Just a Thought on a Snowy Day.

I love his perspective on things in general; this entry caught my eye today.

Teacher Tom writes about baggage.

The Question Was...

"Writing an article on the community response to Cathie Black's appointment as NYC Schools Chancellor. Does ANYONE think she's qualified/appropriate for the position? (She's not...but I thought at least 1 out of the last 11 people would say she is)."

I responded:
I can barely articulate how inappropriate she is. And it's not even her, personally--anyone with her background being in this position just illuminates what giant, awful, glaring things are wrong with the larger cultural mindset in regards to education.

And someone replied:
A lot of what's going wrong in education is because the teachers unions are so powerful. It needs to be said we are expecting a top to bottom change and why not someone from outside the perennial education circle. So many excellent CEO switch industries on a dime and I can't see why not Black.

::sigh::

I don't like getting into public-forum debates, so I didn't reply. Maybe not the best move, because shouldn't there be discussion? But it didn't feel like the right forum. So I'm just ranting here instead.

Saying that teachers' unions are to blame for poor education--often defined as kids scoring poorly on tests--ignores the fact that we put more trust in these tests than in the teachers, who are systematically demonized and trivialized in their paper wake.
People are not products that can be consistently pumped out looking polished like magazines. Yes, there is a chance that Cathie Black can make positive changes. Yes, maybe she can work some budget magic. But budget magic does not change the underlying cultural disrespect and distrust of educators. Cathie Black's appointment effectively underscores that lack of respect: you can't do what you're supposed to do, so we're bringing in this businesswoman who can. Again, she might be a brilliant fit for the job. I'll be happily surprised if she is. But the message remains that educators can't educate.

I'm not a huge fan of unions: I think generally, they've strayed from the original task of protecting workers and have ranged farther and farther out into outrageous roadblocking. But when it comes to the UFT, they're pretty much the only ones even somewhat supporting teachers on a philosophical level (ie, competent, trained professionals). My problem is not with Cathie Black, her decision to leave Hearst and join the DOE. My problem is with Mayor Bloomberg, who offered her the job, and the undoubtedly millions of others who think business models are the solution for education.

People are not products: they don't just go away or get scrapped if they don't turn out right. You can't just put in another order for better ones and stop doing business if they come back unsatisfactory. People are an investment. We all need long-term support and proper care from our earliest days onward.

Where Your Mouth Is

I find myself unable to calm down about the fact that I recently came across a couple of brochures for local private schools. Their tuitions - for kindergarten - are more than I was taking home as a preschool teacher. One of them charges more for pre-K than I cleared in a year.

I just... I am so angry. I recently found myself explaining to non-teachers that $5,000 for preschool is a competitive price. And you know what? The whole thing just pisses me off. The fact that a good education is still such a money club because we, as a country at large, continue to bitch about how bad our schools are and do nothing but "reform" them over and over with new curriculums, new tests, and new demands on teachers and administrators.

How about, oh, I don't know, funding decent schooling?

How about paying teachers decently and respecting their voices (rather than treating them like the enemy who are somehow responsible for the entire failing system) so that intelligent, reflective people are drawn to the profession and stay there, instead of the current split between caring, overworked educators and mediocre, half-invested educators, neither of whom can teach to the level needed?

No one ever suggests that we determine a politician's pay by the local GDP, or a banker's salary by the number of new accounts versus defaults on the bank's loans. Few question a doctor's medical expertise, or an attorney's legal knowledge, yet teachers are constantly suspected of not knowing what they're doing, and these days, their salaries are subject to their students' test scores. People feel entitled to bitch about what public school teachers do incorrectly, but nobody would sit down with a firefighter or a police officer and say, "I know how to do your job better than you do, because my tax dollars pay your salary." It's a perverse system that pits parents against teachers when really, we should all be on the same page because we all want children to become happy, successful adults.

Why do people who can afford to pay those ridiculous tuitions do so? Because those schools hire good educators, pay them well, and trust in their expertise. That trust shows in the reputations of the schools (and is subsequently reflected in their tuition prices).

There's a whole underlying classism issue that I don't want to dig up, but find myself skirting closer and closer to it. Especially after visiting a former student in her home; this child adores me and the feeling is mutual, but all the goodwill I felt from/for mom fairly much evaporated in the space of an hour, as she felt a need to repeatedly complain to me about how difficult it is to get a good housekeeper.

I'm sorry, what?

It gets me angry to a point where I can't be rational; I work my ass off, and get paid shit, and I have supplemented my income at times with babysitting and housecleaning. And guess what? I have a master's degree. I have training, and certification, and I couldn't afford to send my personal children to just about any of the schools that I'm qualified to teach at.

My vocation is more akin to servitude than to other professions. That, dear reader, is disgusting. And today, I can't even begin to offer potential solutions. Today, I can only manage to be gut-level angry at how many people - children and adults - get the shaft because of the way things work in this country.

America, put your ridiculous amounts of money where your mouth is: fund education properly.

An ounce of prevention.

http://www.slc.edu/adult-professional/cdi/events/

If you don't have an hour and a half (who does?), just watch the 10 minutes from about 50 minutes in to the close of the first hour. Temple Grandin talks about kids with autism, but she could very well be talking about anybody, autism or no.

And/or, from 73:09, there's a piece of her answer to the question about bullying and teasing that's absolutely fascinating to me: non-teasing environments, where she had friends, arose from shared interests. She lists a number of activities that can create social bonds for kids with autism (and I would argue kids without autism, too). I thought, these are all the things that get cut first.

Socialization through shared interests: art, theater, science, cooking, building things.

How many jails do we build, how much funding do we throw at social programs, in order to care for (or worse, simply contain) the people who get squeezed out of their own productive capabilities through a lack of support early on?

Coming Back to the Magic Phrase

A few nights ago I read a couple of chapters of Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. The authors use examples from all different sources to illustrate their ideas, and there's some of the inevitable internal phraseology that happens (they borrow Jonathan Haidt's Elephant and Rider analogy for our emotional and rational mind, respectively, and add things like Paths, bright spots, Clinics, etc.), but it's a goldmine of simple, sensical, study-backed social science that is useful in a lot of ways.

What struck me most was this:

To pursue bright spots is to ask the question, "What's working and how can we do more of it?" Sounds simple, doesn't it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: "What's broken, and how do we fix it?"

This one paragraph sums up a lot of what I talk about here: seeing children as broken and in need of repair, instead of working from their strengths. Seeing what kids aren't doing well, and drilling them on it, over and over, in various ways, instead of taking a moment to see what they are doing well and building on it.

As a prime example of this, I'll quote again, from this post, what the American Association of Pediatrics has to say about vision therapy: “Ineffective, controversial methods of treatment such as vision therapy may give parents and teachers a false sense of security that a child’s learning difficulties are being addressed, may waste family and/or school resources and may delay proper instruction or remediation.”

You see, a simple solution such as giving a child "magic glasses" to help them read in a more facile manner works - and it works while flying in the face of the heaping pile of research, statistical compilations, and endless maze of solutions that's grown up around learning difficulties. Low-power glasses don't change a child's ability to read; but they change a child's belief in his or her ability to read, and something so simple and powerful just doesn't fit in with all the carefully controlled studies. Doctors and education specialists conclude that since it doesn't fix what's broken, then the fact that it solves the problem must somehow be false.

No, no, and no!

Do you see? We come back to the magic phrase: people don't see what they're not looking for.

If you are not looking to see what works, you will not see anything that works as a solution. If you're looking for ways to fix something that's broken, you will always be focused on the broken pieces because that's where you started. If you start from success, your solution will be about building on success, rather than avoiding failure.

It's a simple, crucial difference. It's a switch we have to make.

Other Kinds of Smart

I've been heard to say that I don't like people. And that's true: I don't. As a species, I think we're rather craptastic. We destroy ourselves and other living things on a scale that is completely unnecessary, especially considering that nature already has an extensive arsenal of weather phenomena and other means of shaking things up.

However, I also find on a smaller level that we have the capacity for incredible creation. It's heartening, the little moments of kindness that are everywhere if you look for them. It's probably why I like working with small children so much: they are as surprisingly, spontaneously creative and kind as often as they are otherwise.

Kind or otherwise, in destruction or creation mode, the thing about people is, we need each other. We're social creatures, for better or worse. We are not able to meet all of our individual needs by ourselves: we need help from each other, whether it's to meet basic survival needs (food, shelter), emotional needs, spiritual needs, and so on.

So what, may I ask, is the point of educating everyone to have the same skills?

Because you see, we all have different skills and strengths. You can see it very early on, even amongst siblings, the different personalities and qualities that people have. Yet our educational system very clearly favors a particular kind of hands-off, head-only, reading and writing intensive means of approaching things.

What you end up doing is robbing individuals and communities both by limiting the skill sets people can draw from to get things done. Our needs don't change just because we're ill-equipped to meet them.

What happens to A., a child in my class two years in a row, who has such fine control over his body and such an eye for manipulating small parts and fixing things? If given an opportunity to be physically active, and to be the person other people come to when they need something repaired, he might flourish. But he'll get to school and be discouraged from using his hands (except to write), and he'll gets antsy, and his tenuous social skills will be broken down instead of strengthened, because he can't perform well in that environment.
What happens to a countless number of children whose strengths lie outside the narrow range favored in schools? The kid who can make his friends feel better but can't quite add quickly enough; the kid who can choreograph and lead her friends in a dance but can't be bothered to read assigned stories; any number of kids whose skills tend toward social, emotional, physical, philosophical, anything that can't be expressed on composition notebook paper. They are suckled on the lie that they're not good enough.

The reality is, we need every kind of smart we can get. Yes, we need people who can write coherently. Yes, we need people who can calculate various things quickly and accurately. But we also need things to write about, and reasons to make calculations. We need those skills to be in the service of people whose strengths provide the fodder for the writers and calculators; the artists, the entrepreneurs, the athletes and the entertainers, and so on. We do ourselves no favors by suppressing all the other kinds of smart that make us, as individuals, more happy and healthy, and our communities stronger and more resilient.

Update? Wow.

I've been quiet for some time; not for lack of caring, though. And not for lack of thinking about education.

Mostly I've been busy laying the groundwork for a vision of what education could be - what, if you've read this blog so far, I believe it should be.

Now that it's almost September (really?!), I suppose the "back to school" vibe is in the air and has caught my attention to the point where I feel I need to say: still here. Still finding ways to do right by children.

And, in my own small way, still trying to make peace.