PerfectlyDocile

Better Late Than Never

This letter to the editor was written on September 29, 2012. It was e-mailed to a number of newspapers across the state. The Muskegon Chronicle, to its credit, ran it, though not until January 27, 2013, and heavily editted. Here it is in its original form.

Why My Children Don’t Take The MEAP

At this moment, tens of thousands of children across the state of Michigan are hunched over desks filling in the bubbles on their MEAP answer sheets in what has become a yearly ritual across the country, whether it be the FCAT in Florida, the TAKS in Texas, or the CST in California.

My children will be spending that time reading a good book instead. My wife and I, both teachers, decided last year that we’ve seen enough. After watching a decade of failed (and expensive) education reform, and the effect it was having on our children’s learning, we exempted them from this yearly debacle.

Most parents aren’t aware they have that option, but in the early days of the MEAP there was a bubble marked “Parent Exempt” on the answer booklet. After a couple of years that bubble disappeared, not because exempting your child was no longer an option, but because somebody didn’t want you to know that it was an option.

The MEAP was a meaningless annoyance until No Child Left Behind became law in 2001. NCLB was an attempt to apply the tenets of Total Quality Management to the realm of education. TQM is a production paradigm meant to create the most efficient manufacturing process for a particular product. It was TQM that led to the early success of the fledgling Japanese automobile industry under the guidance of W. Edwards Deming (and others) shortly after World War II.  TQM involves the continuous testing of the product and tweaking of the manufacturing process in what is supposed to result in an endless cycle of constant improvement.

Somewhere along the way, some very wealthy and influential people concluded that the process of educating (other people’s) children is no different than the process of manufacturing a toaster, and thus the application of TQM principles to the education system would result in an improved product (or “human capital” in their terms). Those of us who actually have and/or work with children know educating a child and manufacturing a toaster are nothing alike.

Business has always had a hand in schooling in the United States, even from the earliest days. Their goal has been the same all that time - the production of the perfect employee. Here’s a quote from the Rockefeller General Board in 1906:

“In our dreams, people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions of intellectual and character education fade from their minds, and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people, or any of their children, into philosophers, or men of science. We have not to raise up from them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen – of whom we have an ample supply. The task is simple. We will organize children and teach them in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way.”

Unfortunately for corporate America, our schools have had a long history of local control. Democratically elected school boards responded to the voices of community members and parents, most of whom want more for their children than a spot on a minimum wage assembly line. Over time, this protective layer of local control has been gradually stripped away by wave after wave of business-sponsored legislation.

It had to be legislated, because businessmen knew the garbage they were peddling would never get past parents. They tried it before in the early ‘90s with Outcomes Based Education and had the door slammed in their faces. Not to be outdone, they re-tooled, changed the jargon (from “outcomes” to “grade-level content objectives”), and skirted parents by implementing it through legislation. After all, politicians are much easier to dupe and/or buy than parents.

Recently Michigan and 45 other states adopted the Common Core State Standards, enticed by the promise of federal monies.  The Common Core Standards are a product of the National Business Roundtable and National Governors Association. No parent or teacher that I know of had any input into their creation. You and I were not asked our opinion. We were simply informed that the Common Core Standards are now the guiding force behind our children’s education.

The results of No Child Left Behind were dismal.  Scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress rose, but at a much slower rate than they did prior to NCLB.  We paid a lot for this lack of progress, especially when you count the hundreds of millions (perhaps billions) of dollars that have been funneled from schools to companies like Pearson Educational Measurement and McGraw-Hill, two of the many companies that write the tests, score the tests, provide the study guides, and shill the latest test-prep quackery. Now the Common Core Standards have arrived to provide yet another opportunity to profit from the testing treadmill our children suffer daily. The thought here seems to be that children are nothing more than empty file cabinets. Just fill the child with the perfect curriculum and “voila,” another well-rounded citizen of the United States drops off the assembly line. It is literally inhuman.

The Common Core Standards do nothing to address the major cause of poor student achievement – poverty.  Jobs that provide a living wage certainly would help, but those were shipped overseas by the same corporate elite who have now taken over our schools.

Speaking of overseas, why are we trying to emulate the Chinese educational system with its standardized curriculum and national test? Do we admire their toxic products?  Their violation of basic human rights?  Their disregard for intellectual property rights?  Their unfair monetary practices? More likely, some powerful people admire the massive pool of cheap, obedient labor their schools produce.

Have you noticed any conservative pundits or legislators coming out against Race to the Top? In a campaign season in which President Obama has been blamed for everything from global warming to the shopping cart ding you got in the parking lot at Sam’s Club, there has been a remarkable lack of reaction to the federal government’s intrusion into our classrooms. Isn’t this the kind of chum that should have led to a conservative feeding frenzy?

Instead, silence. That’s because these legislators and pundits know who really is behind Race to the Top. It’s the National Business Roundtable, Bill Gates, the Koch brothers, Eli Broad, Dick DeVos, Philip Anschutz, the Walton family - the same billionaires’ boys’ club that has been putting hundreds of millions of dollars into conservative campaign coffers. Don’t expect the Republican Party to ride to the rescue on this one.

It is up to us – parents and teachers.  Well, some teachers - maybe. Most are too afraid of losing their jobs to do anything but attempt to comply with the avalanche of new regulations, professional development, and just plain busy work demanded to support the new standards. See, as part of the business-funded attack on public schools and teachers’ unions, the language in Michigan’s tenure law was changed. Previously, you couldn’t fire a teacher without “just cause.”  Now a teacher may be discharged or demoted for any reason “that is not arbitrary or capricious." Nobody is quite sure what that actually means, and rather than be the first to find out, most teachers are simply hunkering down and hoping the stupid goes away on its own. So parents, we teachers will support you, but most of us are going to do it very quietly and from a very safe distance.

In any attempt to bring down Goliath, it is best to know your enemy. NCLB and Race to the Top survive on three seemingly unlimited resources:

Our ignorance - I’ve just given you a very brief glimpse into what has transpired in our classrooms during the past decade. For a more complete overview of the whole steaming mess, it would be hard to beat Diane Ravitch’s Death and Life of the Great American School System.  Ravitch was an early proponent of No Child Left Behind, and the first to have the courage and integrity to admit that it had failed.

Money - We are beaten hands down here. The people behind the takeover of our schools are one percent of the one percent. They own virtually everything – the media, the politicians, and the banks. No amount of bake sales is going to allow us to come close to matching their resources.

Data - Here is the Achilles’ heel of the colossus. Viewed from a distance, it looks daunting, but on closer inspection, the whole thing is made of eggshells. It thrives on the data we feed it when we present our children to be tested year after year like some kind of annual pagan sacrifice. Starve the thing of data and watch it fall.

Let’s simply walk away from the test en masse. Not just in Michigan, but across the country. Exempt your child. Refuse the test. Both state and federal law acknowledge the right of parents to guide the education of their children. Reclaim that right and take back our schools. You won’t be alone in doing this. Organizations across the country – United Opt Out, Save Our Schools, the Bartleby Project, and Parents Across America, are successfully encouraging parents to join them in exempting their children from these tests, making their voices heard, and taking back public education.

Government does not mess with angry parents. They will threaten the schools, but our public schools are supposed to serve us, not the government. Let’s refuse the tests and then see which legislators step up to defend the rights of business over the natural and legal rights of parents. Knowing who they really support will make choosing a candidate much easier come the November elections.

I’ll be at school this week, administering a test I despise to other people’s children. I’ll do what I can to make it as painless as possible, but as a teacher I’m relatively powerless. As a parent however, I can at least protect my own children. I hope you will consider doing the same for yours.

Scott W. Baker

Shelby, Michigan

September 29, 2012

A Line in the Sand

The arguments regarding NCLB, both pro and con, are at first glance complex and confusing. Myriad special interest groups spout statistics, cite experts, and brandish research that justifies maintaining NCLB in its present state, or perhaps tweaking it, or maybe overhauling it, or just abolishing it completely, depending on who you're listening to at the moment.

This debate is not nearly as "shades of gray" as it seems. At the heart of this argument lies a fairly straightforward question facing all of us:

Are we, and our fellow human beings simply another species of animal, or are we something more?

What's that got to do with NCLB? Just about everything.

If you view humans as just another form of life on this planet, your treatment of your fellow man is going to reflect that view. For some it's a simple matter to take the rules that apply to animal life in general and apply them to the human race. Consider:

Many species of animal live in a rigid social structure (hive, pack, school, herd) in which the life of the individual is of little value, and easily traded in order to promote the survival of the group. Survival of the fittest is the rule, and if you are among the unfit, well, tough.

Every herd needs a leader, someone whose "fitness" qualifies them to make the decisions for the rest of the herd, and to enforce those choices by any means possible. If that doesn't happen to be you, again, tough.

Animals do not possess "free will." They are prisoners of environmental conditions that cause them to behave in predictable ways through reward and punishment. And so are you.

Once you've seen one rat/wildebeest/sardine/etc., you've seen them all. You can measure a few individuals of a species in a great number of ways, and then describe the entire species with the numbers you've generated. Physical or behavioral differences of/by individuals within the species that fall outside the parameters of this mathematical description can be considered anomalies and simply disregarded.

Life is about competition. Animals of different species, and individuals within the same species, compete for common, limited resources. The strong survive and the weak go hungry and perish. That's just the way it is when you're an animal.

But what if you believe otherwise? What if you believe that humans are something unique - a species whose sentience sets us apart from the rest of the planet's inhabitants? What if there is within us some indefinable spark of magic, a touch of divinity that separates us from the rest the planet's life while at the same time binding us to an alternate standard of conduct unique to our special standing in the world?

Such belief requires a respect for the personal journey each of us makes in the course of a lifetime, a deep regard for the potential within every person, and the share of the space and time it needs to develop. Cooperation, rather than competition, seems to make more sense.

This divine spark defies measurement by the crude tools of science, and any attempt to measure and quantify it will be about as successful as trying to pick up mercury with your fingers. Our diversity must be respected as a special feature of humanity, and attempts to standardize humans must fly in the face of a grand understanding that is beyond us.

We are required to reject the wholesale manipulation of the environment to produce "desirable" behaviors in those around us, by those who see themselves as fit to serve as our shepherds.

Take a look now at the No Child Left Behind legislation with its domineering (and cynical) carrot-and-stick approach, its misplaced faith in "statistics," and its attempt to homogenize the population through standardized curriculum and standardized tests. There is no doubt how those who created it must feel about the rest of us.

There are not shades of gray in this matter. NCLB is an affront to humanity. There is no fixing it.

Pick your side and take a stand.

A Parable

I ran across this the other day as I was looking through some old paperwork. It was my attempt to share John Gatto's ideas with people in a manner that wouldn't overwhelm them the way John's book had benumbed me. After re-reading it, I see that much of it is still apropos. After you finish it you might want to pick up John's book at his website (www.johntaylorgatto.com):

There was once a nation of people who dwelt on the shores of a vast ocean. Their survival depended on their ability to use the ocean's resources, so out of necessity they became extremely competent sailors. Because the spent so much time sailing, nearly all of the people were boat builders as well. The skills of boat building and sailing had been passed down from generation to generation, and the beach was lined with tiny craft.

Some people simply cruised the shallows and never ventured farther than it took to fulfill their daily needs. Others spent hours each day on the ocean for the sheer joy of sailing, and other ventured still further toward the far horizon in an attempt to see what was on the other side.

Of course no two boats were exactly alike. It was perfectly obvious to the people that the design of each boat was dictated by its intended use, by the ability of its owner, and by the amount of effort he or she wished to put into it. Most of the boats were built for individuals, but if enough people were interested in reaching the same destination, they would join together to build a boat to suit this purpose. On the surface, it all looked very chaotic, but in fact it provided each person with exactly what he or she needed - no more, no less. In fact, the system had worked so well that it had lasted unchanged for countless generations, and had turned out countless numbers of great sailors.

But one day a man arrived on the beach in a long, black frock coat and carrying a bundle of papers. Climbing on top of a large rock, he addressed the people.

"I have come from across the ocean where I have observed a marvelous vehicle in use by the people of that nation. With just one vehicle, they are able to transport the entire population across the waves towards their destination. I am here now to offer my services in designing and building such a vehicle for you."

To his surprise, his pronouncement was met with a great lack of enthusiasm from the crowd. They were perfectly happy with the system they had used for generations, and which met their needs so handily.

Nonplussed, the gentleman in the frock coat sought out the wealthy and influential among the people and showed them the plans he had obtained. The voyages of these few men had required the combined effort of many people to build and sail massive vessels. This was problematic. Since nearly all people were capable sailors and boat builders, as soon as their destination differed from that of the ship, they were able to construct their own boats and leave. This was a constant source of frustration for the owners of the large vessels who where often left shorthanded.

And so, to these men, the plans for one massive vehicle to keep the entire population headed in a single direction seemed like a fine idea, and these wealthy few threw their wealth and influence behind the project.

In short order a large, dark factory was constructed, and within the work began on the revolutionary vehicle. For weeks the air was filled with the noise of massive hammers, and sooty smoke plumed from the multiple chimneys. Those brave enough to venture up to the windows for a peek were quickly shooed away.

But the day came when two massive doors slid open and the vehicle within was dragged out to the shore of the ocean and carefully aligned with a point on the distant horizon. A rear door was opened, and the man in the frock coat beckoned to the parents, encouraging them to place their children in the rear seat.

Few parent complied. They had a several concerns with the contraption standing before them. The first was that it seemed to be aimed in a direction on one particularly cared to go. When asked about the destination of the journey, the men bankrolling the project replied, "It's a fine place. Trust us."

Secondly, no one could tell the parents exactly how long their children would be gone. "As long as it takes," was the best answer they could get.

Thirdly, the vehicle was a car, and as such seemed destined to go nowhere. Parents were repeatedly assured that the car was designed and run by experts who knew what they were doing. The man in the frock coat produced documents to prove his expertise. This failed to reassure anybody.

Nonetheless, through a series of threats and promises, the back seat of the vehicle was packed with children. A driver, trained specifically in the operation of the car, took his position behind the wheel. The engine turned with a cough and a sputter, then bellowed to life. Putting it in gear, the driver raced into the ocean and across the waves.

Well, two waves to be exact, before it stopped and sank.

The car was quickly hauled to shore and the children resuscitated, with some difficulty. The man in the frock coat wandered around the vehicle. He seemed pleased, though few parents could imagine any reason for that.

"An excellent first attempt," he declared. "Obviously only a few minor adjustments and additions are necessary before the car will simply fly across the waves." His great confidence was not contagious.

And so began an endless series of improvements that were remarkable only in their similarity, and an endless series of voyages remarkable only in their brevity. New tires were added. A fresh coat of paint applied. Fuzzy dice were suspended from the mirror. Costly engineers hired (but rarely fired). The results were always the same. A great sound and fury followed by splashing and gurgling, followed by head scratching and the assignment of blame. This was invariably followed by some new, unproven idea, and expensive modification to the car based on that idea. Finally there was a new voyage that came to the same abrupt ending as all the previous trips. This continued for several generations, until the only things people knew about the ocean came from their experiences in the car, and they believed that it had always been that way.

In the meantime, the children were suffering some very obvious effects from the repeated near drownings. Most were showing a growing reluctance to climb into the car each day. They would not sit quietly as the water covered them, but would claw and kick the doors the windows, and each other. Some would even strike out at the driver, since he was the only person visible to be blamed for what was happening to them.

By this time the process of repeated drownings in the car seemed perfectly reasonable. Since drowning was now considered "normal" it had to be the actions of the children that was "abnormal." Experts were hired to study the children, more to calm them as they drowned, and still more to teach them proper drowning behavior (which usually meant these children had to spend even more time in the sinking car. After all, practice makes perfect).

In order to encourage proper drowning behavior (which was to board the car cooperatively and drown with a smile) an elaborate reward system was established. The children who drowned without complaint were rewarded with shiny aluminum bracelets. Those who drowned fighting, or without smiling, were given lead bracelets.

Parents were in an almost constant state of alarm. Haunted by memories of their own near drownings, and upset at the condition in which their children were returned to them at the end of the day, they demanded proof of some progress toward the invisible goal sitting on the horizon.

In fact, many attempts had been made to measure the progress of the car, but the person holding the far end of the tape measure always ended up drowning too. It was finally decided that any real measure of the car's progress was going to be too difficult and too expensive to make. Another concern was that an honest measurement of the car's progress might demonstrate it was not making any.

Parents were still demanding proof though, so it was determined that a measure of the amount of noise the car produced would generate the necessary numbers. And so the decibel level of the car was taken during the course of one of its many short voyages. The car was dragged back to shore and a new, larger engine was installed. Once more it raced into the waves and once more it promptly sank. However, the larger engine had enabled the car to produce three percent more noise than on its previous trip. Progress had been made! At least that's what the parent were told.

The cycle continued. Larger engines followed each failed voyage, but each engine was louder than the one before, so those who managed the car were always able to produce numbers to show that progress was being made. The numbers also always seemed to show that more work was necessary and more money needed to be spent.

And more money was spent. Each new modification to the car seemed to require more managers, more drivers, more psychotherapists for the children, more engineers, more mechanics, additional testing equipment, and additional people to run the testing equipment. And it all cost money, great heaps it. That was fine though, because at this point the parents were kicking in a good deal of their own money to help float the car.

The car grew larger and more complex every day, as did its operation. After each sinking, the man in the frock coat would turn to the anguished parents and say, "See how difficult and complex crossing the ocean is? It's a good thing you have this vehicle here, along with all these experts to run it. This is no job for amateurs." And the people, who had long since forgotten that sailing and boat building had been the job of amateurs in the past, nodded in dubious agreement.

But still there were those who believed they could do a better job of crossing the ocean, and they continued to nag and pressure those in power for the chance to try. Eventually permission was granted under the following two conditions: 1) The vehicle used to attempt to cross the ocean had to be a car, and 2) it had to head towards the same destination as the original car.

Many individuals and groups immediately began pounding out cars in a variety of styles. The work was funded with the same sources of money as the original car. When these new, improved cars took to the waves, the results were disappointing. They all sank, just as the first car had. Parents and children felt a little better about these drownings though, since now they had a choice as to the type of car in which they would drown. Soon the waves along the shore were dotted with the bobbing roofs of sunken cars, and children were being drowned in many new and exciting ways.

Over the years more than a few enterprising drivers had discovered that if they rolled the windows down and the children in the back paddled furiously, the car actually made some progress. It was unorthodox, and the car did tend to veer off the designated path to some degree, but it did go farther than larger engines had managed. Of course, as soon as this behavior was observed by those who controlled the cars, it was banned on the grounds that it didn't generate enough noise. Instead, the drivers were instructed to keep the windows rolled up and have the children make motor noises with their lips. This indeed led to higher decibel readings and was therefor considered a ripping success.

After a child had endured a predetermined number of near drownings, he or she was presented with a small life jacket, and a piece of paper certifying them as competent sailors, ready to travel the ocean alone. Most of these competent new sailors strapped on their life jackets, walked to the shore, sat down facing the same spot the car had, and began making motor sounds with their lips as the waves washed over them.

Because people had, for the most part, forgotten how to build boats and how to sail, it became more and more difficult for them to perform the day-to-day tasks necessary for their survival. Oddly enough, they had also developed a very intense fear of the water. Few cared or dared to explore the vast expanses of ocean the cars never traveled. And few people had developed an in-depth knowledge of the small section of ocean the cars had crossed repeatedly because they had been somewhat distracted by the discomfort of drowning. It became easier, instead, to rely on the men who controlled the car to provide them with those things necessary for their survival (at a price, of course).

A few intrepid families did manage to sneak away with the intention of relearning the old arts of sailing and boat building. It was a struggle, and made more so by the restrictions put in place by those who controlled the car. These restrictions were similar to the ones placed on those who were building their own cars. Still, some ingenious families were able to get around these obstacles by building boats that looked like cars. These didn't work as well as boats that looked like boats, but were infinitely better than cars that looked like cars.

But for the vast majority of people the cycle of spend-modify-drown-spend-modify-drown continued at an ever more frenetic pace. Soon the ocean was filled with cars in the process of sinking noisily, and the beach was lined with soggy young people making motor sounds with their lips.

From a high window in the factory where the car had been built, the man in the black frock coat looked down on the noisy chaos below. He was an extremely old man, but as healthy as he had ever been and also enormously wealthy. With him were the men who had bankrolled the original car, and had also enjoyed long life and great wealth because of it.

After gazing on the scene below for some minutes, the man turned to those assembled in the room and uttered on word:

"Perfect."

School Will Make You Free!

If school is so good for you, why is attendance compulsory? Vitamins are good for me, yet there is no law that threatens the use of force against me if I don't take my One-A-Day. Milk, broccoli, and church are generally considered of value, yet I am allowed to forgo all three with no more than a dirty look from my wife. Why is it that I am free to choose most of the things I can put in my body, but when it comes to what goes into my brain I am told when and where I must go, and, increasingly, what I will be taught?

Men have, on average, about 75 years (the women get two extra years for having to put up with us) to get the most out of what life offers us.  What right does anyone have to tell us how to spend such a large chunk of such an important time in our lives? School takes enough time from our lives as it is. Check out John Gatto's essay, We Need Less School, Not More. 

The effect of compulsory attendance on the teacher/student relationship is just what you would expect. Because many students feel they are in class against their will, forced there by coercive legislation, they react as most sane humans would - they resist in countless ways large and small. If the teacher is lucky, this resistance takes the form of truancy. More often than not however, it manifests itself in behavior intended to disrupt the class.

And yet, there are currently, three bills introduced in the Michigan legislature that would extend the amount of time our children are in the grasp of government schools.House Bill 4042 and Senate Bill 11 would increase the compulsory attendance age to 18, while Senate Bill 162 would make kindergarten compulsory. All are currently in committee, and I sincerely hope they die there.

Of course, the rationale for all this is the "global economy" as presented in Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat. I am sorry to admit I purchased his book, mainly to see what all of the hubbub was about. As soon as Friedman started quoting Marc Tucker in his chapter on education, "This Is Not A Test," I knew where he was headed. Tucker is most recognized as the author of the leaked "Letter to Hillary" that outlined a "cradle-to-grave" government run educational system to develop the workforce according to the demands of big business. The current demand of big business is that we bend over and except the outsourcing of our jobs, and place ourselves (and our children) on the treadmill of government schooling in order to keep us occupied and out of trouble. The fantasy of higher paying careers is the carrot used to keep us running.

On a brighter note, Senators Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin were among those signing a letter calling for an overhaul of No Child Left Behind, and Representative Peter Hoekstra is introducing an legislative alternative to NCLB.. To Hoekstra's credit, he has been against NCLB from the outset, recognizing it for the governmental intrusion into hearth and home that it is. I hope our legislators at the state level are as sharp, but past experience (i.e. our new graduation requirements) makes me doubtful.

A 13-Year Sentence

I see in today's Muskegon Chronicle that part of our governor's plan to turn the state's economy around is to raise the compulsory school attendance age to 18.

God help us.

Of course the justification for this is the urgent necessity of creating a pool of highly educated employees to attract high tech businesses to Michigan. I'm a bit skeptical about the chances for success with this particular plan. It seems to me the real reason jobs, skilled and unskilled alike, are heading overseas is due to a ready supply of cheap labor, few environmental regulations, no OSHA rules to follow, and no Workmen's Compensation or 401Ks to fund. Until we are willing to give up the quality of life we've worked so hard to build, the possibility that we will draw any meaningful number of well-paying jobs to Michigan is slight.

Understand that raising the compulsory school attendance age to 18 will create jobs, but not the kind of jobs you might hope for. Most of the new jobs will be "school" jobs. Think about it. Keeping young adults in school longer will increase school populations, which means we will need more teachers, administrators, custodians, paraprofessionals, bus drivers, etc.

School as a jobs program is not a new idea. Here's John Gatto's take on it:

"In the economy we have allowed to evolve, the real political dilemma everywhere is keeping people occupied; jobs have to be invented by government agencies and corporations; both employ millions of people for which they have no real use." -from An Underground History of American Education.

"Schools at present are the occupation of our children. Children have become pensioners of the government at an early age. They have make-work jobs, not really jobs at all - there is nothing asked of children in government schools that is real, there is nothing important to do there. Only one performance act is demanded by the state just as it is demanded with all other types of made-up government work: the children must attend. They must be present through the school day as they are passed from stranger to stranger to the sound of horns in this eerie form of growing up they have been assigned."

"We keep kids longer and longer out of the world of human beings and nature. We corruptly make jobs depend on school time and course work even when we are absolutely certain they have no demonstrable connections with such things." - from A Different Kind of Teacher.

Just as telling is an examination of the role of compulsory schooling in our economy by Daniel Quinn, found at www.ishmael.org/Education/writings/unschooling.shtml. Here's a sample:

"...they (schools) do a superb job of keeping young people out of the job market. Instead of becoming wage-earners at age twelve or fourteen, they remain consumers only - and they consume billions of dollars worth of merchandise, using money that their parents earn. Just imagine what would happen to our economy if overnight the high schools closed their doors. Instead of having fifty million active consumers out there, we would suddenly have fifty million unemployed youth. It would be nothing short of an economic catastrophe."

So, for the sake of the economy, our governor is going to propose that we extend the amount of time our children are to be indentured servants to the state. What an incredibly awful idea. As a parent, I'm appalled. What kind of hubris causes a person to think they have the right to impose that kind of sentence on my child? As a teacher, I'm dumbstruck. There are few things more enjoyable and rewarding than teaching students who want to learn, and few things more frustrating, painful, and pointless as trying to teach young people who have no interest in learning material that is essentially force-fed them. The students' attitude is understandable when the meal consists of the thin, tasteless gruel of Michigan's one-size-fits-none curriculum.

Let me be blunt about this. Any legislator who supports raising the compulsory school attendance age to 18 should be impeached and deported to one of the few remaining communist countries left on the globe. They may return when they have completed 13 years at hard labor for the sake of the economy.

"There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison." - William Glasser

Brownies and Einstein

Someday, I would like to go to a State Board of Education meeting and get myself a spot on the agenda.

I would bring brownies, I think. I make a mean chocolate chip cookie, the thin, crispy ones you get by adding too much butter and too much sugar. But I think for the purpose of my discussion I would go with the brownies.

I would set my platter of brownies on a table of to the side, with no note, no instructions, no invitation to try one. They would just sit there, and those who had the inclination or the appetite might try one. Maybe two.

Then, when it was my turn to speak, I would pick up the brownies and approach the board.

"Would you like a brownie?"

Think about it. Would you accept a brownie from a complete stranger? Someone you knew nothing about? Let's say nobody on the board does.

"Tell you what. If you eat one of my brownies, I'll give you five bucks." Would they try a brownie then? Would you? I'll bet a lot of people who might have partaken are going to pause, and those who did have one before the meeting started are wondering if that was such a good idea. I mean, if the brownies were any good, why would anyone have to bribe you to try one?

"Any takers? No? Well, let's try this. Eat a damn brownie, or I'm gonna punch you in the nose."

How you feeling about those brownies now? I'm pretty sure at this point many people in the room are going to be convinced that there's something wrong with those brownies. The folks who did eat a brownie earlier are wishing they had thought to put the Poison Control Center's number on their cell phone's speed dial.

Suppose I did manage to coerce everyone in the room into eating a brownie, and I made them eat brownies, or anything I chose for that matter, every day using either the promise of a reward, or the threat of violence. And let's say I did that for weeks or months on end. How do you think they'd feel about brownies after awhile? Do you think on those rare moments when they were given a choice as to what they could eat that they'd choose brownies?

And yet, our State Board of Education decided that making Algebra 2 a "required" course was a good idea. What utter idiocy. In fact, I cannot think of a better way to drive students away from something than by making it compulsory. The research backs me up on this:

"The more we try to measure, control, and pressure learning from without, the more we obstruct the tendencies of students to be actively involved and to participate in their own education. Not only does this result in a failure of students to absorb the cognitive agenda imparted by educators, but it also create deleterious consequences for the affective agendas of schools (that is, how students feel about learning)...Externally imposed evaluations, goals, rewards, and pressures seem to create a style of teaching and learning that is antithetical to quality learning outcomes, that is, learning characterized by durability, depth, and integration." - Richard Ryan and Jerome Stiller (quoted in Alfie Kohn's Punished By Rewards).

Or consider this:

"It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of education have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe that it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly." - Albert Einstein

I've gotta go with Einstein on this one. Godspeed.

Little Lab Rats

"How do you sleep with all that racket?" a new neighbor asked my folks one day. He was referring to our old windmill, which turned lazily in the cool summer breeze off Lake Michigan. It no longer pumped water and hadn't for years, so its maintenance was not a high priority, especially since that would involve shinnying up 30 feet of frail-looking ladder to grease the gears.

Racket? What racket?

But our new neighbor was right. The whole contraption complained loudly as the blades turned, in a voice that varied from a long, drawn-out moan in a light breeze to an excited Yip! Yip! whenever the winds picked up as a storm closed in. No matter the weather, the sound was never the kind that would be described as "restful," by anyone, and yet in all my time living there I never lost a moment's sleep to it. In fact, until the neighbor's question, I hadn't even considered the idea that the windmill's noise might not belong.  It seemed as much a part of our home as the drafty windows and leaky tin roof.

I think the amateur behaviorists have attained that same kind of existence in our schools. The trappings of faux behaviorism seem to have always been part and parcel with education, and I doubt many of us have even considered that possibility that they might not belong there.

"To induce students to learn, we present stickers, stars, certificates, awards, trophies,membership in elite societies, and above all, grades. If the grades are good enough, some parents then hand out bicycles or cars or cash, thereby offering what are, in effect, rewards for rewards."

This is from Alfie Kohn's 1993 book Punished By Rewards, and in it he discusses the effects of coercion (reward or punishment) on learning. Behaviorist critics of Kohn argue that he doesn't understand Skinner (Who does?), and thus misrepresents behaviorism, but Kohn does understand school and how we coerce students daily to gain their compliance in performing tasks that are, apparently, not worth doing for their own sake.

We act as if all learning would cease if the rewards and threats we currently use were removed, but that would be wrong. Young people are always learning (Even as I write this, my three-year-old daughter is learning how to manipulate a camera tripod. I'm guessing I'll soon be learning how to fix a camera tripod). What children learn on their own does not follow a predetermined, prescribed curriculum, but pursues a course generated internally by curiosity and externally by circumstance. The results of this style of learning, which operated freely, naturally, and effectively for all humankind throughout nearly all of human history, were at some point deemed too random, too unique, and too unpredictable by social engineers who dreamed, and still dream, of an orderly, predictable (and thus controllable) world. The solution was clear: To control how people behave, control the conditions in which they learn. And control is what school is all about. Carrots and sticks aren't necessary to produce learning. They become necessary, however, when you want to make people learn what others want them to learn when others want them to learn it.

I've always been uncomfortable with the amount of carrot-and-stick we rely on in school, and I've eliminated as much from my classroom as possible. I've since discovered that much of it was unnecessary to begin with. I haven't graded a paper since moving to the elementary level, and my students still somehow manage to learn without the invisible dangling carrots, or the threat of the "F" that might go on their permanent (digital) record. They haven't torn my room apart, they haven't left any substitute teachers trussed up in the corner like Thanksgiving turkeys, and they have treated me with respect and courtesy. I think this is because I treat them respectfully and courteously. I respect them as young human beings. They are not white mice, pigeons, or chimps, and because my students are human, the methods of a circus trainer have no place in my classroom.

Now step back and take a look at No Child Left Behind. See it for what it really is; the legalized coercion of the institution of public school - a package of threats and promises passed down from federal to state government, from administrator to teacher to student (and largely bypassing parents). It is not about learning, it is about control. It is not about creating high standards for students, but about imposing someone else's standards on them. And by mandating what will be learned and when it will be learned, a need and justification for the carrots and sticks is created.

This is not "education." It is obedience school for our children.

"Give me a child and I'll shape him into anything." - B.F. Skinner

"Of course, Behaviorism 'works.' So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public." - W.H. Auden

The New, Improved Special Ed.

I've been a special education teacher for 15 years now, and its been very rewarding. Discouraging at times of course, but on the whole it's been both challenging and fun. And I'm proud of the work special educators do, but not just because we work with challenging students, but because of the philosophy behind our work.

The thing we do right, I think, is to spend very little time comparing students to each other. Once you've witnessed the differences in children and their development, saying someone is "behind" starts to seem a little silly. Kind of a "duh" observation. After all, we're all lagging behind someone, and at the same time we're racing ahead of others.

Most of the children I work with have "learning disabilities." A child is determined to have a learning disability if his achievement (what he demonstrates he can do) lags behind his ability (what he should be able to do) as measured by a standard IQ test. The achievement test then serves as our baseline. With this as our starting point, we write an "Individualized Education Program" with annual and short-term goals in each area of weakness. Instruction is designed specifically for the student to improve his performance in the areas where he is weakest.

We stop and measure progress, both formally and informally, along the way. Often we express scores from standardized tests (Kaufman, Brigance, WIAT) as "grade equivalencies." This converts the standard score into something a little easier for parents to understand since nearly all of us have been brought up in age segregated classrooms. "Timmy's reading comprehension is at a grade equivalency ( G.E.) of 3.4." This means Timmy reads at a level expected of a student in the fourth month of third grade. Parents will view this as great if Timmy is in second grade, but not so hot if he's about to graduate from high school.

Special education teachers don't look at it that way. We compare Timmy's current score with his previous score. If he was reading at a G.E. of 1.6 a year ago, we've made nearly two years of progress in just one year. Now there's something to celebrate.

I think the way we in special education test achievement and stress individual growth might serve as a more democratic model to replace the curriculum-centered approach of NCLB. I believe Utah suggested just such an approach. The reply from the Feds was along the line of, "Fine, as long as the growth measured is growth towards the standards set by NCLB."

This is the heart of NCLB; control over the curriculum. The curriculum is the end all and be all. Attainment of the one right and glorious curriculum as defined and enforced by NCLB and state-authored achievement tests is the only growth that matters.

My wife came home from school a few weeks ago (she is a special education teacher as well) and showed me the latest directive from the state. The goals we write for our students in the IEP each year must now be referenced to the "grade-level content expectations" as outlined in the general curriculum. No student is to be deprived of their right(?) to participate in the general curriculum.

Well there's good news. Nobody's "right" to have state-authored drivel crammed down his throat shall be denied. Let the retching begin.

Totally Managed

"U.S. Workforce Development Policy Should Be Based on the Principles of Total Quality. A revolutionary new approach is required in the design of workforce training and development programs. Those programs should be based on the principles of Total Quality Management: identification of customers and their requirements, a commitment to continuous improvement, benchmarking successful programs, results measurement, and involvement of stakeholders in creating solutions." - from the Business Roundtable website (www.businessroundtable.org/taskforces/taskforce/document.aspx?gs=69A6BF807822B0F13D450D46BFC5B280A8106CEEE663D)

Since No Child Left Behind is an attempt to apply the principles of Total Quality Management  to the public education system, we need to understand TQM and how it is made manifest in NCLB.

First, of course, a little background. W.E. Deming is considered by many to be the father of the  Total Quality movement, and his work with Japanese industry after World War II led to a dramatic increase in quality and profitability, and caught the attention of the Big Three automakers back in the United States. Deming preached that most production problems were the result of poor systems and system management, rather than the shortcomings of people working within the system.  Improve the system, improve the product.

Deming offered 14 points for management that included the creation of win/win situations, an emphasis on long term competitiveness over short term profits, continual improvement of the production process, and the elimination of adversarial relationships between workers and management, among others. The full list is available as part of Wikipedia's bio on Deming www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming  (another, less flattering viewpoint on Deming, Peter Drucker and the TQM movement can be found at http://www.crossroad.to/Quotes/TQM.html).

Many of Deming's ideas were adapted by psychologist William Glasser, who would combine them with his Control Theory, and apply them to the field of education in his books The Quality School and The Quality School Teacher.

If you read Deming's ideas, and Glasser's as well, quality management sounds quite positive and empowering for managers, workers, teachers, and students. Both men wrote of the need for those in power (management/administration/teachers) to give up power and and be leaders rather than bosses, to remove the coercive elements in the typical boss/worker relationship that sabotaged an organization's efforts to create quality products.

Is this the Total Quality Management on which NCLB is based? Of course not. The Total Quality movement as most often practiced in the U.S. today is a bastardization of Deming's ideas, and especially so as manifest in NCLB. Let's look at the principles of TQM as it is described by the Business Roundtable in the quote above.

1) Identification of customers and their requirements - Who is the customer of a school system? Is it the parents? The student? The community? The nation? Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong, at least as far as the Business Roundtable is concerned. In their eyes, Business is the customer whose demands public education must meet. Perhaps that seems like a small matter, and maybe even a reasonable idea, but remember; these are the people who refer to your kids and mine as "human capital." Do you think a boss wants the same kind of education for his workers as a parent would want for their children? I'll expand on this idea in a future post. You can mull it over yourself for awhile, but I suspect you already know the answer.

2) A commitment to continuous improvement - This is the source of the pie-in-the-sky, ever-shifting goals of NCLB that are to result in all children being proficient as determined by state testing by 2014. By the way, were you aware that if too many students answer a question correctly on the MEAP, Michigan's statewide assessment tool, it is replaced? Imagine how difficult it would be to become proficient at shooting a free throw if the basket's height, diameter, and location were moved before each practice.

3) Benchmarking successful programs - In NCLB-speak this is the call for an emphasis on "scientifically research-based" instructional methods. Unfortunately, precious little such research exists (Jerry Bracey argues that no such research exists), and none of it guarantees successful instruction for all children all the time. This, of course, is obvious to anyone who spends time around children and recognizes that each one is different in countless ways large and small. What works for one might not work for another, and that's to be expected. Such variability is a hard pill to swallow for those who view kids as little lumps of plastic, though. Plastic is easy to work with, and once you find the single best way to work with it, it responds in a wholly predictable and controllable way.

Interestingly, another TQM website http://home.att.net/~iso9k1/tqm/tqm.html#Ten%20Steps%20to%20Total%20Quality%20Management%20(TQM) notes that reduction of variability is a key component of TQM. The recent scripted preparation for the MEAP we just experienced sheds a light on things to come, when every student will be on working on the same (state-authored) curriculum on the same day at the same time. This flies in the face of everything we know about child development, but remember, we're not talking about educating children, we're developing a workforce.

4) Results measurement - Here is the source of the constant barrage of high-stakes testing our children are tormented with. TQM demands that data must be generated so that measurements can be made, and if it can't be measured, it doesn't matter. So much for curiosity, integrity, motivation, and perseverance. Deming himself noted that one of the seven deadly diseases of systems management was running a system based on numbers alone. Also, notice that we've nicely segued into the field of behaviorism, a key to understanding the full thrust of NCLB and the thinking of those behind it. We will also need to consider the handling of all this data being created, who has access to it, and for what purposes.

5) Involving stakeholders in creating solutions - This actually brings us back to the first point - identifying the customer. Since business considers itself the customer, and thus the major stakeholder, this principle of TQM serves as justification for the Business Roundtable's meddling in the lives of our children. How many parents were actually contacted for their input into state-mandated curricula? You weren't and neither was I. That's because we're not considered major stakeholders in our children's education, and thus don't need to be part of the effort to create solutions.

Much of NCLB flies in the face of Deming's ideas on quality, as did the American incarnation of TQM which Deming himself viewed askance. You can find an interesting commentary on this at http://forum.qualitygurus.com/viewtopic.php?t=19. In it, Paul Forbes, chairman and CEO of The  Forbes Group, observes that U.S. businesses adopted the style of Deming's work without the substance, basically giving it lip-service while violating its most basic principles. This was due to the difference in goal orientation between Japanese and U.S. firms. In Japan, a company's mission is to stay in business and provide jobs through customer satisfaction, innovation, research, constant improvement and maintenance." In America, a company's business is simply to make a profit, and to make it now. With that mindset, the cold science of efficiency guru Frederick Taylor, coupled with the behaviorist's sterile carrot-and-stick approach, suit the needs of business more than Deming's humane, long-term thinking.

Total Quality Management? I don't think so.

Of MEAP and Sheep

My oldest daughter is attending one of our local Christian schools, and my wife and I have been very pleased with the education she has received there. This in itself is no strange thing, except for the fact that we are both teachers in local public schools.

I travel to three small, rural elementary schools in the course of my day and I am continually amazed at the collection of wonderful teachers I find in each. I am fortunate and proud to work with them, and I felt the same about the staff I left behind after working for 12 years at the high school level. I know my wife feels that same way about the people she works with. We would entrust our children to them without a qualm.

So why don't we? Why have we opted to forgo the free public education offered to our daughters, complete with transportation, a wide variety of extracurricular activities, excellent facilities, and wonderful teachers in favor of paying tuition, arranging our own transportation, and having to seek out athletic and cultural opportunities outside of our local schools?

Well, in two words: The MEAP.

I've been watching the MEAP program from inside the system for some time now, and have decided this thing has run its course. It's dead on its feet, and just needs to be buried. At the same time, I've also been around the education bureaucracy long enough to know not to expect common sense and a shovel come from federal or state officials. There are simply too many people making too much money off MEAP testing and preparation, too many new administrative positions created, too much press given to test scores and Merit Scholarships for this thing to limp off to the quiet death it so richly deserves.

MEAP scores are, and have always been, rendered invalid from the start by the fact that they compare this year's fifth graders, for instance, to last year's fifth graders. You can't compare two groups of subjects that can vary so much and come up with any meaningful data. In layman's terms, we're comparing apples to oranges. In small school, differences in abilities between just a few students will cause scores to swing even more wildly from class to class and year to year, and it becomes a case of comparing apples to elephants.

The test itself is technically reliable and valid - to itself. It measures what it claims to measure, that is the amount of success teachers have in imparting the state's curriculum to our children. And here lies my greatest concern: The MEAP is not about "improving student learning" but about improving student learning of the state's one-size-fits-all curriculum.

When a magician performs an illusion, generally one hand will be waving a handkerchief, or a wand, or likewise creating a focus for the audience's gaze. The trick will actually be going on in the other hand. Pickpockets and shoplifters often rely on the same tactic. The seemingly constant flap concerning MEAP testing and the Merit Awards is just such a distraction from the real purpose of the MEAP - conformity.

About ten years ago, the State Department of Education proposed a mandated core curriculum that would dictate what would be taught at each grade level throughout every publicly funded school in the state. This movement was stymied by the outcries of parents and legislators who questioned the wisdom and desirability of a one-size-fits-all education. The state eventually backed down, and instead began to refer to their curriculum as "suggested" (it later morphed into a "model" core curriculum of frameworks/benchmarks/standards, and most recently gradel-level-content-expectations). This, however, did not mean the state had given up its desire to enforce a mandatory curriculum. Instead, it had to rely on some bureaucratic sleight of hand to make it happen.

The state requires all publicly funded schools to be accredited. To receive accreditation, the school must administer the MEAP to 95% of its student body, and show continual improvement on it. Not surprisingly, the MEAP test itself is modeled on the "model" core curriculum. Schools that do not show improvement are threatened  with a variety of big sticks. State monies might be withheld, or the building/district taken over by the state and the administration and faculty replaced. This is compounded by the furor created when scores are printed in the paper (with little explanation as to what they really mean) and schools find themselves praised or damned accordingly. Faced with this amount of coercion, local districts feel obligated to align their curriculum with the state model.

Voila! A mandatory suggested government curriculum for all. Not even the charter schools, for all they claim, can escape it. They too face the same pressure to perform to the government mandated standard - to jump through the MEAP hoop - and corrupt what were often well-intentioned and unique educational opportunities. It was an admirable bit of political smoke-and-mirrors. While proclaiming plans to introduce school "choice" the state, at the same time, acted to make any choice moot. Think of it this way: If the only product offered is skim milk, does having a choice of stores from which to obtain it really matter?

We almost escaped the MEAP net. Parents and students quickly realized there was no benefit in subjecting themselves to the test, and many parents had their children exempted from it. Schools also actively worked to exempt students who might lower test results. Had enough students walked away from the test, the MEAP might have sunk back into the bureaucratic lagoon that spawned it. The state, however, employed its usual response to such situations and brought forth the sticks and carrots. The 95% rule was introduced to bully districts into persuading/coercing/deceiving more students into taking the test. And knowing better than to try and bully parents, the state came out with a big carrot for them in the form of the Merit Awards. With $2500 dangling in front of them, most parents and students were more than happy to take a shot at passing the MEAP.

Central control of curriculum has been the Holy Grail of social engineers since Plato's time. Whoever controls curriculum determines not only what young people learn, but also what they will not learn. By filling a curriculum with trivialities and focusing on process over product, practice in critical thinking about big ideas is crowded out, as are spontaneity and creativity. The clever thing about the MEAP is not just the way it enforces a cookie cutter curriculum, but also how at the same time it provides a diversion to conceal its real purpose. The way to hide an entire forest in plain sight is to focus everyone's attention on counting the leaves. Make sure to develop a complex process for it, and collect lots of data to wave about as a further distraction.

Consider this simple formula: Standardized curriculum + standardized tests = standardized people. Wouldn't it be much easier to govern a population that thinks alike, to predict its behavior, to manipulate its moods, to sell it products, to goad it into war? It's so much simpler to manage a sheep-like populace whose obedience is automatic, whose ability to question dulled, and whose attention is easily drawn to toys, noise, celebrity, drugs, violence, and the other shiny objects waved in its face in order to blind it to the deception taking place in the shadows. This aim of schooling is meant for the poor and middle-class of course; the wealthy send their kids to Choate or Exeter.

The thing that protected students in the United States from the abuses of government schooling as practiced throughout history in Sparta, Prussia, Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union and communist China was the local control exercised by elected school boards. Community members had the opportunity to participate in developing a curriculum custom tailored to the needs of students, their families, the community, and society as a whole.

But in Michigan we gave that control away in 1994 with the passage of Proposal A, which shifted funding for education from local property taxes to the state sales tax. This provided the state the opportunity call the tune, since, in its eyes, it was paying the piper.

Left unchecked, things are going to get worse, not better. No Child Left Behind, coupled with School-To-Work and Goals 2000, is paving the way for a national curriculum, which will be "suggested" or "voluntary" in the same way our present state curriculum is voluntary.

It is well past time to call an end to this enormous boondoggle. If no lawmaker has the backbone to make this happen, then it's going to be up to us as parents to exempt our children from the MEAP, or move them to schools that value the many facets of humanity over "the one-right-way" being prescribed by government. If enough of us take this step, the MEAP will die a swift death, and not a moment too soon.

Scott