Category — forces of destruction

It might seem that I have a negative attitude about schools and schooling. I can understand how it might seem that way since much of what I write about seems to lean in a specific direction. I’d like to offer another perspective or another possible way of seeing the things I write about.

In much of what I write about I am advocating for examining our thinking about why schools exist and trying to understand a little more about what we do in schools and schooling. I am not doing this from an academic perspective. I am a concerned citizen that would like the best for each and every young person in the world – no matter what their background, nationality, religious upbringing, or socio-economic status.

I am inspired by the fact that schools and schooling touch each and every young person at some point in their lives. As such schools and schooling would seem to have a huge potential for making positive changes in the world.

That said, the art an article a colleague of mine sent me earlier today reminded me that there are many places throughout this country where young people are not getting anything close to what could be an amazingly wonderful opportunity to learn and grow and be successful in their lives.

This article reminded me of often heard rhetoric about zero tolerance for violence and gang related activities in schools. This rhetoric often results in perpetuating and increasing violence – it doesn’t reduce violence. Our actions – the actions and behaviors demonstrated by adults – in school settings (which include policies and practices) betray our real underlying philosophies. The results speak for themselves.<

Personally I have zero tolerance for anything that is harmful, disrespectful, or violence perpetrated on or at young people.

For several years now I have been scanning the school oriented press and have found several subjects continually discussed which I feel deserve further exploration and/or understanding. I am often surprised by what passes as news or passes as thoughtful considerations about what to do to improve the schooling process. The amount of violence that young people are exposed to and subjected to does not decrease. Bullying is rampant – both in face to face situations and in online communities.

Most of the strategies being employed to address bullying and violence focus on reducing freedoms, reducing choices, limiting options, and controlling behavior. These strategies are not productive and actually harm young people.

The article referred to above has some pretty strong language in it about this situation. Here’s a quote from the article:

Students being miseducated, mistreated, criminalized and arrested through a form of penal pedagogy in locked down schools that resemble prisons is a vicious and incredibly visible index of the degree to which mainstream politicians and the American public have turned their backs on young people in general and poor minority youth in particular. As schools are reconfigured to resemble prisons, crime becomes the central metaphor used to define the school environment while criminalizing the behavior of young people becomes the most valued strategy in mediating the relationship between educators and students. The consequences of these policies for young people suggest not only an egregious abdication of responsibility – as well as reason, judgment and restraint – on the part of administrators, teachers and parents, but also a new role for schools as they become more prison-like and more segregated as a consequence, eagerly adapting to their role as an adjunct of the punishing state. One wonders how many more kids have to be brutalized in their schools and killed outside of schools before the American public wakes up and takes seriously not only their responsibility to young people, but also their commitment to a mode of politics and a future that is on the side of young people rather than a vision shaped largely by the values of the corporate state and the disciplinary apparatuses of the punishing criminal justice system.

Here’s the link to the whole article.

I know this isn’t the experience at every school – but if it’s happening at one school that is one school too many.

With all this focus on No Child Left Behind and the ensuing testing culture that’s been created I wonder how many people have noticed that the predominate methodology used in schools has gone from Drill and Practice to Drill and Test.

Drill and Practice is an instructional strategy developed and used for much of the history of schools and schooling. Many people feel the practice is out of date and not appropriate for meaningful learning to take place. On the other side of the argument, people that still support the idea of drill and practice as an effective teaching methodology suggest that repetition is necessary for the brain to ‘wire’ itself appropriately.

From a web site on instructional strategies:

As an instructional strategy, drill & practice is familiar to all educators… Drill-and-practice, like memorization, involves repetition of specific skills, such as addition and subtraction, or spelling. To be meaningful to learners, the skills built through drill-and-practice should become the building blocks for more meaningful learning.
http://olc.spsd.sk.ca/DE/PD/instr/strats/drill/index.html

From another web site:

Development of basic knowledge and skills to the necessary levels of automatic and errorless performance requires a great deal of drill and practice. . . . drill and practice activities should not be slighted as “low level.” Carried out properly, they appear to be just as essential to complex and creative intellectual performance as they are to the performance of a virtuoso violinist.
http://www.audiblox2000.com/repetition.htm

I believe the accelerating focus on testing has shifted teaching methodologies to be more akin to drill and test. Tests are taking up more time and focus in the school setting. Many people have complained that teachers are teaching to the test at the cost of learning.

So the old method of drill and practice is giving way to the new method of drill and test. Learning suffers as a consequence.

From a Carnegie Mellon article:

A recurring criticism of tests used in high-stakes decision making is that they distort instruction and force teachers to “teach to the test.” The criticism is not without merit. The public pressure on students, teachers, principals, and school superintendents to raise scores on high-stakes tests is tremendous, and the temptation to tailor and restrict instruction to only that which will be tested is almost irresistible.

further it says:

There is a lesson here for teachers and assessment specialists alike. The tension between the instructional and assessment communities, as well the pejorative connotations that “teaching to the test” entails, will continue unabated so long as testing and assessment are seen as something quite apart from instruction and learning, rather than an integrated reflection of what was intentionally taught. To paraphrase A. G. Rud of Purdue University, what is needed is a deliberate attempt on the part of all parties to link curriculum, instruction, assessment, and standards in a more generative and even transparent way.

Disclaimer: I’m not advocating for either of these methodologies. In fact, I don’t recommend either methodology as being the right thing to do in today’s environment. The purpose of pointing out what I think is happening is to support people to make conscious choices – to know what they are doing and why.

In today’s world I recommend a whole person and brain based approach to learning – with the focus on learning NOT on teaching. Drill and practice is a good method for memorization but as I’ve said in another post memorizing is not the same as learning.

Oh, I forgot to include paddling as an appropriate form of discipline! 

School board brings back paddling with parental permission
By JULIE HUBBARD – The Telegraph in Macon
JEFFERSONVILLE, GA. –Twiggs County principals will be pulling out their dusty paddles when school resumes and using them when students act up.
At least that’s the school system’s aim.

Will the public school system ever provide something that young people are interested in and want to participate in? Or does mandatory – by law – mean “do anything to force young people to sit in their chairs, pay attention, and regurgitate bits of data?”

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.

Well, not really. The beginning of the end already started – but this is more of the kind of thing that will ultimately end in the ruin of Public Schooling. Can you imagine if incentives – paying students to go to school, paying them to get good grades, paying them to pass tests, paying them to graduate, etc. – continues?

I’ve already written about teacher incentives and charging parents if their children don’t come to school or if they miss a parent teacher meeting.

I’ve also written about the different incentives being used on young people: enticing them with iPods, breakfast, paying third graders and paying $5 per A, $4 per B, etc. and offering the enticement of a car for graduating.

Here’s another article along these lines:

A 0 incentive for passing an AP exam
A group of educators and business executives will offer some D.C.-area Advanced Placement students and teachers $250 for each passing score on science, English and math tests. In Dallas, where a similar program launched more than a decade ago, the number of passing AP scores in 10 targeted high schools increased from 71 in 1995 to 877 in 2006. The Washington Post (3/9)

The reason I was saying this is the beginning of the end is because if this continues and one school finds out about some incentive another school has; or schools in one state find out about something going on in another state; the only logical outcome of all this is an escalation of this kind of thinking with the need for greater and greater rewards being offered.

This is NOT SUSTAINABLE!

So here’s another example of theory in use in public education. On the one hand, we’re creating high stakes testing for young people at an early age and continuing that through their lives – punishing young people with greater and greater punishments. On the other hand there are school districts and schools that are resorting to creating incentives and paying young people to attend or to get good grades – with greater and greater extrinsic motivators. And now, a bill has been introduced in the Texas legislature that would fine parents $500 if they miss meetings with their children’s teacher.

Bill proposes fining parents who miss teacher meetings
A bill introduced in the Texas Legislature would impose a $500 fine on parents who miss conferences with their child’s teachers. The representative who filed the bill said it was designed to encourage parents to be more involved with their child’s education. CNN/Associated Press (2/1)

I’ve written in a previous post about how the education system is based on a model of compliance. One of the results of a compliance type environment is these acts of desperation – to force compliance where voluntary compliance isn’t taking place.

Instead we should be spending our resources creating a system that instills intrinsic motivation and enthusiasm for learning with voluntary participation from everyone involved – young people and parents and teachers and community members.

Here’s another example of the desperate attempts to get young people to come to school or keep them from skipping school:

Truancy attacked with iPods, food
Schools throughout the nation are enticing students with everything from breakfast to iPods to keep them in school. Attacks on truancy help boost academic performance, administrators say.