Education and Politicians: Politicians Are All Wrong. Surprise!

If it weren't for my Aspergian tendencies, I'd try to become a lobbyist or politician. Or if I knew I could make a good living off of it I'd do it.

I have some relatives that work in public schools, so I get to hear about lovely programs and solutions-of-the-month that are fed into the public schools by administrators and government. Most of the time I'm just left shaking my head, wondering what the politicians are thinking.

I mean...do they actually spend any time in the classroom to see what effect their various decrees are having?

I was thinking about it again when I found a Time article from a researcher who actually studied the effect of "bribing" kids with money in order to increase achievement in schools. The researcher was an economist, which reminded me of a fantastic book I recently finished, SuperFreakonomics. That book continued to build off the first book, Freakonomics, wherein the economist authors provide both entertaining and informative information while reinforcing the idea that people change their behavior based on the proper incentive (well, that's one of the ideas, anyway...he makes several observations and links between various phenomena of people's behavior).

I was thinking about the way the US is currently trying to increase student achievement. The government finds that our population is stupid. Very stupid. As in, on average, we are scientifically, mathematically, and historically ignorant compared to most other industrialised nations. Recent highlight; the NSF hid results of portions of a recent survey of American regarding the big bang and evolution.

Okay, blame schools, they decide. Enter No Child Left Behind, and the ensuing efforts to standardise education. There are lists of what kids must be able to do by certain grade levels/ages, and if schools keep underperforming, they lose funds, and if it continues to happen, schools are shut down or taken over by outside groups. Kids take a series of tests as dictated by various agencies in various state governments at different times of their educational lives.

There are huge numbers of detractors for the way education is attempting to be reformed, but it seems to me that the most fundamental problem is that the onus of "fixing" education is on the wrong entity.

There is no incentive for students to do better. If they perform poorly, the school is punished. Essentially, the teachers are told that if they have students not doing what they're supposed to be doing, then it's the teacher's fault; the teacher didn't "engage" every kid in the classroom to the point where they want to learn.

This places blame for student stupidity squarely on the teachers, as the blame is placed by politicians on the schools which goes on the administrators who then turn around and blame the teachers. And the blame stops there.

The real problem, as I see it, lay in the community. If the kids screw off in school, the school gets punished. Not them. What incentive is there to learn?

The parents of failing kids rarely seem to care. Usually that sub group is just as ignorant as the kids.

The community as a whole doesn't value education. We have a society that wanted to have a George Bush clone for president because he was someone that the "Average Joe" could sit and have a beer with, while "liberal" candidates were overeducated and out of touch with the average American, apparently because they were educated if you listen closely enough to the criticisms. How can you expect students to want to perform well in academia when we pay sports stars millions of dollars while scientists are begging for funding, usually from corporate interests only funding research that they believe with benefit their own interests?

What it comes down to, in my view, is incentive. Students have no incentive to achieve academically. What happens if they fail math or science? They still have their cell phones, ipods, freedoms for the most part...schools can only limit so much. Even things they're not supposed to have the freedom to do teachers will let kids get away with. "It's study hall, it's not worth taking away the cell phone, so if they want to text go ahead..."

Most parents don't care. The helicopter parents are usually the ones in the conferences and emailing about their child's progress and their kids aren't the ones failing or staying home "sick" for thirty days a year.

Since we don't place incentives or punishments on parents and students, and instead focus on schools being punished, of course schools will fail at getting kids motivated to learn. How do you get kids involved when all teachers hear from the students is, "What do these tests matter? It's not like we're graded on them or something."

It's simply another burden for schools to bear. The funny part is that people still think schools are for learning; they're instead a social program for watching kids. Most parents have no idea how much money is spent on so-called IEP's (this may be different depending on what your state has for helping kids) and special-needs. Schools spend tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on purchasing special equipment for kids that will never be able to move beyond the most basic of skills; 18 year olds with the mental development of a five year old. Schools spend resources on counseling kids, sports, and various activities that have little if anything to do with academics. It's disingenuous to label a school as an educational institution when it actually fills a niche I like to call "community spackle;" public schools are expected to fill in all the gaps that parents can't be bothered to perform in raising their kids.


The whole "No Child Left Behind" is simply highlighting the shortcomings that have been cultivated in our society so blame can be allocated onto the schools and politicians are able, for the next several years, to both look like they care about making society less stupid while simultaneously looking like they're doing something about it. What it actually does is add a greater burden to schools, which in turn puts a greater squeeze on their employees, which then makes more qualified educators flee from the field and encourage more mediocre teachers to fill teaching posts, thus lowering education quality even more.

In short:
There's little incentive for parents to pressure students to achieve.
There's little incentive for kids to achieve.
There's little incentive for good, qualified educators to stay in the field.
There's little power given to schools to actually affect any change in the situation. They're simply given a directive, and when they fail, they're punished. Ever been put in charge of something that you have no authority to direct? Isn't that the definition of being set up to fail?

There are several things I've found to be screwed up with public education but until we acknowledge that many of these problems begin and end with the public, our nation will continue to carry a reputation of being among the most mediocre countries for education, per capita, among the developed nations of the world.

Young Kids: It's Black and White

I remember when I was younger (way back in the 80's) I used to love watching cartoons like Transformers and Voltron. There were plenty of other series on like Smurfs, G.I. Joe, Dinosaucers, and many, many others.

I remember as I grew up it became fairly confusing how each of the series seemed to follow the same tropish formula. I don't mean just the examples found in series like Voltron, either, where you have a basic premise of the bad guys coming in and launching an all-out assault against the "good" planet (alway focusing somehow on the good guy's base of operations), good guys get into a scrape (how will they get out of it?) then the whole thing is resolved in the last five minutes by forming Voltron and slashing the bad guy in half with the Blazing Sword.

No, I mean the trope wherein these cartoon worlds were always divided into two factions; the good, and the evil. While in elementary school I began to wonder why the good guys always won. It was boring. We never knew why the bad guys wanted to take over the universe (who would want the paperwork involved? And what do you do once you've taken over the universe? Go to Disneyworld?)

Why were bad guys bad? Sometimes there's some trite backstory involving how the psychotic Bad Guy(tm) feels the world wronged him or the hero of the series wronged him, but there was never a decent reason given as to what motivated this Bad Guy to dedicated his life (and make a living, somehow) off making the Good Guys suffer, or why the Good Guys were dedicated to thwarting the Bad Guy.

It was always so simple, so clear cut which was good and which was bad (why didn't the bad guys just wear white? They could easily infiltrate the Good Guy base just be switching colors, it seemed). For no apparent reason whatsoever the bad guy simply perpetuated every "bad" stereotype out there for being bad. It really drove me nuts. Even in church I never understood why the Devil, Satan, Prince of Darkness, was such a trope...if God was infallible, and was the paragon of goodness, why would Satan have crossed Him? What possible reason would have made him think he could "beat" God? And even if it was just because he was jealous, why dedicate the rest of existence to this endless game of screwing with humanity to anger God? I mean, doesn't it get boring after a thousand years, and why wouldn't God just get tired of it and say, as most parents do when they grow weary of a child's petulance, "That's enough, you've had your fun. Now stop it or I'm going to invert the laws of physics holding your molecular structure intact."

The world didn't seem to play by these simple rules of Here's Good, There's Evil, and Good Always Wins, although we were always told that's how things worked. Certain political parties pandered to the citizenry as holding American values, that we're the Good Guys, that we do what must be done for the good of the world. We are the good guys, over there are the bad guys.

As I grew older I read stories of American warriors sent to other countries to destabilize their governments; we assassinated, we tortured, we killed. We reeled in disbelief at pictures held up by our government of concentration camps created by other countries as examples of their evil intentions and behaviors while simultaneously forgetting that America apparently had concentration camps for Asian-Americans during World War II.

The blinders continue to this day, but I'm not entirely sure anymore it's media that causes this viewpoint. Rather, media simply reinforces this notion that the world is a simple matter of black-and-white, good-and-evil. They're playing to an audience in order to sell more stuff to kids.

I'm the father of a four year old. Thanks to our corporate overlords my son was introduced to Lego Wii games in the form of Lego Indiana Jones and Lego Star Wars. I blew his mind when I told him these were based on movies.

So he watched Star Wars. Yes, even three. I'm a bad parent that way. But what I found interesting was his total lack of comprehension for what he's watching. Yes, he's four, but there are some things he latched onto ("Star Wars people are cool!" he'd say, referring to the Jedi with the lightsabers) and other things that flew over his head (understandably so). But in particular, he needed to divide the movie into "good guys" and "bad guys."

Star Wars is not necessarily a shining example of perfect storytelling. But it is rather complicated. It weaves a story together not just of a man's journey from his own failures and shortcomings to redemption, but of a man who plotted and achieved great power at the expense of a democratic republic, all the while the people of the republic supported his ascension to power. It told a story of corruption and of the apathy on the part of the citizenry that were in a position to do something about these things and didn't.

My son talked of the "bad guy" Trade Federation, the army of droids, in the movie. They weren't bad, I tell him. They were oppressed by taxation that they felt was unfair. Not surprisingly this didn't matter to my son.

He doesn't understand how the Republic ended up putting powers into the hands of Palpatine as supreme chancellor, and how he manipulated the events to eventually make himself emperor, or turn a democratic republic so mired in bureaucracy into a smooth if oppressive empire.

He doesn't understand how the "good guys" in the first three movies become "bad guys", or that Vader became Vader because he was selfish but driven to gain power over life and death itself in order to protect his true love (whom he ended up killing anyway).

As I live to observe kids in different ages I see fewer and fewer differences. We are, by most accounts in ways it matters, sheeple. We follow crowds. We are manipulated by television ads and print media, all the while told the television shows and ads and print media are just giving us what we want. Petulance becomes tempered and expressed in other more subtle forms as we get older, but in observing children I see human behavior in its most raw form. I see what we want, and what we want to do, in the most basic form. Children have no qualms about telling someone they're fat. Or that you stink. Or any of a number of things that we learn are social faux-pas to admit to. They want something, they say so, unlike my teenager that tries to manipulate us into getting something for her through other means.

And one of the things children latch on to is the idea that the world is simple. It's black and white. There's good, there's evil. Grey wavy lines in between are uncomfortable and take thought and critical thinking to work through.

That's why I think Star Wars is actually kind of a nice critical thinking test for my son. He doesn't yet understand what is going on in it, but someday he hopefully will. In it's own way Star Wars is a wonderful analytical exercise for understanding and critical thinking despite the obvious tropes and horrible elements put into the story for seemingly no reason (Jar-Jar? Oh geez...)

There are elements that should give pause. Why were the Jedi revered while so arrogant in their own power? Why was so little emphasis placed on the fear they placed on ordinary people, or is it unethical that children strong in the force were simply taken away for training, whether they wanted to or not? Was the Empire truly bad, when they apparently had done some good for the citizens in the Empire? And the rebels were killing large numbers of people who probably were not inherently "evil"...they blew up a Death Star that probably had many innocent people working and living on it. They killed beings whose only sin was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And at the same time, the Empire had held the galaxy in order, and by destroying the central government they achieved what? Plunging the galaxy into a system of regional chaos, overseen by regional governors with their own agendas, while trying to re-establish a central Republican (not American political party Republican) government like the one that had become bloated an ineffectual in the first place? The Empire had drawbacks; being xenophobic, killing dissidents, and a small roster of other offenses to what we consider basic freedoms, but the Empire also brought stability and actual governance where the Republic had failed miserably.

On the surface the movies are simple and appeal to people who, like my son, want superficial simple good-is-good and evil-is-evil and rah rah for the good guy action. But there are skeptics and critical thinkers that want more.

I know this because there is now a growing surge in revisiting the 80's. It seems every franchise is having an attempt at a reboot, and in the process storylines are being fleshed out and revamped, some for better and some for worse.

Not long ago I read a story about the origin of Megatron, the leader of the "evil" Decepticons in Transformers (the real transformers, not the Michael Bay productions). I truly enjoyed it. Why was Megatron bad? He wasn't, really. He was a miner whose job was being taken away through the automation of the plant at which he worked, so Megatron and all the other "low ranking" beings were being forced from a job so a corrupt Autobot government would profit. The series showed how Megatron more or less fell into the position of Decepticon leader after leading a rebellion against a corrupt government. The Autobots were not all clean and clear of fault after all, and the Decepticons, despite having a simplistic set of motives in the childhood cartoons (namely, "we're conquering the galaxy because...well, because.") had actually valid reasons for the spark of insurrection.

Other heroes eventually explored the more complicated intricacies of their backgrounds. Batman is a truly screwed up individual. Iron Man faced his ethical demons in the Civil War story arc, one of the best series I've read from Marvel. Even Voltron has had some light shown in darker recesses that question how wonderful and pure he was as a hero when you look at the original, non-Americanized (and non-Disneyfied) Japanese origin story of Voltron.

This gives me some hope that sometime down the road my son will grow to be a critical thinker. There's hope I can interest him in thinking under the initial layers of simplistic thinking, that the Empire, despite Lucas' efforts to show otherwise, isn't just an evil scourge on the universe. There are complicated undercurrents to the story that can be fascinating to explore and in the process perhaps learn more about the world in which we live.

Education Reform

The Bush administration tried making education their domestic poster-boy cause as the Obama administration is making healthcare reform their current domestic worthy-cause. Ironic, given the Bush pronounced the word "nuclear" the same way as Homer Simpson. But it's about as fair to pick on Bush's intellect as it is to pick on a snake for losing a thumb wrestling competition, so I'll get back on track with my original topic now.

School reform made a small ripple in the news-o-sphere with the release of a study from the Annenberg Institute and NYCLU recommending making schools less of a prison state in order to increase success of students in academia.

It's kind of important to note that this was done in schools of "at-risk" students.

Their recommendations:

• Discourage the installation of metal detectors. Schools can create safe and successful learning environments without relying on metal detectors.

I honestly don't have experience with this. Our school districts don't spend money on this, and personally I never thought it was needed. But I'm not familiar with city schools, especially at-risk schools. I suppose as a deterrent it's a good thing, as a practical thing I don't know how effective it is. Guess it just means the kids wait until after school to shoot each other, and meanwhile a belt buckle is holding up the line of kids trying to get to class on time. If you absolutely have to get rid of that sucka' that be dissin' you girl, time ta' get creative in shop class with the band saw...

The statement is true though. You never hear about schools in clothing-optional communities having problems with kids smuggling contraband drugs and weapons into the buildings, so I guess they can have safe environments without metal detectors.

• Restore discipline responsibilities to educators. Minor disciplinary infractions must be handled exclusively by school officials, not police personnel.

That would be nice. In theory. In practice today, administration is beholden to the public, simply because it's a headache to deal with little Johnny's parents. Seems as if in more cases than no little Johnny is always the angel that couldn't possibly have stolen Sally's iPod and the parents have no idea how it ended up in Johnny's backpack, but I'm sure they'll find out in a lawsuit to the school because this suspension means Johnny can't play in the football game.

Okay, I'm overgeneralizing.

My point is that discipline is a...well, discipline in and of itself, and educators having to police the kids while walking a political line to keep parents happy is never a good mix. It seems that once parents start pulling the litigation or harassment card then it's simply not worth the hassle of giving Johnny a life lesson in character weighed against the time that would be invested in educating the parents that life just isn't always fair and that yes, their son can be a pain in the arse, contrary to what they seem to believe.

I suppose that it does end up teaching Johnny a lesson. Life not giving you your way? Mommy and Daddy can make it fair for you. I think that's where No Child Left Behind's brainchild had his life lessons learned, come to think of it...

• Assign fewer School Safety Agents to patrol schools. The number of police personnel patrolling the city’s schools should be reduced significantly, creating financial savings and strengthening the educational mission of the schools.

Again we don't have much experience in our area. Growing up, we didn't have them in our schools. I think that our local district did have a police officer or two after I had graduated; the school officials liked outsourcing discipline since it meant that the parents with objections had to take it up with a judge and not infringe on the administrator's time with objections.

I'm not sure what the recommendation means by implying there's a connection between fewer police officers patrolling schools will lead to a greater education mission in schools; perhaps the article linked to simply waters down the bullet points into sound bites and as a result it lost its meaning.

• Mandate alternatives to harsh discipline. Restorative justice practices, a conflict resolution method used at several schools profiled in the report, should be implemented in all city schools.

This could be interesting, given that I have no idea what the alternatives are they're proposing. A student court? We can't even get actual tax-paying citizens to report for jury duty; do we really want kids who won't pay attention in class to be in charge of some kind of pseudo-justice system?

My daughter is in student council. She did...well, nothing, to my knowledge. But it looks good on her college application. In that regard it seems as if student government is a lot like actual government. Even when I was in school I couldn't figure out what student government was supposed to do...they didn't have more than a pittance budget and were supposed to...well, I don't know, sponsor dances, maybe? They sure as hell didn't do anything with rules or learning incentives. We had a representative that was supposed to go to school board meetings, but it wasn't like they had a vote or could do anything other than talk to board members who would politely ignore them because I suppose the student didn't pay attention in civics classes in the first place.

For students with an IQ above a toaster oven most of the "student conflict resolution" prepackaged programs probably won't hold much meaning. It's telling that people who are supposed to be in the real world apparently can't just tell kids how to handle situations and instead are told they must rely on pretty posters and handbooks that tell them how to deal with conflicts...apparently educated adults who are considered functional members of society can't share their common-sense strategies on how to deal with the jerk that doesn't know how to properly trade lunch tray items or get their fat arse off the swingset and share.

• Ensure students’ input into school rules. Giving students a sense of ownership over the school rules makes them more willing to obey codes of conduct.

This could be a nice laugh-riot. First we get a report that essentially points out that kids are brain-damaged, developmentally, until they're into their twenties, then there's this recommendation that urge turning more control over to these brain-damaged kids.

Do these people ever sit down and talk to these kids, get their ideas, before actually proposing these things? It sounds reasonable. Sounds very reasonable. In practice...um...I'll just say I'm skeptical and leave it at that.

Would it be out of left field to draw a similar parallel to prisons would having happier prisoners if they had a vote in how their punishments and disciplining was carried out? Or patients in asylums? These are extremes, but when it comes down to it, the people in prisons and schools don't have much say in whether they're there, what is done to them there, and they're working in a system which encourages conformity to reduce discipline issues. Usually for a reason.

• Institute transparency and accountability in school safety practices. The DOE must disclose raw data to allow New Yorkers to determine the effectiveness of school safety practices. Moreover, School Safety Agents should be subject to the same oversight as police officers.

...because the public is SOOO much more effective at dealing with issues they have no experience in. State and federal legislators have shown this time and time again with all the bureaucracy they've helped introduce into various sectors of society, from education to transportation to taxes and healthcare.

I love hearing people who have spent no time on the other side of the classroom...any role aside from their childhood brain-formative years sitting at a desk...dictating how to fix education. They have no idea what teachers have to put up with and how teachers spend more time dealing with bureaucracy and policies and politics instead of just teaching.

Although I'll also point out that teachers are members of the public too. They seem equally mystified much of the time at matters of intellect and education; there's nothing that seems to prevent sub-intellectual or low-achieving teachers from taking up positions in schools; I've heard stories of teachers that promote the idea that the moon landing were faked being in charge of teaching students and worse. It's just part of the human condition. On the other hand, why would good teachers with solid skills want to work for crap pay to put up with the hassles that are attached to teaching if what they really want to do is teach?

• Provide support services for students’ non-academic needs. Partnering with local hospitals and community based organizations to provide students health care and social services addresses non-academic challenges before they develop into behavioral problems.

This one sounds like advocating that schools become a nanny day-care than focusing schools on being schools. Parents already expect schools to act as substitute parents (unless it clashes with whatever subset of obligations they decide they actually want to take care of; "You want to teach my kid about SEX?? NEVER!") Now we want schools to give added services for kids that are lonely, pregnant, gangbangers, mentally ill, bored, overweight, underweight, depressed...

Was there a time when kids went to school to learn instead of form their own miniature nanny state?

Maybe I'm being too harsh or cynical. At this point it seems that we've had decades of "failing education" so...going by track record...there's not much hope that things will change anytime soon.

I've said before that just criticizing without offering alternatives is rather wasteful. I think I do have ideas. Practical? Probably not. But they're something, and the ideas distilled into something that would fit here would probably render them rather trite