Miseducation

There have always been awful teachers. I have a friend who's a veteran high school English teacher. Some years ago I remember him talking about a woman in his department they were trying to get rid of because she wasn't teaching English, she was teaching flower arrangement. Which is kind of a neat thing to learn, but not her job.

There are individual bad teachers, though, and then there is a collective movement toward bad education. In what at least used to be the normal course of events, teachers might slag off work to pursue their own agenda, but it would just be single teachers doing their own thing. And that thing might just be laziness. The Internet and social media allowed untold thousands in cities across the nation to coordinate their efforts such as they are, and it's given them a flag to sail under.

Much of what the Libs of TikTok account on Twitter did was to show what kind of agenda so many teachers had in common. And if they weren't doing their jobs, what is it they were dong? They were planning together and showing off for each other in a way that would not have been imaginable before Web 2.0. But that meant leaving evidence out in the open where Libs of TikTok could find it. Live by the tech, die by the tech.

Not surprisingly, when the Washington Post took sides on this matter it was on the side of the politicized teachers. But that paper can't settle the argument.

Choose wisely

If power is going to corrupt, it stands to reason that it will flatter first. Which is to say that one might start out wanting to do good, and even actually doing it. But gradually the good that you were doing becomes a secondary priority. And thanks to a kind of tunnel vision you don't even notice it.

In a recent profile, Cecily Myart-Cruz shows signs of being in the advanced stages. She's the head of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), a powerful teacher's union in California. And one of her current top priorities is justifying the school closures that have kept so many children out of in-person learning for the past year.

Today, however, on a sunny May afternoon, Myart-Cruz is allowing a reporter inside her inner sanctum—or at least inside a glass-paneled conference room down the hall from her eleventh-floor office. And right away, she lives up to her reputation: after settling into in a swivel chair and slowly removing her zebra-print face mask, the 47-year-old lightning rod for controversy calmly sets her hands on the table and begins issuing a series of incendiary statements that almost seem aerodynamically designed to grab headlines and infuriate critics. Like this one: “There is no such thing as learning loss,” she responds when asked how her insistence on keeping L.A.’s schools mostly locked down over the last year and a half may have impacted the city’s 600,000 kindergarten through 12th-grade students. “Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.” She even went so far as to suggest darkly that “learning loss” is a fake crisis marketed by shadowy purveyors of clinical and classroom assessments.

When an educator thinks it's a winning argument to say, "Maybe the kids don't know their ABCs but they know to think what we tell them to think," well, you can't lose the plot much more badly than that.

Of course the article mentions that Myart-Cruz barely ever speaks to the press. Maybe she would have been better advised to stick with that avoidance.

Showdown at Smith

 One downside of America's aspiration to be a classless society is that there is little if any sense of working class society. Being working class is seen as simply not earning enough, quite probably a personal failing, and in any case something that you should leave behind as soon as you're able. Widespread unionization after World War 2 might have mitigated this, but that state of affairs only lasted for 30-40 years.

It's also true that shit rolls downhill, and this goes for matters of wokeness as much as anything else. Whenever a corporation says that they "need to do better", "doing better" almost invariably means throwing an employee or two under the bus, putting the survivors in awkward encounter groups, and making sure none of it effects the way the CEO and other top executives live.

And of course the new digital realm of social media often seems dedicated to increasing the speed at which a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.

All three dynamics can be seen at play in the recent <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/us/smith-college-race.html">turmoil</a> at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. A student teacher aid was living in the dorms in the summertime, when they are otherwise closed. A janitor didn't know she had gotten special permission, only that someone was hanging out at the dorm which wasn't supposed to be open to Smith students. He'd been instructed to call security, which is what he did.

The student posted about the incident on Facebook. In the absence of any evidence she accused the workers of racism, including a couple of food service workers who had nothing to do with any of it. The result has been the sort of ugly witch hunt more associated with Salem than Northampton, and people have actually lost their jobs.

In the face of all this, the school's administration has been worse than useless in defending its employees' rights. And as has often seemed to be the case in recent years, whatever the ACLU's concern is, it's not civil liberties.

The name of the student who made the accusations is published in the NYT article. I'm not using it here because she's not the point. Young adults are raging narcissists, and probably always have been. And look at the examples they're given today. But adults, college presidents very much included, are supposed to act as a check on their narcissism. That's their job, and they're not doing it.

loops

Without getting into the politics of any particular plan, when I was a wee one cursive handwriting was still part of the core curriculum, so it was something they were teaching us in school. It's not a bad thing to learn. It gives you a chance to think about what makes particular letters themselves, rather than something else? What can you take away and what do you need to keep?

Of course results aren't guaranteed. Actually producing good-looking cursive letters? Not something I can be relied on to do. I mean, sometimes, but it takes concentration.

The importance of owning Ernie

Salon's Arthur Chu  has some thoughts on the new normal regarding Sesame Street, whereby HBO effectively owns the show and shows first run episodes that will rerun in nine months' time. Is this something, by the way, that Jim Henson would have accepted were he still with us? Maybe if his back were really against the wall, but I can't imagine him being happy about it. Chu provides some background on how this came to be.

The basis of Ganz Cooney’s famous “little dinner party” where a small group of TV executives and developmental psychologists came up with the idea for “Sesame Street” was a simple formula–poor kids watch more TV than rich kids, thanks to poor kids having busy parents and being more likely to be “raised by TV.” Poor kids get less education than rich kids. Make TV that’s educational–good TV that’s educational, TV that was “addictive” in the way successful shows are rather than the crappy low-budget afterthought TV that most children’s programming was back then–and you might level the socioeconomic playing field.

The idea has its obvious flaws, which were criticized at the time. (Doesn’t all of this just train kids to watch more TV? Doesn’t the constant need to entertain necessarily distort your message? Neil Postman, etc.) But the mission is undeniably noble and shockingly radical even for today
.

Maybe more radical for today. So what happened? A couple of things, I think. One is that public television is part of a government reachout that's been so demonized by the right that even people who agree with its mission have started to see it as doomed. Also the intellectual class - at least the most accepted part of it - has a serious case of shiny object syndrome when it comes to technology. Consider the seriously-made argument that taxi companies represent a monopoly but ride-apps don't even though the latter are represented by only two companies nationwide. Anyway, in 1969 TV was still a relatively recent technological development. The big changeover to color was only three years in the past. Yet people were sufficiently critical of it to recognize that it wasn't going to provide a cultural good all by itself, that this might take some effort.

Teachable moments

There's a good article here here about liberal opposition to common core, worthwhile not least because of its own links.  Common core is currently best known as a bete noire of the right, including politicians like Bobby Jindal who were all for it until five minutes ago.  Arne Duncan, CC proponent and the current Education Secretary, is certainly a deserving target, put there by Obama.  Hillary Clinton, from everything we know about the Clintons' associations, would almost certainly have appointed Duncan or someone indistinguishable as well.  And a Republican presidnet might have given us a Secretary Michelle Rhee, a hair-raising prospect.  So it's not really a partisan issue, and a non-depressing political outcome is unlikely in the short term.  There needs to be grassroots resistance, which luckily has started to arrive.

My own opposition is rooted in the time I spent taking the preliminary classes for teacher education back in the nineties.  While I didn't go on to the profession myself, I got to know a lot of other people who were preparing to become teachers.  They were a varied group, some very inspiring, some very much not.  But the best, it seemed to me, were the ones who best knew their own rhythms, and thus would be most resistant to rules set down by a far-away technocrat.  I have friends who do teach now, and I think time has borne me out.

Taughtology

This column defends - within the context of the upcoming Boston mayoral race - the association of politicians with union members. Oberal it's a good point, and I'm glad someone is publicly making it. But there's a "but" coming. Abraham stops to castigate the firefighters' and teacher's unions, the kind of unions its fashionable to dislike. In the latter's case, she writes, "Leaders of the Boston Teacher's Union, who are not fans of Walsh and haven'e endorsed anyone yet, do an injustice to dedicated educators by opposing changes that could transform many schools.

There's nothing really more specific here, so it's a little hard to get into. But there's an assumption here that measures opposed by teacher's unions would be a big boon to kids and schools, and that the representatives have only selfish and/or reactionary motives for opposing them. Selfish motives may play a part somewhere - they usually do - but I see on reason to assume the changes would be good. Educational reform needs more debate than it's getting, not less.

Once these kids...

Making you go hmmm...

Jeff Sessions (R-AL), ranking minority member of the Senate Budget Committee, called for a full investigation into how the nation's schools were able to secure the necessary funds to monitor teachers and pay salaries based on performance.

"The fact that this careless mistake also ended up financing new teacher training programs, allowing educators to become more than just glorified babysitters, is disgraceful," Sessions said. "Now we are left with a situation where schools can attract talented professionals who really want to teach our children, which will in turn create smarter and more motivated students who wish to one day make a contribution to society."

"In all my years in government I have never seen such a shameful error," Sessions added. "Our appropriations process has gone horribly awry, and I for one demand to know how it happened."

If they did start putting their points this blatantly, how many people would actually notice?

Apple polishing

Did Michelle Rhee's record turning around the schools in DC seem too good to be true? Well, it looks like there's a reason for that.

On the 2009 reading test, for example, seventh-graders in one Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets; the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than 1. The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians consulted by USA TODAY.
"This is an abnormal pattern," says Thomas Haladyna, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University who has studied testing for 20 years.
A trio of academicians consulted by USA TODAY — Haladyna, George Shambaugh of Georgetown University and Gary Miron of Western Michigan University — say the erasure rates found at Noyes and at other D.C. public schools are so statistically rare, and yet showed up in so many classrooms, that they should be examined thoroughly.

Rhee's response is basically one of having her glass jaw tapped.

"It isn't surprising," Rhee said in a statement Monday, "that the enemies of school reform once again are trying to argue that the Earth is flat and that there is no way test scores could have improved ... unless someone cheated."
TESTING: In D.C., were the gains real?
USA TODAY's investigation into test scores "is an insult to the dedicated teachers and schoolchildren who worked hard to improve their academic achievement levels," Rhee said.
Rhee, who said Monday night that the investigation "absolutely lacked credibility," had declined to speak with USA TODAY despite numerous attempts before an article ran online and in Monday's newspaper. Her comments were made during the taping of PBS' Tavis Smiley show to air on Tuesday night.

Of which Alex Pareene at Salon pretty much gets it right

I'm sorry, but this is the "haters gonna hate" defense. It's just a blanket assertion of bias without any sort of attempt to refute the actual charges leveled against her. How is she not already a paid Fox analyst?

Rhee has been a superstar on the educational reform scene for a few years running now. She is especially popular among proud union busters. And yet the media has mostly treated her as a non-partisan, or even progressive figure. What's slipped under public notice is that she and many other reformers have been stacking the deck against unions and for privatization. If the story of these standardized test crop circles makes people a little less credulous, that's a step in the right direction.

Waiting for Joey

I don't see myself going out to see Waiting for "Superman". When it comes to films about education, Allan Arkush's and the Ramones' Rock 'n' Roll High School set a very high standard. Can Davis Guggenheim fill those sneakers? I doubt it.

This rave from Forbes is smooth and articulate. It has the structure and contours of a reasoned response. Trust it not. Close your eyes for a second and you can see the guy in front of you swearing that he's never met the three card monte dealer before, and going "golly gee" as he "wins" twenty bucks.

I find myself more in the same boat as IOZ.

I would probably strangle the first "likely voter" I saw upon leaving the theater, and somehow I don't think that my cellmate would believe me when I told him that I'm a top. The anguish that our technocrats direct at the perceived failures of our system of education delights me to no end. Oh, no, we are failing to turn our children into readily employable automotons whose mecahnistic mental processes mitigate against any improvement in their own station, amelioration of their own working conditions, or consideration of the nature of control and ownership--indeed, cause them to work actively against their own best interests by inculcating a Stockholm-syndrome-like identification with the values and imperatives of a corporate ownership class that they themselves will never join!

And through him, Eye of the Storm.

if you are sitting here with tom friedman actually worrying that our kids have lower standardized test scores than the finns or something, i say you have floated outside the realm of actual human beings or real children or anything relevant to learning. really is this an education program, or is it a project for world conquest? these people give you the impression of each nation's children as a kind of army, in a war with all the other nations' children to dominate the future. try to become aware of how fantastical and optional that is as a way of representing reality. but try to be aware too of what a picture like that entails about how we actually treat children.

My own two cents, the expression of which is compromised by computer keyboards lacking a cent sign? You hear about merit pay. You hear about battling the evil teacher's unions to get rid of bad teachers. A smokescreen, all of it. They're not talking about elevating good teachers over bad ones, not really. All educators are to be reduced to indentured servants. The future is all about central planners. Pay attention to flesh and blood kids to see what they need on a case-by-case basis, and you are not With The Program.

And doesn't the question of "Why are so many immigrants doctors and engineers?" sound a lot like "Why can't we put those people back in their place?"

Sly fox

At Vanity Fair David Kamp has written a nifty portrait of Sylvester Stewart, aka Sly Stone. Sly and his outfit the Family Stone have left musical fingerprints all over the place: Sesame Street, blaxploitation soundtracks, and Prince are just starters.

The article goes over some bad times in the seventies, when the music stayed good until it wasn't. But it's not depressing. The man is cogent and fit, even if the accompanying picture does look distressingly like Flava Flav in Death Race 2000. And he seems to be coming back out of his shell as a musician too. So there's reason for hope here.

And if you doubt the thing about Sesame Street, check this out.

Oh no! Not Elmo room!

It's laundry night, and i'm also trying to improve myself with some Eudora Welty, so it's a good time for a short post with visual aids.



You know, much as I love Schoolhouse Rock, this one doesn't quite tell the whole story. Yes, it was nice to stretch out after being cooped up in Europe all those millennia. Yes, there was dangerous passage over the Atlantic, and covered wagons, and all that good junk. But didn't this continent sort of have people living on it already? They found out PDQ that they're oceans would no longer protect them. And that these fair-skinned visitors had pretty sharp elbows. Ask a Semonole or Ojibwa about it sometime.

So in conclusion, it's 2008. Where the hell is my damn Martian condo already?