Category — factory schools

I think we’re making another mistake when it comes to the conversations around motivation. One of my basic premises in writing this blog is that we, the people having a conversation about young people and learning, are continually lead in the wrong direction – or down a rabbit hole – by calling what we do in schools education.

That mistake leads to further mistakes. One of those mistakes is motivation. I’ve argued that extrinsic motivation is has potential short term gains (at best) but long term has more potentially damaging impacts.

We know there are movements for paying teachers based on merit – for performance (getting better test scores). We also know about the experiments taking place where young people are being paid to improve their test scores.

That seems to speak pretty loudly that test scores, and more specifically scores on standardized tests, are what is important in schools.

This Time Magazine article,  Should Kids Be Bribed to Do Well in School? describes the research of Harvard economist Roland Fryer Jr. in which he discovers bribes do work – for behaviors within a young person’s control – but do not necessarily work for things (like grades) that are subjective and young people cannot control.

Daniel Pink, in his video presentation above and in this CNN article argues that paying for performance (extrinsic rewards) work in a very narrow set of circumstances but for most conditions have long term negative impacts. Paying large bonuses do not produce the kind of results one might think they do. He further argues in his newsletter that merit pay for teachers is a pretty bad idea. He lays creating a system that is actually fair and based on good measures is near impossible and suggests a better alternative for improving performance is to simply raise base pay and creating a way to weed out bad teachers.

In my opinion, finding ways to improve the performance of either students or teachers in a system that is doing the wrong thing isn’t worth putting our energy into. I don’t think the results will get us anywhere closer to an educated populace – but then maybe that’s not what our government and the powers that be really want.

Some friends of mine are engaged in instigating a really important conversation in their community. Minority parents and students have been attempting to show how the schools are profiling certain young people as potential gang members and forcing them in one way or another to leave school – primarily to improve their drop-out and graduation numbers.

As many as 100 young people have already left one of the schools through these means.

The conversation that has begun is about developing something that will although these young people an opportunity to experience more of life and achieve some or all of their goals – while removing the typecasting and stigma of an ‘uneducated’ person.

I applaud this and really, truly hope that something good can come of it. It even looks like some school personnel are willing to participate in this conversation.

I know it’s hard as someone involved in the schooling system to continue to want to do good – and do the best you can – while all around you there are challenges and criticisms about what’s going on. Much of what’s going on is not your fault. At the same time much of what is going on is actually harming young people.

Do Schools Harm Young People?

The following is part of a note I wrote to my friends in this community. This is the first time I’ve been public in this explicit a way with one of the most important insights I’ve had about schools and schooling.

I am only posting one side of the conversation here. I am not including the many emails that have gone back and forth about why this kind of thing happens (profiling and forced drop-outs) but I am posting my response which refers to how and why I believe some of this activity might come about. I am open to any and all comments and further conversation about this.

Here’s part of my email:

One of the clearest and most powerful ways I can communicate about how schooling and education are different is by using the example of American Indian Boarding Schools. The methodologies used in those schools are the very same methodologies used in every public school in the United States today – in varying degrees and some less than others. We really have to understand that public schools are not healthy for young people. They never were intended to do anything like what we have talked about and what you are talking about doing this evening and with the entire community inclusion and transformation process.

The same tactics and intentions were used in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, to destroy existing native cultures and South Africa during apartheid to control and limit blacks from getting anywhere beyond the ghettos. Schools are tools for white oppressors to dominate and control the poor, native people and people of color – and anyone from another culture.

No one that I know would admit to this publicly. That’s one reason why I’m only copying a few of you.

A few of the tactics that are evident (and this is not an exhaustive list) in the use of schools to destroy people and cultures are:

• taking responsibility away from the parents and family
• separating children from their homes and their parents
• forcing the use of another and non-familiar language (English)
• not allowing elements of existing cultures to be present – be it language, dress, or cultural idiosyncrasies
• celebrating sameness and removing difference
• corporal punishment and force for non-compliance
• grading, ranking, dividing, profiling, and segregating children by achievement or any criteria
• a forced and controlled curriculum
• mandatory attendance
• separating the school from the rest of the community (insulating the school from the community)
• social injustice and inequity

The racial profiling that has been discussed that is happening Capital is likely happening in every school everywhere to some degree or another. This is a natural part of the “schooling” process and one of the reasons I have harped on making this distinction so hard. Needless to say it’s harmful to individuals and ultimately very harmful to society.

What Miguel has suggested for the conversation this evening – and for the larger conversation – is about helping young people feel wanted and to feel a part of something that helps them develop their own identities and self-expression while in the context of learning and serving. These few concepts are anti-thetical to school and schooling and CANNOT be a part of what we know of as school. Something else has to be created to do that.

There is one more thing for this short rave. The young people that are being pushed out and/or dropping out are the smart ones. I doubt that many people around them can see how smart they really are (although John G made reference to this in one of his emails). These young people deserve our respect and our best thinking and resources.

This conversation you will be having this evening and the ones that follow could be the most important conversations any of us have ever had. The seeds for brilliance are there.

David Langford is one of the smartest and best consultants I know working in the schooling world. His knowledge and experience of quality and it’s application to schooling is beyond par. The following article came in a recent email newsletter from him. I couldn’t say it any better! I’ve copied the newsletter in its entirety. Enjoy.

Quality Learning: Paying students to learn?
By David P. Langford

In the past, I believed most educators understood the inherent differences between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and valued the latter over the former. However, this does not seem to be the case. Pay-for-grades, gold stars, student-of-the-month programs and attendance rewards are all too prevalent extrinsic motivators used to push students to do a better job. I’ve found an overwhelming amount of evidence that these schemes do not work in the long term, and can even dangerously affect attitudes toward learning. (Alfie Kohn does an excellent job of compiling the evidence against extrinsic motivators in his books No Contest and Punishment by Reward.) There is no lack of evidence that pay-for-grades programs do not work, so why do schools continue to use them? The short answer is: because they appear to work.

Extrinsic rewards and punishments always seem to work if you do not count the costs. Studies have shown that you can get people to do almost anything if you make the motivator—payment or punishment–strong enough. For example, would you sabotage a colleague for ten dollars? Most people would answer “no.” But what if I upped the stakes? Would you do it for one thousand dollars? Ten thousand? One million? If I continued to increase the reward, most people would agree sooner or later–especially if they got to pick the colleague.

The same principle is true with students. If you pay students to get good grades, more students will get good grades for a while. Very quickly students who were only working to get the reward will discover that it is hard work to maintain good grades, and they will decide it isn’t worth the effort unless the reward is increased, because the motivation for getting good grades is not to learn, but to be rewarded. The concept of “learning” to improve one’s self never comes into play with the reward system. Just as teacher unions negotiate for higher pay, so student “unions” will eventually want to negotiate for a higher reward.

Extrinsic Theory: Improved Grades = Reward

Most always these reward schemes are touted as a “new trial program,” as if the idea of extrinsic motivation is a new one. In Washington D.C., Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who is making a valiant effort to improve a failing system, was asked why they implemented a “new” program that pays students to get good grades and attendance and she responded, “When critics say that it’s sad to pay students, I say it’s sad that only 8% of D.C. eighth-graders are proficient in math. People in the suburbs use incentives for their kids all the time, like giving them $10.00 for an ‘A.’ Kids in our program can save money for college or get a bank account.” (Parade Magazine, November 16, 2008, p. 26.) It’s unfortunate that we have such huge education gaps in this country and I am certain Chancellor Rhee feels the need to do something about it, but the bottom line is that two wrongs don’t make a right. Just because some parents bribe their children to get better grades does not mean we should apply the same principle to all students. We can easily sabotage motivation through the best efforts of well meaning people.

If the pay-for-grades theory is correct, there should not exist a single example of students succeeding on their own. Yet there are thousands–if not millions– of students who work hard because of a love of learning. Dr. W. Edwards Deming often stated that it only takes a single example to invalidate a theory. Having only 8% of students proficient in math is a dismal statistic to face, but the problem is in the system–not the students. Manipulating students with money will improve some students’ performance for a short period of time, but what happens to students when you can no longer afford to pay them and their attachment to learning is for money? Smothering intrinsic motivation is a cost too great for even one student.

Intrinsic Motivation: Acquired Knowledge = Joy in Learning

When learning rewards and punishments are eliminated, systemic performance results will always return to what they were before extrinsic manipulation. Remember, 98% of the problem comes from the system, and students have little or no control over systemic factors. Manipulating student extrinsic motivators does not address the basic cause(s) of the problem. Try asking students with a Force Field Analysis to identify driving and preventing forces of learning, then prioritize the preventing forces with an NGT. You might be shocked to realize that existing factors preventing learning have nothing to do with lack of pay-for-grades. One of the most misguided efforts of quality improvement is trying to improve something that should be eliminated, such as automating grading systems, increasing training for behavior modification or improving the pay-for-grades program. I can guarantee you, in low performing schools there are fundamental problems with:

Teacher training and support
Leadership and management
Process Management
Communication
The way schools are built and maintained
The way technology is being used or not used
Funding for classroom books and materials
Vision and purpose

One of the reasons many extrinsic motivation programs have stayed around for so long and are continually resurrected and improved is because they are convenient for the people managing the system. They keep the focus off leadership and mistakenly place it on the people working in the system. In every education system I have consulted–from the U.S. Naval Academy to primary and secondary schools in the U.S. and Australia to pre-schools in Argentina–the story is the same: we blame students for poor performance without first considering the systemic causes. In psychology this is known as the fundamental attribution error.

If you want a significantly different result, you must first change the system. I applaud Michelle Rhee in Washington D.C. for trying to improve a broken system, and I offer my help. She has made many excellent systemic changes in D.C. such as closing 23 under-populated schools and paying for librarians, art, music and P.E. teachers at remaining schools. These systemic efforts will help to improve student motivation for learning.

Systemic problems are normally out of the circle of influence of students and none of these systemic problems will go away simply by bribing students to work harder within a failing system. Leaders must learn to, as Dr. Deming once said, “work smarter, not harder.” If you want a different result, try changing the system and watch what happens to behavior, instead of continually doing what we have always done by leaving the system alone and trying to change the behavior of the people in it.

©2008 Langford International Inc. All rights reserved.
e-Mail: office@langfordlearning.com
12742 Canyon Creek Road, Molt, MT 59057
Phone: 406-628-2227 Fax: 406-628-2228

Making the mistake of thinking that schooling is education can lead to a very large number of additional choices that make sense in one context but are completely different in another context. If we continue to think about schooling the way we do we will force young people to do things they are not meant to do nor do they do naturally. 

Over the last 20+ years my firm has worked with large groups to accelerate and enhance their ability to learn and collaborate. This work results in increasing the productivity of the group – often accomplishing weeks, months, or years worth of work in a matter of days. To aide us in accomplishing these results we use a creative physical environment that allows information to move along with the people (most everything in the environment has wheels!).

Buildings are among the most telling artifacts of what we believe, what we value, and what we think. Western Europe’s great cathedrals built in the 12th to 16th centuries leave no doubt about what was most important in their time. While our society in the 21st century is far more diverse, our buildings will speak just as clearly to future generations—including the kids who attend our schools.

What do our school buildings say about what we think is really important? What do schools being built in 2008 around Frederick W. Taylor’s and William Wirt’s ideas from 1908 say to kids about their futures? What do schools that mimic the architecture of other centuries say to the children within them working on digital devices? Are our school buildings saying what we want to convey to teachers and students?

Schools are inherently about the future. We design school facilities to house the education of students for their futures, and we plan those facilities to last for decades. Our challenge is heightened by the most rapid change in all of human history—Moore’s Law, which defines the exponential growth in digital technology, is quickening the pace of change in every aspect of our society. In planning new or renovated school facilities, educators and architects are “futurists’’—the question is whether we recognize and fulfill the responsibility thrust upon us.

There is a concept in the theory of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) that suggests systems are significantly influenced by their initial conditions. Complex Adaptive Systems develop patterns of ‘order’ that emerge out of the seemingly chaotic ‘soup’ of interactions between lots and lots of ‘agents’ (independent agents following ‘rules’ to guide their behavior). 

This blog is about building a case for redesigning our public schools. In several posts I have commented about the fact our schools are based on a model that was conceived and implemented some time around the 1870′s. And it hasn’t changed much. 

I’ve been remembering – and thinking about – the fact that words and language have a lot of power. There are studies and entire bodies of knowledge about the power of words and the connection between words and mental images and mental models. 

Form the Free Dictionary: 

school·ing (skooling) n.

1. Instruction or training given at school.
2. Education obtained through experience or exposure: Her tumultuous childhood was a unique schooling.
3. The training of a horse or a horse and rider in equitation.

From Webster:

Schooling \School”ing\, n.

Discipline; reproof; reprimand; as, he gave his son a good schooling. –Sir W. Scott.

School \School\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Schooled}; p. pr. & vb. n. {Schooling}.]
To tutor; to chide and admonish; to reprove; to subject to systematic discipline; to train.

 

From Wikipedia:

Education encompasses teaching and learning specific skills, and also something less tangible but more profound: the imparting of knowledge, positive judgment and well-developed wisdom. Education has as one of its fundamental aspects the imparting of culture from generation to generation (see socialization). Education means ‘to draw out’, facilitating realization of self-potential and latent talents of an individual. It is an application of pedagogy, a body of theoretical and applied research relating to teaching and learning and draws on many disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, sociology —often more profound than they realize—though family teaching may function very informally.

From Wikipedia on Schooling: 

Schools and their teachers have always been under pressure — for instance, pressure to cover the curriculum, to perform well in comparison to other schools, and to avoid the stigma of being “soft” or “spoiling” toward students. Forms of discipline, such as control over when students will and will not speak, and normalized behaviour, such as raising one’s hand to speak, are imposed in the name of greater efficiency. Practitoners of critical pedagogy point out that such disciplinary measures have no positive effect on student learning; indeed, some would argue that disciplinary practices actually detract from learning since they undermine students’ individual dignity and sense of self-worth, the latter occupying a more primary role in students’ hierarchy of needs.

Here’s an example of a University doing the very thing that will inhibit their students from taking risks and thinking. Toronto’s Ryerson University has threatened to expel a student for setting up a study group on Facebook. Can you imagine? I’m almost at a loss for words. This is so silly and short sighted. Actually it is a perfect example of the administrations ‘theory of business’ (which in this case also betrays their theory of learning and their theory of knowledge). Schools are based on control and compliance and use fear to motivate. That is exactly what the culture created by high stakes testing does. It is the exact opposite of what I would want in a culture and in a learning environment. 

Canadian university faces off with digital generation
By Natasha Elkington
Thu Mar 20, 3:02 PM ET
TORONTO (Reuters) – A Canadian university has instilled a culture of fear by threatening to expel a student for cheating because he set up an online study group on Facebook, critics said this week.