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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The Ongoing Study of How and When Teachers Should Praise Students

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

Should teachers praise their students?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But another study from 1998 turns this on its head.

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

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

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

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

So what are teachers to do?

Frankly, researchers don’t know.

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

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

There are simply too many variables at play.

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

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

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

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

I reprimand, too.

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

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

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

It’s exhausting.

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

The results are mixed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Six Problems with a Growth Mindset in Education

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

Sometimes the truth is not enough.

Especially if you misunderstand its meaning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How exactly do you use growth to drive achievement?

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

Does it actually work?

The results have been pretty inconclusive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2) It Doesn’t Fit with Current Education Policies

We live in a fixed mindset world.

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

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

It doesn’t.

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

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

Moreover, it’s incoherent.

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

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

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

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

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

3) It Ignores Student Needs and Resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4) It Can Make Kids Feel Disrespected and Disparaged

No child wants to be remediated.

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

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

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

David Yeager and Gregory Walton at Stanford claimed in 2011:

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

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

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

5) It is Not Suitable For All Kids

Everyone’s minds don’t work alike.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ve got this growth mindset thing all wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Standardized Tests Are Not Objective Measures of Anything

June 29, 2019 stevenmsinger Accountability, Civil Rights, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Data, Education, ESEA, ESSA, Eugenics, Every Student Succeeds Act, history, Learning, Opt Out, Philosophy, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, privatization, Racism, School Funding, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers B. F. Skinner, behaviorism, cognitive complexity, education, education policy, Noam Chomsky, objective, objectivity, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, Purpose of Education, standardized testing, Students, subjectivity, Teacher Evaluation, teachers, test-based accountability, Value Added Measures, VAM

When it comes to standardized tests, most people are blinded by science.

Or at least the appearance of science.

Because there is little about these assessments that is scientific, factual or unbiased.

And that has real world implications when it comes to education policy.

First of all, the federal government requires that all public school children take these assessments in 3-8th grade and once in high school. Second, many states require teachers be evaluated by their students’ test scores.

Why?

It seems to come down to three main reasons:

1) Comparability
2) Accountability
3) Objectivity

COMPARABILITY

First, there is a strong desire to compare students and student groups, one with the other.

We look at learning like athletics. Who has shown the most success, and thereby is better than everyone else?

This is true for students in a single class, students in a single grade, an entire building, a district, a state, and between nations, themselves.

If we keep questions and grading methods the same for every student, there is an assumption that we can demonstrate which group is best and worst.

ACCOUNTABILITY

Second, we want to ensure all students are receiving the best education. So if testing can show academic success through its comparability, it can also be used as a tool to hold schools and teachers accountable. We can simply look at the scores and determine where academic deficiencies exist, diagnose them based on which questions students get incorrect and then focus there to fix the problem. And if schools and teachers can’t or won’t do that, it is their fault. Thus, the high stakes in high stakes testing.

Obviously there are other more direct ways to determine these facts. Historically, before standardized testing became the centerpiece of education policy, we’d look at resource allocation to determine this. Are we providing each student with what they need to learn? Do they have sound facilities, wide curriculum, tutoring, proper nutrition, etc.? Are teachers abiding by best practices in their lessons? Many would argue this was a better way of ensuring accountability, but if standardized assessments produce valid results, they are at least one possible way to ensure our responsibilities to students are being met.

OBJECTIVITY

Third, and most importantly, there is the assumption that of all the ways to measure learning, only standardized testing produces objective results. Classroom grades, student writing, even high school graduation rates are considered subjective and thereby inferior.

Questions and grading methods are identical for every student, and a score on the test is proof that a student is either good or bad at a certain subject. Moreover, we can use that score to keep the entire education system on track and ensure it is functioning correctly.

So this third reason for standardized testing is really the bedrock rationale. If testing is not objective, it doesn’t matter if it’s comparable or useful for accountability.

After all, we could hold kids accountable for the length of their hair, but if that isn’t an objective measure of what they’ve learned, we’re merely mandating obedience not learning.

The same goes for comparability. We could compare all students academic success by their ability to come up with extemporaneous rhymes. But as impressive as it is, skill at spitting out sick rhymes and matching them to dope beats isn’t an objective measure of math or reading.

Yet in a different culture, in a different time or place, we might pretend that it was. Imagine how test scores would change and which racial and socioeconomic groups would be privileged and which would suffer. It might – in effect – upend the current trend that prizes richer, whiter students and undervalues the poor and minorities.

So let’s begin with objectivity.

ARE STANDARDIZED TESTS OBJECTIVE?

There is nothing objective about standardized test scores.

Objective means something not influenced by personal feelings or opinions. It is a fact – a provable proposition about the world.

An objective test would be drawing someone’s blood and looking for levels of nutrients like iron and B vitamins.

These nutrients are either there or not.

A standardized test is not like that at all. It tries to take a series of skills in a given subject like reading and reduce them to multiple choice questions.

Think about how artificial standardized tests are: they’re timed, you can’t talk to others, the questions you’re allowed to ask are limited as is the use of references or learning devices, you can’t even get out of your seat and move around the room. This is nothing like the real world – unless perhaps you’re in prison.

Moreover, this is also true of the questions, themselves.

If you’re asking something simple like the addition or subtraction of two numbers or for readers to pick out the color of a character’s shirt in a passage, you’re probably okay.

However, the more advanced and complex the skill being assessed, the more it has to be dumbed down so that it will be able to be answered with A, B, C or D.

The answer does not avoid human influences or feelings. Instead it assesses how well the test taker’s influences and feelings line up with those of the test maker.

If I ask you why Hamlet was so upset by the death of his father, there is no one right answer. It could be because his father was murdered, because his uncle usurped his father’s position, because he was experiencing an Oedipus complex, etc. But the test maker will pick one answer and expect test takers to pick the same one.

If they aren’t thinking like the test maker, they are wrong. If they are, they are right.

MISUNDERSTANDINGS

Yet we pretend this is scientific – in fact, that it’s the ONLY scientific way to measure student learning.

And the reason we make this leap is a misunderstanding.

We misconstrue our first reason for testing with our third. What we take for objectivity is actually just consistency again.

Since we give the same tests to every student in a given state, they show the same things about all students.

Unfortunately, that isn’t learning. It’s likemindedness. It’s the ability to conform to one particular way of thinking about things.

This is one of the main reason the poor and minorities often don’t score as highly on these assessments as middle class and wealthy white students. These groups have different frames of reference.

The test makers generally come from the same socioeconomic group as the highest test takers do. So it’s no wonder that children from that group tend to think in similar ways to adults in that group.

This isn’t because of any deficiency in the poor or minorities. It’s a difference in what they’re exposed to, how they’re enculturated, what examples they’re given, etc.

And it is entirely unfair to judge these children based on these factors.

UNDERESTIMATING HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY

The theory of standardized testing is based on a series of faulty premises about human psychology that have been repeatedly discredited.

First, they were developed by eugenicists like Lewis Terman who explicitly was trying to justify a racial hierarchy. I’ve written in detail about how in the 1920s and 30s these pseudoscientists tried to rationalize the idea that white Europeans were genetically superior to other races based on test scores.

Second, even if we put blatant racism to one side, the theory is built on a flawed and outmoded conception of the human mind – Behaviorism. One of the pioneers of the practice was Edward Thorndike, who used experiments on rats going through mazes as the foundation of standardized testing.

This is all good for Mickey and Minnie Mouse, but human beings are much more complicated than that.

The idea goes like this – all learning is a combination of stimulus and response. Teaching and learning follow an input-output model where the student acquires information through practice and repetition.

This was innovative stuff when B. F. Skinner was writing in the 20th Century. But we live in the 21st.

We now know that there are various complex factors that come into play during learning – bio-psychological, developmental and neural processes. When these are aligned to undergo pattern recognition and information processing, people learn. When they aren’t, people don’t learn.

However, these factors are much too complicated to be captured in a standardized assessment.

As Noam Chomsky wrote in his classic article “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,” this theory fails to recognize much needed variables in development, intellectual adeptness, motivation, and skill application. It is impossible to make human behavior entirely predictable due to its inherent cognitive complexity.

IMPLICATIONS

So we’re left with the continued use of widespread standardized testing attached to high stakes for students, schools and teachers.

And none of it has a sound rational basis.

It is far from objective. It is merely consistent. Therefore it is useless for accountability purposes as well.

Since children from different socioeconomic groups have such varying experiences, it is unfair.

Demanding everyone to meet the same measure is unjust if everyone isn’t given the same resources and advantages from the start. And that’s before we even recognize that what it consistently shows isn’t learning.

The assumption that other measures of academic success are inferior has obscured these truths. While quantifications like classroom grades are not objective either, they are better assessments than standardized tests and produce more valid results.

Given the complexity of the human mind, it takes something just as complex to understand it. Far from disparaging educators’ judgement of student performance, we should be encouraging it.

It is the student-teacher relationship which is the most scientific. Educators are embedded with their subjects, observe attempts at learning and can then use empirical data to increase academic success on a student-by-student basis as they go. The fact that these methods will not be identical for all students is not a deficiency. It is the ONLY way to meet the needs of diverse and complex humanity – not standardization.

Thus we see that the continued use of standardized testing is more a religion – an article of faith – than it is a science.

Yet this fact is repeatedly ignored by the media and public policymakers because there has grown up an entire industry around it that makes large profits from the inequality it recreates.

In the USA, it is the profit principle that rules all. We adjust our “science” to fit into our economic fictions just as test makers require students to adjust their answers to the way corporate cronies think.

In a land that truly was brave and free, we’d allow our children freedom of thought and not punish them for cogitating outside the bubbles.

Standardized Testing is a Tool of White Supremacy

April 5, 2019 stevenmsinger #BlackLivesMatter, Accountability, Civil Rights, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Eugenics, Learning, Politics, Poverty, Prejudice, Racism, School Funding, Schools, Social Justice, Standardized Testing, Students, Teachers, White Privilege Buck v. Bell, Carl Brigham, education, Eugenics, history, Lewis Terman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Psychology, public schools, Robert M. Yerkes, SAT, SCOTUS, standardized testing, white supremacy

Let’s say you punched me in the face.

I wouldn’t like it. I’d protest. I’d complain.

And then you might apologize and say it was just an accident.

Maybe I’d believe you.

Until the next time when we met and you punched me again.

That’s the problem we, as a society, have with standardized tests.

We keep using them to justify treating students of color as inferior and/or subordinate to white children. And we never stop or even bothered to say, “I’m sorry.”

Fact: black kids don’t score as high on standardized tests as white kids.

It’s called the racial achievement gap and it’s been going on for nearly a century.

Today we’re told that it means our public schools are deficient. There’s something more they need to be doing.

But if this phenomenon has been happening for nearly 100 years, is it really a product of today’s public schools or a product of the testing that identifies it in the first place?

After all, teachers and schools have changed. They no longer educate children today the same way they did in the 1920s when the first large scale standardized tests were given to students in the US. There are no more one-room schoolhouses. Kids can’t drop out at 14. Children with special needs aren’t kept in the basement or discouraged from attending school. Moreover, none of the educators and administrators on the job during the Jazz Age are still working.

Instead, we have robust buildings serving increasingly larger and more diverse populations. Students stay in school until at least 18. Children with special needs are included with their peers and given a multitude of services to meet their educational needs. And that’s to say nothing of the innovations in technology, pedagogy and restorative justice discipline policies.

But standardized testing? That hasn’t really changed all that much. It still reduces complex processes down to a predetermined set of only four possible answers – a recipe good for guessing what a test-maker wants more than expressing a complex answer about the real world. It still attempts to produce a bell curve of scores so that so many test takers fail, so many pass, so many get advanced scores, etc. It still judges correct and incorrect by reference to a predetermined standard of how a preconceived “typical” student would respond.

Considering how and why such assessments were created in the first place, the presence of a racial achievement gap should not be surprising at all. That’s the result these tests were originally created to find.

Modern testing comes out of Army IQ tests developed during World War I.

In 1917, a group of psychologists led by Robert M. Yerkes, president of the American Psychological Association (APA), created the Army Alpha and Beta tests. These were specifically designed to measure the intelligence of recruits and help the military distinguish those of “superior mental ability” from those who were “mentally inferior.”

These assessments were based on explicitly eugenicist foundations – the idea that certain races were distinctly superior to others.

In 1923, one of the men who developed these intelligence tests, Carl Brigham, took these ideas further in his seminal work A Study of American Intelligence. In it, he used data gathered from these IQ tests to argue the following:

“The decline of American intelligence will be more rapid than the decline of the intelligence of European national groups, owing to the presence here of the negro. These are the plain, if somewhat ugly, facts that our study shows. The deterioration of American intelligence is not inevitable, however, if public action can be aroused to prevent it.”

Thus, Yerkes and Brigham’s pseudoscientific tests were used to justify Jim Crow laws, segregation, and even lynchings. Anything for “racial purity.”

People took this research very seriously. States passed forced sterilization laws for people with “defective” traits, preventing between 60,000 and 70,000 people from “polluting” America’s ruling class.

The practice was even upheld by the US Supreme Court in the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision. Justices decided that mandatory sterilization of “feeble-minded” individuals was, in fact, Constitutional.

Of the ruling, which has never been explicitly overturned, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Eventually Brigham took his experience with Army IQ tests to create a new assessment for the College Board – the Scholastic Aptitude Test – now known as the Scholastic Assessment Test or SAT. It was first given to high school students in 1926 as a gatekeeper. Just as the Army intelligence tests were designed to distinguish the superior from the inferior, the SAT was designed to predict which students would do well in college and which would not. It was meant to show which students should be given the chance at a higher education and which should be left behind.

And unsurprisingly it has always – and continues to – privilege white students over children of color.

The SAT remains a tool for ensuring white supremacy that is essentially partial and unfair – just as its designers always meant it to be.

Moreover, it is the model by which all other high stakes standardized tests are designed.

But Brigham was not alone in smuggling eugenicist ideals into the education field. These ideas dominated pedagogy and psychology for generations until after World War II when their similarity to the Nazi philosophy we had just defeated in Europe dimmed their exponents’ enthusiasm.

Another major eugenicist who made a lasting impact on education was Lewis Terman, Professor of Education at Stanford University and originator of the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. In his highly influential 1916 textbook, The Measurement of Intelligence he wrote:
psych

“Among laboring men and servant girls there are thousands like them [feebleminded individuals]. They are the world’s “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” And yet, as far as intelligence is concerned, the tests have told the truth. … No amount of school instruction will ever make them intelligent voters or capable voters in the true sense of the word.

… The fact that one meets this type with such frequency among Indians, Mexicans, and negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to be taken up anew and by experimental methods.

Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master, but they can often be made efficient workers, able to look out for themselves. There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding” (91-92).

This was the original justification for academic tracking. Terman and other educational psychologists convinced many schools to use high-stakes and culturally-biased tests to place “slow” students into special classes or separate schools while placing more advanced students of European ancestry into the college preparatory courses.

The modern wave of high stakes testing has its roots in the Reagan administration – specifically the infamous propaganda hit piece A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform.

In true disaster capitalism style, it concluded that our economy was at risk because of poor public schools. Therefore, it suggested circumventing the schools and subordinating them to a system of standardized tests, which would be used to determine everything from teacher quality to resource allocation.

It’s a bizarre argument, but it goes something like this: the best way to create and sustain a fair educational system is by rewarding “high-achieving” students.

So we shouldn’t provide kids with what they need to succeed. We should make school a competition where the strongest get the most and everyone else gets a lesser share.

And the gatekeeper in this instance (as it was in access to higher education) is high stakes testing. The greater the test score, the more funding your school receives, the lower class sizes, the wider curriculum, more tutors, more experienced and well compensated teachers, etc.

It’s a socially stratified education system completely supported by a pseudoscientific series of assessments.

After all, what is a standardized test but an assessment that refers to a specific standard? And that standard is white, upper class students.

In his book How the SAT Creates Built-in-Headwinds, national admissions-test expert, Jay Rosner, explains the process by-which SAT designers decide which questions to include on the test:

“Compare two 1998 SAT verbal [section] sentence-completion items with similar themes: The item correctly answered by more blacks than whites was discarded by [the Educational Testing Service] (ETS), whereas the item that has a higher disparate impact against blacks became part of the actual SAT. On one of the items, which was of medium difficulty, 62% of whites and 38% of African-Americans answered correctly, resulting in a large impact of 24%…On this second item, 8% more African-Americans than whites answered correctly…”

In other words, the criteria for whether a question is chosen for future tests is if it replicates the outcomes of previous exams – specifically tests where students of color score lower than white children. And this is still the criteria test makers use to determine which questions to use on future editions of nearly every assessment in wide use in the US.

Some might argue that this isn’t racist because race was not explicitly used to determine which questions would be included. Yet the results are exactly the same as if it were.

Others want to reduce the entire enterprise to one of social class. It’s not students of color that are disadvantaged – it’s students living in poverty. And there is overlap here.

Standardized testing doesn’t show academic success so much as the circumstances that caused that success or failure. Lack of proper nutrition, food insecurity, lack of prenatal care, early childcare, fewer books in the home, exposure to violence – all of these and more combine to result in lower academic outcomes.

But this isn’t an either/or situation. It’s both. Standardized testing has always been about BOTH race and class. They are inextricably entwined.

Which leads to the question of intention.

If these are the results, is there some villain laughing behind the curtain and twirling the ends of a handlebar mustache?

Answer: it doesn’t matter.

As in the entire edifice of white supremacy, intention is beside the point. These are the results. This is what a policy of high stakes standardized testing actually does.

Regardless of intention, we are responsible for the results.

If every time we meet, you punch me in the face, it doesn’t matter if that’s because you hate me or you’re just clumsy. You’re responsible for changing your actions.

And we as a society are responsible for changing our policies.

Nearly a century of standardized testing is enough.

It’s time to stop the bludgeoning.

It’s time to treat all our children fairly.

It’s time to hang up the tests.

NOTE: This article expands upon many ideas I wrote about in an article published this week in Public Source.

College Remediation is Less About Bad Students Than Academic Elitism

October 5, 2018October 5, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, Budget, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, college, Common Core, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Learning, Politics, Prejudice, School Choice, School Funding, school segregation, school vouchers, Schools, small class size, Special Education, Standardized Testing, standards, Students, Teachers, Uncategorized Budget, college, college admissions, developmental psychology, education, educators, Elitism, Higher Learning, Post-Secondary, Profit, Psychology, Remediation, school funding, schools, standardized testing, teachers, Test Prep

Ah, college.

The school on a hill.

The marble columns, wood paneled studies and ivy encrusted gardens.

It’s never really been a place for everybody. But in rhapsodizing the college experience, our lawmakers have pushed for universities to enroll an increasing number of students. The demand for free or reduced tuition – especially for low-income students – has meant more kids putting on a letterman jersey and giving it the ol’ college try.

Teenagers who wouldn’t dream of higher education in previous decades are going for it today.

And the result has been a greater proportion of incoming college freshman taking remedial courses before they can even begin the normal post-secondary track.

According to a 2017 report by the Hechinger Report, more than half a million students at two- and four-year colleges in 44 states had to take such courses.

This costs up to an estimated $7 billion a year.

So, as usual in our country, we’re looking for someone to blame. And look! Here’s our favorite scapegoat – the public school system!

The gripe goes like this: Incoming college freshman wouldn’t need remediation if the public schools had bothered to teach them correctly!

However, the argument ignores several important factors and jumps to a completely unearned conclusion.

1) Public schools don’t decide who is accepted at colleges. College admissions departments do.

If people in higher learning think all these teenagers don’t belong in college, don’t accept them. Period.

But that would mean fewer students, less tuition and forgoing the lucrative revenue stream provided by – surprise! – these same remediation courses!

We pretend that colleges are special places where honor and scholarship rule the day. It isn’t necessarily so.

They are run by people, and like anywhere else, those people can be ethical and egalitarian or petty and materialistic.

Colleges aren’t immune to small mindedness or the economic realities facing institutions of learning everywhere.

Like most schools, they’re starved for funding.

The state and federal government have slashed subsidies to colleges and universities just as they have to public schools. Colleges have to make up the shortfall somewhere.

So they enroll students who don’t meet their own academic standards and then charge them for the privilege of attempting to get up to snuff.

It’s a good deal. You get to blame kids coming in AND reap the rewards.

2) How exactly do we determine that these kids need remediation?

In many schools, they use standardized tests like the SAT or ACT to make this determination. Others give their own pretest to all incoming freshman and assign remediation based on the results.

You’d expect more from institutions of higher learning.

You’d expect them to know how inadequate standardized tests are at assessing student knowledge. After all, most of the mountain of studies that conclude these tests are worthless are conducted at the college level. However, it seems people in admissions don’t always read the scholarly work of their colleagues in the departments of education and psychology.

I remember when I was in college, several classmates were being pressured to take remedial courses but refused. It didn’t stop them from graduating with honors.

3) Let’s say some of this remediation actually is necessary. Why would that be so?

These are high school graduates. What has changed in public schools over the past few decades to increase the need for these additional services at colleges?

It seems to me the answer is three-fold:

1) School budgets have been cut to the bare bone

2) Schools have to fight for limited funding with charter and voucher institutions

3) Standardized testing and Common Core have been dominating the curriculum.

If you cut funding to schools, they won’t be able to prepare students as well.

That’s a pretty simple axiom. I know business-minded number crunchers will extol the virtue of “doing more with less” and other such self-help platitudes, but much of it is nonsense.

You never hear them explain how cutting CEO salaries will mean corporations will run more effectively. It’s only workers and schools that they think deserve tough love and penury.

Look, schools with less funding mean fewer teachers. That means larger class sizes. That means it’s more difficult to learn – especially for students who don’t already come from privileged backgrounds.

None of this is bettered by the addition of charter and voucher schools sucking up the limited money available. We don’t have enough for one school system – yet we’re asking two or more parallel systems to exist on that same amount. And we’re stacking the deck in favor of privatized systems by prioritizing their funding and not holding them to the same accountability and transparency standards as traditional public schools.

It’s like deliberately placing leeches on a runners back and wondering why she’s started going so slowly.

Moreover, it’s ironic that the Common Core revolution was conducted to make students “college and career ready.” It has done just the opposite.

Narrowing the curriculum to weeks and months of test prep has consequences. You can increase students ability to jump through the hoops of your one federally mandated state test. But that doesn’t translate to other assessments. It doesn’t mean they’ll do better on the SAT or other college entrance exams. Nor does it mean they’ll possess the authentic learning we pretend we’re after in the first place.

The bottom line: if we really want to improve student academic outcomes in public schools, we need to fully and equitably fund them. We need to abandon school privatization schemes and fully support public schools. And we need to stop the obsession with standardized assessments, curriculum and – yes – even canned standards, themselves.

That might actually reduce the numbers of students who allegedly need remediation at the college level.

However, there is another aspect that we need to consider that is harder to remedy…

4) Developmental psychology.

Schools – whether they be post-secondary, secondary or primary – are built to meet the needs of human beings. And human beings don’t grow according to a preconceived schedule.

Just because you think someone should be able to do X at a certain age, doesn’t mean they’re developmentally ready to do so.

Speaking from experience, I was a C student in math through high school. It wasn’t until I got to college that I started to excel in that subject and earned top marks.

I didn’t have to take any remedial courses, but I was forced to take a quantitative reasoning course as part of my liberal arts majors.

I’m not alone in this. Many people aren’t cognitively ready for certain concepts and skills until later. That doesn’t make them deficient in any way nor does it betray any problems in their schooling.

That’s just how their brains work. We can whine about it or we can accept human nature and do what we can to help students cope.

And this brings me to my final reason behind the college remediation trend – a problem that is more insidious than all the others combined.

5) The elitism behind the whole post-secondary system.

For centuries, higher learning has been seen as a privilege of the wealthy and the upper class. Sure a few exceptional plebians were let into our hallowed halls just to “prove” how egalitarian we were.

But college was never seen as something fit for everyone.

As such, the attitude has always been that students are on their own. Many who enroll will not end up graduating. And that’s seen as perfectly acceptable. It’s part of the design.

It’s the baby sea turtle school of education – thousands of hatchlings but few survive to adulthood.

However, if you really want to make college the right fit for an increasing number of students, you have to get rid of the elitist attitude.

If students come to college and need remediation, stop whining and provide it.

And it shouldn’t incur an extra cost from students, either. This should just be a normal part of the process.

If a patient comes to the emergency room with heart disease, you don’t penalize him because he didn’t eat heart healthy. You do what you can to help him heal. Period.

That’s how colleges and universities need to approach their students.

You know – the way public schools already do.

SOLUTIONS

In summary, it’s not a case of colleges vs. public schools. And anyone who tells you differently probably has a hidden agenda – the standardization and privatization industry, for instance.

We need to support colleges and universities. We need to support public schools. Both need additional funding and political will.

However, colleges need to become more accepting and supportive of the students enrolled there. They need to meet them where they are and provide whatever they need to succeed.

Moreover, public schools need the autonomy and respect routinely given to college professors.

The answer is a transformation of BOTH institutions.

That’s how you make a better school system for everyone.

That or we could just keep grumbling at each other, forever pointing fingers instead of working together to find solutions.

The Only Way to Survive Trump is Together

August 11, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, Bernie Sanders, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Democrat, Donald Trump, Dr. Jill Stein, Education, Election, Election Reform, Green Party, Hillary Clinton, immigration, John Podesta, Obama, Politics, Prejudice, President, protest, Republican, School to Prison Pipeline, Schools, Social Justice, Teachers, voter suppression, voting Depression, Donald Trump, hope, Pessimism, Politics, Psychology, Trump Anxiety Disorder, unity

There are days when I feel like a broken man.

And it is Donald Trump who has broken me.

Not his political victories. Not the failures of his opposition.

But the very fact that this piece of shit is President of the United States – that fact sits on my brain like an insect I can’t swat.

On those days my belief in this country wavers and disappears.

Oh, I’ve always recognized its faults, how our reality hardly ever lived up to our ideals. But I also thought that the United States was populated by mostly good people who knew right from wrong.

To run this country we wouldn’t choose an obvious conman, a racist and sexist, a person of low IQ, a man with little to no experience, a reality TV star. We wouldn’t let him pick the next Supreme Court justices. We wouldn’t give him the power to pardon whomever he likes. We wouldn’t give him the ability to write almost whatever he wants into law through signing statements. And we certainly wouldn’t give him the nuclear codes.

But we did.

We did all of that.

Or we allowed it to happen by ignoring a broken electoral system that overturns the popular vote with frightening regularity.

So there he sits in the Oval Office – when he isn’t on vacation at Mar-a-Lago – like a smear of feces on the American flag.

Therapists call this feeling “Trump Anxiety Disorder” and I have it. Boy! Do I have it!

The D.C. Counseling and Psychotherapy Center has identified it as a “collective politically induced anxiety among patients.”

Apparently, Trump’s name comes up frequently in sessions with mental health professionals. Patients say they feel on edge because of the President’s ill-chosen, childish and undiplomatic words, fear of his bad decision making, and anxiety over his xenophobic and prejudicial policies.

Trump Anxiety Disorder is not yet an official diagnosis, but symptoms seem to include lack of sleep, a feeling of losing control and helplessness in an unpredictable political scene, along with endless negative headlines and excessive time spent on social media.

Elisabeth LaMotte, a therapist at the Washington, DC, center, said, “There is a fear of the world ending. It’s very disorienting and constantly unsettling.”

I’m not sure I fear that Armageddon is close at hand, but I certainly feel like the world I thought I knew is unraveling.

Fox News was quick to frame this story as a joke – those silly “libtards” are losing their minds over Trump. But it’s not just people on the left who suffer from the disorder, says LaMotte.

Many Trump supporters feel isolated from friends and family who don’t blindly follow their diminutive Furor. I guess it’s hard to pal around with someone who thinks it’s completely justified to separate children from their parents and lock them up in cages – unless you think the same thing.

Even the American Psychological Association (APA) has recorded a rise in anxiety since the 2016 election that increases depending on how political a person is regardless of affiliation.

The APA also noted that electronic news consumption increases that risk.

In my own case, my symptoms manifested physically on Election Day, itself.

I literally had a heart attack in 2016 after casting my ballot. And I had another one a short while later.

The first one may have had something to do with depression over the political options.

I didn’t know Trump would win. I thought the chances of it were infinitesimal. But I didn’t want Hillary Clinton, either.

I wanted Bernie Sanders, and since I thought the Democratic National Convention stacked the deck against him (and therefore voters) in the primaries, I voted for Jill Stein.

In the months since, I’ve run that decision over in my mind a million times.

Was I right? Was I wrong? Could I have given Trump the margin of victory with my one stupid vote?

When I examine all the information I had at the time, it still makes sense.

The media was telling us that there was no way Trump could win. Clinton was going to come storming into the White House and continue or worsen the neoliberal policies of Barack Obama.

As a school teacher, I was concerned that she would continue to wage war on public education – she would continue to boost charter schools and standardized testing while shrugging at funding inequity, increased segregation and the school-to-prison pipeline.

It’s not that I didn’t realize Trump would be worse. It’s that I didn’t think Clinton would be that much better.

But had she won, I don’t think I would be suffering the same anxiety.

We would have a sane and sensible leader who wouldn’t do anything much to make things better, but certainly wouldn’t be plunging us into an abyss. She wouldn’t betray every single American value while blatantly using her office for personal gain and gaslighting anyone who had the temerity to point out what was happening in plain sight.

So maybe some of it is guilt in my case.

Maybe I caused all this chaos. But I’ve looked at the numbers and that doesn’t add up.

Even if my position as a blogger who criticized Clinton (and Trump) convinced thousands of voters to cast ballots like I did, I could not have significantly affected the outcome.

But on those days of doubt and depression, I still feel guilty.

This is not the world I want to live in.

Things would be different if I thought there were any real hope of change.

Sure Trump may be defeated. If there’s a blue wave in the midterms, the orange one may be impeached. Or he may find it increasingly difficult to continue his corruption and be ousted in 2020.

But long term I don’t see much changing.

The Democrats are almost as corrupt as the Republicans.

Don’t give me this false equivalency crap. I’m not saying they’re the same. The Democrats are unequivocally better. But with the exception of social issues, their policies are almost the same as Republicans. The only difference is timeframe.

Republicans will destroy the world tomorrow. Democrats will destroy it next week.

And the system is just not set up to offer any challenge to the duopoly.

I desperately want to believe that insurgent progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zephyr Teachout will somehow wrest control of the Democrats and steer the party back to real populist goals, but on most days it’s hard to keep that hope alive.

On those days it seems like the rich and powerful own our government and will never allow us to take it back no matter how many of us try to vote, no matter how often we take to the streets, no matter what we do.

We live in a world of shit.

And none of it will ever change for the better.

I don’t want to feel this way.

I still want to believe that the moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice.

But on most days that feels like an illusion.

Is that a mental disorder? Or do I finally see the world for the way it is?

I have no answers.

Perhaps this article has no point.

I only offer it as a mark of solidarity.

If you’re feeling this way, you are not alone.

There are many more out there like you.

I don’t know how we get through this or even if we can. But this much seems certain.

If we are to survive, the only way is together.

So I send out this missive of hope and fear with all my love and a big virtual hug.

Be kind to each other. We’re all we’ve got.

For a peak at my views on more positive days, see HERE and HERE.

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Modernizing Education Starts With Questioning Our Assumptions

May 18, 2018May 19, 2018 stevenmsinger Accountability, capitalism, Charter Schools, Civil Rights, Compassion, Corporate Education "Reform", Education, Junk science, Learning, Philosophy, Politics, privatization, School Choice, school vouchers, Schools, Standardized Testing, standards, Students, Teachers, Value Added Measures, VAM Accountability, assumptions, behaviorism, education, Learning, learning objectives, Measurement, modernize, Philosophy, Psychology, standardized testing, Students, teachers, Value Added Measures

When it comes to education, we take an awful lot for granted.

For example, we look at learning almost entirely from a behavioral standpoint.

Teachers provide inputs. Students give outputs. And those outputs demonstrate the intended learning.

Yet this framework was developed in the early 1900s. Using it today is to ignore a century of subsequent psychological advancements. It glosses over the impact of the unconscious, the social nature of understanding, physical differences, even the mediating thought processes between stimulus and response such as memory and problem solving.

Instead, we force students into inauthentic laboratory conditions (i.e. the classroom) upon which they are passive actors to be molded and shaped by expert educators.

Every time we post our learning objectives on the board or when we write our lesson plans beginning with the old chestnut – Students Will Be Able To (SWBAT) – we are hearkening back to early 20^th Century thinking a hundred years out of date.

We are enshrining a host of assumptions long past their fresh by date:

-Learning is observable.

-It happens immediately.

-It is measurable.

-Once you learn something it never goes away.

-Most problems with learning are attributable to inputs provided by the teacher.

None of these assumptions have been proven.

In fact, there is considerable evidence against each and every one of these premises, yet our entire system of corporate education is based on them like a house built on a foundation.

If we are truly to create a 21^st Century school system, the only place to begin is here. Recognize our bedrock beliefs are mere speculation and question whether we should really support everything else that’s been built on such shaky ground.

WHAT IS LEARNING?

It is an empirical fact that human beings are capable of learning. It’s something we do every day. But what exactly does it consist of? What happens when a person learns?

Perhaps it’s best to start with a definition. We generally characterize learning as the acquisition of knowledge; the possession of facts, information or skills.

But how does one gain knowledge? How does one possess the intangible?

It seems that learning always involves thoughts – usually conscious impressions but sometimes unconscious ones, as well. However, not all thoughts qualify, only thoughts of a certain kind.

The notion must be true of the world. And often it is an idea that has surfaced before but that now can be recalled at will and used to create new concepts.

Perhaps I’m wrong, but it seems that no matter how you flesh it out, we’re talking about internal mind states.

Learning takes place in and of the brain. And this has consequences for our education system – an apparatus designed to make these brain states more frequent along certain prescribed lines.

IS LEARNING OBSERVABLE?

That depends. Can we lop off the top of students’ heads and peer at the gelatinous mass inside?

Not really. And even if we could, we wouldn’t understand what we were seeing.

Even if learning may be reducible to a complex set of on-and-off switches among synapses, that does not make it generally observable – certainly not without greater knowledge of how the brain works and advanced neural imaging equipment.

As such, the idea that learning is directly perceptible is not necessarily true. It may be evident in some second hand manner, but this is not the same as first hand experience. At best, what we see is a pale shadow of what’s actually going on in students’ gray matter.

That alone should send shock waves through the edifice of modern corporate education. We’ve built an entire apparatus to label and sort kids based on observing students. If those observations are inadequate to give us the full picture of these internal learning states, our system is likewise inadequate.

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF TEACHER INPUT?

To answer this question we must start further back – when and why does learning takes place.

A student experiences a new neural state that constitutes the acquisition of knowledge. Why?

Does it happen because of the input made by a teacher? Is it the result of experience? Is it the result of some other input – reading, interacting, writing, doing something? Or is it the result of something even the student him- or herself cannot easily identify or explain?

All of these are possible. All of these (and more) are the catalyst to learning at various times.

Thus we lose another premise – that teacher input is the essential cause of inadequate learning. If we cannot place a primacy on the teacher, we cannot wholly place blame there either.

Certainly teachers are important. They can have a tremendous impact on their students. But they are not strictly necessary. They are not even the prime cause of learning. They facilitate learning in the way a doctor facilitates healing. The surgeon may set the broken bone, but it is the body that actually does the healing. And in the case of learning, the action is not entirely involuntary. It is much more active and intentional.

In short, teachers can call students attention to something that sparks learning. They can bring about optimal conditions for learning to take place. But they are not by themselves sufficient for that learning. They cannot make it happen. Insofar as it is voluntary at all, it is up to the student. To give teachers sole reward or blame for student learning is absurd.

IS LEARNING IMMEDIATE?

Learning may be a response to stimulus of some kind. But when does that response take place? Is it immediate?

There is no evidence that it must be so. Certainly there are times when one has learned something immediately. When a child first puts her finger in the flame, she quickly learns to remove it. However, there are some lessons that we don’t learn until many years after that stimulus. For instance, that our parents’ advice was often more sage than we initially gave it credit.

Thus, again it is inadequate to place reward or blame on teachers for their students’ learning. You can judge a teacher for what he or she did to help, but not what you take to be the result. Just because the teacher’s input may not have sparked learning in the student now, that doesn’t mean that the same input might not engender learning at a later date, given time.

IS LEARNING PERMANENT?

Which brings up another question – once you learn something, does it remain yours forever or is it susceptible to degradation?

If learning is an internal state – if it is the result of neural connections like any thought or memory – it is susceptible to fading. It can be lost or degraded.

Therefore, when students enter a class without prerequisite knowledge, it is not necessarily the fault of their previous teachers. Like any skill, memory or thought – recall is enhanced through repetition. Using the knowledge often results in greater retention.

If we want a more intellectual society, we should habitualize critical thinking and reward intelligence in our public interactions. Not the exact opposite.

CAN LEARNING BE MEASURED?

And finally, we are brought to perhaps the most vital question in the field of education – measurement.

What did students grasp and to what degree was it mastered?

There is an entire industry based on providing accurate accounting of learning.

There are corporations making billions of dollars based on providing this service. Moreover, the school privatization industry is almost completely predicated on the “failure” of public schools as shown by the measurements of these testing corporations.

As such, there is a tremendous amount of economic pressure to keep this premise that learning can be accurately measured. However, when looked at logically, it cannot be supported.

When we measure learning, what are we measuring? And how are we quantifying it?

If learning is an internal state, how do we calculate that? Possibly at some point in the future, we’ll be able to look at real time pictures of the brain and be able to tell which information has been learned and to what degree. But we are not at that point now. Perhaps we will never be.

Even if we were, what exactly would we be measuring? What units would we be using? Volts? Amps? Some new element susceptible to subdivision?

The fact that we can’t give a definitive answer to that simple question illustrates how vast our ignorance is of learning. We do not understand what goes on in our own heads that constitutes understanding expect in the broadest possible terms.

Yet how much importance we put on these crude attempts to measure the ineffable!

Grades and test scores are but the rudest approximations of the real phenomena hidden inside our skulls. Yet we sort and rank students on the pedagogical equivalent of cave paintings.

“It is easier to measure the number of semicolons used correctly in an essay than the wonderful ideas contained within it,” said Alfie Kohn. “The more focused you are on measurable outcomes, the more trivial your teaching tends to become.”

Or as Linda McNeil of Rice University famously observed, “Measurable outcomes may be the least significant results of learning.”

Kohn has repeatedly suggested that McNeil’s statement ought to be printed out in “36-point Helvetica, framed, and tacked to the wall of every school administrator’s office in the country” for these same reasons.

When we talk about knowledge and learning, we don’t know what we’re talking about.

CONSEQUENCES

That should make us reluctant to say anything definitive about learning beyond our own ignorance of it.

Yet, as in so much of human affairs, when has ignorance ever stopped us?

We have to go about the business of educating. We have a society to run, markets to establish and consumers to exploit.

Imagine if, instead, we approached learning like explorers or scientists, mapping the shores of our ignorance and determining what helps us comprehend more and better.

There are so many tantalizing clues about what helps students learn, ways to foster the spark of inspiration, creativity and critical thinking.

I wish we were invested in that activity instead of a capitalist sham of education. We talk much about the skills gap between white and black kids without doing anything constructive about it – a chasm predicated on the fact that one category is predominantly poor and the other privileged.

Perhaps we would do better to talk about the ignorance gap of our own understanding of what it means to understand.

Perhaps then we wouldn’t be so bold as to monetize that which is fallacious and foolhardy.

Perhaps then we would be more curious, thoughtful and kind.

Perhaps then we could build a truly modern system of education that values students and not just how they can be transformed into profit.