

It won’t be the College Board, a billion-dollar American business calling itself a non-profit, that after years of stalling finally released its Advanced Placement African American Studies curriculum – a college-level course available for high school students nationwide. In the wake of political backlash, the new course material is as watered-down as weak tea in comparison to previous drafts of the course.

This just goes to show that the free market will never stand up to political power if it is perceived as adversely affecting the bottom line. True education comes not from corporate academic standards or standardized test gatekeepers. It comes from teachers.

And we must teach like never before because our lessons have a pivotal impact on society at large.

Intersectional frames such as those under attack by billionaires posing as populists have been incredibly important in supporting overlooked social problems and addressing today’s human rights failures.

Those of us who know history understand that suppression of knowledge and intellectuals (especially those from marginalized peoples) are a tool used to increase racism and oppression – to overturn the progress of the last century.

Refusing students access to books, criminalizing “divisive concepts,” and discrediting those with whom they disagree have all been tools of domination. Just as denying the persistence of any inequality has been a tool to discredit its victims.

Progress has been made in the last hundred years, but the struggle is not over. And denying that there are any problems left to solve is a way of stifling that progress and turning back the clock against it.

If we give in to these partisan “anti-woke” imperatives, we enable the return of racist and cultural inequalities that had been at least partially rectified years ago. We clear the way for these extremists to bring back a mythical past in which women are meant to be merely subservient to men and where race, gender and sexuality are rigidly defined and limited according to the ruling class.

Teachers, we cannot allow this to happen.

We stand at the gates, the first (and perhaps last) line of defense, because we stand at the schoolhouse doors.

It is a responsibility none of us signed up to take. But here we are.

If we are truly educators, we must teach the truth.

We must put the facts in their proper context.

We must encourage our students to think about what came before and what’s happening now.

We must stay woke.

Or the whole world sleeps.

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When Students Cheat, They Only Hurt Themselves

March 4, 2023 stevenmsinger academic freedom, Accountability, capitalism, Child Safety, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", edtech, Education, Facebook, Learning, literature, memes, Philosophy, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, protest, Schools, Standardized Testing, student action, student teacher relationship, Students, teacher autonomy, Teachers, Technology, Uncategorized cheating, Corporate Education Reform, edtech, educational technology, fraud, Learning, plagiarism, Poe, poetry, Politics, public schools, schools, standardized testing, Students, teachers

Paolo invited me to his desk yesterday.

“Mr. Singer, take a look at this,” he said and handed me a scrap of paper with a few hastily scribbled lines of poetry on it.

“What do you think?” he said and smiled up at me hopefully.

I squinted at the page and said slowly, “I think it’s wonderful. The use of assonance in these lines is perfect…”

And his smile matured into a grin, until…

“…if only Edgar Allan Poe hadn’t already written them.”

Cheating is a part of school.

It’s probably always been.

Students copy off of other students, they take quotes from books without giving the author credit, they make crib sheets to consult during the test.

But since technology has pervaded nearly every aspect of our classrooms, cheating has skyrocketed.

Just ask the students.

According to a survey of 70,000 high school students conducted between 2002 and 2015 across the United States, 95 percent admitted to cheating in one way or another, and 58 percent admitted to plagiarizing papers outright.

According to a 2012 Josephson Institute’s Center for Youth Ethics report, nearly 3/4 of high schoolers said they’d copied a friends’ homework, and more than half said they’d cheated on a test.

It’s hard to blame them. These days there are few things cheaper than information.

Nearly every student – no matter how impoverished – has a smartphone. And even if they don’t, districts supply them with virtually the same features in tablets or laptops. Like never before, students can connect to the Internet anywhere, anytime, and they don’t even have to type in a question – they can simply ask Alexa or Siri.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen children sit in front of shelves stuffed to bursting with dictionaries as they clandestinely whisper into their phones asking how to spell certain words.

Mountains of studies show that technology has made cheating in school easier, increasingly convenient, and more difficult to detect. So much so that many students don’t even consider digital plagiarism to be plagiarism.

Current generations practically were raised on social media and thus have a warped sense of intellectual property. Watching TikTok parody videos, reposting images on Instagram, and repurposing memes on Facebook or Twitter have eroded their sense of what constitutes intellectual property and what counts as original work.

Going back to Paolo, I don’t think he consciously tried to pass off Poe’s poetry as his own. He was trying to complete an assignment using assonance (repetition of vowel sounds in nearby words) in a poem.

He probably asked his district-issued iPad for examples and was directed to a snippet from Poe’s “The Bells.” So he copied it down, changing a word here and there and thought he had created something new.

It wasn’t word-for-word. It was just very close. He didn’t realize that such an exact approximation of an iconic verse would be so obvious.

And it was my understanding – knowing the student, judging his reaction to being caught, and being able to piece together how this act of plagiarism took place – that informed my reaction.

I explained to him that he needed to go further a field – to create his own lines that might be inspired but more distinct from Poe’s. And he did.

This wasn’t the end product; it was a bump in the road.

However, not all cheating is so forgivable.

There are many cases where students know exactly what they’re doing and simply don’t care or feel the risk is worth the reward.

A study from 2021 published in the International Journal for Educational Integrity concluded that students’ emotions and attitudes toward assignments have a lot to do with whether they engage in purposeful cheating.

Students who feel sad, distressed or other negative emotions tend to be more open to plagiarism than those who feel more positive. In fact, one can use student’s negative emotions to predict the chances that they’ll cheat on assignments, according to this research.

The fact that so many aspects of modern day curriculum focus on standardized testing and teaching to the test also factors into the equation.

Students have admitted that drill-and-kill assignments, testing look-a-likes, etc. are seen as worthless and thus they are more prone to cheating on them.

Students will perpetrate fraud even on assignments that they see as valuable, but they are much more likely to do so on standardized curriculum – the kind policymakers and many administrators are increasingly pressuring districts and teachers to include in the classroom.

Educators are under incredible pressure to include the most boring and useless of skills in their lessons – not how to think critically, read thoughtfully or write expressively, but how to take this or that assessment. Then when students rebel by cheating, teachers are admonished to detect it at every corner but not to punish students too severely.

Thus we create an infinite loop of academic dishonesty. And no matter what happens, it’s the teacher’s fault.

The way I look at it, teachers should take steps to stop cheating in the classroom, but without administrative support, they can only go so far. If there aren’t academic consequences for cheating, administrators have tacitly accepted the behavior regardless of what teachers do in the classroom. If there are no consequence – no adequate disincentive – cheating is normalized regardless of the words written in the student handbook.

I’m not saying there shouldn’t be grace and understanding, but there need to be consequences, too. Students feel more free to be authentic and original when they are immersed in a school culture where authenticity is valued over fraud.

After all, even in circumstances where teachers have full support, they can’t catch everything. And I think that’s okay.

Who is most harmed when students cheat? It is not a victimless crime. When students engage in such behavior, they aren’t really hurting anyone other than themselves.

Think about it.

You’re a student in school ostensibly here to learn. If you cheat on an assignment (a valuable assignment) you’re just stopping yourself from achieving the intended learning.

You’re limiting your own knowledge, your own skills and abilities. Instead of grasping how to write and read critically, for instance, you get the grade without the learning.

It would be like going to the doctor and presenting fake bloodwork. That’s not going to harm the physician – it’s going to hurt the patient.

It’s the same for accidental and purposeful cheating.

So what can we do about it?

1) Perhaps the most important thing to discourage the unintentional variety is to teach kids what it is – especially with relation to technology.

Districts have to shift from embracing any technology as a given to being technologically literate. EdTech is like the Internet – a sewer. There’s way more garbage in there than treasure. If the district can’t control its own technosphere, it’s best not to have one at all. Be purposeful about the kinds of hardware and software you allow, and actively teach students how to use it.

A 15-minute crash course once every four to eight years is not enough. At minimum computer etiquette and digital proficiency should be an annual semester course, because students who cannot navigate the new media will be forever slaves to it.

However, that’s only half of the solution.

2) The best way to discourage purposeful cheating is to present students with meaningful work.

If kids actually want to learn what you’re teaching, they’ll be less inclined to fake their way through it.

Of course, this can only be truly effective when educators are allowed a voice in their own curriculum, their expertise is valued, and they are free to determine how best to go about their jobs. But let’s be honest – that’s not going to happen anytime soon.

3) Focus on process more than product.

For example, when my students write an essay, I never give them the prompt and then wait to see the results. We do prewriting together that needs to be approved before they can even begin their first drafts. We discuss it every step of the way until they submit it for a grade – and if it still has issues, I simply don’t accept it. I hand it back with suggestions for changes again and again until it meets the agreed upon standard.

That makes cheating much harder to do. It also puts learning – the journey from point A to B – at the forefront rather than coming up with something arbitrary.

4) Finally, relationships are the bedrock of responsibility.

Nothing in my class is high stakes.

If a student messes up today, there’s always tomorrow. All assignments are accepted late up to a point. All tests can be retaken. Everyone gets another chance to succeed.

It’s a huge burden on me, the teacher, but I think it’s worth it to extend a little grace to students. It’s worth it demonstrating that I value them over their work.

In teaching, relationships are everything, and you’re less likely to get purposeful cheating from students who respect you and whom you respect.

I’m not saying this is perfect or that I have all the answers. But in an age where everyone seems worried about academic integrity without any concern for academic freedom, it’s important to put your priorities front and center.

Cheating may never go away entirely, but at least we can be honest about why it happens and who it hurts.

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gadflyonthewallblog

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

student teacher relationship

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Teach for America Promised to Fix the Teacher Exodus Before Anyone Even Noticed There Was One. Now It’s Choking on Its Own Failure

What Can Educators Learn from “Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom”?

1) Power of the Sandbox

2) Importance of a Learning Community

3) The Danger of Outside Assessment

Teaching Blind Obedience is Child Abuse

Student Projects are Better Than Tests

When Our Students Leave Us

Forgotten Pre-Covid Report Reveals Standardized Testing Weaknesses in PA

1) PA Educators Hate Standardized Tests

2) Opt Outs on the Rise

3) Impact of New Reasons to Opt Out

4) Replacing the Keystone Exams

When Students Cheat, They Only Hurt Themselves